For thirty years he wandered up and down this forlorn district, enduring all manner of hardships, preaching and teaching wherever he went. Presently he was joined by other missionaries. Here and there churches and monasteries were built. The land around soon began once more to be brought under cultivation, and, beneath the shelter of their walls, villages and little towns gradually sprung up. Bruges, St. Omer, Thorhout, Tronchienne, each of them claims as its founder one or other of the missionaries who at this time were evangelizing the country; and at Bruges they still show the rude chapel on the banks of the Roya in which St. Amand baptized his first neophytes.
It was not, however, to this remnant of resuscitated Celts that the Netherlands owed the important part they played later on in the civilization of Europe. A race ignorant alike of the refinement and the corruption of Roman civilization, and which, because it was barbarous itself, had never had its spirit crushed beneath the heel of barbarism, a race which hailed from the same fatherland from whence came our own ancestors, akin to them in habit of thought and speech and blood, animated by the same intense passion for liberty and hatred of servitude, by the same reverence for woman and love of home, by the same keen admiration for the brave and the true, was destined to build up that marvellous stronghold of mediæval freedom, culture and commercial enterprise called Fleanderland, the land that is of the Fleming, of the exile, the land whose hospitable shore had given to the victorious Viking a haven for his ships and a foot or two of solid earth on which to pitch his tent.
How or when the first Flemings came here are subjects wrapt in mystery. Perhaps the same upheaval which, in the middle of the four hundreds, drove our own Saxon forefathers from their old homes in Jutland and Friesland and Sleswicke-Holstein to seek new homes in Britain, impelled also the Saxon Flemings to the northern shore of Gaul. Be this as it may, all along the coast line of the Netherlands were scattered, at a very early date, settlements of men of Saxon origin, of this there can be no doubt, who possessed in a very marked degree the qualities and characteristics of their race. They were chaste, proud, daring, avaricious, given to plunder. Mutual responsibility was the basis of their social system; the Karl, or free land-holder, the pivot on which hinged their entire political organization. Like all Saxons, they had a horror of slavery. Courage for them was the queen of virtues; freedom dearer than life; vengeance but the cultus of filial piety, and family ties the most sacred of all.
These were the dominant tones which coloured all their institutions. At the uproarious banquets at which in Fleanderland, as elsewhere, the Karls assembled to deliberate on public affairs, to choose their leaders, and deposit in a common hoard the gulden destined for an insurance fund in case of shipwreck, fire or storm, the first goblet drained was in honour of Woden, for victory, and the last to the memory of those heroes who had fallen on the battlefield.
When, after the carnage of Fontanet (A.D. 841) all Europe was overrun by robber bands, who killed, burnt and harried at will, in those rude days when ‘not to be slain,’ as Stendhal says, ‘and to have in winter a good leathern jerkin, and,’ in the case of a woman, not to be violated by a whole squadron, was, for very many, the supreme sum of human happiness, and all the world were seeking in feudalism a refuge from anarchy such as this, and patiently accepting even the right of marquette as something less horrible than the horrors which they would otherwise have to endure,[2] these hardy sons of the North, almost alone among the peoples of Europe, retained their independence. Again and again the feudal lords endeavoured to reduce them to serfdom, and again and again their endeavour proved abortive.
In Fleanderland at least they preserved their liberty, living under their own laws and their own elected chiefs; a nation of free men, practically independent of the sovereigns who nominally ruled over them, until, at all events, the advent of the House of Burgundy.
Of this stock was the real founder of Bruges—Baldwin of the Iron Hand—first Count of Flanders.
His coming was in this wise.
It was the time of the break up of Charlemagne’s artificial empire—A.D. 850—and strong men on all sides were gathering up the fragments and laying the foundations of great houses, sometimes of kingdoms. The Danes were everywhere harrying Neustria, and the old Frank king, Charles the Bald, unable to purchase peace by the strength of his own arm, was buying it at the best markets he could, with gold and concessions. Guntfried and Gosfried, two Northern chieftains, had lately sworn him fealty, and for the moment were exercising paramount influence over the feeble will of their lord, whilst Rotbert, surnamed le fort, an adventurer of obscure origin whom people had lately begun to talk about, was at this time the strongest man along Loire, a freebooter, as some said, from the forests of Germany, in whose veins ran the blood of Charlemagne himself, according to others, the son of a butcher from the shambles of Paris, matter of little moment. In days when a mighty hand and an outstretched arm alone could lead to fortune, his reputation for strength of will and thew was of far greater importance. This man, then, it were politic to bind to the crumbling fortunes of the royal house, so thought Guntfried and Gosfried, in all singleness of heart, and at their instigation King Charles the Bald consented to receive his homage, little thinking that he was thereby laying the foundations of a house which would one day wreck his dynasty.
But the new vassal was something more than a strong man, he was a man, too, of tact and address, and his influence soon became so great, and the favours showered on him so large, that Guntfried and Gosfried, jealous of the rival whom they themselves had set up, determined to compass his overthrow.