So too was it at Bruges. When the news of the disaster reached them, the women went into hysterics and the men lost their heads, and in less than the twinkling of an eye, the lilies of France, run up by their own hands, were proudly floating over the belfry.
In spite of their pusillanimity, the reckoning which the burghers had to pay was a sufficiently onerous one: humiliation unspeakable, the city fathers on their knees suing for mercy in the dust of the Maele road, and worse—the charter of their liberties cancelled, their ramparts broken down, and a fine so heavy that they were never able to pay it; and worse still—not a few of their leading citizens, men of substance and renown, tortured to death, and all their wealth confiscated.
Amongst these note Lambert Bowine, captain of the Franc, and Willem de Deken, town burgomaster. His fate was the cruellest of all. He had fled to Brabant in the hope that the burghers there would protect him, but they showed themselves as craven as their fellows in Flanders. They handed him over to the French King, and poor Deken was carried to Paris, where he was mutilated, pilloried, put on the wheel, taken off again for fear he should die too soon, and bleeding, broken, in pitiable plight, but still alive, set in gaol till the morrow, when he was torn to pieces by wild horses. They gathered up the fragments of his poor mangled body and hung them on the great gibbet of Mont Faucen, by way of object lesson for the citizens of the capital.
These items made up the sum-total of the burghers’ bill of costs, and it was the same all over the country. Not a town save Ghent preserved its liberties intact, and even beloved Ghent saw not a few of her burghers driven into exile. In less than three months ten thousand Flemings were done to death.
The Abbot of St. Martin’s at Tournai explains how this came about. ‘Louis’s keen appetite for gold,’ he says, ‘increased in a marvellous manner his suspicions, and consequently the number of his victims. And the most galling part of it was that all this untarnished gold was squandered on harlots and on favourites, men too of mean estate some of them. His lackeys, his grooms, and even his barber were at Bruges installed in palaces which had once been the homes of honourable burghers.’ The city archives bear witness to it.
At last, after long years of waiting, salvation came from England, at first indirectly, and afterwards through the active co-operation of Edward III. with the communes of Flanders.
Of course England acted from self-interest. She had no more love for the down-trodden burghers of Flanders than they had for the comfortable yeomen on the other side of the channel; and even if her sympathy had been ever so great, she could not have raised a finger to help them unless she had been likewise impelled by some less ephemeral motive. Individuals may sometimes indulge in the luxury of pure benevolence; trustees, in justice to their clients, can rarely afford to do so. Occasionally the interests of the latter may go hand in hand with their own charitable inclinations, and then they may pose as philanthropists, and if the pit applaud their seeming generosity, so much the better.
In the case before us, however, no such protestations were made. The freedom of the Flemish communes was vital to the prosperity of England, and the motives which inspired the respective parties were avowedly motives of mutual accommodation. In those days the wool growers of the island kingdom had but one customer, the mammoth guilds of Flemish weavers, and they, in their turn, could nowhere find such famous wool as in the English market.
‘So fine was the breed of English sheep at this period,’ notes Green, ‘that the exportation of live rams for the improvement of foreign wool was forbidden by law, though a flock is said to have been smuggled out of the realm shortly after, and to have become the source of the famous merinos of Spain,’ and the magnitude of the wool trade between England and Flanders may be estimated from this fact. In a single year Edward received more than eighty thousand pounds from duties levied on wool alone.[30]
When, therefore, in the autumn of 1336, hostilities broke out between Edward III. and Philip of France, and Louis of Nevers, at the instigation of the latter, caused every Englishman in Flanders to be put under arrest, and Edward by way of reprisal forbade the exportation of English wool, all Flemish looms ceased work, and the towns were filled with misery. But the sheep-farmers of England suffered equally with the weavers of Bruges, and soon the English King was forced in the interests of his own subjects to attempt negotiations, first with Louis of Nevers, and when this failed, directly with the burghers.