Note amongst those still standing the Black House, as it is called, a grim, weird-looking building behind the theatre. It is erroneously said to have been used later on as the Court House of the Inquisition, and of course is in consequence haunted. A most interesting habitation this, with mullioned windows in which much of the beautiful old green glass is still remaining, protected on the outside by wrought-iron grills. It contains a spacious hall with a timber roof, vast chambers with low ceilings moulded all over with fruit and flowers and foliage, and a suite of apartments panelled in cedar, the whole fast falling to decay. Then there is the Paris Hall, where French merchants formerly congregated, now degraded into a pot-house called Charles le Bon. The façade has been spoiled with whitewash and plaster, but the old gables at the back are still brown and beautiful, and have endured nothing worse than the caresses of time. At the corner of the rue des Pelletiers at its junction with the rue Flamande, stands an old mansion of beautiful grey stone, embellished with sculpture and Gothic windows rich in geometrical tracery. Unspoiled and unrestored, it is still a fair and stately building. It was once the hall of the merchants of Genoa.
Looking on to the canal at the end of the rue Espagnole stands a spacious habitation which has evidently seen better days. Here dwelt the merchants of Spain. A little further down on the banks of the same canal was the loveliest palace of all, the Maison des Orientaux, the home of the great traders of the Hanseatic League (1480). The builders were already at work at it in the month of August 1478,[41] and when it was completed three years later, it was one of the most beautiful edifices in brick in the city of Bruges. Zegher van Maele, who lived early enough to behold it in all its glory, affirms of the tower that in his day there was not its equal in all Flanders, and Guiccaiardini, who wrote in the early sixteen hundreds, informs us that all the iron work in the interior was gilded. Mark Gheeraert’s plan of Bruges, published in 1562, furnishes an illustration of this wondrous mansion. It was a large, oblong-shaped, crenelated building, four storeys high, with slender turrets at each corner corbelled out from the walls at the second storey, and terminating in iron finials surmounted with metal flags. The façade giving on the Place des Orientaux was divided into five vertical panels or bays with round-headed arches. In these the windows were placed, and the spaces between each storey were filled with flamboyant tracery. Adjoining the main building, but slightly in the rear, there was a turreted annex of smaller dimensions, though conceived in the same style. This, perhaps, was the refectory, for all the inhabitants dined at a common board. In front of this building was a spacious courtyard, two sides of which were formed by the façade of the refectory and the eastern façade of the main building, and the other two by beautiful crenelated walls with a slender and very graceful turret at their angle. The tower and spire which called forth the admiration of Van Maele sprang from the side of the main building, which gave on the courtyard, and for the rest, towers, turrets, chimneys were everywhere adorned with graceful panelling or dainty Gothic tracery in moulded brick. All this splendour is among the things which have been. Only a fragment of the old palace now remains: the main building, shorn of its tower, its pinnacles, and its upper storeys, and there is now nothing left to indicate its glory of former days. This piece of vandalism was committed about a hundred years ago, when the prosperity of the city of Bruges was at its lowest ebb. The proprietor at that time was without the means of keeping so extensive and costly a mansion in repair, and the city fathers either could not or would not come to his assistance.
It was not only, however, by these public or semi-public buildings that Bruges was enriched during the period we are now considering. At this time, and more especially during the long peace of over thirty years which followed the great humiliation of 1437, there appears to have been a veritable mania for construction. From Duke Philip himself to the meanest householder in Bruges, every man seems to have been afflicted with it.
Those of the great burgher-nobles who already possessed palaces enlarged and embellished them; the new men who had recently amassed fortunes vied with the old aristocracy in the magnificence and luxury of the mansions which they now built; plain, well-to-do merchants were everywhere constructing those roomy, comfortable abodes, which, with their high stepped gables and their façades enriched with stately panelling and Gothic tracery, still render the streets and squares and waterways of Bruges the most picturesque in Europe. Even working men, humble members of the great guilds of smiths, or masons, or carpenters, were making their homes beautiful with the fruit of their handicraft; constructing canopied niches at street corners, or over the doorways of the hovels in which they lived, and placing in them graven images of Our Lady or of some favourite saint; hammering out exquisite lanterns, which it was their delight to hang before them, from brackets of no less dainty fashion; fabricating, of wrought-iron, those quaintly beautiful trade signs by which it was their wont to call attention to their avocations; making door, and lintel, and chimney, and rafter comely with fruit and foliage, fascinating with heraldic devices, and grotesque and leering heads, and the images of devils and of saints.
Much of this work has of course disappeared, but some of it still remains to bear witness to the skill and the energy and the devotion of these poor toilers.
Amongst the nobles who about this time enlarged their palaces note Louis of Gruthuise, whose grandfather John had erected, probably during the closing years of the previous century, that portion of the Hôtel de Gruthuise which skirts the left bank of the river. The stupendous kitchen, of which we give a sketch, dates from this period. Not content with this magnificent pile, Louis added thereto, in 1464 or thereabouts, the great wing at right angles to it, and thus made the home of his ancestors the most magnificent mansion in the city. Here it was that he stored his famous library, and here he entertained, in 1471, King Edward IV. and Richard Crookback. Even the upper chambers in this sumptuous abode are paved with encaustic tiles, and it is no less than three storeys high, and when it was restored some few years since, it was found that the spaces between the timber ceilings and the flooring in the rooms above were in each case filled with earth. Thus all noise is effectually confined to the floor in which it is produced. The palace is connected by a covered way with the Church of Notre Dame, and here Louis erected, in 1474, a very beautiful tribune of sculptured stone and carved oak. It is an exquisite piece of workmanship, in the flamboyant style of the period, adorned with rich tabernacle-work and fruit and flowers, and with Louis’s initials and his family arms, and his proud device, Plus est en nous, which last appears over and over again throughout the whole palace. It is in a wonderful state of preservation, and, strangely enough, seems to have entirely escaped alike the hand of the iconoclast and the restorer. Indeed, the Gruthuise tribune in the Church of Notre Dame has probably been little changed since the days when its founder and his family worshipped there more than four hundred years ago.