There are two other points of interest about this fascinating mansion. During the process of restoration there was recently discovered a secret chamber in the great kitchen chimney, and in it the skeleton of a man. Behind the same chimney there was also discovered a secret staircase leading to two underground passages branching off in opposite directions. Neither has yet been explored, but it is supposed, and probably rightly, that one of them communicates with the vaults beneath Notre Dame. As for the other, the concierge avers that it leads to the Château of Maele some four miles out of the town, a most unlikely conjecture. True there is a tradition that an underground passage exists between the Chapel of St. Basil and the château in question, and this is sufficiently conceivable. Subterranean ways and subterranean chambers are not unknown in Bruges, and they have sometimes been discovered in strange places. Only recently, when a heavily-laden waggon was entering the rue Flamande from the Grande Place, the ground sank beneath its weight, and one of the wheels was embedded in a deep hole. Some bricks in the vault of an unsuspected cavern had suddenly given way, and the vast chamber thus disclosed was afterwards found to extend for a considerable distance along the street and beneath several houses on each side of it. Moreover, St. Basil’s was originally the Court Chapel, and Maele, as we have seen, had from time immemorial been a favourite residence of the Sovereigns of Flanders. But why should the Lords of Gruthuise have secretly connected their town house with one of the ducal castles? It is much more likely that the passage in question communicated with their own manor at Oostcamp.
Chief among the parvenus who at this time laid out vast sums in bricks and mortar note Peter Bladelin, son of Peter de Leestmaker, by trade himself dyer of buckram, and who, in his youth entering the service of Philippe l’Asseuré, presently rose to the important position of Controller-General of Finance. Not content with erecting a palace at Bruges and a château fort in the open country beyond Maele, around the walls of his castle he built a whole town (1444), which he endowed with a church (1460) in honour of St. Peter, and surrounded with fortifications. This place he called Middelburg, and though it has now dwindled down to a mere village, it was at one time a centre of no small importance. Here, after the sack and burning of Dinant by Charles the Terrible in 1466, a colony of brassworkers found refuge. Bladelin obtained for them from Edward IV. the same privileges and exemption from English custom dues as they had enjoyed in their native city, and to this day a street in Middelburg is called La rue des Dinantais.
In the great quarrel with Maximilian, Middelburg took the side of that shifty prince, and the men of Bruges repaid them in 1488 by razing their fortifications and destroying their castle.
We first get a glimpse of the founder of Middelburg in the spring of the year 1452, when we find him, in company with Louis of Gruthuise, shutting the gates of Bruges in the face of a deputation of Ghenters who had come to beg that city to give them her support in their struggle with Philippe l’Asseuré, and afterwards, along with Gruthuise, going out to parley with them and trickily making them believe that they had attained the object of their mission. ‘He was a man,’ says the Flemish chronicler Chastelain, ‘of much wealth and of much sense, and the most trustworthy person in the county of Flanders, although his honesty was not to the taste of all, and many, alike gentle and simple, grieved thereat.... He was, moreover, controller of the Duke’s household, one of the four treasurers of the order of the Golden Fleece and but a plain citizen of Bruges. One excellent quality he had—he managed the Duke’s affairs marvellously well; there, where there was rent or wound, he always found means to heal or mend, and he paid cash for all goods delivered at the palace. All this the Duke was well aware of, and on this account and for other reasons he gave him the high position he held. For in sooth he was a wise man, and one to be relied on, comely alike in person and in morals, and none more industrious and diligent than he could well be found.’