Beneath the choir, and slightly below the level of the nave, is a dark and gloomy crypt, the atrium to the Holy Sepulchre. This is approached by a passage so low that it can only be traversed by going on hands and knees, and so narrow that but one person can enter at a time. The sepulchre itself, which is behind an iron grill, is said to be a facsimile of the Holy Tomb in the garden of Joseph of Arimathæa. One of the founders of the Jerusalem Church is known to have visited Palestine. When Philippe l’Asseuré was contemplating a new crusade, he applied to this man for information as to the holy places, and there is still in existence an account of the pilgrimage which his son Anselm made to Jerusalem. Within the sepulchre, covered with a veil of richly-worked point lace, lies the effigy of the dead Christ, so realistically modelled that, in the dim light of the single taper which illumines the vault, it is difficult not to believe that one is in the presence of a corpse.

Note yet another glorious mansion—a stately pile of red brick at the end of the rue du Vieux Bourg. It is still a building of vast proportions, and in former times it was considerably larger. When Mark Gheeraerts made his map it was adorned with a beautiful steeple, and to this day it possesses a stupendous Gothic doorway through which there would be no difficulty in driving a coach and four. A house with marked features this, and a face full of expression—a house which one instinctively feels must have a story. Perhaps Peter Lanchals dwelt here; certainly in later and calmer days it was the home of Mark Laurin, Lord of Watevliet and Canon of St. Donatian’s, and a staunch supporter of the New Learning, who numbered among his guests and intimate friends Erasmus, and perhaps too Sir Thomas More and Cuthbert Tunstall. Presently tenants of another sort inhabited its hospitable walls. Here for three weeks dwelt the Merry Monarch before he went to the Zeven Toren.



For the rest, the Craenenburg in the Grande Place, of which we have already spoken; the great brown brick house with a tower and a grey stone gable by the Pont St. Jean Nepomucene, and where later on Perez Malvenda hid the relic of the Precious Blood; and, most famous of all the palaces of Bruges, the Princenhof of Philippe l’Asseuré; these too were erected during the period we are now considering, and there are others no less magnificent, all trace of which has long since disappeared; amongst them the mansion of Jean de Gros, where Maximilian was imprisoned. But if this sumptuous residence has been swept away, Bruges still possesses a sample, sadly mutilated indeed and shorn of all its splendour, of its founder’s handiwork—the aisle which he built in 1472 off the southern side of the choir of St. Jacques.

And what of the architects who designed, and the masons and carpenters and other craftsmen who together produced all these glorious buildings? The names of some of them have come down to us—Nicholas Willemszuene, for example, who was Master Mason of the city of Bruges from 1414 to 1436, and Dean of the Guild of Masons from 1426 to 1432; he constructed the southern turrets of the Hôtel de Ville, and probably also the beautiful house of the Florentine Consuls (1429); George Weylaert, Dean of Masons in 1468 and 1473 and 1482; he was the architect and builder of the Church of St. Jacques, all his work is perfectly executed, and the brick moulding of the windows is especially excellent; Vincent de Roode, Master Mason of the Hospital of St. John, and probably the author of the beautiful chapel, now sadly defaced, erected in 1475; and, greatest of them all, Jan van de Poele, member of the Guild of Masons from 1472 to 1516. The most beautiful monuments erected in Bruges during this period are from his designs. He was not only an architect and a builder but a sculptor of no mean order. The stately octagonal tower of the Belfry is perhaps his work; the beautiful façade of the Palais du Franc, of which we shall have something to say later on, is certainly so, and it was he who designed the chevet of the Cathedral of St. Sauveur, with the ambulatory and the seven bays of the apse, and also the Maison des Orientaux, whilst we find him furnishing five statues for the adornment of the chantry of Peter Lanchals. Van de Poele’s work in the Cathedral is not only in itself exceedingly beautiful, but it bears witness also to his skill as an engineer. He conceived and successfully carried out the daring scheme of converting the seven huge windows of the apse into arcades, whilst at the same time retaining the ancient triforium and clerestory above them. Thus the Cathedral of Bruges affords a perhaps unique example of a structure of the thirteenth century supported by piers and arches of the fifteenth. Van de Poele did not live to complete the chevet; he died in 1520, and the work was carried on and at last completed in 1527 by Ambrose Roelandts and John Beyts, each of them Master Masons and perhaps his pupils.

Until the end of the thirteen hundreds the houses of Bruges were all constructed of wood, and the designs of the buildings of brick which at this time began to take their place, with their lofty gabled façades, adorned, as they generally were, with a vast Gothic arch, were perhaps inspired by the reminiscence of the wooden edifices which preceded them. This is the opinion of the learned architect and archæologist Verschelde, who, for years, had made the ancient buildings of his native town his especial study, and Mr. Weale and Canon Duclos are of like opinion; but the most casual observer cannot fail to be struck with the resemblance which these great arches bear to the huge windows so common in the gables of churches of the thirteen and fourteen hundreds, and it may well be that it was from these that the architects of the brick dwellings of the period we are considering and of the similarly adorned timber façades of the century which preceded it alike drew their inspirations.

So too the series of panels or bays which presently superseded the single arch. These formed a frame for the windows of the various stages, and terminated at the summit, sometimes in pointed, more frequently in round-headed arches, which were at first filled with geometrical tracery. So like are they to the long, narrow windows usual in the public buildings of the period that a mansion thus adorned might easily be mistaken for some old Gothic church or hall with its windows bricked up converted into a dwelling-house.