Later, when troubadour and trouvère sang of love and war from Provence to Normandy, there were minstrels also in the castles of Flanders and Brabant. Jean Bodel of Arras, in his “Chansons des Saxons,” sang of resistance to the power of Charlemagne, and it was the trouvères of the Walloon country who first borrowed from the Britons the cycle of the Table Ronde. The greatest poet of the reign of Philip of Alsace, at the end of the twelfth century, was Chrestien de Troyes, a native of Brabant, whose writings were imitated in England and Germany.
The “Chambers of Rhetoric,” formed in the sixteenth century to provide entertainment for the people, exerted so great an influence in promoting a taste for art and literature among Belgians in general that our own Motley could find nothing with which to compare it except the power of the press in the nineteenth century. These chambers were really theatrical guilds, composed almost entirely of artisans, and they not only produced plays and recited original poetry but also arranged pageants and musical festivals. In 1456, the Adoration of the Lamb was reproduced as a tableau vivant by the chamber of rhetoric at Ghent. The “Seven Joys of Mary” was given at Brussels for seven years, beginning in 1444, and was the best acted mystery of that time. Jean Ruysbroeck was called the “Father of Flemish Prose,” while Jean le Bel (a Walloon) started a school of writers which rivaled that of France.
The treatment these rhetoricians received from the Spanish sovereigns is sufficient proof that they were the mouthpiece of the people and voiced their aspirations for freedom in both church and state—Charles V was their persecutor, Philip II their executioner.
When the long struggle with Spain ended in the subjugation of the Spanish Netherlands and art and literature were stifled in the southern provinces of the Low Countries, Vondel, the Fleming, produced in his safe retreat in Holland plays which are worthy of notice today. About the same time the poet who is known as “le père des Flamands, le Vieux Cats,” had many followers, and his works were so popular that they were called “The Household Bible.”
Another exile, Jacques van Zèvecote, a native of Ghent, who also emigrated to Holland during the Spanish oppression, was a great poet. His hatred of Spain found expression in these vigorous lines:—
“The snow will cease to be cold,
The summer deprived of the rays
Of the sun, the clouds will be
Immovable, the huge sand-hills on the shore
Leveled, the fire will cease to burn,