The Story of Bruges

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The   Story   of      Bruges
by     Ernest    Gilliat-Smith
Illustrated by Edith Calvert
and H e r b e r t   R a i l t o n

London:         J.    M.    Dent   &   Co.
Aldine House, 29 and 30 Bedford Street
Covent Garden W.C.               1909

PREFACE

CONTENTS

GENEALOGICAL TABLES

ILLUSTRATIONS

The Story of Bruges

CHAPTER I

The First Flemings

The Menapii and the Morini, the bravest of them all and the last to withstand the Roman legions, were at length compelled to bend their necks beneath the yoke of Rome’s enervating and effete civilization, and when, four centuries later, a whirlwind of Northern barbarism had swept the land, only a handful of them, sparsely scattered, abject, cringing, hidden away in forest and marsh, were left to tell the tale.

The civilization of Rome had been clean wiped out in that quarter of Europe. Silence unbroken settled down on the land, and for two hundred years the Latin-Celts of the Netherlands slipped out of the world’s memory.

It was not until the middle of the six hundreds that men began once more to think of them.

The cause of their reappearance upon the stage of European history is chronicled for us in a contemporary life of St. Amand, Bishop of Bourges.[1] It happened in this wise.

Towards the close of the year 630, Amand, who had journeyed to Rome, was one day praying before the tomb of the Apostles, when suddenly he heard the voice of St. Peter bidding him be up and return to Gaul, where he must preach the Gospel.

So impressed was he with the reality of the warning, that he at once set out for the northern province, and presently reached Sens.

Here he was told that there was a country beyond the Scheldt called Gand, where dwelt a wild people who had forgotten God, and who worshipped trees, and that so rude was this land, and so fierce were its inhabitants, that no missionary had hitherto ventured there. This must be the field, said Amand, which St. Peter would have me till, and with a small band of companions he landed on the further bank of the Scheldt.

The reception the new comers met with was not one calculated to inspire confidence. The natives, men and women alike, showed unmistakable signs of hostility, and at length, in a wild outburst, seized upon Amand himself and plunged him into the stream. This so terrified his companions that they, all of them, drew back in fear of their lives. But Amand, nothing daunted, went on with the work he had undertaken, and in course of time won the confidence of the natives, many of whom he baptized.

For thirty years he wandered up and down this forlorn district, enduring all manner of hardships, preaching and teaching wherever he went. Presently he was joined by other missionaries. Here and there churches and monasteries were built. The land around soon began once more to be brought under cultivation, and, beneath the shelter of their walls, villages and little towns gradually sprung up. Bruges, St. Omer, Thorhout, Tronchienne, each of them claims as its founder one or other of the missionaries who at this time were evangelizing the country; and at Bruges they still show the rude chapel on the banks of the Roya in which St. Amand baptized his first neophytes.

It was not, however, to this remnant of resuscitated Celts that the Netherlands owed the important part they played later on in the civilization of Europe. A race ignorant alike of the refinement and the corruption of Roman civilization, and which, because it was barbarous itself, had never had its spirit crushed beneath the heel of barbarism, a race which hailed from the same fatherland from whence came our own ancestors, akin to them in habit of thought and speech and blood, animated by the same intense passion for liberty and hatred of servitude, by the same reverence for woman and love of home, by the same keen admiration for the brave and the true, was destined to build up that marvellous stronghold of mediæval freedom, culture and commercial enterprise called Fleanderland, the land that is of the Fleming, of the exile, the land whose hospitable shore had given to the victorious Viking a haven for his ships and a foot or two of solid earth on which to pitch his tent.

How or when the first Flemings came here are subjects wrapt in mystery. Perhaps the same upheaval which, in the middle of the four hundreds, drove our own Saxon forefathers from their old homes in Jutland and Friesland and Sleswicke-Holstein to seek new homes in Britain, impelled also the Saxon Flemings to the northern shore of Gaul. Be this as it may, all along the coast line of the Netherlands were scattered, at a very early date, settlements of men of Saxon origin, of this there can be no doubt, who possessed in a very marked degree the qualities and characteristics of their race. They were chaste, proud, daring, avaricious, given to plunder. Mutual responsibility was the basis of their social system; the Karl, or free land-holder, the pivot on which hinged their entire political organization. Like all Saxons, they had a horror of slavery. Courage for them was the queen of virtues; freedom dearer than life; vengeance but the cultus of filial piety, and family ties the most sacred of all.

These were the dominant tones which coloured all their institutions. At the uproarious banquets at which in Fleanderland, as elsewhere, the Karls assembled to deliberate on public affairs, to choose their leaders, and deposit in a common hoard the gulden destined for an insurance fund in case of shipwreck, fire or storm, the first goblet drained was in honour of Woden, for victory, and the last to the memory of those heroes who had fallen on the battlefield.

When, after the carnage of Fontanet (A.D. 841) all Europe was overrun by robber bands, who killed, burnt and harried at will, in those rude days when ‘not to be slain,’ as Stendhal says, ‘and to have in winter a good leathern jerkin, and,’ in the case of a woman, not to be violated by a whole squadron, was, for very many, the supreme sum of human happiness, and all the world were seeking in feudalism a refuge from anarchy such as this, and patiently accepting even the right of marquette as something less horrible than the horrors which they would otherwise have to endure,[2] these hardy sons of the North, almost alone among the peoples of Europe, retained their independence. Again and again the feudal lords endeavoured to reduce them to serfdom, and again and again their endeavour proved abortive.

In Fleanderland at least they preserved their liberty, living under their own laws and their own elected chiefs; a nation of free men, practically independent of the sovereigns who nominally ruled over them, until, at all events, the advent of the House of Burgundy.

Of this stock was the real founder of Bruges—Baldwin of the Iron Hand—first Count of Flanders.

His coming was in this wise.

It was the time of the break up of Charlemagne’s artificial empire—A.D. 850—and strong men on all sides were gathering up the fragments and laying the foundations of great houses, sometimes of kingdoms. The Danes were everywhere harrying Neustria, and the old Frank king, Charles the Bald, unable to purchase peace by the strength of his own arm, was buying it at the best markets he could, with gold and concessions. Guntfried and Gosfried, two Northern chieftains, had lately sworn him fealty, and for the moment were exercising paramount influence over the feeble will of their lord, whilst Rotbert, surnamed le fort, an adventurer of obscure origin whom people had lately begun to talk about, was at this time the strongest man along Loire, a freebooter, as some said, from the forests of Germany, in whose veins ran the blood of Charlemagne himself, according to others, the son of a butcher from the shambles of Paris, matter of little moment. In days when a mighty hand and an outstretched arm alone could lead to fortune, his reputation for strength of will and thew was of far greater importance. This man, then, it were politic to bind to the crumbling fortunes of the royal house, so thought Guntfried and Gosfried, in all singleness of heart, and at their instigation King Charles the Bald consented to receive his homage, little thinking that he was thereby laying the foundations of a house which would one day wreck his dynasty.

But the new vassal was something more than a strong man, he was a man, too, of tact and address, and his influence soon became so great, and the favours showered on him so large, that Guntfried and Gosfried, jealous of the rival whom they themselves had set up, determined to compass his overthrow.

To this end, supported by Louis, son of Charles the Bald, and by Judith, his beautiful and accomplished daughter, they called to their assistance the Flemish chief, Baldwin, son of Odoaker, a man of whose antecedents we know nothing. Judith was at this time one of the most remarkable women in Europe. Her career had been a strange and a stormy one. First married, in his old age and as his second wife, to our own King Ethelwolf of Wessex, it was to Judith, his step-mother, that Alfred the Great was indebted for his earliest training.

When Ethelwolf died she had contracted an alliance with Ethelbald, a son of the old king by a former marriage, and upon his death in 860 she retired to Senlis, where she was living in queenly state under the sovereign protection of its bishops when Baldwin saw her, became enamoured of her beauty, and it would seem, with her own connivance, carried her off for his bride.

King Charles was holding his Court at Soissons when the news of the abduction and of his son’s confederacy with Guntfried and Gosfried reached his ears, and furious at the disregard shown to his parental authority, he acted, for once, with energy and decision. Summoning the nobles of his Court to his presence forthwith, he pronounced judgment against the culprits in accordance with civil law, next obtained from his complaisant bishops their excommunication, and marching in person against the two conspiring vassals, surprised them at Meaux, and forced them to lay down their arms. The plot then had for the moment failed. Baldwin and Judith fled to the Court of Lothaire, and from thence to Rome, where they sought the aid of that sturdy old Pontiff, Nicholas II. Nor did they seek in vain.

‘Your liegeman Baldwin,’ he wrote to the King of France, ‘has taken refuge at the sacred threshold of the blessed Apostles Peter and Paul, and with earnest prayers has approached our pontifical throne.

‘We therefore, from the summit of our Apostolic power, beseech you for the love of our Lord Jesus Christ and of His Apostles Peter and Paul, whose support Baldwin has preferred to that of earthly princes, vouchsafe to grant him your pardon and to completely overlook his offence, in order that, supported by your goodness, he may live in peace along with your other faithful subjects; moreover, when we ask your sublimity to forgive him, we are not only moved thereto by reason of the charity we owe to all those who implore the pity and protection of the Apostolic See, but we are impelled likewise by fear lest your anger should drive Baldwin to ally himself with the Danes, the enemies of Holy Church, and thus prepare new evils for the people of God.’ This effusion, however, does not seem to have made much impression on Charles, and the following year Pope Nicholas wrote again, and with vigour. ’ “Consider the times,” says the Apostle, “for evil days are at hand,” and I say unto you that the danger which he announces is already at your door. See to it, then, that you do not bring down upon your head disasters yet more terrible. Have sufficient good sense to master your spleen, and be not for ever deaf to Baldwin.’ At length, not without reluctance, and less from love of his daughter than from fear of his redoubtable son-in-law and the Danes, Charles yielded to the Pope’s request. On the 25th of October 863, he received Judith at his palace at Verberie, and shortly afterwards her union with Baldwin was celebrated with great splendour at Auxerre. But though Charles had consented to acknowledge the marriage, no argument could induce him to be present at the ceremony by which it was made legal. ‘I could not persuade the king,’ runs the letter in which Archbishop Hincmar of Rheims recounts to Pope Nicholas the whole affair, and Hincmar had probably at this time more influence with Charles than anyone else, ‘I could not persuade the king to go in person to the wedding, but he sent his ministers and officers of state, and in compliance with your request has conferred the highest honours on Baldwin.’

Thanks, then, to the intervention of the Pope, the main object which Guntfried and Gosfried had in view was at length obtained. Whilst Rotbert, who had been successively created Count of Anjou and Abbot of Tours, was consolidating his power on the banks of the Loire, Baldwin was being invested with still greater authority over the Northern ‘Marches,’ in the vicinity of the Lys and the Scheldt.

The first was the founder of the royal house of France, the second the ancestor to whom all the Counts of Flanders traced their descent.

CHAPTER II

Earliest Bruges

Moved by this consideration, hither came Baldwin and Judith when they had made their peace with the irascible King Charles, determined to make Brugge the headquarters of their government and their principal abode. A felicitous choice of residence destined to be fruitful in results. Thanks to it, we shall see the tumbled-down ruins of Bruggestock develop later on into that wondrous conglomeration of picturesque civic splendour—rival, in its heyday, of Venice, alike in commerce and in treasures of art, and in glory of piled-up brick, which later generations called Bruges, the Queen of the North.

Before going further, let us linger awhile over the Brugge of Baldwin’s day. The old fortress which he found there was built on an oblong-shaped island. The river Roya, which enclosed it on two sides (those facing S.E. and N.E.), still runs in its ancient bed; it flows alongside of that pleasant lime grove, which some old Burgomaster of a hundred years ago planted in front of that unlovely terrace of substantial, comfortable-looking eighteenth-century bourgeois homes which goes by the name of the Dyver.

Soon, however, after the bend of the stream, the Roya now burrows underground, vaulted over in the seventeenth century, and wends its subterranean course along the south-west side of the Place du Bourg, under Government House, and at the back of the houses which line the east side of the rue Flamande, and comes once more into daylight just opposite the old Academy in the Place des Biscayens.

As to the Boterbeke—the stream which formed the north-west boundary of the old Bourg, its course has long since been diverted, and it now only skirts the city. It formerly entered Bruges beyond the station, near the spot where the old Bouverie gate stood forty years ago, crept along near the cathedral, down the rue du Vieux Bourg, beneath the Belfry, built on piles thrust into its bed, and finally mingled its waters with those of the Roya at the corner of the rue Breidal. The moat which formed the south-western boundary of the old Bourg has also been filled in, and the present rue Neuve is built over its ancient bed.

Of the actual buildings which Baldwin found at Brugge, it is doubtful whether any remain. Possibly the Baptistry Chapel, in the rear of the Chapel of St. Basil, is of the date which tradition claims for it, and, if so, it may perhaps be identified with St. Amand’s Chapel on the banks of the Roya, but recent expert investigation makes it almost certain that this portion of the Chapel of St. Basil dates from the same epoch as the rest of the building, and that Baldwin, Bras de Fer, was himself its founder. St. Eloi’s Church of Our Lady occupied the site of the present cathedral, but of the original structure no vestige remains, save perhaps the lower portion of the tower, and even this is doubtful. The old Bourg itself had fallen into such a state of decay when Baldwin first came to Bruges, that he did not dare deposit there the relics of St. Donatian which had been given to him by Archbishop Ebber of Rheims, but sent them for safe keeping to his castle at Thorhout, about three leagues south of Bruges, until the new bourg which he was building should be ready to receive them. The old fortress was never restored, but its stones were used later on during the reign of Baldwin II. for the construction of a wall round the city, and of this wall no vestige remains.

Baldwin’s new Bourg was built on an island formed by a backwater of the Roya—an irregular-shaped strip of land of considerably smaller dimensions than the island of the old Bourg. The backwater in question branched off at right angles to the main stream, and running for a short distance straight on, presently turned sharp round to the left, at a little beyond the site of the present fish market; and then gradually curved round till it again met the river at the corner of the Grand’ Place, and of the rue Philipstock.

VIEW OF THE QUAI VERT

The course of this backwater has long since been entirely changed. Running on in a straight line past the fish market, it now empties itself into the grand coupure, and is one of the most picturesque waterways in Bruges.

Along the right bank of this beautiful stream, going towards the great canal, runs a towing-path, well shaded with poplar trees and limes, and fringed on the side with some delightful old gabled houses, and by

others less interesting and of more recent date. But it is the left bank which gives the stream its greatest charm, for here, at the angle where the backwater turns off from the main stream, stand certain phlegmatic municipal offices of the last century, laving their feet in the water—comfortable-looking, old-fashioned red-brick buildings which, somehow or other, ‘the golden stain of time’ has managed to make beautiful. Behind them soar the high-pitched roofs and dormer windows of an old city hall, whose pinnacles and turrets and spires give play to light and shade, and break up the sky line. Hard-by, at the end of a narrow street which runs back from the water, behold a rival of the Bridge of Sighs, and in a gilded gatehouse without gates, the marriage of the Middle Age and the Renaissance, and to the right, quaint, venerable and picturesque in weather-beaten brick, the Palace of the Liberty of Bruges, and further still, a vista of old homes, and shady lawns, and overhanging trees and bridges, hunch-backed and of ancient date.

But to return to Baldwin’s bourg, the Castle itself—a spacious and strongly-fortified building, which stood on ground now occupied by the Palais de Justice, the Hotel de Ville, and the unsightly modern erections on the east side of the square—included within its precincts not only Baldwin’s own residence, but the residence of the Châtelains or Viscounts of Bruges, the Ghistelhaus where hostages were lodged, the Court chapel and the Court prison; opposite this group of buildings on the north side, that is, of the Bourg, stood a sanctuary dedicated to Our Lady, which Baldwin had founded to receive the relics of St. Donatian, and further on the cloisters of the priests who served it.

The whole island was encircled by a strong and lofty wall, pierced by four great gateways, each one protected by a portcullis and a drawbridge, which were the only means of communication with the outer world. Such was the citadel reared on the banks of the Roya by the father and founder of Bruges. Of his handiwork only a fragment has come down to us, but a fragment so perfect, that as one enters the gloomy crypt beneath the Chapel of the Precious Blood, the mind is involuntarily carried back to the time when Baldwin and his family worshipped there, a thousand years ago.