The turn of Ghent came a little later. On her refusal to pay a salt-tax to which Bruges and Ypres had submitted, a conflict began which lasted for four years (1449). After the Duke had twice stopped the ordinary administration of justice, the whole body of the people took the power into its hands, appointed three captains (hooftmannen), and at the sound of the bell assembled under arms on the Vrydags-markt. The Duke retorted by a decree of blockade and outlawry against Ghent. Bruges and the other towns jealously held aloof; and, though the Ghenters appealed both to the French suzerain and to the government of Henry VI of England, they had to fight out the contest virtually alone. In the city a ruthless terrorism maintained an unreasoning enthusiasm, till a long and sanguinary campaign ended, within sight of her towers, by the carnage of Gavre (1453). The settlement which ensued established the ducal authority as paramount in every important function of the administration of the city, abolished the most cherished guarantees of its previous independence, and among other humiliations inflicted on its representatives that of confessing the guilt of the suppressed rebellion in the French tongue. Some of the privileges of the prostrate city were indeed renewed in a new charter, the powers of the royal bailiff were restricted, and no mention was made of the obnoxious salt-tax. But the victory was not the less complete, and was followed by the revocation of the charters of other towns, although they had abstained from supporting Ghent.
The overthrow of the greatness of the Flemish communes was due in part to the anarchical spirit which more and more took possession of them as their public life passed into the ochlocratic stage, and which could not but impair their military discipline and defensive strength. What had here-and the state of things was not very different in Brabant-remained of the authority of the territorial prince was confined to the influence exercised by his bailli upon the administration of justice, and when possible upon the choice of magistrates and upon legislation. The patriciate-the poorters at Bruges and Ghent, to which the lignages corresponded in Brabant-still ordinarily determined the choice of the magistrates or aldermen; but in any season of agitation this power was sure to be swept out of their hands with all the judicial, financial, and other functions of government. Not un-frequently such outbursts of popular fury were provoked by the venality of the ruling classes, and the fear of their recurrence naturally inclined the patricians towards the ducal authority, unless when their advances were blindly repelled by the harshness of the sovereign, as in the later days of Charles the Bold. The real holders of power in the Flemish communes were now the working population at large, divided on a system varying in the several towns into trades or handicrafts (am-bachten); in Brabant these trades had before the accession of Philip effected a compromise with the lignages; in Holland and Utrecht their authority was great but not overwhelming; in Liege, as has been seen, it was paramount. In the three great Flemish towns, the great mass of the trades ordinarily asserted their power by the votes of their representatives, and on critical occasions by the organised resort to arms under their banners in the market-place (wapeninghe). By itself each trade formed not only a military, but also a social and religious unit, with its common purse for purposes of business, pleasure and charity, and often with a chapel and a hospital of its own. In the course of the fourteenth century the great craft of the Weavers had effected its predominance in each of the three cities, and became omnipotent at Ghent. Next to them came the Fullers, with whom they had many a sanguinary conflict. At Ghent there were besides these two great crafts 52 smaller crafts; and in one of them even the poorters, who constituted a guild without political power, had to inscribe themselves if desirous of becoming eligible for a magisterial office. At Bruges there were four great crafts-Weavers, Fullers, Shearers and Dyers-and the famous muster of October 10, 1436, included 48 smaller, from the butchers and bakers to the paternoster-makers; all these were combined into eight “members,” with a ninth consisting of the four “free trades” of merchants, while the Ghent trades made up three “members” only. Each “member” (elsewhere called “nation”) was presided over by a Grand Dean; and these officers were always, however its composition might from time to time vary, included in the representative committee (called collatie at Ghent) of the entire commune. The approval of this committee was doubtless asked by the commune, when in moments of supreme excitement hoqftmannen or captains were chosen by or for it- a term which seems in the first instance to have meant merely the heads of a poorters1 guild.
The absence of any durable league or alliance between the several communes was due to the narrow jealousy which they cherished towards one another and which has already been illustrated in the case of the relations between Bruges and Ghent. In 1423 Ghent successfully thwarted the attempt of Ypres to divert to herself the water-transport of wine and cereals; half a century later the Yprois joined the Ghenters in ignoring the apprehensions of Bruges as to the sanding-up of the Zwyn. To this pernicious jealousy was added the ill-will of the large against the smalle steden, and the tyrannous arrogance of the towns towards the rural districts; nor was it till 1438 that Duke Philip restored the rights of the Vrije (le Franc) of Bruges as a “fourth member” of Flanders.
The economic decline of Flanders in the fifteenth century has been obscured by the glowing descriptions of luxurious life in which the Court chroniclers of Philip and Charles abound. The great industry which had filled the famous Cloth-hall of Ypres steadily declined; till about the time of the death of Mary a city population which had formerly amounted to something like 100,000 had fallen to about one-twentieth of that total. Ypres, like some other of the Flemish towns, had suffered from special causes, but there was one which fundamentally affected them all. The fabrication of cloth in England had endangered the chief industry of Flanders already at the close of the fourteenth century; and, profiting alike by the instruction derived from the Flemish immigration which the troubles of the fifteenth century had superadded to earlier immigrations in the twelfth and fourteenth, and by the facilities of export offered by the Hanseatic merchants, she gradually drove Flemish cloth from the staple at Calais. The crucial question whether it were better to attract to the Flemish market the sale of this exported English cloth, or to exclude it altogether from competition with the native industry, was settled by a sort of compromise in favour of protection. But the repeated prohibitions of the importation of English cloth (1436-64) remained ineffectual, and the cloth industry was paralysed in the Flemish cities; though it maintained itself for a considerable time in the open country. Ghent was able to some extent to fall back upon its resources as a staple of corn; and at Bruges, where the banking business of Europe was in the hands of foreign merchants, a busy traffic continued to be carried on. In the struggle pertinaciously maintained by the latter city, from the close of the thirteenth century onwards, against the transference of her foreign trade to Antwerp, interest in the end prevailed over habit. The English Merchant Adventurers, who had set up a house at Antwerp early in the fifteenth century, by the middle of it had transferred themselves thither in a body. While the great transmarine trade was thus drawn away from Flanders proper to Brabant, and the depopulation of the former, which assumed alarming proportions under Charles the Bold, had begun already in the last years of his predecessor, the prosperity of the Northern Netherlands continued to increase. Navigation, with the great fishing and other industries, flourished; and little troubled by the remote wars of Charles the Bold, the Hollanders and their neighbours took consolation for his exactions in the cheapness of comforts which they came to reckon among the necessaries of life. In the struggles of the Dukes with the communes the nobles ranged themselves readily on the side of the former down to the close of Philip’s reign-notably in Flanders, where Courtray had never been forgotten. Only very gradually under him, though more abruptly under his successor, the modern notion of the sovereign throned in majestic isolation superseded the feudal conception of the prince among his peers. To a large extent the change was doubtless due to the influence of the most splendid of contemporary Western courts. The pictures of its magnificence and luxury drawn by Jacques du Clercq and the elaborate episodes of feast and tournament, with which Olivier de la Marche loves to intersperse his narrative, bear out the assertion of Commines, that in the prodigality of enticements it surpassed any other Court known to his experience. In the Court guide composed