waiting for what the morrow might bring forth, while others went to the ramparts on the north, and strained their eyes to see if help was coming from Damme.
At early dawn—it was Friday, May 18, 1302—the watchers on the ramparts saw a host of armed men rapidly approaching the town. They were divided into two parties, one of which, led by De Coninck, made for the Porte Ste. Croix, while the other, under Breidel, marched to the Porte de Damme, a gateway which no longer exists, but which was then one of the most important entrances, being that by which travellers came from Damme and Sluis. Messengers from the ramparts ran swiftly through the streets, in which daylight was now beginning to appear, and spread the news from house to house. Silently the burghers took their swords and pikes, left their homes, and gathered in the Market-Place and near the houses in which the French were sleeping. The French slept on till, all of a sudden, they were wakened by the tramp of feet, the clash of arms, and shouts of 'Flanders for the Lion!' Breidel had led his men into the town, and they were rushing through the streets to where Châtillon had taken up his quarters, while De Coninck, having passed through the Porte Ste. Croix, was marching to the Bourg. The Frenchmen, bewildered, surprised, and only half awake, ran out into the streets. The Flemings were shouting 'Schilt ende Vriendt! Schilt ende Vriendt!'[5] and every man who could not pronounce these words was known to be a Frenchman, and slain upon the spot. Some fled to the gates; but at every gate they found a band of guards, who called out 'Schilt ende Vriendt!' and put them to the sword.
All that summer's morning, and on throughout the day, the massacre continued. Old men, women, and children hurled stones from the roofs and windows down upon the enemy. Breidel, a man of great strength, killed many with his own hand, and those whom he wounded were beaten to death where they fell by the apprentices with their iron clubs. In the Market-Place, close to where the monument to De Coninck and Breidel stands, a party of soldiers, under a gallant French knight, Gauthier de Sapignies, made a stand; but they were overpowered and slaughtered to the last man. Châtillon tried to rally his forces, but the surprise had been too complete, and, disguising himself in the cassock of a priest, he hid, in company with Chancellor Flotte, till it was dark, when they managed to escape from the town. By this time the carnage had ceased; the walls of the houses and the gutters ran with blood; and the burghers of Bruges had done their work so thoroughly that 2,000 Frenchmen lay dead upon the streets.
But the final reckoning with France was yet to come. When Châtillon reached Paris and told his master the direful story of the Bruges Matins, Philip swore revenge; and a few weeks later an army 40,000 strong invaded Flanders, under the Comte d'Artois, with whom rode also Châtillon, Flotte, and many nobles of France. The Flemings went to meet them—not only the burghers of Bruges, led by De Coninck and Breidel, marching under the banners of their guilds, but men from every part of Flanders—and on July 11, near Courtrai, the Battle of the Golden Spurs was fought.
A FLEMISH BURGHER
The ground was marshy, with a stream and pools of water between the two armies; and just as the Scots at Bannockburn, twelve years afterwards, prepared pitfalls for the heavy cavalry of England, so the Flemings laid a trap for the French knights by cutting down brushwood and covering the water. The horsemen, clad in cumbrous armour, charged, the brushwood gave way, and most of them sank into the water. The Comte d'Artois got clear, but was beaten to the ground and killed. The Chancellor Flotte, who had boasted that he would bring the people of Bruges to their knees, was trampled to death. Châtillon died too; and when, at last, a long day's fighting came to an end, the Flemings had gained a complete victory. By this battle, which took its name from the thousands of golden spurs which were torn from the French knights who fell, the victors secured—for a time, at least—the liberty of their country, and the memory of it was for many a day to Flanders what the memory of Bannockburn was to Scotland or of Morgarten to Switzerland.
Footnotes
[5] 'Shield and Friend!'
CHAPTER V
DAMME—THE SEA-FIGHT AT SLUIS—SPLENDOUR OF BRUGES IN THE MIDDLE AGES—
THE FALL AND LOSS OF TRADE
Damme, where the patriots mustered on the eve of the Bruges Matins, is within a short hour's stroll from the east end of the town. The Roya, which disappears from view, as we have already seen, opposite the Quai du Rosaire, emerges from its hidden course at the west end of the Quai du Miroir, where the statue of Jan van Eyck stands near the door of the building now used as a public library. This building was once the Customs House of Bruges, conveniently situated in the neighbourhood of the Market-Place, and on the side of the Roya, which thence stretches eastwards between the Quai du Miroir and the Quai Spinola for a few hundred yards, and then turns sharply to the north, and continues between the Quai Long and the Quai de la Potterie, which are built in rambling fashion on either side of the water. Some of the houses are old, others of no earlier date, apparently, than the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries; some large and well preserved, and some mere cottages, half ruinous, with low gables and faded yellow fronts, huddled together on the rough causeway, alongside of which are moored canal-boats with brown hulls and deck-houses gay with white and green paint. At the end of the Quai de la Potterie is the modern Bassin de Commerce, in which the Roya loses itself, the harbour for the barges and small steamers which come by the canal connecting Ostend with Bruges and Ghent; and near this was, in ancient days, the Porte de Damme, through which Breidel and his followers burst on that fateful morning in May 600 years ago.
To the right of the Bassin a broad canal, constructed by Napoleon in 1810, extends in a straight line eastwards, contained within dykes which raise it above a wide expanse of level meadow-lands intersected by ditches, and dotted here and there by the white-walled cottages with red roofs and green outside shutters which are so typical of Flemish scenery. About two miles out of Bruges one comes in sight of a windmill perched on a slope at the side of the canal, a square church-tower, a few houses, and some grassy mounds, which were once strong fortifications. Even the historical imagination, which everyone who walks round Bruges must carry with him, is hardly equal to realizing that this was once a bustling seaport, with a harbour in which more than a hundred merchant ships, laden with produce from all parts of the world, were sometimes lying at the same time. In those busy times Damme, they say, contained 50,000 inhabitants; now there are only about 1,100.
Beyond Damme the canal winds on through the same flat landscape, low-lying, water-logged, with small farmhouses and scanty trees, and in the distance, on the few patches of higher ground, the churches of Oostkerke and Westcapelle. At last, soon after passing the Dutch frontier, the canal ends in a little dock with gray, lichen-covered sides; and this is Sluis, a dull place, with a few narrow streets, a market-place, two churches, and a belfry of the fourteenth century. It is quite inland now, miles from the salt water; and from the high ramparts which still surround it the view extends to the north across broad green fields, covering what was once the bed of the sea, in the days when the tide ebbed and flowed in the channel of the Zwijn, over which ships passed sailing on their way to Bruges. But any English traveller who, having gone a little way out of the beaten track of summer tourists, may chance to mount the ramparts, and look down upon the fields which stretch away to the shores of the North Sea and the estuary of the Scheldt, and inland beyond Damme to the Belfry and the spires of Bruges, is gazing on the scene of a great event in the naval history of England.
Here, on what is now dry land, on the morning of June 24, 1340, 800 ships of war, full of armed men—35,000 of them—were drawn up in line of battle; and further out to sea, beyond the entrance of the Zwijn, the newly-risen sun was shining on the sails of another