A Distant Mirror_ The Calamitous 14th Century - Barbara W. Tuchman [248]
For a gift of money to the King and the Duke, all the silver and gold plate of the confréries and their candlesticks and incense boxes were sold. Royalty was not mollified. Despite the original pardon, twelve of the rioters were executed, the tocsin bell taken down, the chains for closing streets removed, fines imposed, Rouen’s charter of liberties revoked, and its administration turned over from the independent guilds to a royal bailiff. Cowed by the example, the Estates of Normandy voted a sales and a salt tax and a tax on income. In suppression of revolt, the crown was finding a way to fill its treasury and, more significantly, an opportunity to cancel town charters and extend royal power.
The wrath of Paris was still far from subdued, and dangerous events in Ghent augmented the fear that a general rising, if not yet concerted, might become so. The cry of solidarity, “Vive Gant! Vive Paris no’ mere!” was being heard in towns from the Flemish border to the Loire.
In Ghent, the White Hoods of Jacob van Artevelde’s day reappeared. A people’s militia was organized and a captain found in Artevelde’s son Philip, a small, sharp-eyed man of aggressive energy and “insinuating eloquence,” chosen largely for the aura of his name. Forced by circumstance, if not preference, to depend on the common people, he ordered that all classes would be heard in counsel, “the poor like the rich,” and all would be fed alike. When 30,000 had eaten no bread for two weeks, he forced abbeys to distribute their stores of grain and merchants to sell at fixed prices. Traditionally, the turmoils of Flanders had divided the Count, the nobility, the urban magnates and guilds in shifting alignments against each other, but this time they began to see in the sustained rebellion of Ghent the red vision of revolution and closed ranks under the Count to suppress it.
Reduced by hunger, the city agreed to a parley in April 1382. The Count, confident of mastery, demanded that all the Gantois from fifteen to sixty should come bareheaded in their shirts with halters around their necks halfway to Bruges, where he would determine how many would be pardoned and how many put to death. At a meeting in the market place, the starving townsmen were told these terms by their deputies and offered three courses of action—to submit, to starve, or to fight. The third was chosen: an army of 5,000 of those best fit to fight was mobilized and launched against Bruges, headquarters of the Count’s party. The result was one of the stunning upsets of the century.
The militia of Bruges, no less confident against their old rivals than the Count, caroused through the night and staggered forth on the morrow, May 5, shouting and singing in drunken disorder. In vain the Count and his knights endeavored to hold them back for orderly advance. A blast of stone and iron cannonballs followed by an assault of the Gantois mowed them down. Panic and flight could not be stemmed and seem rather easily to have swept the Flemish knights into the retreat. Louis de Male, the Count, was unhorsed and, despite efforts to rally his forces after dark by lantern light, avoided capture only by changing clothes with his valet and escaping on foot to refuge in a poor woman’s hut. “Do you know me?” he asked. “Oh yes, Monseigneur, I have often begged at your gates.” Found by one of his knights, he called for a horse and, provided with the indignity of a peasant’s mare, rode bareback into Lille, a less happy journey than when long ago he had galloped briskly away from marriage with Isabella.
Ghent was provisioned and joined in her triumph by other cities under the cry “Tout un! (All one).” Having taken possession of Bruges and 500 of its most notable bourgeois as hostages, Philip van Artevelde declared himself Regent of Flanders. All the towns surrendered to his rule, “and there he made new mayors and aldermen and new laws.