CHAPTER VII

_The Greater and the Lesser Folk_

The municipal organisation of the towns of Brabant was at first of a very simple character. It consisted in every case of an unpaid magistracy--a college of _schepen_ or aldermen appointed by the Duke for life from among the chief freeholders of the city, of which they were held to be its representatives--presided over by a paid officer, who bore the title of Mayor or Ecoutête or Amman--from town to town the title differed--was the sovereign's direct delegate, and in all things the representative of his authority. He was not necessarily or even usually a burgher of the city over which he presided. The Duke was free to choose whom he would, and to revoke the appointment at will; and though this officer held the first place in the civic hierarchy, he was in reality nothing more than his master's hired servant.

Alongside of the College of Aldermen was the Merchants' Guild. Whether this corporation had any legal existence prior to the institution of the magistracy is a problem which has yet to be solved; but it is certain that by the end of the eleven hundreds the guild was firmly established in most of the towns of Brabant; that, including as it did all the commercial and industrial capitalists of the city, it had exercised from the first no little influence on public affairs, and that it contributed in great measure to the full expansion of municipal self-rule.

The next century saw the birth of another institution, the Council of Jurors, and there can be no doubt that it was to the Merchants' Guild that the Jury owed its origin.

With the increase of the population, outcome of the commercial development which signalised the opening of the twelve hundreds, the old machinery no longer sufficed for the maintenance of public peace and the regulation of trade. It became necessary to devise some new means to check the growing disorder, and the burghers, united as they were in the powerful organisation of their guild, were strong enough to take the matter into their own hands. Hence the Council of Jurors, a subsidiary body, annually elected by the people for policing the city and the management of municipal affairs, and which also participated with the College of Aldermen in the administration of justice.

So far from offering opposition, the sovereigns of Brabant from the first showed themselves favourable to this development. Not that they had any particular liking for democratic institutions, but because they were sufficiently clear-sighted to see that, in the interest of their revenue, it was incumbent on them to do so: they were well aware that the towns of Brabant depended wholly on trade, and that this delicate plant can only thrive in an atmosphere of freedom.

There is no record of the Jury at Brussels prior to 1229, at Antwerp till 1232, at Louvain till 1234, and at Tirlemont till 1249, but it is most likely that in all of these towns it dates from an earlier period, and by the close of the first half of the century it had been granted to almost all the communes of Brabant.

Its existence, however, as a body distinct from the higher magistracy was nowhere, save at Louvain, of long duration. As early as 1274 the Jury had disappeared at Brussels, and in hardly any of the great towns did it outlive the century. From the first the relations between the two corporations had almost everywhere been strained: they were the embodiment of hostile ideals--oligarchy and popular rule. Presently the burghers obtained a voice in the election of aldermen, and their term of office was limited to one year. The Council of Jurors thus ceased to be the sole expression of the will of the people; the higher magistracy had become, not only in theory, as it had always been, but in fact, representative of the city, and had risen proportionately in public esteem. Thus protected by the mantle of popularity, it was able, seemingly without opposition, little by little to itself assume the functions of its rival, and thus, little by little, to absorb it into its own bosom.

At Louvain, however, the case was different. In that city the aristocratic element was all-powerful, and the jury was recruited from the same families which furnished the College of Aldermen; from the first the two corporations had worked together in harmony, and until the end of the Middle Age they continued to exist as two distinct bodies.

For a long period after the municipal organisation of the cities of Brabant had been definitely determined, all administrative and legislative power remained in the hands of a narrow oligarchy of great capitalists, headed by the old patrician families, which from time immemorial had furnished the magistracy.

One was the source of their title to distinction--the ownership of land; but the means by which the first patricians had acquired their title-deeds were not in every case the same, nor were they all of like origin. Some of them were the descendants of _ministeriales_ who, when the township was a feudal domain, had levied their lords' dues for him, and generally managed his affairs; others of yeomen of the same period, whom thrift or good fortune had enabled to purchase the freehold of the soil they tilled; others, again, were successful traders, or the sons of successful traders, who, retiring from business, had invested the wealth which commerce had given them in real property.

Together they formed a class apart, distinct alike from the feudal nobility and from the general body of townsmen. They were divided into groups in each city, which bore the characteristic title of _lignages_ or clans; but it is certain that many patricians were not the direct lineal descendants of the houses whose names and arms they bore: the status of patrician was transmissible in the female line, and patrician daughters were not unfrequently given in marriage to prosperous plebeians; moreover, some of the sons of the house were only sons by adoption--the wealthy merchant of alien blood was not always refused admission to the charmed circle, though as a rule the door of matrimony was the only door open to him; and occasionally we find whole families, sometimes sections of families, forsaking their original clan to enroll themselves in another. Indeed, the great _lignages_ of Brabant, which play so large a part in the stories of her towns, were, to a certain extent, voluntary associations of aristocratic families banded together for the sake of mutual protection and help, and with a view to securing the election of their own nominees to the magistracy; and though, no doubt, a considerable number of the members of each clan traced their descent to one stock, it is certain that the ties by which they were most strongly knit together were not those of blood, but of kindred pursuits, and kindred associations and kindred political interests. It is a significant fact, as Pirenne observes, that the number of _lignages_ in each town corresponded to the number of their aldermen, and that each _lignage_ had obtained a prescriptive right of representation in the magistracy.

Though the patricians as a body were a wealthy class, all of them were not rich men; some, indeed, were so poor that they were glad to earn a livelihood by hiring themselves as servants to their more fortunate kinsmen; others, on account of their poverty, renounced their privileges, and sank back into the general body of the people. On the other hand, the wealth of the patricianate was being constantly augmented by the new men who found admission into its borders, and with the increasing prosperity of the town, their land was becoming daily more valuable for building purposes. Many of them were thus able to live in luxury on the rents produced by their property, others increased their revenue by farming the State taxes, others were engaged in banking operations, others again in commerce. In that case they became members of the Merchants' Guild, for the Guild, whose members were constantly being enrolled in the _lignages_ was always ready to open its doors to the son of the aristocratic house who wished to resume the calling by which, most likely, his ancestors had attained wealth. Thus it was growing daily more and more aristocratic, and at last nearly all its members were patricians by birth or by adoption. Embracing as it did at first traders of every kind, it now became an exceedingly close corporation, and only admitted to its membership the sellers of cloth and the sellers of wool, the cream of the commercial world.

Such were the men who owned the soil of the cities of Brabant, who had endowed them, often at their own cost, with magnificent public buildings,[7] who had won for themselves free institutions, and who for the best part of two hundred years tyrannised over everyone else.

[7] The old Cloth Hall of Louvain, for example.

Mightier than the feudal chiefs, whose fathers' swords had made the evolution of the city possible, they had absorbed them into their own ranks, or driven them forth from their borders, and now adopted their dress and speech and manner of living. In time of war they wore coats of mail like knights, and they alone of the civic army were mounted. They lived in great houses of stone, whose turrets and battlements towered above the thatched hovels of the helots who did their bidding:--weavers who starved when work was slack, and in good times just managed to keep body and soul together, the poorest and the most numerous of them all were they, the most turbulent, too, and the worst organised, always snarling at their hard lot and their impotence to better it, ready to break out into rebellion on the slightest provocation, and never content with their wages; dyers with blue nails--outward and visible sign of moral degradation, for though it was owing to their skill that the cloth of Brabant was more beautiful than that of any other land, and sometimes, though not often, they obtained wealth, they could never hope for the rights of citizenship until time had wiped out those fatal stains; men of a hundred other callings, degraded creatures all of them, who earned their bread by the sweat of their brow, mere human chattels without heart and without soul, whom an honest burgher might cuff at will, aye, and, if he would, carry off their daughters without fear of incurring any legal penalty.

It was not always so. Before the year 1200 class distinctions were far less marked. In the early days the weaver could sell his own cloth, and even petty traders were admitted to the Merchants' Guild. The advent of the middleman had changed all this, and as time went on the patricians, the _majores et potentiores_, as an ancient chronicler calls them, grew more and more exclusive and more and more overbearing. But though they looked down on the 'lesser folk,' the bowels of their compassion were not shut up against them: they built and lavishly endowed hospitals where they might be tended when they were sick, refuges to which they could retire when hard work and old age had worn them out, orphanages for such of their children as had been deprived by death of their natural protectors, and above all, churches, glorious without and within--palaces of the people, where Lazarus and Dives knelt side by side. Nor is the stream of their charity yet dried up: the rich endowments of the _Bureaux de bienfaisance_ throughout Belgium are in great measure due to the munificence of these merchant princes of the Middle Age, who in turn cuffed and caressed the turbulent folk on whose hardships they fattened, and whose poverty rendered their riches possible.

No less inconsequent was the patrician burgher in his dealings with the Church--with one hand he smote her in the mouth and with the other he loaded her with benefits. And yet, after all, perhaps he was not so inconsistent, for the soul of this man who possessed the faith, in his way a devout Christian, was consumed by pride and the lust of power. He would share his authority with no man, he would be master in his own house, and so he ousted the noble, ground down the toiler, flouted the clerk and set his heel on his neck. A firm believer in the rights of the laity, he would never suffer priest or monk to meddle with his affairs, but he did not hesitate, whenever it suited his purpose, to busy himself with theirs. Thus, from time immemorial most city livings had been in the gift of one or other of the religious houses which dotted the countryside, but he quietly ignored their abbots' pretensions, and named his parish priests himself, and never rested until he had obtained a legal right to do so. So, too, in the matter of education: the management of schools had been always recognised as the especial province of the clergy, but he was not happy until he had succeeded in placing them under municipal control, or, in other words, until he had undertaken their management himself. Nor would he always recognise the clerk's right to justice in his own courts, though when he himself was technically a churchman, he never scrupled to make use of them if he thought it would be an advantage to him to do so. Thus at Louvain, where almost all the patricians were _Hommes de Saint Pierre_, the old ecclesiastical courts, officered indeed by laymen, were maintained intact for his behoof till the Revolution.

The peculiar circumstances of the Church in Brabant favoured these pretensions. The one great ecclesiastical power in that province, where no bishop had his See, was monasticism, and when the burgher was in the heyday of his magnificence monasticism was spiritually and temporally at a low ebb. The fiery zeal which characterised the days of the Cluniac revival had long ago flickered out. Discipline had become sadly relaxed, the monk had ceased to be the saint and the popular hero he had been in days of yore, and the alms of the faithful no longer flowed into his coffers. Another source of revenue, too, had all but dried up. Owing to the fall in the purchasing power of money, the produce of his manorial dues, which he had no power to raise, had diminished almost to vanishing point. Thus was the abbot, at his wits' end how to keep order amongst his rebellious family and make both ends meet, sadly handicapped in his contests with his all-powerful foe, from whom, indeed, he was not unfrequently constrained to borrow at usurious rates of interest. But although the burgher looked askance at the old religious orders, for some reason or other his antipathy to the monk did not extend itself to the friar. He never quarrelled with the 'watch dogs of the Lord,' and with the disciples of 'the poor man of Assisi' his relations were most cordial. Perhaps as a practical business man the object of their mission appealed more to his sympathies; perhaps he thought he had nothing to fear from the children of the gentle saint who had taken for his bride the Lady Poverty. But by a strange irony of fate it was not the monk but the friar who hurled the first blow at his dominion. It was from the lips of the friar who toiled among the poverty-stricken masses that these poor folk learned, for the first time, the dignity of man, and no teacher was needed to awaken in their souls the consciousness of their degradation. They experienced it every day: when they lounged about the market-place on Monday morning waiting, often in vain, for the supply of labour generally exceeded the demand, for someone to hire them at wages fixed by the town magistrates, men who themselves were employers of labour and in whose appointment the people had no voice; when, working at home at their looms, they received the visit of the guild inspector, who had the right to ransack their hovels at all hours, with a view to assuring himself of the excellence of their work, and who received as his salary a portion of the fine imposed for any fraud detected. This was their normal lot in times of prosperity, and when work was slack, or when there was no work at all, as was sometimes the case when wool was not forthcoming from England, the wounds inflicted on their self-respect went deeper and smarted more: then were they constrained to choose between two evils--either they must starve, and, worse still, see their wives and their little ones starve; or they must band together and parade the streets whining for that bread which they could no longer win. Well might the friar preach to men set in such straits the beauty of Christian humility and of Christian resignation, and bid them despise as dross that gold which they could not obtain. The weavers and dyers who hung on his lips possessed, of earthly goods, very often only the rags they stood up in; and the wealth which they saw around them, and which they could never hope to enjoy, they knew very well was in many cases the fruit of their underpaid toil, and that the holders of it, of like origin with themselves, were not only their rulers and taskmasters, but corrupt stewards of the common-weal--the men who managed the city, and managed it in their own interests.

What wonder, then, that they soon began to confound contempt for riches with contempt for the rich, and that presently contempt engendered hatred. Were not the oppressors of the poor the enemies of Jesus Christ? Was it not easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God? Had not one of their preachers[8] told them that the rich man, even if he were righteous, was less worthy of esteem than the woman of the street?

[8] Guillaume Cornelius of Antwerp. _See_ Thomas de Cantimpré (a native of Brussels, born in 1201), _Bonum universale de apibus_, p. 433 (Duaci, 1605). 'Il importe de remarquer toutefois,' notes Pirenne (vol. i. p. 353), 'que ce Cornelius était hérétique, mais, même dans l'église orthodoxe, des prédications analogues à celles de Lambert le Bègue (_see_ 'Story of Brussels.' p 233) et l'ardent mysticisme des premières béguines (_see_ pp. 228 and 233) devaient agir fortement sur le peuple.'