The Spell of Flanders. Edward Neville Vose
were stored in a strong room within the belfry walls, where four wrought iron doors secured by ten locks and ten keys guarded them against abstraction by the emissaries of some Count who might desire to curtail the privileges of the city. Eight of these keys were kept by the deans of the eight leading guilds—the butchers, bakers, shoemakers, tailors, weavers, brokers, carpenters and blacksmiths—who thus virtually controlled the government. This room the Professor desired to see above all else in the old structure. We found the four wrought iron doors, but the archive chamber no longer contains archives or the city’s seal. It was a most interesting old room, nevertheless, and one that ought to particularly interest the builders of the elaborate burglar-proof and earthquake-proof vaults that extend below so many great banking houses in America. Alas! neither the four doors nor the ten locks rendered this ancient strong-room for the protection of the city’s liberties proof against the cunning and power of tyrants, and the precious charters it once held were gradually taken away, despite the stout handiwork of one Erembald, blacksmith, who received eighty-one pounds for forging the doors in the year 1290.
To reach the bells one mounts a steep, dark staircase which is said to contain four hundred and two steps, although we did not count them. The chimes are claimed to be the finest in Europe, and comprise forty-nine bells weighing in the aggregate fifty-six thousand, one hundred and sixty-six pounds. They were cast by George Dumery in 1743 and are noted for their soft tone. The tambour which operates the chimes that ring every quarter of an hour weighs nineteen thousand, nine hundred and sixty-six pounds and is pierced by thirty thousand, five hundred square holes in which are fixed the pegs that pull the strings commanding the hammers hanging outside the bells. By altering the position of these pegs the tunes can be varied, but the programme played while we were in the city was as follows:
At the hour: “Rondo, 15th sonata,” by Mozart; at the quarter past: “Le Carillon de Dunkerque,” a popular air; at the half: “The Day of Happiness,” by Mozart; at the three-quarters past: “The Three Drummers,” a Flemish popular air. The official bell-ringer is M. Toon Nauwelaerts, a native of Lierre, where his ancestors have been bell-ringers for more than a hundred years. Although a young man, M. Nauwelaerts won an international competition of bell-ringers organised by the city of Bruges in 1911.
The view from the summit of the Belfry is one of the most superb in Flanders, especially if the visitor is so fortunate as to have fallen on one of those days when the clouds roll in great fleecy masses of dazzling white that form a wondrous background for the grim grey tower of St. Sauveur and the tapering red spire of the cathedral. As one looks down upon the sea of tiny red-roofed houses far below he is transported in fancy to the time, centuries ago, when watchmen peered off across these very parapets day and night to sound the alarm of an approaching foe, or announce the approach of their mighty Count or some noble visitor. In so doing he can realise what the old Belfry has meant to the city on the Roya. “For six hundred years,” wrote M. Gilliodts, one of the city’s learned archivists, “this belfry has watched over the city of Bruges. It has beheld her triumphs and her failures, her glory and her shame, her prosperity and her gradual decay, and, in spite of so many vicissitudes, it is still standing to bear witness to the genius of our forefathers, to awaken alike memories of old times and admiration for one of the most splendid monuments of civic architecture which the Middle Ages have produced.”
The best time of all in which to study and admire the external aspect of this noble structure is when the sun is sinking to rest and its rays fall slantingly across the sombre pile of tawny brick, touching up its projections here and there with high lights that contrast sharply with the deep shadows behind them, and listen—as did so often our poet Longfellow—to the wonderfully sweet chimes as they ring the quarter hours:
“Low and loud and sweetly blended,
Low at times and loud at times,
And changing like a poet’s rhymes
Ring the beautiful wild chimes
From the Belfry in the market
Of the ancient town of Bruges.”
The Halles themselves, of which the Belfry is the chief ornament, are notable for their considerable size, forming a rectangle one hundred and forty-three feet broad and two hundred and seventy-six feet deep. The archeological museum in one wing—which is in course of removal to the Gruuthuise Palace—enabled us to see the interior of the structure, the extent of which indicates the volume of business that was transacted there when Bruges was known as “the Venice of the North.” The great commercial activity of Bruges during the period of its prosperity, from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries, was due primarily to the fact that the Counts of Flanders decreed that it should be the sole port of entry for the entire country. The burghers quickly perceived the priceless value of this privilege, and by their enterprise and liberality made the city the foremost metropolis in Europe in the volume and variety of its international trade. With London its relations were especially intimate and cordial, each city granting to the merchants of the other privileges that in those days were almost unheard of. For example, the merchants of Bruges in time of war were granted forty days of grace in which to dispose of their property and provide for their personal safety. On one occasion, while a war was actually going on, they were given a special truce of ninety days in which to traffic freely with the subjects of the King of England. The reason for these unusual favours was that Bruges was the great market where the wool of England, on which the prosperity of the country depended, was disposed of. Not infrequently the archives record instances where the Kings of England treated with the chief magistrates of Bruges on terms of complete equality, as if with a sovereign power.
Nor was England the only country represented in the market places of Bruges during this period. The Doges of Venice often treated directly with the Burgomasters of the Italian city’s Flemish rival, while the powerful Hanseatic League established here their chief establishment for the Netherlands. The list of the “Nations,” as the groups of foreign merchants were called, makes curious reading at the present day. There were English, Scotch, French, Lusitanians, Castilians, Venetians, Genoans, Florentines; merchants from Aragon, Biscay, Lucca, Milan, Lombardy and Navarre. The German merchants from the Hanseatic towns of Lubeck, Hamburg, Cologne, Dantzig and Bremen numbered no less than forty houses in the year 1362, while the Italian and Spanish firms resident in the city were still more numerous. Many of these concerns were among the foremost trading and banking houses of the Middle Ages, with mercantile transactions extending into every part of the known world and strong enough financially to loan money to princes. When the Duke of Pembroke was captured by Du Guesclin in the Hundred Years’ War between England and France it was in Bruges that his countrymen borrowed the seventy thousand pounds demanded as ransom.
As befitted the first mercantile city in the world, business methods were more advanced at Bruges than anywhere else. It is claimed that the first insurance policies ever drawn up were devised and signed in Bruges about the year 1300. A form of registration of land titles was in use there as early as the fifteenth century. Its Bourse, or central exchange for merchandise of all kinds, is claimed to have been the first ever established.
In a single day in the year 1456 no less than 150 foreign vessels arrived at Bruges through its canals and the River Zwyn, and while these were, of course, small craft as compared to those of the present day there was then no port in the world that could boast of an equal quantity of shipping. Industrially, the town was no less important, having some fifty thousand artisans belonging to fifty-two different guilds.
The silting up of the Zwyn, rendering the approach and departure of shipping difficult and uncertain, started a downward movement that in less than a century destroyed all of this great activity and prosperity. Had it come alone it is probable that the sturdy merchants of Bruges would have found a way to overcome this adverse factor to their continued success, either by digging a new channel to the sea or by dredging, but misfortunes—as is their proverbial wont—did not come singly. In 1488, as a result of a conflict between the city and Maximilian, the stores and exchanges were closed for three months and all business came to a standstill. Seven years later it was said that nearly five thousand houses stood vacant and abandoned, no one caring either to buy or rent them. One by one the great merchants of the city closed their counting-rooms and went away; one by one the artisans departed. The last of the “Nations” to desert the declining