productions of the age.  About this period we find prevalent those Northern singers corresponding to the Trouveres, Troubadours, and Jongleurs.  They are in Flanders the Spreker, Segger, and Vinder, who, when travelling through the country, took the name of Gezel, received in town or village, court or hamlet, as the wandering minstrel of the South.  The golden age when sovereigns doffed their royal robes to lay them on the shoulders of some sweet-singing poet, as the old chronicles tell us, was of short duration in the North, if ever the Sproken or erotic poems may be said to have brought their authors into such favor.  On the other hand, we find some of the wanderers arrested for theft and other crimes.

Little light has been thrown on their first ante-historical attempts.  Until the late labors of German philologers, little had been done to clear up the confusion resting on this period of literary history.  As yet the field has scarcely been explored beyond the regions not immediately connected with the literature of Germany.  We have long historical poems of little interest, arranged without order,—­interminable productions of thousands and ten thousands of lines of uncertain date, didactic and encyclopedia-like, besides unmistakable remnants of a Netherlandish theatre.

The battle of Roosebeke, where the second Artevelde and his companions succumbed to superior numbers, was the last great enterprise of the Flemings against the French.  Half a century earlier, a strong league had been formed against these powerful neighbors.  In the interior, the country was divided into factions,—­the partisans and enemies of France.  Prominent were the Clauwaerts and the Leliarts, from the lion’s claw and the fleur-de-lis which they respectively wore on their badges.  The country, which has ever been one of the battle-fields of Europe, was abandoned to all the horrors of civil war.  The Duke of Brabant was childless.  The Count of Flanders gave his daughter, his only legitimate child, in marriage to the Duke of Burgundy; and the provinces soon came into the hands of those ambitious and restless enemies of the Court of France.  It may easily be imagined that these events were not without their influence on a language deteriorated on the one hand by constant contact with a Romanic idiom, and in Holland by the transmission of the sovereign crown to the House of Avesnes.

The “Chambers of Rhetoric,” an institution peculiar to the Low Countries, reached their highest point of prosperity under the Burgundian rule.  The wandering life of poets and authors had nearly ceased.  The Gezellen, settled in towns, and moved by the prevalent spirit which prompted men of one calling to unite into bodies, naturally fell into corporations analogous to the Guilds.  Without attaching any very definite or clear idea to the term Rhetoric which they employed, these associations exerted