communes, and the two French leaders, the Constable and the Count of Artois, were left, both of them, lying on the field of battle amidst twelve or fifteen thousand of their dead.  “I yield me!  I yield me!” cried the Count of Artois; but, “We understand not thy lingo,” ironically answered in their own tongue the Flemings who surrounded him; and he was forthwith put to the sword.  Too late to save him galloped up a noble ally of the insurgents, Guy of Namur.  “From the top of the towers of our monastery,” says the Abbot of St. Martin’s of Tournai, “we could see the French flying over the roads, across fields and through hedges, in such numbers that the sight must have been seen to be believed.  There were in the outskirts of our town and in the neighboring villages, so vast a multitude of knights and men-at-arms tormented with hunger, that it was a matter horrible to see.  They gave their arms to get bread.”

[Illustration:  The Battle of Courtrai——­167]

A French knight, covered with wounds, whose name has remained unknown, hastily scratched a few words upon a scrap of parchment dyed with blood; and that was the first account Philip the Handsome received of the battle of Courtrai, which was fought and lost on the 11th of July, 1302.

The news of this great defeat of the French spread rapidly throughout Europe, and filled with joy all those who were hostile to or jealous of Philip the Handsome.  The Flemings celebrated their victory with splendor, and rewarded with bounteous gifts their burgher heroes, Peter Deconing amongst others, and those of their neighbors who had brought them aid.  Philip, greatly affected and a little alarmed, sent for his prisoner, the aged Guy de Dampierre, and loaded him with reproaches, as if he had to thank him for the calamity; and, forthwith levying a fresh army, “as numerous,” say the chroniclers, “as the grains of sand on the borders of the sea from Propontis to the Ocean,” he took up a position at Arras, and even advanced quite close to Douai; but he was of those in whom obstinacy does not extinguish prudence, and who, persevering all the while in their purposes, have wit to understand the difficulties and clangers of them.  Instead of immediately resuming the war, he entered into negotiations with the Flemings; and their envoys met him in a ruined church beneath the walls of Douai.  John of Chalons, one of Philip’s envoys, demanded, in his name, that the king should be recognized as lord of all Flanders, and authorized to punish the insurrection of Bruges, with a promise, however, to spare the lives of all who had taken part in it.  “How!” said a Fleming, Baldwin de Paperode; “our lives would be left us, but only after our goods had been pillaged and our limbs subjected to every torture!” “Sir Castellan,” answered John of Chalons, “why speak you so?  A choice must needs be made; for the king is determined to lose his crown rather than not be avenged.”  Another Fleming, John de Renesse, who, leaning on