And even in the case of all that were most powerful in Flanders, knights, esquires, and burghers of the good cities, whom he believed to be favorable to the Count of Flanders, them he banished from Flanders, and levied half their revenues.  He had levies made of rents, of dues on merchandise, and all the revenues belonging to the count, wherever it might be in Flanders, and he disbursed them at his will, and gave them away without rendering any account. . . .  And when he would borrow of any burghers on his word for payment, there was none that durst say him nay.  In short, there was never in Flanders, or in any other country, duke, count, prince, or other, who can have had a country at his will as James Van Artevelde had for a long time.”

It is possible that, as some historians have thought, Froissart, being less favorable to burghers than to princes, did not deny himself a little exaggeration in this portrait of a great burgher-patriot transformed by the force of events and passions into a demagogic tyrant.  But some of us may have too vivid a personal recollection of similar scenes to doubt the general truth of the picture; and we shall meet before long in the history of France during the fourteenth century with an example still more striking and more famous than that of Van Artevelde.

Whilst the Count of Flanders, after having vainly attempted to excite an uprising against Van Artevelde, was being forced, in order to escape from the people of Bruges, to mount his horse in hot haste, at night and barely armed, and to flee away to St. Omer, Philip of Valois and Edward III. were preparing, on either side, for the war which they could see drawing near.  Philip was vigorously at work on the pope, the Emperor of Germany, and the princes neighbors of Flanders, in order to raise obstacles against his rival or rob him of his allies.  He ordered that short-lived meeting of the states-general about which we have no information left us, save that it voted the principle that “no talliage could be imposed on the people if urgent necessity or evident utility should not require it, and unless by concession of the Estates.”  Philip, as chief of feudal society, rather than of the nation which was forming itself little by little around the lords, convoked at Amiens all his vassals, great and small, laic or cleric, placing all his strength in their co-operation, and not caring at all to associate the country itself in the affairs of his government.  Edward, on the contrary, whilst equipping his fleet and amassing treasure at the expense of the Jews and Lombard usurers, was assembling his Parliament, talking to it “of this important and costly war,” for which he obtained large subsidies, and accepting without making any difficulty the vote of the Commons’ House, which expressed a desire “to consult their constituents upon this subject, and begged him to summon an early Parliament, to which there should be elected, in each county, two knights taken from