The chief provisions were as follows:  The deans of the gilds were deprived of participation in the election of sheriffs.  The privileges of the naturalisation laws were considerably abridged.  No sentence of banishment could be pronounced without the intervention of the duke’s bailiff, whose authorisation, too, was required before the publication of edicts, ordinances, etc.  The sheriffs were forbidden to place their names at the head of letters to the officers of the duke.  The banners were to be delivered to the duke and placed under five locks, whose several keys should be deposited with as many different people, without whose consensus the banners could not be brought forth to lead the burghers to sedition.  One gate was to be closed every Thursday in memory of the day when the citizens had marched through it to attack their liege lord, and another was to be barred up in perpetuity or at the pleasure of their sovereign.  To reimburse the duke for his enforced outlay, a heavy indemnity was to be paid by the city.

July 30th was the date appointed for the final act of submission, the amende honorable of the unfortunate city.  The scene was very similar to that played at Bruges in 1440.  Two thousand citizens headed by the sheriffs, councillors, and captains of the burgher guard met the duke and his suite a league without the walls of Ghent.  Bareheaded, barefooted, and divested of all their robes of office and of dignity, clad only in shirts and small clothes, these magistrates confessed that they had wronged their loving lord by unruly rebellion, and begged his pardon most humbly.

The duke spent the night of July 29th at Gaveren, prepared to march out in the morning with his whole army in handsome array.  Philip was magnificently apparelled, but he rode the same horse which he had used on the day of battle, with the various wounds received on that day ostentatiously plastered over to make a dramatic show of what the injured sovereign had suffered at the hands of his disloyal subjects.

The civic procession was headed by the Abbot of St. Bavon and the Prior of the Carthusians.  The burghers who followed the half-clad officials were fully dressed but they, too, were barefoot and ungirdled.  All prostrated themselves in the dust and cried, “Mercy on the town of Ghent.”  While they were thus prostrate, the town spokesman of the council made an elaborate speech in French, assuring the duke that if, out of his benign grace. he would take his loving and repentant subjects again into his favour, they would never again give him cause for reproach.

“At the conclusion of this harangue, the duke and the Count of Charolais, there present, pardoned the petitioners for their evil deeds.  The men of Ghent re-entered their town more happy and rejoiced than can be expressed, and the duke departed for Lille, having disbanded his army, that every one might return to their several homes.” [19]