Edward seemed ruined both in reputation and purse.  He had exhausted his resources in meeting the extravagant demands of his allies, and their help had profited him nothing at all.  Yet his inexhaustible energy opened up a surer means of foreign assistance than had been supplied by the unruly vassals of Louis of Bavaria.  At the moment when the imperial alliance was tried and found wanting, the way was opened up for close friendship between Edward and the Flemish cities.  In earlier years the chivalrous devotion of Louis of Nevers to his overlord had secured the political dependence of Flanders upon the King of France.  If the action of their count made the Flemings the tools of French policy, their commercial necessities bound them to England by chains forged by nature itself.  Alone of the lands of northern and western Europe, Flanders was not a self-sufficing economic community.[1] Its great ports and weaving towns depended for their customers on foreign markets, and the raw material of their staple manufacture was mainly derived from England.  When in 1337 Edward prohibited the export of wool to Flanders, his action at once brought about the same result that the cessation of the supplies of American cotton would cause in the manufacturing districts of Lancashire.  A wool famine, like the Lancashire cotton famine of 1862-65, plunged Ghent, Ypres, and Bruges into grievous distress.  The starving weavers wandered through the farms begging their bread, and, when charity at home proved inadequate, they exposed their rags and their misery in the chief cities of northern France.  Even wealthy merchants felt the pinch of the crisis which ruined the small craftsmen.

    [1] See for this Pirenne, Histoire de Belgique, vols. i. and
    ii., and Lamprecht, Deutsche Geschichte, iii., 304-324, and
    iv., 134-142.

A common desire to avoid calamity bound together the warring classes and rival districts of Flanders, as they had never been united before.  Bruges and Ypres had borne the brunt of earlier struggles, and had not even yet recovered from the exhaustion of the wars of the early years of the century.  Their exhaustion left the way open to Ghent, where the old patricians and the rich merchants, the weavers and the fullers, forgot their ancient rivalries and worked together to remedy the crisis.  A wealthy landholder and merchant-prince of Ghent, James van Artevelde, made himself the spokesman of all classes of that great manufacturing city.  He was no demagogue nor artisan, though his eloquence and force had wonderful power over the impressionable craftsmen of the trading guilds.  He was no Netherlandish patriot, as some moderns have imagined, though he was anxious to unite Flanders with her neighbour states, on the broad basis of their identity of economic and political interests.  A man of Ghent, above all things, his policy was to save the imperilled industries of his native town, and to make it the centre of a new movement for the