Philip the Fair enrolled himself as a member in one of these societies.  It may easily be inferred, therefore, that they had already become bodies of recognized importance.  The rhetorical chambers existed in the most obscure villages.  The number of yards of Flemish poetry annually manufactured and consumed throughout the provinces almost exceed belief.  The societies had regular constitutions.  Their presiding officers were called kings, princes, captains, archdeacons, or rejoiced in similar high-sounding names.  Each chamber had its treasurer, its buffoon, and its standard-bearer for public processions.  Each had its peculiar title or blazon, as the Lily, the Marigold, or the Violet, with an appropriate motto.  By the year 1493, the associations had become so important, that Philip the Fair summoned them all to a general assembly at Mechlin.  Here they were organized, and formally incorporated under the general supervision of an upper or mother-society of Rhetoric, consisting of fifteen members, and called by the title of “Jesus with the balsam flower.”

The sovereigns were always anxious to conciliate these influential guilds by becoming members of them in person.  Like the players, the Rhetoricians were the brief abstract and chronicle of the time, and neither prince nor private person desired their ill report.  It had, indeed, been Philip’s intention to convert them into engines for the arbitrary purposes of his house, but fortunately the publicly organized societies were not the only chambers.  On the contrary, the unchartered guilds were the moat numerous and influential.  They exercised a vast influence upon the progress of the religious reformation, and the subsequent revolt of the Netherlands.  They ridiculed, with their farces and their satires, the vices of the clergy.  They dramatized tyranny for public execration.  It was also not surprising, that among the leaders of the wild anabaptists who disgraced the great revolution in church and state by their hideous antics, should be found many who, like David of Delft, John of Leyden, and others, had been members of rhetorical chambers.  The genius for mummery and theatrical exhibitions, transplanted from its sphere, and exerting itself for purposes of fraud and licentiousness, was as baleful in its effects as it was healthy in its original manifestations.  Such exhibitions were but the excrescences of a system which had borne good fruit.  These literary guilds befitted and denoted a people which was alive, a people which had neither sunk to sleep in the lap of material prosperity, nor abased itself in the sty of ignorance and political servitude.  The spirit of liberty pervaded these rude but not illiterate assemblies, and her fair proportions were distinctly visible, even through the somewhat grotesque garb which she thus assumed.