These charters are certainly not very extensive, even for the privileged municipalities which obtained them, when viewed from an abstract stand-point.  They constituted, however, a very great advance from the stand-point at which humanity actually found itself.  They created, not for all inhabitants, but for great numbers of them, the right, not to govern them selves but to be governed by law:  They furnished a local administration of justice.  They provided against arbitrary imprisonment.  They set up tribunals, where men of burgher class were to sit in judgment.  They held up a shield against arbitrary violence from above and sedition from within.  They encouraged peace-makers, punished peace-breakers.  They guarded the fundamental principle, ‘ut sua tanerent’, to the verge of absurdity; forbidding a freeman, without a freehold, from testifying—­ a capacity not denied even to a country slave.  Certainly all this was better than fist-law and courts manorial.  For the commencement of the thirteenth century, it was progress.

The Schout and Schepens, or chief magistrate and aldermen, were originally appointed by the sovereign.  In process of time, the election of these municipal authorities was conceded to the communities.  This inestimable privilege, however, after having been exercised during a certain period by the whole body of citizens, was eventually monopolized by the municipal government itself, acting in common with the deans of the various guilds.

Thus organized and inspired with the breath of civic life, the communities of Flanders and Holland began to move rapidly forward.  More and more they assumed the appearance of prosperous little republics.  For this prosperity they were indebted to commerce, particularly with England and the Baltic nations, and to manufactures, especially of wool.

The trade between England and the Netherlands had existed for ages, and was still extending itself, to the great advantage of both countries.  A dispute, however, between the merchants of Holland and England, towards the year 12l5, caused a privateering warfare, and a ten years’ suspension of intercourse.  A reconciliation afterwards led to the establishment of the English wool staple, at Dort.  A subsequent quarrel deprived Holland of this great advantage.  King Edward refused to assist Count Florence in a war with the Flemings, and transferred the staple from Dort to Bruges and Mechlin.

The trade of the Netherlands with the Mediterranean and the East was mainly through this favored city of Bruges, which, already in the thirteenth century, had risen to the first rank in the commercial world.  It was the resting-place for the Lombards and other Italians, the great entrepot for their merchandise.  It now became, in addition, the great marketplace for English wool, and the woollen fabrics of all the Netherlands, as well as for the drugs and spices of the East.  It had, however, by no means reached its apogee, but was to culminate with Venice, and to sink with her decline.  When the overland Indian trade fell off with the discovery of the Cape passage, both cities withered.  Grass grew in the fair and pleasant streets of Bruges, and sea-weed clustered about the marble halls of Venice.  At this epoch, however, both were in a state of rapid and insolent prosperity.