by Peter Wright

The story told in these articles,¹ (based on a lecture six months earlier),² published by Morris in Commonweal between 11 July and 18 August 1888, was intended to encourage his Socialist comrades by relating the successes, though temporary, of revolutionaries in earlier ages, It is based almost entirely on the narrative in Froissart’s chronicle of events in Flanders between 1379 and 1385.³ Dwelling in the 1380s mostly in Hainault south-east of Flanders Froissart had been well-placed to collect reports of events in that neighbouring territory, though sometimes local chronicles from Ghent and documents in its municipal archives suggest that he was in error over minor details. Morris has used, modernising the spelling of ordinary words, but mostly not of names of people and places, the translation of Froissart made by Lord Berners in the early 16th century. founded on an early printed text, which contained what might be called the ’vulgate’ version of the chronicle. Morris has not examined, nor for his purpose did he need to, either of the editions in Old French, based on medieval manuscripts, published in France and Belgium in the late 19th century. He had already presumably studied the chapters in Froissart covering the years around 1380, a period of popular rebellion both in England, France, and Flanders, while he was preparing his Dream of John Ball in 1886–7. Morris alludes briefly in the last of these articles to the struggle of the northern French towns against heavy taxes, described in chapters which he would have found interlaced with those dealing with affairs in Flanders. It is not clear whether he was aware of the near contemporary revolt in Florence in 1378 of the ‘Ciompi’, its ordinary weavers, against the oligarchic government which supported their oppressive employers in the Arte della Lana. He would no doubt have recognised that gild of wealthy wool merchants as an example of the late medieval ‘corruption’ of the gilds, of which he speaks several times in these articles.

Flanders in the 14th century suffered from being entangled in the rivalry of what were in then contemporary terms two great powers, the French and English monarchies. In the late 1330s Edward III, at war with France initially over the sovereignty of his duchy of Aquitaine, sought, as his predecessors King John in the 1210s and Edward I in the 1290s had done, to build up a coalition of rulers in the Netherlands to assail France from the north-east. (Those expeditions, though costing great sums of English money in subsidies to those rulers, seldom achieved much military success.) The Flemish cities could be pressured by using English control of the export of wool needed for their cloth industry, to join in anti-French alliances, as happened in the 1340s, when James Van |Artevelde was at their head, even though the then Count of Flanders⁴ supported the French. Following the weakening of French power after the French defeats of the mid 14th century, the next Count, Louis ’of Male’, effectively the ‘villain’ of Morris’s narrative, was able from the 1350s to the 1370s to observe an effective neutrality in the military conflict between England and France, playing the two opponents against one another to the advantage of his county, while he secured the free import of English wool on which is prosperity, and so much of his revenues, depended. He was even in the 1360s willing to consider marrying his daughter and heiress Margaret to a younger son of Edward III, and was perhaps only thwarted by the pro-French Pope refusing the necessary dispensation for too close kinship. Louis’s attitude in the 1370s, just before the beginning of Morris’s story, is revealed by his brusque treatment of an over-ostentatious French envoy on his way to Scotland through Flanders, after which the Flemish cities promised him firm support against any retaliation by the king of France.(FB. I. cccxliii.)

The Count’s relations with those cities over previous decades had on the whole not been hostile, provided his over-riding authority was recognised. After his capture of Ghent early in 1349, he excluded the weavers, the most numerous and also the most radical of its craft gilds from power there for almost a decade, but thereafter they were reinstated, and were dominant in the 1380s, strongly supporting the authority of Morris’s protagonist Philip Van Artevelde n 1382. Of the leading cities the Count had tended to favour Bruges, which was becoming chiefly a centre of international trade and finance rather than the mainly industrial city of Ghent, which during the late 14th century was beginning to undergo a period of economic decline The previous dominance in North European markets of the heavy luxury cloths, which were Flanders’s chief product, was being challenged by the developing English cloth trade, assisted indirectly by a reverse subsidy, because the English clothiers did not have to pay the heavy customs duties imposed from the 1330s on exports of English wool, which raised the price of the Flemish cloth made with it. Ghent’s urban weavers also faced competition from others working in the smaller towns and villages surrounding it, who, besides making cheaper, lighter cloths, also sometimes tried to copy its special types of fabric; its militia of ‘White Hoods’ was often used to enforce its monopoly of making such cloths. The Count, however, did not seek to supprress the cloth industry of those other settlements. So the weavers of Ghent began to find that the merchant drapers who organised its cloth manufacture were less able to provide them with employment and an income. Whereas the wealthy merchants from among whom the magistrates governing the Flemish cities were usually drawn, having more to lose, were commonly ready to seek for conciliation in any dispute with the Count, the weavers would engage in more violent courses and were likely to find support among the ordinary working craftsmen of other cities: Morris will have noticed the contrast which the chronicler regularly makes between the ’rich and noble merchants‘ and the ‘ribalds and unthrifty people’, who would welcome the men of Ghent within their walls, and join with them in resistance to their lawful ruler.

Morris’s story begins, after the prelude explaining how John Lyon, once high in the Count’s favour, was driven into opposition to him by the intrigues of a rival family, in the summer of 1379, when the re-organised White Hoods of Ghent violently blocked, where it entered the jurisdiction of Ghent, the completion of a canal being dug on behalf of Bruges. This canal was not itself at issue between economic classes, but it was objectionable to the particular interests of Ghent, because it would have diverted from that city the trade in grain towards Bruges which had previously passed along waterways through Ghent which brought profit to it shippers. That autumn Lyon, having virtually burnt his bridges with the Count by the slaying of his officer and the burning of his mansion outside Ghent, succeeded in getting possession of Bruges with the support of its working classes. Following his death at the end of the year Ypres likewise fell to the forces of Ghent. The Count, to relieve his besieged garrison in Oudenarde, made a temporary peace with Ghent, perhaps insincere on both sides. But, having failed to obtain the disbandment of the militia upon which Ghent probably relied for the preservation of its liberties and its popular leaders also for their lives, against his resentment. he began hostilities again in 1380, winning back first Bruges and then Ypres and Courtrai, and punishing the rebels caught there. The ’knights. squires, and gentlemen’ of Flanders and neighbouring territories rallied to his army, stirred up too by the destruction by raids from Ghent of their houses around it, which might have served as strongpoints against that city. The Count twice that year led his force up to Ghent \and skirmished with its armed people, besides gaining successes over its forces sent expeditions sent elsewhere. Bur he did not attempt to engage in a regular siege of a place well protected by rivers and marshes, preferring throughout 1381 to subject it to a blockade which deprived its inhabitants both of corn and other provisions, and of the materials needed for its craftsmen to continue their manufacturing.

The neighbouring princes, ruling Brabant, Hainault, and Holland, though sympathising personally and politically with Count Louis and willing to issue formal orders forbidding food to be carried to the blockaded city, had also to consider the attitude of the major cities within their own dominions, such as Brussels and Louvain., and of the great metal-working city of Liege, which for much of the 14th century had the upper hand over its prince-bishop. Their burgesses would probably have approved the objectives of Ghent, might emulate its revolt, and were ready, even eager, to smuggle food to its hungry people. In Spring 1382 a food-seeking convoy from Ghent, though denied entry inside the walls of Brussels, was supplied with enough grain to fill six hundred carts, while its leader was courteously received by the duchess there.(FJ. II. xciii.) Those princes accordingly thought it advisable to sponsor two conferences in October 1381 and April 1382 to attempt mediation between the Count and his rebels. He, however, confident of victory as the famine within Ghent intensified, demanded virtually 'unconditional surrender’, even hardening his terms in April to threaten the lives of almost the whole population of Ghent. It was at this moment that Philip Van Artevelde achieved his ascent to power and his brief hour of glory.

In January 1382 the heads of the more radical, but recently luckless, extreme party., chose to pit forward as a new leader a man, who, though he was past forty and until a month before had apparently taken no part in its politics or government, bore a name which recalled the time forty years before, when under his father James Ghent had dominated Flanders for several years, as Froissart’s imagined dialogue between Philip and Peter du Bois shows. Philip accepted the invitation to assume power, and at a meeting in the city’s market place he was elected, with strong support from the weavers’ faction, as the first of five captains of the city, on 23 January, a day before two senior aldermen from among the wealthy, and ‘moderate’, party were to report to the council the terms offered at the October conference: terms which would place two hundred of the chief rebels at the Count’s mercy. Philip and Peter rapidly and violently eliminated those two aldermen before the council could decide in the results of their treating.. Shortly, as Froissart reports(FJ. II. lxxxi.) but Morris does not notice, Philip, taking revenge as a loyal son, used his new power to have executed several men (or their closest living kinsmen) whom he held responsible for his father’s slaying forty years earlier.⁵ His taking over the stocks of food in the city’s religious houses, and the six hundred cartloads briefly relieved Ghent’s difficulties, but soon the blockade pressed again, and in April he could bring back from another conference terms even harder and more humiliating than had been offered in October. Democratically another meeting accepted his proposal to use Ghent’s last supplies of food in a desperate assault on the Count’s position at Bruges. Probably against expectation that attack, on 3 May, with which Morris closes his detailed narrative, succeeded, dramatically, and with the occupation of Bruges and Ypres Ghent again briefly dominated Flanders for almost half a year, enabling Philip to assume the estate of a sovereign ruler.(FJ. II. c.)

In October, however, having possibly learnt of Philip’s negotiations with England France redirected a royal army, till then intended to assail the English position in Gascony, towards Flanders. Some places passed on the march showed much enthusiasm for Ghent’s cause, After the army had broken across the river Lys and captured Ypres in November1382, Philip, rather than trying to prolong the campaign into the approaching winter, and perhaps encouraged by his spring victory, decided to risk a pitched battle. On 26 November his host, recalled from a prolonged siege of Oudenarde, massed together, and though numerous not too experienced in combat, was apparently attacked by the French knighthood not only on its flanks, but from the rear, and massacred,, he perishing with them, crushed to death in the rout. Ghent, however, after a moment’s despair, though it had lost its control of almost all Flanders, was able to hold out, under its earlier leadership and with some help from England, for another three years. When it eventually submitted to Duke Philip of Burgundy, who had succeeded his father-in-law in 1384, late in 1385, it was on very favourable terms, which Froissart transcribes in full.(FJ. II. clxxviii.) It obtained a complete amnesty and the confirmation of its municipal self-government, and long continued, with Bruges and Ypres, as one of the Three Members of Flanders, to enjoy the right, held in other principalities by assemblies of Estates, to represent the people of that county when their lord needed to seek their consent for his actions Twice more, led by its gildsmen, in 1452–3, when its still then considerable autonomy was challenged,⁶ and in 1539–40,⁷ Ghent rebelled against its overlord, but each time it was defeated: its privileges were each time reduced and its political importance finally extinguished.

Morris’s interpretation in his opening part, of the social and economic background o f he Revolt in the Flemish cities is considerably affected by the spectacles of Marxist social analysis (distinguishing social classes primarily by their economic position) through which he views it, Thus he repeatedly calls the Count of Flanders a ‘feudal lord’ That ruler, though remotely descended from a ‘feudal’ dynasty, was by the late 14th century largely governing his county through hired and paid officers, some professionally trained . His nobles too, .like most of those in Western Europe had since the 13th century replaced the direct exploitation of the farmland on their estates with the collection of rent from their peasant tenants, who in that region practised for the time quite advanced agricultural methods. Like the landed aristocracies which dominated most of Western Europe until the 18th century, they formed, rather than a class of entrepreneurs, a governing elite supported by agricultural rents ((in a way analogous to the taxation off which the bureaucrats who manage modern stares live), though they probably used their political \authority to extract from their subjects a disproportionate share of the income of their society. The antagonism between knights and burghers which Froissart so vividly portrays was probably founded rather in political, and cultural, than on strictly economic factors.

When discussing the Flemish cities Morris, following Marxist anthropology, situates their initial foundation within a society divided into tribes and ‘clans’. He is, however, reasonably confirmed by later study when he ascribes their origin to the development of handcrafts within the safety of fortifications, at first of wood (‘palisaded’), but eventually of stone, and also when he sees them as dominated in the 12th and 13th centuries, politically and economically, by an ‘oligarchy’ of men, (styled by modern historians ‘patricians’), whose wealth came partly from trade, partly from the ownership of property, houses, workshops, and so on, within the walls, and landed estates in the surrounding countryside. Their dominance was ended in Flanders just after 1300 by revolutions which gave a substantial share of power to representatives of the craft gilds, although successors of the ’patricians’ still enjoyed a minor share of the city‘s governing bodies.

But when Morris discusses the social structure of 14th century Ghent, although he notices a differentiation among gild members between an ‘aristocracy’ and ordinary working men, he does not fully perceive the contrast between the simple master craftsmen, each heading a workshop, and the richer merchants engaged in the cloth trade, an export industry requiring ‘commercial capital , who imported wool, distributed it among the craftsmen who successively worked it up, and finally exported the finished product. It was their wealth which established in cities such as 14th-centurt Ghent a new dominant class. Men politically prominent there,, such as Morris’s ’great Bourgeois’ James Van Artevelde, or in the time of his narrative John Lyon, probably owed their position rather to their political talents than to any ancestral wealth or standing. Towns often had regulations intended to ensure equality among craftsmen, limiting the number of those they employed, or requiring them sometimes to share out raw materials at a ‘just price’. But such restrictions were less applicable among those who traded in cloth on a large scale. Morris also exaggerates the ‘democratic’ element in the Flemish cities: their people, even those who resented the prosperity of their rulers, did not seek for any universal citizenship among their inhabitants, but at most equality among the gild membership. Still less had they any definite ‘Socialist’ or ‘communistic’ tendencies. With methods of production under which, as Morris understands, each master and his hired men used human effort and skill on individually possessed tools, for weavers looms, there could hardly be a demand for the ‘common ownership of the means of production‘. When medieval theologians or poets imagined any commonalty of ownership excluding individual property, it was rather a communism of consumption, as in the legendary ‘Golden Age‘, with nature furnishing abundant simple food and drink for all...

Among the ruling class, too, whom Morris reckons as ‘feudal’, he also over-emphasises the amount of solidarity and mutual support, for instance between the Kings of France and the Counts of Flanders. From the late 13th century successive Counts did what they could to assert their independence: around 1300 they, or members of their dynasty when the Count was a captive in France, often took on the leadership of the rebellious Flemish cities, though one new Count in the late 1320s did call on a French royal army to suppress a rebellion among the peasantry of the Flemish coastlands. The Counts did indeed tend to share the chivalric contempt felt among their aristocratic companions against those of other classes concerned with physical work, who presumed to claim any large share of political authority, During the conflict related by Morris, we find Count Louis of Flanders readily ordering the mass beheading. sometimes in hundreds ,of defeated and captured burghers,⁸ on a scale which he would hardly have inflicted on more nobly born rebels. The chivalry of France likewise had the feeling, occasionally voiced by Froissart, that the Flemish revolt was an episode in a continuous struggle between nobles and their social inferiors: after their victory at Rosebeke in 1382 they found, as Froissart reports, in the church at Courtrai the gilt spurs of slain knights, erected as a trophy after the great (and unexpected) victory there in 1302 of the Flemish cities’ infantry over the kn ightly cavalry of France; they promptly sacked that town \and massacred its people.(FB. I. ccccxxiii). It was only after that victory, too, that the regency government of France ventured, as Froissart relates, to repress the defiant opposition, encouraged by the example of Flanders, of Paris and other northern French cities too heavy royal taxation.

Morris’s suggestion, however, that the English government delayed sending assistance to Ghent in 1382 because they felt that the rising of the Flemish townsmen dangerously resembled the revolt of their own peasantry the summer, before, must be qualified The Commons had declined that spring to vote taxation sufficient to fund any substantial overseas expedition. The English council too was divided between some willing to consider assailing France from the north-east, through Flanders, and others favouring an attack on France’s southern ally the king of Castile, whose galleys had in recent years raided England’s southern coasts. They did treat with Ghent’s envoys over the summer, and though surprised at its demands for somewhat excessive concessions, commercial and financial,(cf. FJ. II. cvi.) offered an alliance late in October, though too late for Van Artevelde, In 1383 England sponsored an cts expedition, proposed the previouss autumn, into Flanders in the guise of a ‘crusade’,, and in 1384–5 it maintained a small garrison in Ghent, which only withdrew after the city’s submission. (Froissart describes these events at length.) Morris apparently ignores too, how readily governments may sacrifice ideological prejudices to immediate political advantage: thus in the mid 16th and the mid 17th centuries the Catholic kings of France, who frequently persecuted and fought Protestants at home, willingly provided aid to the Protestant princes of Germany fighting their fellow-Catholic Hapsburg rulers, who were their rivals for supremacy in Western Europe; not to mention the aid given in the late 18th century by the absolutist French monarchy to the revolutionary American colonies.

Morris ends his extracts from Froissart with the men of Ghent at a brief moment of triumph, and huddles up the unhappy sequel in a mere three paragraphs. But could he have expected that his fellow-Socialist readers might draw from his story a Hope, (like that which he had recently depicted in The Pilgrims of Hope) that in their own time too, or not too far ahead, a seemingly secure social establishment might collapse as suddenly as that of 14th century Flanders, with is political leaders suffering a downfall as deep and humiliating as that which happened to his haughty and oppressive ‘Earl of Flanders’, reduced in Morris’s series’ last part to hiding under a poor woman’s bed? Revolutionaries, probably aware how in the previuos hundredc years four monarchical regimes in France had suddenly fallen amid violence, might hope that their courage and endurance under apparently unfavourable conditions might similarly be rewarded with unexpected success.