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We must, however, remember that England in the fourteenth century was incomparably more self-supporting than it is in the nineteenth century; that there were no great centres of industry then; that the rural population was largely in excess of the urban population; that we exported the wool which the Flemings manufactured into cloth; and that if there were fewer hands to till the soil, there were fewer mouths to feed.
It was composed of a variety of materials, Hollanders, Walloons, Flemings, Scotch, English, Irish, Germans, but all welded together into a machine of perfect regularity. The private foot-soldier received twelve florins for a so- called month of forty-two days, the drummer and corporal eighteen, the lieutenant fifty-two, and the captain one hundred and fifty florins.
From the Protestants in Germany nothing more was required than that which, on other grounds, had been long their object, their throwing off the Austrian yoke; from the Flemings, a similar revolt from the Spaniards.
He is one of the foremost men in the city; he has broad and liberal ideas, and none of the jealousy of us Flemings that is so common among the citizens, although my countrymen more directly rival him in his trade than they do many others who grumble at us, though they are in no way injured by our trading."
Here, on the square, is the site of the house where the Emperor Maximilian was imprisoned by his rebellious Flemings; and next it, with a carved lion, that in which Charles II. of England lived after the martyrdom of that patient and virtuous ruler, whom the English Prayerbook calls that "blessed martyr, Charles the First." In Notre Dame are the tombs of Charles the Bold and Mary his daughter.
Holland and Zeeland were thronged with refugees, Flemings and Brabanters, French Huguenots and numerous Spanish and Portuguese Jews, driven out by the pitiless persecution of Philip II. The Hollanders and Zeelanders had long been a seafaring people, who had derived the chief part of their wealth from their fisheries and their carrying trade; and this influx of new and vigorous blood, merchants, traders, and textile workers, bringing with them their knowledge, skill and energy, aroused such a phenomenal outburst of maritime and commercial activity and adventure as the world had never seen before.
It is curious to trace how by degrees his feelings regarding Holland, made up of disgust and attachment, are transferred to the Low Countries in general. 'In my youth', he says in 1535, repeating himself, 'I did not write for Italians but for Hollanders, the people of Brabant and Flemings. So they now all share the reputation of bluntness.
The emperor having entered the Netherlands at the head of forty thousand men, Maximilian, so supported, soon showed his contempt for the obligations he had sworn to, and had recourse to force for the extension of his authority. The valor of the Flemings and the military talents of their leader, Philip of Cleves, thwarted all his projects, and a new compromise was entered into.
His brother, Count John, advanced him a considerable sum of money; the Flemings and Hollanders, in England and elsewhere, subscribed largely; the prince himself, after raising loans in every possible way on his private means, sold his jewels, his plate, and even the furniture of his houses, and threw the amount into the common fund.
Some were playing at chess; others "strolled from tent to tent in their fine robes, in search of amusement; "and the king was asleep in his tent after a long carouse, when all on a sudden his confessor, a Dominican friar, shouted out that the Flemings were attacking the camp.
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