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 strengthen his hold over the series of towns along the line of the Somme, extending from St Quentin to St Valery at the mouth of the river. These Picard towns, "the key of France," had been left in pledge by France to Burgundy already in the Treaty of Arras (1435), which first impressed upon western Europe a sense of the magnitude of the Burgundian power; redeemed by Louis, in 1463, at a time when Philip and his heir were on ill terms with one another, they had been recovered in 1465 for the Netherlands and the protection of their southern frontier.

The temporal power of the Bishops of Utrecht covered, at least in name, the later provinces of Overyssel and Drenthe (called the Upper See), Groningen, and Utrecht (called the Lower). Although much restricted by the "five Chapters," whose deputies took the first place in the Diets, the episcopal system of government, as well as the institutions of the city of Utrecht, showed considerable lasting power; largely because, while the representatives of the trades controlled the civic Council, members of the noble families residing at Utrecht had been frequently placed on the roll of the trades themselves. Conflicts, however, repeatedly broke out on the occasion of the filling up of the see, and in Jacqueline's times the factions of the Llchtenbergers and the Lockhorsts respectively supported the Hoeks and the Kabeljaauws. In 1425 the question of the episcopal succession gave rise to a protracted contest, in which Philip took part; and when, after this had come to an end on the expulsion of one of the claimants and the death of the other, the succession was again disputed, he menaced Utrecht with a large armada, and thus managed to secure the see for his illegitimate son David, who kept possession of it till the death of Charles the Bold. From 1456 onwards to that date Utrecht was entirely under Burgundian influence; but though, as will be seen, Maximilian in 1483 assumed the administration of the principality, and though from 1517-24 another of Philip the Good's bastards was put in possession of the bishopric, it was not till 1529 that the temporal government of the Upper and Lower See was definitively assumed by Charles V as the sovereign of Brabant and Holland.

It was still later that Gelderland in its turn acknowledged the authority now established over all the rest of the Netherlands. The dynastic broils of the House of Gelders had been tragic enough while they merely affected its own dominions and the neighbouring duchy of Juliers-brother supplanting brother, and sister striving against sister. The contending factions in the duchy of Gelders, whose fury survived the occasion of their origin, went by the names of the Heckerens and the Bronkhorsts. The spheres of English and Burgundian influence in the Netherlands were respectively enlarged, when Duke William IX of Juliers and Gelders, himself the grandson of an English princess, opposed the efforts of Joan of Brabant, the friend of Burgundy, and