Page:The history of medieval Europe.djvu/415

 French; flemish, English, German towns 365 but manufactured no longer, such as Polonius hides be- hind in one of the scenes in Hamlet. Cambrai, the chief ! city of an ecclesiastical principality, still manufactures j cambric which was invented there in the fifteenth century. Lille, originally LTsle, whence comes the expression " lisle i thread"; Valenciennes, once noted for its lace; and Douai [were then located in Flanders and Hainault, although now in France. By 1200 there were some forty towns in Flanders alone, of which Bruges, Ghent, and Ypres were the chief. These three cities ranked with the great Italian communes in their size and wealth. Elsewhere in the Low Countries cities were less numerous. There were about a dozen in Brabant, seven in Hainault, and half a dozen in the Bishopric of Liege. In- other towns dustry and trade developed much earlier in what '^ th e Low is now Belgium than among the Dutch, so that in 1200 there were very few towns in what is now the Netherlands. The rise of cities on any large scale did not occur in Holland until the latter part of the thirteenth , century. Before that Utrecht with its four markets a year was the chief commercial center in the north. The great Flemish cities probably began as market- j places under the shadow of castle or monastery. By the I eleventh century they were flourishing centers Internal j of industry and commerce, and repeatedly re- t ^ e Flemish ! volted against the authority of their counts, towns i Their inhabitants made up four classes, soldiers, landowners, merchants, and artisans, of whom the two last were by far the more numerous. A number of new towns with harbors
 * were founded by the Counts of Flanders in the course of

the twelfth century. Then, too, the towns received many privileges from the counts, who entrusted the administra- tion of local justice and of municipal affairs in large measure to the rich patrician families, from whose ranks developed 1 a council whose members held office for life and elected their successors. The magistrates and citizens not only admin- istered the internal affairs of their towns, but during the 1 thirteenth century were usually consulted by the count;: