and confined them in the belfry of the Cloth Hall.

"Then the leaders in council resolved to kill the magistrates, and
beheaded the Burgomaster and two sheriffs in the place before the Cloth
Hall in the presence of their colleagues" (Vereeke).

Following the custom of the Netherlands, each town acted for itself
alone. The popular form of government was that of gatherings in the
market-place where laws were discussed and made by and for the people.
The spirit of commercial jealousy, however, kept them apart and
nullified their power. Consumed by the thirst for commercial, material
prosperity, they had no faith in each other, no bond of union, each
being ready and willing to foster its own interest at its rival's
expense. Thus neither against foreign nor internal difficulties were
they really united. The motto of modern Belgium, "L'Union fait la
Force," was not yet invented, and there was no great and powerful
authority in which they believed and about which they could gather.

This history presents the picture of Ghent assisting an army of English
soldiers to lay siege to Ypres. So the distrustful people dwelt amid
perpetual quarreling, trade pitted against trade, town against town,
fostering weakness of government and shameful submission in defeat. No
town suffered as did Ypres during this distracted state of affairs in
Flanders of the sixteenth century, which saw it reduced from a place of
first importance to a dead town with the population of a village. And so
it remained up to the outbreak of the world war in 1914.

This medieval and most picturesque of all the towns of Flanders had not
felt the effect of the wave of restoration, which took place in Belgium
during the decade preceding the outbreak of the world war, owing to the
fact that its monuments of the past were perhaps finer and in a better
state of preservation than those of any of the other ancient towns.
Ypres in the early days had treated the neighboring town of Poperinghe
with great severity through jealousy, but she in turn suffered heavily
at the hands of Ghent in 1383-84 when the vast body of weavers fled,
taking refuge in England, and taking with them all hope of the town's
future prosperity.

Its decline thenceforward was rapid, and it never recovered its former
place in the councils of Flanders. Its two great memorials of the olden
times were the great Cloth Hall, in the Grand' Place, and the Cathedral
of Saint Martin, both dating from the twelf