hat he was
minded to go and play and take his pastime in the city, and so they
attended him to supper-time.

"And know that each of these hirelings had _per diem_ four groschen of
Flanders for their expenses and wages, and he had them regularly paid
from week to week. And even in the case of all that were most powerful
in Flanders, knights, esquires, and burghers of the good cities, whom he
believed to be favorable to the Count of Flanders, them he banished from
Flanders and levied half their revenues. He had levies made of rents,
of dues on merchandise and all the revenues belonging to the Count,
wherever it might be in Flanders, and he disbursed them at his will, and
gave them away without rendering any account. And when he would borrow
of any burghers on his word for payment, there was none that durst say
him nay. In short there was never in Flanders, or in any other country,
duke, count, prince, or other who can have had a country at his will as
James van Artevelde had for a long time." It is possible that, as some
historians have thought, Froissart, being less favorable to burghers
than to princes, did not deny himself a little exaggeration in this
portrait of a great burgher-patriot transformed by the force of events
and passions into a demagogic tyrant.

While the Count of Flanders, after having vainly attempted to excite an
uprising against Van Artevelde, was being forced, in order to escape
from the people of Bruges, to mount his horse in hot haste, at night and
barely armed, and to flee away to St. Omer, Philip of Valois and Edward
III were preparing on either side, for the war which they could see
drawing near. Philip was vigorously at work on the Pope, the Emperor of
Germany, and the princes neighbors of Flanders, in order to raise
obstacles against his rival or rob him of his allies. He ordered that
short-lived meeting of the states-general about which we have no
information left us, save that it voted the principle that "no talliage
could be imposed on the people if urgent necessity or evident utility
should not require it, and unless by concession of the estates."

Philip, as chief of feudal society rather than of the nation which was
forming itself little by little around the lords, convoked at Amiens all
his vassals great and small, laic or cleric, placing all his strength in
their cooperation, and not caring at all to associate the country itself
in the affairs of his government. Edward, on the contr