The Edinburgh Review Volume 153 (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: fellow, of low extraction, ready to sacrifice king, earl, and country, to enrich and aggrandise himself. It is worth a little trouble to trace this calumny to its origin, and to restore the so-called ' Brewer of Ghent' to his true position in history as a far-seeing statesman and an enlightened disinterested patriot. This article will have been written in vain if the reader does not rise from its perusal with the conviction that to Jacob van Arteveld is justly applicable the eulogy which Clarendon passed upon John Ilampden: ' He was, indeed, a very wise ' man and of great parts, and possessed with the most absolute ' spirit of popularity, and the most absolute faculties to govern ' the people, of any man I ever knew.' Gilles li Muisis, Abbot of St. Martin's monastery at Tour- nai, who died about the middle of the fourteenth century, says, under the date of 1345?only eight years before his own death ?that Arteveld ' regnavit per septem annos, et fuit gubernator ' et superior totius villae Gantii ac totius patria? Flandriae, et ' ad ejus imperium et voluntatem obediebant, et nihil in dicta ' patria fiebat sine eo.' He adds that he was always accompanied by twenty-five to thirty armed men ' fortissimis et ad ' bella promptissimis. Et multa mala evenerunt per eum et ' propter eum.' This small band of followers was increased to sixty or eighty by the Canon Jehan le Bel, who belonged to one of the noblest families of Liege, and died about the year 1370. Describing the ill feeling that existed between Louis de Nevers and the Flemings, he proceeds to remark:? ' II y avoit ung homme a Gand qui avoit nom Jacques d'Artevelle, et avoit este brasseur de mies (miel). Celluy Jacques estoit entre en si grande fortune et grace envers les Flamens que c'estolt tout fait et bien fait quanques i...