e was very similar
to that played at Bruges in 1440. Two thousand citizens headed by the
sheriffs, councillors, and captains of the burgher guard met the
duke and his suite a league without the walls of Ghent. Bareheaded,
barefooted, and divested of all their robes of office and of dignity,
clad only in shirts and small clothes, these magistrates confessed
that they had wronged their loving lord by unruly rebellion, and
begged his pardon most humbly.

The duke spent the night of July 29th at Gaveren, prepared to march
out in the morning with his whole army in handsome array. Philip was
magnificently apparelled, but he rode the same horse which he had used
on the day of battle, with the various wounds received on that day
ostentatiously plastered over to make a dramatic show of what the
injured sovereign had suffered at the hands of his disloyal subjects.

The civic procession was headed by the Abbot of St. Bavon and the
Prior of the Carthusians. The burghers who followed the half-clad
officials were fully dressed but they, too, were barefoot and
ungirdled. All prostrated themselves in the dust and cried, "Mercy on
the town of Ghent." While they were thus prostrate, the town spokesman
of the council made an elaborate speech in French, assuring the
duke that if, out of his benign grace. he would take his loving and
repentant subjects again into his favour, they would never again give
him cause for reproach.

"At the conclusion of this harangue, the duke and the Count of
Charolais, there present, pardoned the petitioners for their evil
deeds. The men of Ghent re-entered their town more happy and
rejoiced than can be expressed, and the duke departed for Lille,
having disbanded his army, that every one might return to their
several homes." [19]

The joy experienced by the conquered, here described by La Marche, as
he looked back at the event from the calm retirement of his old age,
was not visible to all eye-witnesses. The progress of this war was
watched eagerly from other parts of Philip's dominion. His army was
full of men from both the Burgundies, who sent frequent reports to
their own homes. Some passages from one of these reports by an unknown
war correspondent run as follows:

"As to news from here, Monday after St. Magdalen's Day,
Monseigneur the duke got the better of the Ghenters near Gaveren
between ten and eleven o'clock. They attacked him near his
quarters.... The d