de Nevers." "What then!" replied the king; "are
you not the Count of Flanders?" "It is true, sir," rejoined the other,
"that I bear the name, but I do not possess the authority; the burghers
of Bruges, Ypres, and Cassel have driven me from my land, and there
scarce remains but the town of Ghent where I dare show myself." "Fair
cousin," said Philip, we will swear to you by the holy oil which hath
this day trickled over our brow that we will not enter Paris again before
seeing you reinstated in peaceable possession of the countship of
Flanders." Some of the French barons who happened to be present
represented to the king that the Flemish burghers were powerful; that
autumn was a bad season for a war in their country; and that Louis the
Quarreller, in 1315, had been obliged to come to a stand-still in a
similar expedition. Philip consulted his constable, Walter de Chatillon,
who had served the kings his predecessors in their wars against Flanders.
"Whoso hath good stomach for fight," answered the constable, "findeth all
times seasonable." "Well, then," said the king, embracing him, "whoso
loveth me will follow me." The war thus resolved upon was forthwith
begun. Philip, on arriving with his army before Cassel, found the place
defended by sixteen thousand Flemings under the command of Nicholas
Zannequin, the richest of the burghers of Furnes, and already renowned
for his zeal in the insurrection against the count. For several days the
French remained inactive around the mountain on which Cassel is built,
and which the knights, mounted on iron-clad horses, were unable to scale.
The Flemings had planted on a tower of Cassel a flag carrying a cock,
with this inscription:--

"When the cock that is hereon shall crow,
The foundling king herein shall go."

They called Philip the foundling king because he had no business to
expect to be king. Philip in his wrath gave up to fire and pillage the
outskirts of the place. The Flemings marshalled at the top of the
mountain made no movement. On the 24th of August, 1328, about three in
the afternoon, the French knights had disarmed. Some were playing at
chess; others "strolled from tent to tent in their fine robes, in search
of amusement; "and the king was asleep in his tent after a long carouse,
when all on a sudden his confessor, a Dominican friar, shouted out that
the Flemings were attacking the camp. Zannequin, indeed, "came out full
softly