and without a bit of noise," says Froissart, with his troops in
three divisions, to surprise the French camp at three points. He was
quite close to the king's tent, and some chroniclers say that he was
already lifting his mace over the head of Philip, who had armed in hot
haste, and was defended only by a few knights, of whom one was waving the
oriflamme round him, when others hurried up, and Zannequiii was forced to
stay his hand. At two other points of the camp the attack had failed.
The French gathered about the king and the Flemings about Zannequin; and
there took place so stubborn a fight, that "of sixteen thousand Flemings
who were there not one recoiled," says Froissart, "and all were left
there dead and slain in three heaps one upon another, without budging
from the spot where the battle had begun." The same evening Philip
entered Cassel, which he set on fire, and, in a few days afterwards, on
leaving for France, he said to Count Louis, before the French barons,
Count, I have worked for you at my own and my barons' expense; I give you
back your land, recovered and in peace; so take care that justice be kept
up in it, and that I have not, through your fault, to return; for if I
do, it will be to my own profit and to your hurt."

The Count of Flanders was far from following the advice of the King of
France, and the King of France was far from foreseeing whither he would
be led by the road upon which he had just set foot. It has already been
pointed out to what a position of wealth, population, and power,
industrial and commercial activity had in the thirteenth century raised
the towns of Flanders, Bruges, Ghent, Lille, Ypres, Fumes, Courtrai, and
Douai, and with what energy they had defended against their lords their
prosperity and their liberties. It was the struggle, sometimes sullen,
sometimes violent, of feudal lordship against municipal burgherdom. The
able and imperious Philip the Handsome had tested the strength of the
Flemish cities, and had not cared to push them to extremity. When, in
1322, Count Louis de Nevers, scarcely eighteen years of age, inherited
from his grandfather Robert III. the countship of Flanders, he gave
himself up, in respect of the majority of towns in the countship, to the
same course of oppression and injustice as had been familiar to his
predecessors; the burghers resisted him with the same, often ruffianly,
energy; and when, after a six years' struggle amongst Flemings, the C