solated churches
and monasteries, the farmsteads and villages burnt to ashes.

Edward seemed ruined both in reputation and purse. He had exhausted his
resources in meeting the extravagant demands of his allies, and their
help had profited him nothing at all. Yet his inexhaustible energy
opened up a surer means of foreign assistance than had been supplied by
the unruly vassals of Louis of Bavaria. At the moment when the imperial
alliance was tried and found wanting, the way was opened up for close
friendship between Edward and the Flemish cities. In earlier years the
chivalrous devotion of Louis of Nevers to his overlord had secured the
political dependence of Flanders upon the King of France. If the action
of their count made the Flemings the tools of French policy, their
commercial necessities bound them to England by chains forged by nature
itself. Alone of the lands of northern and western Europe, Flanders was
not a self-sufficing economic community.[1] Its great ports and weaving
towns depended for their customers on foreign markets, and the raw
material of their staple manufacture was mainly derived from England.
When in 1337 Edward prohibited the export of wool to Flanders, his
action at once brought about the same result that the cessation of the
supplies of American cotton would cause in the manufacturing districts
of Lancashire. A wool famine, like the Lancashire cotton famine of
1862-65, plunged Ghent, Ypres, and Bruges into grievous distress. The
starving weavers wandered through the farms begging their bread, and,
when charity at home proved inadequate, they exposed their rags and
their misery in the chief cities of northern France. Even wealthy
merchants felt the pinch of the crisis which ruined the small craftsmen.

[1] See for this Pirenne, _Histoire de Belgique_, vols. i. and
ii., and Lamprecht, _Deutsche Geschichte_, iii., 304-324, and
iv., 134-142.

A common desire to avoid calamity bound together the warring classes
and rival districts of Flanders, as they had never been united before.
Bruges and Ypres had borne the brunt of earlier struggles, and had not
even yet recovered from the exhaustion of the wars of the early years
of the century. Their exhaustion left the way open to Ghent, where the
old patricians and the rich merchants, the weavers and the fullers,
forgot their ancient rivalries and worked together to remedy the
crisis. A wealthy landholder and merchant-prince of Ghent, James