nt learning in
France and England cannot be considered as by any means effectual even
at the expiration of the fifteenth century. At this point, however, I
close the present chapter. The last twenty years of the middle ages,
according to the date which I have fixed for their termination in
treating of political history, might well invite me by their brilliancy
to dwell upon that golden morning of Italian literature. But, in the
history of letters, they rather appertain to the modern than the middle
period; nor would it become me to trespass upon the exhausted patience
of my readers by repeating what has been so often and so recently told,
the story of art and learning, that has employed the comprehensive
research of a Tiraboschi, a Ginguene, and a Roscoe.

FOOTNOTES:

[571] Macpherson's Annals of Commerce, vol. i. p. 270. Meyer ascribes
the origin of Flemish trade to Baldwin count of Flanders in 958, who
established markets at Bruges and other cities. Exchanges were in that
age, he says, chiefly effected by barter, little money circulating in
Flanders. Annales Flandrici, fol. 18 (edit. 1561).

[572] Matthew Westmonast, apud Macpherson's Annals of Commerce, vol. i.
p. 415.

[573] Such regulations scared away those Flemish weavers who brought
their art into England under Edward III. Macpherson, p. 467, 494, 546.
Several years later the magistrates of Ghent are said by Meyer (Annales
Flandrici, fol. 156) to have imposed a tax on every loom. Though the
seditious spirit of the Weavers' Company had perhaps justly provoked
them, such a tax on their staple manufacture was a piece of madness,
when English goods were just coming into competition.

[574] Terra marique mercatura, rerumque commercia et quaestus peribant.
Non solum totius Europae mercatores, verum etiam ipsi Turcae aliaeque
sepositae nationes ob bellum istud Flandriae magno afficiebantur dolore.
Erat nempe Flandria totius prope orbis stabile mercatoribus emporium.
Septemdecim regnorum negotiatores tum Brugis sua certa habuere domicilia
ac sedes, praeter complures incognitas paene gentes quae undique
confluebant. Meyer, fol. 205, ad ann. 1385.

[575] Meyer; Froissart; Comines.

[576] It contained, according to Ludovico Guicciardini, 35,000 houses,
and the circuit of its walls was 45,640 Roman feet. Description des Pais
Bas, p. 350, &c. (edit. 1609). Part of this enclosure was not built
upon. The population of Ghent is reckoned by Guicciardini at 70,000, but