"Quatre-Métiers," and the district of Alost, the Count of Flanders in reality enjoyed almost complete independence. "Kings," says a chronicler of the period, William of Poitiers, "feared and respected him; dukes, marquesses and bishops trembled before his power." From the beginning of the tenth century he was considered to have the largest income in the whole kingdom, and in the middle of the eleventh century an Archbishop of Rheims could still speak of his immense riches, "such that it would be difficult to find another mortal possessed of the like." Great was the ascendancy exercised by Baldwin V of Lille (1036-1067); as guardian of Philip I, King of France, he administered the government of the kingdom from 1060 to 1066, and by marrying his eldest son to the Countess of Hainault he succeeded in extending the authority of his house as far as the Ardennes (1050). Robert the Frisian (1071-1093) bore himself like a sovereign prince, he had an international policy, and we find him making an alliance with Denmark in order to counterbalance the commercial influence of England. He gave one of his daughters in marriage to Knut, King of Denmark, and in conjunction with him prepared for a descent upon the British Isles.
The count was even strong enough, it appears, to give Flanders immunity, to a large extent, from the general anarchy. By procuring his own recognition as advocate or protector of all the monasteries in his states, by monopolising for his own benefit the institution of the "Peace of God" which the Church was then striving to spread[1], by substituting himself for the bishops in the office of guardian of this Peace, the count imposed himself throughout Flanders as lord and supreme judge in his state. He peremptorily claimed the right of authorising the building of castles, he proclaimed himself the official defender of the widow, the orphan, the merchant and the cleric, and he rigorously punished robbery on the highways and outrages upon women. He had a regularly organised administration to second his efforts. His domains were divided into castellanies or circumscriptions, each centring in a castle. In each of these castles was placed a military chief, the castellan or viscount, along with a notary who levied the dues of the castellany, transmitting them to the notary-in-chief or chancellor of Flanders, who drew into a common treasury all the revenues of the country.
Thus it is not strange that Flanders should have attained earlier than other provinces to a degree of prosperity well worthy of remark. As regards agriculture, we find the counts themselves giving an impulse to important enterprises of clearing and draining in the districts bordering on the sea, while in the interior the monastic foundations contributed largely to the extension of cultivation and of grazing lands. At the same time the cloth industry was so far developed that the home-grown
- ↑ See Huberti, L., Studien zur Rechtsgeschichte der Gottesfrieden und Landfrieden, and Vol. v.
