Angela sat at her desk, book briefly abandoned, looking out the window at the wren in the small garden. Hopping about the path and the shrubs, pert tail vertical, busy, alert and resolute. Angela turned back to the text on her desk, Froissart’s Chronicles, a contemporary account of the doings of France and her neighbors in the fourteenth century. Her essay task was to write a critique of Froissart’s telling of the revolt of the citizens of Ghent against their lord, the Count of Flanders.
Ghent, along with other Flemish cities like Bruges and Ypres, had grown great and wealthy through the wool trade. A taxation dispute with the Count escalated dramatically when the Count sent his bailiff and two hundred men to arrest half a dozen leading Ghent citizens. Forewarned, the guilds of craftsmen organised themselves into armed bands and seized and slew the bailiff. Bruges and Ypres joined the revolt. With most of Flanders lost, the Count agreed to peace.
But the Count’s acquiescence was merely tactical: once securely installed in Bruges, the Count imprisoned and then beheaded those within Bruges who had supported the revolt. Ypres was then besieged and fell; the Count massacred seven hundred of the inhabitants. Ghent had sent men to relieve the Ypres siege but they were defeated, a second Ghentois force was also defeated and those who retreated to a nearby church were burned to death. Ghent itself was then besieged and the surrounding countryside was laid waste.
The Ghentois were starving, but resolved to die on their feet. They sent out five thousand men with the last of their victuals to offer battle outside Bruges, where the Count and his forces were based. Froissart wrote that the Count put forty thousand men in the field, but the Bruges contingent of the Count’s army turned and fled at the onslaught of the Ghentois. The Count’s other forces, seeing the Bruges men flee, also retreated back into Bruges. The Ghentois, in hot pursuit, followed them through the gates and seized control of the city. The Count only escaped by hiding under a bed in a poor woman’s hovel. Most of Flanders then quickly joined the rebels.
Nevertheless, the revolt was doomed. The King of France decided to moved against the rebels in November 1382. According to Froissart, twenty-five thousand of the rebels were slaughtered at the battle of Rosebeque.
Froissart, no revolutionary himself, clearly respected the valor of the Ghent citizens. Angela was pondering the impartiality of Froissart’s epic, when a cacophony erupted outside her window: a jackdaw was seeking to rob the wren’s nest. The wren refused to give up her eggs; the struggle was fierce, but unequal. Angela saw an egg fall from out of the ivy, and saw the jackdaw swoop and bear the smashed egg away in his beak.
***
Yet the next morning, Angela watched from her window as a wren hopped busily about the garden—vivid and indomitable.
Grey Sparrow Journal 