Although the commune owed certain duties to the lord, it had also, as a politically autonomous body, some important rights: the right to have a special seal to be appended to the official documents issued by the commune; the right to build a city hall and a belfry, the belfry being a tower, usually erected in the market-place, where the bell that called the burgesses to arms was hung, and where the archives of the city were carefully kept in iron safes. As the commune exercised the right of life and death over its members, it erected as symbols of that right the pillory and the gallows, generally at the gate or outside the city wall. The development of the communes was not quite the same in the various sections of Belgium. In the principality of Liège, the cities of Dinant, Huy, and Saint-Trond obtained their privileges sooner than Liège itself. The charter of freedom for Huy dates from 1066. In the ecclesiastical principality of Cambrai the commune was established by violently revolutionary means in 1077. The merchants of Cambrai suffered from the tyranny of the officers appointed by the bishops, and a conspiracy was organized. On a certain day when Bishop Gerard left the town, the citizens ran to arms, under the leadership of the prominent merchants, and proclaimed the commune. But the bishop returned unexpectedly and his knights killed many of the people and pillaged the houses of the leaders. The supremacy of the bishop was restored for a long period. In Flanders, the counts were sincere protectors of the communes; they regarded them as a mighty resource of their treasury and early recognized the claims of the _mercatores_. From the end of the eleventh century the main demands contained in the propaganda of the guilds were accepted and special privileges were granted to the cities. From the time of Count Charles the Good (1119-27), each city had its own _échevins_ (sheriffs), chosen from among the burgesses; the president alone, the _bailli_, was an officer of the lord, and responsible only to him. The house of the counts of Alsace (1128) owed its accession to the communes and therefore protected the cities in a special manner. They gave to all of them the same municipal charter, a copy of the charter of Arras, and both the Flemish and the Walloon communes of Flanders enjoyed identically the same privileges. In the duchy of Brabant, the communes developed more slowly, owing to the fact that conditions for the development of trade and industry were not so much advanced here. From the time when the commercial highroad between Cologne and Bruges was constructed the municipal movement was participated in more actively by the princes. Here, also, the princes came to assume the same sympathetic attitude as in Flanders, but there was no general organization granting the same type of constitution for all the cities. The privileges of each city were recognized and granted separately.