A few years later, Brabant compelled its duke to grant it an assembly which should transact all legal and judicial business, and should consist of fourteen deputies, four chosen from the nobles and the other ten from the people. The towns soon began to join their forces. Brabant and Flanders formed a sort of union. But the burghers owed allegiance not to a country but only to a small bit of a country, each to his own town. Their confederacy was bound together by self-interest alone. Ghent was jealous of Bruges, and failed to lend assistance when the Brugeois rebelled against their count. For lack of this support the latter were crushed. We speak of the cities of the Netherlands, but in the thirteenth century they bore little resemblance to the cities of today. They were walled towns, to be sure, but the walls were generally ramparts of earth with an outside covering of thick planking. Within the walls the better class of people lived in low wooden dwellings roofed with thatch, the churches and the houses of the noblemen and the chief citizens were often built of stone, but the poor, we may imagine, found shelter in rude mud huts. The "streets" were usually mere crooked cart tracks, the dumping ground for the rubbish of the community, in which boards and straw were thrown down in an effort to bridge the numerous holes and pools of muddy water. In Bruges and Ghent, as we learn from the ancient records, the principal streets were paved with stone from the quarries near the Meuse. The squares were, perhaps, not unlike the "common" of a New England village, open grassy places in which were pumps--the common source of water supply for the inhabitants--and drinking troughs for the domestic animals that were allowed to roam through the streets. There was the ever present danger of fire in cities so rudely built, and the fires often became great conflagrations in which whole cities were consumed. What with the bad roads, the blackness of the unlighted streets, and the presence in these towns of many ignorant, riotous workmen and seamen from foreign ports, we can understand that the citizen who sallied forth without escort for an evening stroll, having only his lantern for protection, might well be risking his life in a dangerous adventure.