At Bruges the official reception was the most gorgeous of all, the rich gowns of the wives and daughters of the burghers causing Queen Isabella to exclaim, "I thought I was alone Queen, but here I see six hundred!" The mass of the people, however, were cold and sullen, and when the King proclaimed some public games no one would take part in them. Hardly had the royal party left the city before an insurrection broke out. De Coninck was arrested, but his followers burst into the prison, and, for a time, the leaders of the Liliaerts were behind the bars. A French force soon entered the city and set them free, and De Coninck fled to Damme, where the Lion of Flanders waved unmolested over a rapidly increasing host of Clauwaerts. On the 17th of May, 1302, a still stronger army of French entered the city, and it was rumoured that a general massacre of the Clauwaerts was planned for the morrow. Without waiting for the blow to be struck, the men from Damme and the surrounding towns, under the leadership of De Coninck and John Breidel, poured into the city before daybreak and roaring "_Schilt end vriendt_"--a battle-cry and password that no Frenchman could pronounce--they overwhelmed the partisans of the Lily. So sudden and unexpected was the attack, in the darkness and among narrow streets with which they were not acquainted, that the two thousand French knights who had entered the city so gaily on the previous day could offer no resistance and were slaughtered almost to a man. Barely forty escaped to tell King Philip of the massacre, while no record was made of the number of Liliaerts among the Flemings themselves who were in the heaps of dead that for three days thereafter were being buried in the fields outside of the city. This was the famous Matin de Bruges, hardly a glorious day's work considered as a feat of arms, but bold enough when regarded as a defiance by the artisans of a single industrial town of the most powerful monarch of the age. Philip, as was to be expected, was furious, and at once gathered an army the like of which had never before been seen in France; while all Flanders, with the exception of Ghent which the French still held, rallied to the support of De Coninck and his comrades. Scores of Flemish nobles were at that time languishing in French prisons, but those who were free to come enlisted under the Lion of Flanders. The army of defence consisted for the most part, however, of workingmen--members of the great guilds of Bruges, Ypres, Audenaerde and the other Flemish towns, with seven hundred even from Ghent. Each guild marched under its gorgeous banner, the men armed with long pikes, iron lances, short swords, and a sort of club which they derisively called "_goedendag_," or "good morning." On the eve of the battle a conference was held by the leaders of the army of defence, this being the scene depicted in the fine fresco in the Hotel de Ville.