Note amongst the banished, Nicholas Barbesaen, erst burgomaster and city treasurer, who had been in former days a devoted adherent of Louis of Maele, and on more than one occasion, as he himself recounts in a memoir still extant amongst the archives of Lille, had risked his life to save him. He was also a man of much public spirit, and at his own cost had rebuilt the town gates which had been destroyed by the Ghenters in 1382. Two of them, the _Porte Ste. Croix_ and the _Porte de Gand_, are still standing. 'I showed great diligence,' he says, in the document above referred to, 'anent the public buildings of the town, such as bridges, fountains, gates, towers and the like, the greater number of which were rebuilt during the time that I was burgomaster and treasurer of this city.' [Illustration: THE PORTE DE GAND] But the meed of John's vengeance was not yet complete. Emboldened by the ease with which he had obtained the burghers' acceptance of the _Kalfvel_, he imposed by means of the new corporation a host of onerous taxes which had never been heard of before, notably a heavy duty on wheat, and obtained from his subservient magistrates a legal decision that the seventh _denier_ in all town revenues belonged by right to the Sovereign. To every honest burgher submission meant sorrow and bitterness of heart, but with their town in the hands of foreign mercenaries, Ghent bound hand and foot with golden fetters, sycophants and traitors in their own camp, they could but lie low and wait, and they waited for four years, and then their hour of triumph came. It was the fall of the year 1411. The strife between the Burgundians and the Armagnacs was at its height. John was encamped in the plain of Montdidier waiting for Orléans to give battle. With him was an army of Flemings recruited from all the towns in the county. Their services, for a limited period, had been purchased by means of concessions--according to one account at the cost of a commercial union with England consecrated by an acknowledgment of the suzerainty of Henry IV. Each city was to fight under its own banner and be commanded by its own elected chiefs; on these conditions only had the burghers consented to leave their homes, and so eager was John for their services that he had made no protest even in the case of the Bruges men who had chosen Lieven van Schotclaere the burgomaster, whom he himself had deposed in 1407.