He was a prince, they tell us, of wondrous dignity, and yet of a disposition so sweet that all men were drawn to him. He alone of the Counts of Flanders never once unsheathed his sword, and so great was his love of peace that he would never suffer his subjects to do so. 'His officers carried white wands, long and straight, symbols of justice and mercy,' and they maintained such good order throughout his domains, that no man was fain at night to bar his doors against thieves, and when the husbandman went home in the evening, he did not fear to leave his ploughshare in the fields, and this is the reason, they add, why all men called him 'the good Count of Flanders.' In order to accurately appreciate the causes of the almost perennial struggles between the sovereigns of Flanders and their subjects throughout the Middle Ages, it is important to know something of the men, and of their position in the body politic who formed the backbone of the people's resistance; of the men from whose primitive institutions were gradually evolved the complicated municipal machinery by which all the great cities of Flanders were eventually governed, and in defence of which almost all the struggles in question were originally undertaken. These men were the Flemings or Karls of the seaboard, Saxons of pure blood, distinct in race, though not in speech, from the inhabitants of the towns, for in the veins of the townsman there often flowed a strain of Celtic blood, and at Bruges especially, where, as we know, at an early date there was settled a colony of foreign merchants, the population must soon have become one of mixed race. The Karls then formed a class apart, a vast middle class of free landholders, distinct alike from the Court nobility--the comrades of the Count, his bodyguard, the great feudal lords who knew no trade but war--from the _vilains_ or serfs who were their retainers; and from the inhabitants of the towns. But the Karl was not only a farmer, he was sometimes also a fisherman, often a merchant, and always, and above all things, a soldier. If it had been otherwise, he could never have preserved either his own personal freedom or the freedom of the soil he tilled. To him toil was no disgrace. The greatest of their chiefs, even those among them in whose veins ran noble blood, were not ashamed to dig. Herred Krangrok, who dwelt along with his wife Ethel, a niece of the Bishop of Térouane, in the impregnable Castle of Salvesse in the midst of the marshy forest land, which in those days stretched away beyond Furnes, was a typical Karl of high degree. This man seems to have been a brewer by trade, and they gave him the surname _Krangrok_ from a habit he had of throwing his cloak back over his shoulder when he was driving his own plough.