The great Abbey of St. Bavon at Ghent as early as the eleventh century possessed a school of artists. Some of their illuminated manuscripts have actually come down to us, and are at present in the Ghent university library. At the little town of Maeseyck in Holland they still preserve an eighth-century manuscript adorned by Harlinde and Rilinde, two of the abbesses who ruled the convent which in those days flourished there. Among the seven hundred and thirty-four manuscripts in the municipal library at Bruges, and in the library of the Bruges diocesan seminary, there are some which date from the thirteenth century, a few from the twelfth. Many of them are of rare beauty. Notably, at the city library, a thirteenth-century missal embellished with exquisite miniatures (No. 314), and, at the seminary, a Cistercian missal and a Cistercian Breviary of the fourteen hundreds, and a splendid Valerius Maximus in four volumes, with paintings which are perhaps by John van Eyck. The greater number of these books were written and illustrated in the famous Cistercian Abbey which once stood on the Dunes at Coxyde, between Furnes and Ostend, or by the monks of the affiliated house, called Ter Doest (All Saints), which Hacket founded at Lisseweghe. Bruges in the thirteen and in the fourteen hundreds was famed for her miniaturists and her illuminators. The _Bibliothèque royale_ at Brussels contains a whole series of manuscripts which once formed part of the sumptuous libraries of the last Flemish Counts--of Robert of Bethune, of Louis of Maele, of Philip the Rash, and which one and all bear witness to the marvellous skill and untiring patience of the men who wrote and adorned them; these assuredly were not all monks, many of them, doubtless, were laymen, members of that great artist-guild of St. Luke, of which we shall have something to say later on. Some of them basked in the smiles of princes, like John van Eyck, whom Philippe l'Asseuré enriched and to whose son he stood godfather, and who enjoyed too the patronage of the Regent Bedford; or Simon Marmion, who received from Charles the Terrible a sum equal to no less than three hundred and sixty pounds for a single book of Hours; or Jean Fouquet, the friend and confidential adviser of Louis XI. Others there were content with the position of sleek upper servant in the household of some lesser Mæcenas, and others again, who longed to hold such a post, but were unable to obtain it; men like poor Jehan Gillemer, for example, who, on the tramp in search of a patron, was presently arrested as a spy by the agents of Louis XI. and handed over to the tender mercies of Tristam l'Hermite, a circumstance, notes M. Lecoy de la Marche,[43] not too deplorable, since to it we are indebted for the details of his life which have come down to us, and are thereby enabled to lift a corner of the veil which covers the manners and customs of one of the most interesting corporations of the middle ages.