In the neighbouring States of Guines and Normandy, Northern freedom and Northern notions of liberty had long ago given place to a feudal _régime_ of the sternest type, under which the freehold farmer of olden days had rapidly sunk into the _vilain_. The untimely death of Baldwin the Good, in 1070, afforded the Flemish barons, as they thought, a fitting opportunity for reducing the Karls of Flanders to a similar condition. Arnulph, the heir to the throne, was a youth of fifteen years, and Richilde of Hainault, the Countess Dowager, had assumed the reins of government and taken for her chief councillor Albéric de Coucy, a man who, on account of his tyrannical tendencies, had experienced the wrath of Baldwin of Lille. The first measure of her reign showed the spirit by which she was animated--the imposition of a tax, an _inaudita et indebita tributa_, as Lambert of Ardres describes it, the proceeds of which were intended to defray the cost of maintaining town ramparts. Since these had hitherto been kept in repair by means of forced labour, and the _Böelfart_ was only to be levied on the Karls of the seaboard, they naturally regarded the measure in question as a direct attack on their liberty. That the men now called on to pay for the work were henceforth to be considered as of like condition with the slaves who had formerly toiled at it, this for the Karls was the meaning of Richilde's decree--in the bitter words of Lambert of Ardres, it was the outcome of the hatred she bore them, 'and they murmured to one another and to God, and they bethought them of the valiant deeds of Robert, the good Count's brother.' Flanders was in a state of ferment, but the widow of Baldwin was in no way daunted at the tokens of the coming storm. She had inflamed the heart of a mighty champion, who had had experience in the taming of Karls--William FitzOsberne, Earl of Hereford, the Conqueror's right hand at Senlac, but lately his Viceroy in England, and the bravest and the craftiest of all his knights. She had conciliated the good will of Baldwin's kinsman, Eustace, Count of Boulogne, and for 4000 livres she had purchased the help of Philip I. of France. Confident in this added pillar of strength, Richilde made light of her subjects' complaints, and answered their appeal to Robert the Frisian by cutting off three-score heads and by invading his county of Alost.