When Count Charles assumed the government of Flanders the Erembalds were a power to be reckoned with. Their political influence was unrivalled, the number of their retainers was legion, their wealth was immense, by their marriages they had allied themselves with the first families in the county. Desiderius Hacket, the head of this house, was Châtelain of Bruges, and, as such, second man in the realm; Bertulph, his brother, as Provost of St. Donatian's, was the greatest churchman in Flanders, and, as hereditary chancellor, chief of the Count's household, whilst other members of the family held honourable and lucrative appointments about their sovereign's person. Notwithstanding, however, their great position, the Erembalds were never included in the ranks of the feudal nobility. They were originally simple freeholders or Karls, perhaps hereditary chiefs of some circle or guild, who by commerce, and may be also by plunder, for the Karls were lawless folk, had amassed vast wealth, and thereby been enabled to climb to the high places they now held. That they could by the same means, if they had been so minded, have also been ennobled, there can be no doubt, but the Erembalds, like all Karls, despised feudalism and all its works and all its pomps; in their eyes the title of Freeman was a nobler one than any which princes could bestow. Tancmar, the head of the great feudal house of Straten, was the owner of the lordship of Straten, in the neighbourhood of Bruges, where he had built himself an impregnable fortress, a wealthy devotee who had gained no little renown for piety and good works, the great Abbey of St. Andrew, hard-by his own domain, was the especial object of his munificence. He held high office in the Count's household, was a member of his Privy Council, and, what was worth more to him than anything else, his sovereign's confidential and devoted friend. Tancmar himself had no children, but he had adopted two nephews, sons, perhaps, of his brother; Giselbert, or, as we should say Gilbert, and Walter, whom men called the Winged Lie. Between the families of Erembald and Straten there had gradually grown up a deadly feud. As to the first cause of it both Walter and Walbert are silent, but the former writer tells us that, like many other great quarrels before and since, it arose out of a very small matter. Wegener, indeed, comes to the conclusion that the primary quarrel was between Charles himself and Bertulph, that it sprang from the Count's hatred of the Erembalds, whose pride and lawlessness were marring his projects of reform, and that the Stratens on the one side, and Bertulph's kinsfolk on the other, were mere tools in the hands of these two wire-pullers, who themselves at first remained in the background. Certainly all the facts of the case, taken together, go to show that if Charles himself was not its first instigator, he at all events exploited the quarrel for his own political ends.