What his original station in life may have been, and what public offices, if any, he may have filled, are questions, perhaps, which will never be determined. May be, as Gheldorf thinks, he was a man of noble birth who had formerly occupied some position of trust at Guy's Court--it was by no means an unusual occurrence for Flemish noblemen in those days to become members of city companies. May be Kervyn is right in asserting that he was a son of the people; nor, if this were so, does it follow that De Coninck had not been attached to his sovereign's household; men of doubtful origin, before and since, have sometimes been esteemed by princes, and Guy is known to have favoured his lesser folk. Perhaps he was a Flemish Karl of the Liberty of Bruges, one of those sturdy yeomen whose ancestors for generations back had, each of them, cultivated his own plot of land and held it by the strength of his own right arm. Be this as it may, neither the baseness nor the brilliancy of De Coninck's origin diminished or increased the esteem in which he was held by the people. They loved him for what he was, and not for what his forebears had been; and when, supported by the deans of five-and-twenty guilds, in the market-place of Bruges, beneath the shadow of the great bell tower which had just arisen from its ashes more beautiful than it was before, he thundered at the corruption and ambition of the city fathers and called them sycophants and knaves, the vast crowd which thronged the market-place rallied round him to a man, and swore to refuse the obnoxious tax--that not one groat of their hard-earned coin should find its way into the coffers of so corrupt a municipality. In vain the outraged sheriffs caused De Coninck and his comrades to be put under arrest; that very night the people burst open their prison and set them free, and when John of Ghistelle, the chief of the Leliaerts,[23] concerted with them a plot to fall on the Clauwaerts[24] unawares and cut down all their chiefs, the bell which should have signalled the work of destruction was for more than one of the plotters his own passing knell. Somehow or other the Clauwaerts had got wind of the storm that was brewing, and as the first shrill cry of the tocsin clanged over the city, they flew to arms. Panic laid hold of the Leliaert host, and though the swiftness of their heels saved some, not a few of the leaders were reckoned amongst the slain, and others before nightfall were safely lodged in the prison which had so lately held De Coninck and his friends; but the measure of the great tribune's vengeance was not filled up yet.