accomplishment, for a strong guard of Flemings was posted outside each gate. All day long the work of destruction continued, and when at last, worn out with slaying, the Flemish sheathed their swords, the streets and lanes of the city were red with blood and filled with dead men, and so great was the number of corpses that it took three whole days to cast them into the adjoining fields, and there give them burial. And yet fortune had been kind to some of them; the lives of forty knights had been spared, and perhaps of three-score soldiers. These men had been cast into prison; others more fortunate still had saved alike their lives and their liberty. Amongst them note the authors of all the mischief, Jacques de Châtillon and Chancellor Flotte. The former, who, with all his faults, was no coward, at first essayed to stem the tide, but when his horse had been slain under him, seeing that resistance was hopeless, he endeavoured to slip away unobserved, and in the darkness and confusion succeeded in doing so. Presently, wandering about the mazy byways in search of some refuge, he fell in with Pierre Flotte in like predicament with himself. At last they discovered the place they were seeking, perhaps the garret or the cellar of some warehouse giving on one of the canals. Here these two friends, the one a prince of the blood royal and the other the bastard of a courtezan, each of them men of wealth and might, without victuals and without drink, lay huddled up in a frowsy corner, expecting each moment would be their last, until once more the shades of night fell on the town. Then slinking forth, not without trepidation, Châtillon in the garb of a clerk, Flotte disguised in some other fashion, each of them presently made good his escape, and found an interval of breathing time, the first at Courtrai, the second at Lille, during which to recruit themselves for the great contest so soon to follow. Truly the fourteenth century was a century of noise and adventure, and yet somehow or other in those days, so we are told, men had no nerves. CHAPTER XV _The Battle of the Golden Spurs_ The victory was not yet won, Flanders was not yet free, but the massacre which took place at Bruges on Friday, May 13, 1302, and which the burghers for centuries after with brutal irony delighted to call their 'good Friday,' was the beginning of the end.