Mightier than the feudal chiefs, whose fathers' swords had made the evolution of the city possible, they had absorbed them into their own ranks, or driven them forth from their borders, and now adopted their dress and speech and manner of living. In time of war they wore coats of mail like knights, and they alone of the civic army were mounted. They lived in great houses of stone, whose turrets and battlements towered above the thatched hovels of the helots who did their bidding:--weavers who starved when work was slack, and in good times just managed to keep body and soul together, the poorest and the most numerous of them all were they, the most turbulent, too, and the worst organised, always snarling at their hard lot and their impotence to better it, ready to break out into rebellion on the slightest provocation, and never content with their wages; dyers with blue nails--outward and visible sign of moral degradation, for though it was owing to their skill that the cloth of Brabant was more beautiful than that of any other land, and sometimes, though not often, they obtained wealth, they could never hope for the rights of citizenship until time had wiped out those fatal stains; men of a hundred other callings, degraded creatures all of them, who earned their bread by the sweat of their brow, mere human chattels without heart and without soul, whom an honest burgher might cuff at will, aye, and, if he would, carry off their daughters without fear of incurring any legal penalty. It was not always so. Before the year 1200 class distinctions were far less marked. In the early days the weaver could sell his own cloth, and even petty traders were admitted to the Merchants' Guild. The advent of the middleman had changed all this, and as time went on the patricians, the _majores et potentiores_, as an ancient chronicler calls them, grew more and more exclusive and more and more overbearing. But though they looked down on the 'lesser folk,' the bowels of their compassion were not shut up against them: they built and lavishly endowed hospitals where they might be tended when they were sick, refuges to which they could retire when hard work and old age had worn them out, orphanages for such of their children as had been deprived by death of their natural protectors, and above all, churches, glorious without and within--palaces of the people, where Lazarus and Dives knelt side by side. Nor is the stream of their charity yet dried up: the rich endowments of the _Bureaux de bienfaisance_ throughout Belgium are in great measure due to the munificence of these merchant princes of the Middle Age, who in turn cuffed and caressed the turbulent folk on whose hardships they fattened, and whose poverty rendered their riches possible.