'Now it so happened that a certain wicked, false ribald, who had seen all that had taken place, at once made report thereof to Myn Here Coutherele, Mayor of Louvain, and affirmed upon oath that the fishmonger had stolen the horse; and thus it came to pass that no sooner had the said fishmonger set foot in Louvain than he was arrested for a thief and cast into gaol. At last the matter was brought before the Court of Aldermen, who adjudged the accused not guilty and directed that he should be set free; whereat the Mayor refused to comply, and the magistrates were cut to the quick. In flouting their sentence Coutherele had infringed one of those very privileges which, upon taking office, he had solemnly sworn to maintain. He was no longer worthy to be their Mayor. Henceforth they would cease to regard him as such.' In refusing to carry out the sentence of the aldermen Coutherele had no doubt acted illegally, and the magistrates, in retaliating as they did, were strictly within their rights, but if they had not been blinded by passion they would have surely held their peace. They knew very well that the Mayor of Louvain would be certain to represent the course they had pursued as a flagrant violation of the ducal prerogative; and they knew too that the man who now sat on the throne of Brabant was of other blood and of other complexion to those friends and fosterers of freedom--the princes of the House of Louvain. The last of them was John III., and when (December 5, 1355) he was gathered to his fathers the mantle of their policy did not fall on the shoulders of his son-in-law and successor. Winceslaus of Luxembourg, the new Duke, knew nothing of civic institutions. How should he? There were no great towns in the land in which he had been reared. And though it was to the burgher-nobles of Brabant that he owed his recently acquired domains, he deemed the influence and pretensions of these tradesmen a standing affront to his dignity, of which from the first he was determined to be rid. Moreover, he was aggrieved with most of them personally, for had they not welcomed Louis of Maele when that sycophant of patrician pride, under pretext of recovering his wife's portion, had invaded his domains, and was it not by their counsel that he had afterwards styled himself Duke of Brabant? Added to this, it was the lesser folk who had at last driven out the usurper, and when others of his order had deserted their prince Coutherele had stood by him manfully. Such was the complexion of affairs at the moment when the patricians of Louvain defied their enemy, and such was the man into whose jaundiced ears that aggrieved individual now poured the story of their aggressions.