It is significant of the trend of public opinion that the deputies made these requests their own, and further, named a committee of eight patricians and eight plebeians to study the question of the town debt and the financial situation generally. By Pentecost they had sent in their report, and Duchess Jeanne--Winceslaus being absent in Luxembourg--at once laid it before the conference, which was now sitting in St. Gertrude's Abbey. It embodied many wise and prudent suggestions, some of which sound strangely modern, but they touched too nearly the rights of property to be acceptable to most of the patricians. It would have been surprising, indeed, if many of them had welcomed an income tax and death duties, or a tax on Church lands, or an all round reduction of official salaries, and these proposals, and others of a like kind, aroused such a storm of opposition that Jeanne suggested that perhaps it might be as well to leave it to the Duke and his council to solve the financial problem, but to this, naturally enough, everyone objected, and when presently Winceslaus himself returned he could only reiterate his wife's proposal, promising that he would take no step without first consulting his _bonnes villes_ and his brother-in-law of Flanders--Louis of Maele, whose tenderness to his own patricians was notorious throughout the Low Countries; but he might just as well have held his breath, the patricians refused to hearken and things came to a standstill. Whereat the people grew restive. Difficulties, they alleged, were being purposely raised to stave off reform, they themselves would settle the matter in their own fashion; and on the 22nd of July the mob was out, battering at the doors of the Town Hall, and clamouring to Burgomaster Van Nethen to bring forth the great seal and the town charters. To do so, he said, was impossible, he had not got the keys, and, even if he had, it were contrary to law to unlock the rolls coffer save in the presence of the whole council. Needless to say, the rioters were not convinced, and at nightfall a host of them, with arms and banners, headed by the weaver, Wouter Vander Leyden, filed into the Grand' Place, took possession of the Hôtel de Ville, arrested the aldermen they found there, and, without much difficulty, made themselves masters of the town.