Their larger assemblies were
accompanied with long festivities, the solemn entry into a town or
village being styled _Landjuweel_ (Landjewel). The nobility mingled in
them, incited by the example of Henry IV. of Brabant or
Philippe-le-Bel. The wealth of the Netherlands was displayed on these
solemnities, and the citizens rivalled their monarchs in magnificence.
The burghers of Ghent and Bruges and Antwerp shone, on these
occasions, in the gaudy pomp of princely patricians. All were invited
to take part and dispute the prizes awarded by fair hands.
It can scarcely be expected that these guilds, composed in many cases
of mechanics, should give rise to works of the highest order of merit.
Their dramatic representations were rather gorgeous than tasteful,
their attempts at wit little better than buffoonery, their humor mere
personal vituperation. Yet even in matters of taste they are not much
inferior to the then more pretentious academies of other lands. It was
an age of long religious dramas, of tortured rhymes and impossible
metres, when strange and new versification imported from France found
favor among a people whose silks and linens and rich tapestries were
destined to reach a wider circulation than all the poetical effusions
of their guilds, the "Lily," the "Violet," and the "Jesus with the
Balsam Flower."
It was Philip the Fair who, wishing to centralize the scattered
efforts of these societies, established at Malines, in 1493, a
sovereign chamber, of which he appointed his chaplain, Pierre Aelters,
_sovereign prince_.
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