Revised October 5, 2003

Charles, Count of Flanders, rose from bed a bit later than usual that first Wednesday of March 1127, although still well before dawn. He was troubled by a kind of anxious wakefulness and he had had a hard time falling asleep and had tossed and turned all night, "now lying on one side, now sitting up again on the bed. The darkness and the cold, humid air did nor help matters. It was only the second night he had spent in his house in the burg, the fortified center, of Brugge since his return from a visit to his cousin, King Louis VI of France, and he had "many things on his mind". A carefully cultivated feud between two of the leading men from the region of Brugge; Thancmar of Straeten, whose stronghold lay to the west of town on the road to Ypres, and Thancmar's neighbor, Borsiard (a.k.a. Busschaert) had once again broken out during Charles's absence, and when he had returned to Flanders, he had been met in Ypres by a crowd of people from the region who had complained of the damage and losses they had suffered at the hands of the freebooter Borsiard gang had loosed on the countryside.

Borsiard had clearly been the aggressor this time, but he was not an easy man to punish. His Erembald family grandfather had become, around 1067, the castellan of Brugge, the Count's principal residence (through, rumor said, adultery and murder) and the post had been held by one of his descendants ever since. One of Borsiard's uncles,
Diederik Haket, was castellan in 1127. Another uncle, Bertulf, had been the provost of Saint Donatian the church attached to the Count's house in the castle since 1091. Bertulf was also, by virtue of his office, the receiver of the Count's revenues from throughout the county and the chancellor of Flanders, in charge of the clerical personnel attached to the Count's court and administration. The family's wealth and power in the county were second only to Charles's own.
    The situation was further complicated by the questions that had recently been raised about the Erembald family's legal status. Having hearing them accused of being only of servile status, Charles had ordered an investigation into the matter and, finding that there was indeed good reason to believe that the members of the family were, in fact, his serfs, had summoned them to Castle last year to prove they were not serfs.
    When the day had come, they had shown up with three thousand armed supporters. Charles, fearing bloodshed, had postponed the hearing. He had thus incurred the hatred of the family and all its friends and dependents; since they risked losing their wealth, offices, and power if they were found to be of servile status; but had not been able to enforce his rights: all he had gained was a large group of powerful enemies.
    Faced with the need to punish a leading member of this powerful and ill-disposed family, Charles had summoned his court to meet in Ypres on Sunday, February 27, and had asked those present to advise him how to do so. Some had immediately advised him to burn down Borsiard's house while others; more politic; had suggested that he go himself and see what had been done, and then fit the punishment to the crime. He had therefore traveled to the region Monday morning - despite being told that Borsiard had recently been overheard asking:-
    "If someone were to kill the Count, who would avenge him?"; and, moved to tears by what he had seen, had burned and razed Borsiard's house. He had then gone on to spend the night in his own house in Brugge, from where he could look out and see, within the same castle walls, the houses of Borsiard's uncles, the provost and the castellan.
   The Count had spent Tuesday hearing suits and tending to the accumulated affairs of the county, and had again been warned, during the day, that Borsiard and his family were plotting some treachery. After dinner, Guy of Steenvoorde, who had married one of Borsiard's cousins, and a number of other prominent men had come to the Count to ask him to pardon Borsiard and his allies and take them back into his favour. Asking himself if he had dealt with Borsiard's outrageous deeds fittingly Charles replied, "although I had one of his little houses burned, is Borsiard himself as yet unpunished? Does justice not demand rather that he restore to the poor everything he carried off and pay for the suffering caused by such great crimes? If he wishes to find the mercy he seeks, he should restore justly everything he has unjustly stolen and acknowledge the status of his lineage. For by what reckoning can he obtain forgiveness and keep what he has stolen from the poor?".
    He had nonetheless concluded that "he would act justly and mercifully" toward Borsiard and his supporters if they would henceforth give up their fighting; and he assured them, moreover, that he would compensate Borsiard with a house even better than the one he had burned. He swore, however, that as long as he was Count, Borsiard would never again own anything in the place where the house had been burned, because as long as he lived there near Thancmar he would never do anything but fight and feud with his enemies, and pillage and slaughter the people. The mediators had let the matter drop with surprising ease, but had stayed to drink the Count's wine, "asking to be served again still more abundantly, as drinkers often do".
    After Count Charles had retired that night, yet other rumors and warnings had reached him that Borsiard and his relatives were planning some kind of attack. The Count's insomnia and desire to stay in bed a little longer than usual that morning are thus understandable. When he did finally rise, washed and, as was his habit, distributed food and clothing to several paupers in his house before crossing the stone archway connecting it to the gallery of the Saint Donatian church . Once in the gallery, he proceeded to the altar dedicated to the Virgin Mary, where he prayed and listened to mass every morning when he was in Brugge, while most of the handful of men escorting him wandered off in search of a quiet corner somewhere.Charles began his prayers as usual. Eventually he prostrated himself before the altar and, with his psalter open before him, began to recite the seven penitential psalms. From time to time he took a silver penny from his purse that his chaplains had placed on the psalter and gave it to a pauper whom they had led to his side. As he was reciting the fourth psalm, he reached our his right hand to give a penny to a poor woman whose turn had finally come. As he did so, he felt a light tap on the left side of his head and the woman cried out: “‘Lord count, look out!”'. He turned his head to the left and looked up, but he may not have seen Borsiard or the sword that crushed his forehead and “knocked his brains out on to the floor”.

   Borsiard had nor slept well that night either. When the mediators who had gone to the count on his behalf had returned to the provost’s house where he, his uncle Bertulf, and several relatives and supporters were waiting for them, the wine they had drunk gave an aggressive edge to their report. They announced “that they had nor been able to secure any mercy either for the [provost’s) nephews or their supporters” and that “they would never obtain mercy from the count unless they all confessed themselves his serfs”. Enraged by this inflammatory rendition of the count’s response and fearful that he was planning to move against them in the near future, Bertulf; his brother, Wulfric; their nephews, Borsiard, Robert, and Isaac (one of the count’s chamberlains); and a few other men had retired to an inner room where they had sworn to kill the count as soon as they could. They had then split up, each returning to his own dwelling. When everyone in his house was asleep, Isaac had gone back out, collected Borsiard at his house, and they had gone together to the house of another knight, Walter, taking with them those members of Borsiard’s household who had been chosen to murder the count. Once there, they had put out the fire and had plotted, waited, and perhaps dozed fitfully in the dark, planning to murder the count when he went to the church. Isaac, however, had left shortly before dawn. When the servants Borsiard had sent into the courtyard of the castle to watch had returned and reported that the count had gone into the gallery, “that raging Borsiard and his knights and servants, all with drawn swords beneath their cloaks, followed the count into the same gallery, dividing into two groups so that not one of those whom they wished to kill could escape from the (circular) gallery by either way, and behold! they saw the count prostate before the altar, on a low stool, where he was chanting psalms to God and at the same time devoutly offering prayers and giving our pennies to the poor”.
   After a week of indecision and confusion, the barons of Flanders gathered at Brugge and drove the assassins and their accomplices into the castle, where they besieged them. Aided by friends, relatives, or large bribes, some of the besieged escaped; many of those who did, including Borsiard and Bertulf, were eventually captured and executed. Those who remained inside the castle were forced to retreat, first, to the church of Saint Donatian and then to the church’s tower. They finally surrendered on April 19; on May 5, and many were executed by being thrown from the tower of the count’s house.
   Charles died without an obvious or designated successor, and King Louis VI of France immediately seized the opportunity to exercise his rights as overlord of the county of Flanders in the choice of the new count. He summoned the barons of Flanders to meet him at Arras and, after hearing appeals from various claimants, chose William Clito (1101—1128), the nephew of Henry I of England and son of Robert Curthose, the dispossessed duke of Normandy. The choice was confirmed, in return for numerous and significant concessions, by the barons and towns of Flanders, and William was duly invested with the county and officially received as count throughout it.
   However enmity of King Henry I of England toward the new count had a chilling effect on the important commercial relations between the cities of Flanders and England in the months that followed William’s election and King Henry seems to have bribed everyone he thought could possibly make life difficult for his nephew. The loss of commercial revenues, the flood of English money, and a series of unpopular actions taken by William led to rising discontent with the new count in urban centers like Lille, Brugge, Saint-Omer, and Gent, and by March 1128 William no longer had full control of the county. The citizens of Saint-Omer had welcomed Charles’s nephew, Arnold of Denmark, and elected him count, while Thierry of Alsace, Charles’s cousin and the son of Thierry II, duke of Upper Lorraine, had been received in Gent and elected count there by its citizens.
    Baldwin IV, Arnold and Baldwin made no headway, but Thierry gained the support of Brugge and other cities. William finally won a decisive victory over him at the battle of Axpoel on June 21, and effectively reestablished himself as count. The defeated Thierry was pursued and besieged in Aalst on July 12 by William and Godfrey, duke of Louvain, but William was mortally wounded in the course of this siege and died on July 27 or 28. Deprived of its leader, the opposition to Thierry evaporated and he was quickly recognized as count of Flanders, a position he held for forty years until his death in 1168.

GALBERT OF Brugge

   Thanks to the foresight of one of the senior canons of Saint Donatian, “the accounts and records of the revenues of Count Charles” were carried out of the church and the besieged castle on March 17, along with the church’s relics and more valuable movable possessions, and thus saved from damage during the assault on the church and the pillaging that followed its capture. With Charles dead and Bertulf on the run, however, the county's administration could not have functioned in any regular way until after William Clito’s arrival in Brugge on April - and the installation of a new provost on April 16. Impressed by the shocking and unprecedented events going on around him and in some way sensing their importance for the future, Galbert, one of the functionaries of Charles' administration decided to put his forced leisure to good use by recording them. He was an unusual and unlikely historian by the standards of the early twelfth century, and the chronicle he eventually wrote, but never quite finished, likewise stands out from other historical writing of that time.
The administration of the county of Flanders at the beginning of the twelfth century was one of the wonders of the bureaucratic world. The historical core of the county had been divided into castellanies in the course of the eleventh century, each administered from a comital castle governed by a castellan appointed by the count. Some of these fortified centers were of recent origin and may have been established as part of a deliberate comital policy intended to facilitate communications and increase commerce in the heart of Flanders and unify the county politically. Such castellanies usually contained a lodging for the count, and a church (usually a collegiate church).

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