In its first period, Flemish literature found some encouragement from its princes. John I. of Brabant fostered it, and even took, himself, the title of Flemish Troubadour. Under Guy of Dampierre, who neither in heart nor mind was sympathetic with the people he ruled, we find Maerlant, still revered by his country; his name is ever coupled with the epithet of Father of Flemish Poets. Didactic rather than poetical, his influence was great in breaking down the barriers which separated the people from the higher classes, by adapting to their own home-idiom the best productions of the age. About this period we find prevalent those Northern singers corresponding to the _Trouvères_, _Troubadours_, and _Jongleurs_. They are in Flanders the _Spreker_, _Segger_, and _Vinder_, who, when travelling through the country, took the name of _Gezel_, received in town or village, court or hamlet, as the wandering minstrel of the South. The golden age when sovereigns doffed their royal robes to lay them on the shoulders of some sweet-singing poet, as the old chronicles tell us, was of short duration in the North, if ever the _Sproken_ or erotic poems may be said to have brought their authors into such favor. On the other hand, we find some of the wanderers arrested for theft and other crimes.
Little light has been thrown on their first ante-historical attempts. Until the late labors of German philologers, little had been done to clear up the confusion resting on this period of literary history. As yet the field has scarcely been explored beyond the regions not immediately connected with the literature of Germany. We have long historical poems of little interest, arranged without order,--interminable productions of thousands and ten thousands of lines of uncertain date, didactic and encyclopedia-like, besides unmistakable remnants of a Netherlandish theatre.
The battle of Roosebeke, where the second Artevelde and his companions succumbed to superior numbers, was the last great enterprise of the Flemings against the French. Half a century earlier, a strong league had been formed against these powerful neighbors. In the interior, the country was divided into factions,--the partisans and enemies of France. Prominent were the _Clauwaerts_ and the _Leliarts_, from the lion's claw and the _fleur-de-lis_ which they respectively wore on their badges. The country, which has ever been one of the battle-fields of Europe, was abandoned to all the horrors of civil war. The Duke of Brabant was childless. The Count of Flanders gave his daughter, his only legitimate child, in marriage to the Duke of Burgundy; and the provinces soon came into the hands of those ambitious and restless enemies of the Court of France. It may easily be imagined that these events were not without their influence on a language deteriorated on the one hand by constant contact with a Romanic idiom, and in Holland by the transmission of the sovereign crown to the House of Avesnes.