BRUGES AND WEST FLANDERS

CHAPTER I

THE MARKET-PLACE AND BELFRY--EARLY HISTORY OF BRUGES

Every visitor to 'the quaint old Flemish city' goes first to the
Market-Place. On Saturday mornings the wide space beneath the mighty
Belfry is full of stalls, with white canvas awnings, and heaped up
with a curious assortment of goods. Clothing of every description,
sabots and leathern shoes and boots, huge earthenware jars, pots
and pans, kettles, cups and saucers, baskets, tawdry-coloured
prints--chiefly of a religious character--lamps and candlesticks,
the cheaper kinds of Flemish pottery, knives and forks, carpenters'
tools, and such small articles as reels of thread, hatpins, tape,
and even bottles of coarse scent, are piled on the stalls or spread
out on the rough stones wherever there is a vacant space. Round
the stalls, in the narrow spaces between them, the people move
about, talking, laughing, and bargaining. Their native Flemish
is the tongue they use amongst themselves; but many of them speak
what passes for French at Bruges, or even a few words of broken
English, if some unwary stranger from across the Channel is rash
enough to venture on doing business with these sharp-witted, plausible
folk.

At first sight this Market-Place, so famed in song, is a disappointment.
The north side is occupied by a row of seventeenth-century houses
turned into shops and third-rate cafés. On the east is a modern
post-office, dirty and badly ventilated, and some half-finished