The return of peace after the Nordic invasions
and the restoration of links across
the Rhine and with the regions bordering the North Sea reanimated the Low
Countries, which were now no longer a 'finis terrae', the end of the earth, but an
inhabited area covered with fortified castles and walled towns. Bands of hitherto
vagrant merchants settled down near the towns and castles. By mid-eleventh
century, the weavers of the flatlands had come to live in the urban centres. The
population increased, large agricultural estates prospered, and the textile industry
kept workshops busy from the banks of the Seine and Marne to the Zuyder Zee.
It was all to culminate in the goo fortune
of Bruges. By 1200, this city, together with
Ypres, Thourout and Messines,was included in the circuit of the Flemish fairs. This
in itself made Bruges a more important place: she was receiving foreign
merchants, her industry was thriving and her trade was reaching England and
Scotland where she found the wool needed both for her looms and for re-export to
the cloth-making towns of Flanders. Her English contacts also served her well in the
provinces of France owned by the king of England: hence her early dealings in
Normandy grain and Bordeaux wines. And finally the arrival in Bruges of Hanseatic
ships confirmed and developed her prosperity.
The citizens of Bruges built new outer
harbours, first at Damme (1180) and later at
Sluys at the mouth of the Zwyn: their construction was called for not only by the
gradual silting-up of the harbour in Bruges, but also by the need for deeper
moorings for the heavy Koggen of the Hanseatic ports.
