Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from History of the People of the Netherlands, Vol. 2: From the Beginning of the Fifteenth Century to 1559
This part, too, offered peculiar difficulties in the way of a well-ordered, connected narrative. The writer had no longer to contend with an almost complete lack or at least great imperfection of data, as was the case in various chapters of Part I. We have no cause of complaint for the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries, espe cially not in the last part. The great difficulty lay in the many points both of likeness and of difference in political and social matters in the Netherland provinces of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The writer deemed that the best method of overcoming the difficulty was to give the political history of the various states separately, as far as possible; to keep in mind their exact mutual relation by referring, in the accounts of common wars and feuds, to what had been previously said; and to discuss social conditions in the various provinces occas ionally, when they came to the fore, as, for example, the guilds in Flanders, the Vehmgericht in Utrecht, the position of the feudal nobles in Hainaut.
An important place must be given to the political his tory of this tumultuous time, more prominent than may be deemed desirable by many in a history of the people of the Netherlands; war, feud, and disputed succession were, in those centuries, all in the order of the day and con trolled social development then as well as in the cent uries immediately preceding. Therefore, consideration is devoted to the critical periods which had real in?uence on the condition of the people.
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