Explore "The Town Hall of Louvain" by Esther Singleton on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
GRANT ALLEN.
Louvain is in a certain sense the mother city of Brussels. Standing on its own little navigable river, the Dyle, it was, till the end of the Fourteenth Century, the capital of the Counts and of the Duchy of Brabant. It had a large population of weavers, engaged in the cloth trade. Here, as elsewhere, the weavers formed the chief bulwark of freedom in the population. In 1378, however, after a popular rising, Duke Wenseslaus besieged and conquered the city; and the tyrannical sway of the nobles, whom he re-introduced, aided by the rise of Ghent, or later, of Antwerp, drove away trade from the city. Many of the weavers emigrated to Holland and England, where they helped to establish the woollen industry....