The Lion of Flanders

"Schild en vriend." Shield and friend: two Flemish words that a French tongue could not quite get round, and on a May night in Bruges they decide who lives until morning. Hendrik Conscience wrote this novel in a Belgium whose courts and newspapers spoke French, and he wrote it in the language of weavers and butchers, about the summer those weavers and butchers, armed with pikes and the spiked clubs they called goedendags, walked out to meet the finest cavalry in Europe.