From Norfolk to Bruges

I have been fascinated by Bruges for a long time, mostly due to having read and reread the Niccolo books by Dorothy Dunnett which vividly describe 15th century Bruges including the dyeing industry there. So when I went to Cologne a couple of weekends ago for the trade fair, I persuaded my husband that he would like nothing better than to spend a day in Bruges before we came back to the UK. I was so glad I did. It is a beautiful city and we had not expected it to be so large and so well preserved. I think we might have been lucky too, because it was early March and the weather was beautiful but it was not horribly busy. I should imagine it is rather jammed during the normal tourist season.

The wealth of Bruges in the medieval period was based on the textile industry. From the 11th century onwards the famous Flemish cloth provided the economic boost which meant that the population of the city grew rapidly. By the end of the 13th century Italian merchants from Genoa and Venice had settled there and by the end of the 14th century it was one of the most important trading centres in Northern Europe, especially as it was at the crossroads of the northern Hanseatic League trade. (England’s members of the Hanseatic League included Kings Lynn (the first to become a member), Great Yarmouth and Ipswich, and this was because of the medieval wool trade). As a result, Bruges is one of the finest medieval cities I have ever seen – street after street after canal of wonderful buildings and churches. What was really striking is that most of those buildings were built, not by aristocrats or powerful politicians, but by merchants. They are still a marker of money and power, but in a different way than say, Norwich, which is dominated by the Castle (the power of the king) and the Cathedral (the power of the church). In Bruges the most impressive tower was not that of the big church, but the Belfry (in the photo below) built in the 13th century, which formerly housed a treasury and the municipal archives and which still houses a carillon of 47 bells. Although in fairness, the spire of the Church of Our Lady was also pretty impressive, being world’s second highest brick building.

I have been reading an excellent book by Jenn Monihan of Fibreworkshop called Norfolk Horn – the Saga of a Rare Breed, its Place and its People, and have discovered that in the 11th century, when Bruges was just beginning its Golden Age, raw wool was England’s main export product and Norfolk Horn wool was being exported to Flanders where it was worked into fabric and then sold back to England. By the 12th century, Norfolk was manufacturing its own fine woollen fabric from the wool of the Norfolk Horn, called Worsted, and by the end of the 13th century the Worsted textile industry in Norfolk was well established with an excellent reputation both at home and in Europe, and of course the fabric would have been exported via Bruges which was at that time the main trading port in Flanders. It is hard sometimes to regard our rather sleepy corner of the world as having been so pivotal for such a long time in international trade, but it was.

One of the nods to the importance of the wool trade in Bruges is a street called ‘Wool Street’ which is one of the main thoroughfares in the centre of the town leading to the main square. And of course, we had to go and check out the Dyers Quarter for my own satisfaction. Bruges is a city of canals and the dyers lived and worked on the waterways because they needed the water for processing the fabrics. It must have been a fairly smelly part of town, partly because natural dyes do not often smell good when being boiled in vats, and partly because urine was one of the main fixatives used in the process at that time. The Dyers Quarter sits on a junction of two canals and is now very pretty and not at all smelly. We had a lovely drink in the sunshine there.

All in all, it was a very satisfactory visit, made more so for me because of the strong connection between Bruges, Norfolk and the wool trade. I recommend it if you have not already been.