On this date in 1328, Willem de Deken, burgomaster of Bruges, had his hands cut off and his neck strung up in Paris for treason.
De Deken was among the leaders of the 1323-1328 Revolt of Coastal Flanders.
“As with most rebellions in Flanders, the revolt was not a straightforward clash of social classes,” notes Medieval Bruges: c. 850-1550.
At first, the protests of the rebels of the castellany of Bruges and other rural districts in coastal Flanders were aimed at the abuses in tax collection by the ruling elites — and more specifically members of the castellany’s noblemen who were thought to be exploiting the commoners to line their own pockets … However, the rising was soon joined by a Bruges coalition of artisans and some disgruntled members of the city’s commercial elite.
De Deken “led a rebellious coalition uniting various social groups though with the textile workers as its backbone”; at one point the rebels even captured Louis, Count of Flanders. (He escaped.)
The rising’s scale brought in the intervention Louis’s French allies,* and the French finally brought Flanders to heel at the Battle of Cassel on August 23, 1328.** De Deken did not have the good sense of his peasant rebel counterpart Nicolaas Zannekin to die at this battle.

The Battle of Cassel, by Hendrik Scheffer (1837).
This was all bad news for the men and women in rebellion in the 1320s but triumph on the Cassel battlefield could not resolve a fundamental contradiction in the Low Countries between Flemish merchants, whose booming wool trade pulled them ever closer to the English cloth industry, and the French-facing political alignment of Count Louis.
Just a few years later when English-French rivalries blossomed into the start of the Hundred Years’ War, a new merchant-rebel succeeded where De Deken had failed, expelling the Count and aligning the Low Countries with England. (Eventually these precincts would become part of the Burgundian patrimony, and those dukes’ running rivalries with the French crown.)
* Times being what they were, French intervention also entailed having the Avignon Pope John XXII pronounce a sacramental interdict against Flanders pending its submission.
** It’s one of several battles of Cassel in northern France, further muddled by several battles of the unrelated but homophonic Cassel/Kassel in Hesse.
On this day..
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- 1969: Equatorial Guinea's Christmas Eve executions
- 1744: The Black Boy Alley Gang hanged at Tyburn
- 1946: Gen. Leopold Okulicki murdered in Soviet prison
- 1774: William Ferguson, redcoat
- 1715: William Ainslie, Edinburgh Castle betrayer
- 1635: Hester Jonas, cunning-woman
- 1941: Eight Russian POWs at Flossenburg
- Unspecified Year: The Robbers of Nordenshaw
- 2008: Nine hanged in Iran
- 1705: John "Half-Hanged" Smith Half-Hanged
- 1684: Baillie of Jerviswood