is found, for instance, in 1278 at the encounters at Le Hem in northern France. There was an honoured place for noblewomen on these occasions, and the blend of military prowess and amorous pursuit, which was condemned by the institutional Church, could be a heady mixture for young nobles. By 1316, however, papal disapproval of the tournament was greatly moderated by John XXII, and the Church's recognition of the new secular chivalric orders (the Garter, Star, Crescent, or Golden Fleece) of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was an indication of a change in attitude. These orders met and held their 'chapters' in churches--St George's Chapel, Windsor, Notre-Dame at Bruges, or Saint-Maurice at Angers--and a liturgy was devised for these solemn occasions. To claim the services of nobles at a period when loyalty was negotiable, often in monetary terms, princes found chivalric orders to be of political value. Philip the Good of Burgundy was able to enforce a prior claim upon the loyalty of his knights of the Golden Fleece (founded 1430), and the order bound together nobles from the heterogeneous Burgundian lands which lacked a parliamentary peerage on the English pattern. The Habsburgs were also to make use of it after they inherited the Burgundian Netherlands and the culture of Maximilian's court at Innsbruck and Vienna was profoundly influenced by the example of the Valois dukes. The court of Edward IV of England ( 1461-83) was similarly affected and the extraordinary efflorescence of literature, music, and the visual arts in fifteenth-century Flanders, Brabant, Hainault, and Holland made the Low Countries a source of cultural patterns copied elsewhere--even in Italy.

Yet the court of Burgundy and the art of the Flemish 'primitives', as we have seen, did not emerge from a vacuum. Although there was a flourishing Netherlandish literary court culture in Brabant until the mid-fourteenth century, the dominance of French as a literary language in the Low Countries was already pronounced even in Netherlandishspeaking areas by 1300. French was the language of courtly society and the households of the counts of Artois, Flanders, and Hainault actively promoted secular literature of the pre-

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