FURNES--THE PROCESSION OF PENITENTS
CHAPTER VIII
FURNES--THE PROCESSION OF PENITENTS
The traveller wandering amongst the towns and villages in this
corner of West Flanders is apt to feel that he is on a kind of
sentimental journey as he moves from place to place, and finds
himself everywhere surrounded by things which belong to the past
rather than to the present. The very guidebooks are eloquent if we
read between the lines. This place 'was formerly of much greater
importance.' That 'was formerly celebrated for its tapestries.'
From this Hotel de Ville 'the numerous statuettes with which the
building was once embellished have all disappeared.' The tower
of that church has been left unfinished for the last 500 years.
'Fuimus' might be written on them all. And so, some twenty miles
north of Ypres, on a plain which in the seventeenth century was
so studded with earthen redoubts and serrated by long lines of
field-works and ditches that the whole countryside between Ypres
and Dunkirk was virtually one vast entrenched camp, we come to
the town of Furnes, another of the places on which time has laid
its heavy hand.
The early history of Furnes is obscure, though it is generally
supposed to have grown up round a fortress erected by Baldwin
Bras-de-Fer to check the inroads of the Normans.
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