 Yes, I'm going to tell you a story that will resemble the story that Frode told you, but we think alike in many ways, I think about times at least. It's a story that is also published now in the Rural Riches and Royal Racks volume for Francis his 65th birthday, a very important book referring to his ERC project on the Rural Riches. And I will going to talk about Ghent, which is the largest town in Europe north of the Alps in the late medieval period, and we don't have economic decline at least not in Ghent at the 11th, 12th century. This, and I will start my story with the story from the early 11th, maybe late 10th century. It's a story that is written down in the Miracola Sanctiva Polis and in Ghent, the St. Barnacle Abbey, which you see depicted over here, and here you see a relic of that abbey today, plays a very important role. It's situated actually over here. And the story goes about a merchant who had failed because yes, his ship had burned and all the ship had gone and the commodities had gone and he had nothing left. So he was now an impoverished beggar and he came to the abbey because the abbey was where the saint was and he prayed to the saint, can you please help me? And then he noticed a golden chalice on the altar and he said, ah, maybe dear saint, if I can use your golden chalice, just borrow it for restarting my business. Will you allow it? And of course the saint answered with a benevolence, silence. So he took the chalice and went back to restart his business and a few years later he was successful again and came back to the abbey in order to repay the saint and the abbey in subsist rich ways and we give the chalice and so on and so on. Now this story tells about a merchant, first of all you could say, well yes, it tells you about an abbey and an abbey is of course so rich that it represents the value of many merchants' businesses. On the other hand, it shows you also like Van Werveke, the pupil of Pyrene, told already the merchant is an independent entrepreneur and he's responsible for his own business. It shows also that the merchant can make considerable profit because in a few years he has his infrastructure again and he can pay himself a golden chalice in order to repay to the abbey. So high gain, high risk for merchants and that's that interpretation which is more or less correct I think, of course fits the Pyrene theory, Pyrene who was actually a liberal bourgeois, that's the main thing you have to remember about Pyrene, liberal entrepreneurship is progress. He actually wanted to explain why the French cities were so rich and important in the later medieval society. You all know that he also made a trust opposition between the success of the entrepreneur and then the early middle ages where he said, well back then it was all very backward. Now the other thing that you could do with the chalice is move more into the direction of what Franz Thiefs, also Richard Hodges and others write about tournaments of value in the sense that the chalice is an expensive ceremonial object. It is in fact inalienable, although it is transformed into entrepreneurial capital and then re-transformed again into a ceremonial artifact. This reminds me of what Franz Thiefs wrote for Maastricht, Maastricht in architectural dialogues about the key of since it was one of the great Cavaligian art objects, which is also in inalienable objects, a ceremonial object, and that he connected to the role of the assembly in Maastricht, Maastricht where we were last year, assembly but then in the association of a basilica, a saintly basilica of Synthepasius, one of the biggest basilicae we have in the low countries, were in the shadow of that particular saint. The same things happened as Frode actually described for an assembly place, the legal, the social, the political and the economic transactions, which also brings me to the argument or Franz Thiefs and I follow him there, that long-term transactions are not in contradiction with short-term transactions at all and that on these assembly places and tournaments of value places, Abby Basilica, that you do have the interaction between both atmospheres and circuits, ritual and commercial. I'm going to go briefly a bit. There was someone who said similar things already 100 years ago and also pointed towards the importance of the thing and hundred there. He's kind of forgotten in literature by now, but we have to think about his writings again. Alfons drops and of course there is also Franz Thiefs, Chris Laughlin, Julio Ascalona, who have written similar things. This brings me to the question, okay, what is the role of social reproduction and governance by the early medieval peasant society because in Maastricht, and that is contradictory to Piren, in Maastricht, we are dealing with an assembly place, a rich assembly place from the sixth, seventh century, not later. It becomes rich again in the 10th, 19th century. It has a gap in the eighth century that nobody can explain, but it was a rich place in the seventh century. So you have to connect it to free allodial landowners. There's no manner at that time, manorial system at that time. And how are these people and how are these governance processes, these assembly processes, how is this related to market development, like Frodo asked as well. And we want to go beyond the good end modernization as well, like I actually said. We want to connect the periods and forget about poor middle ages. And like I said, it's hence where I want to discuss this process, actually the market of hence. Frodo actually already described ritual assembly, so I don't have to go into that. This is a very nice picture of assembly from a hundred years ago. And of course, you know, we park, I don't have to go into that. We also have our own temples in the low countries, by the way, just excavated a few years ago. So we have the central places as well with temples, with important gifts made on the surface, next to large halls. It's Vasse de Steenbree. Here is Maastricht, but I already told about Maastricht. Maastricht, which town or which central place, assembly place has, of course, also rich craft productions, like the presence of the Monetari, glass bead production, pottery production, copper alloy production, and so on. And then we come to Hent again. The town in the 16th century. Here is the abbey by the second half of the 16th century, Charles the 50th emperor, who was actually born in Hent. They have destroyed the abbey into a fortification around it, but that's the situation. There was a twin abbey, by the way. Both abbeys were from the 7th century. Then we have a castle site over here. You will hear from that castle site more. And then there was a v-shaped fortification over here at number three around the present cathedral of Hent. And the river, by the way, is the Skelve. I should tell you the river Skelve runs through the city. In the early medieval periods, we do have a lot of early medieval rich material around the center. This is a very funny place. In a sense, it's called Port Arthur. It refers to King Arthur, who was actually never in Hent. But that's typically for the cultural historical explanation. So we find early medieval material. Oh, King Arthur was here. But he chose you the wealth of the peasantry. The peasantry, which had their own smaller a laudial landholdings around Hent. Those were studied by Adrián the ghost and those were, in fact, not manners at all. It's their burial ground, and it's also entirely cremation burial ground, which is very funny because it continues until 700. The funny aspect is that by then, we already had for 70 years two major abbeys. So they were not so successful in their Christianization of the society for the first 70 years, at least. It shows you the typical wealth of the rural riches, like Francis says. These people gather at the assembly. And we know the assembly not from archaeology, but from a written source. It's Sint Amandus himself, who describes it in its high geography. And he comes to a place where a certain Comes, the Comes is at that moment not really a lord, but someone who takes an official position in the Merovingian government structure. And he speaks about blah. They are going to execute a slave who had run away. Of course, the saint wants to revive the slave, et cetera, et cetera. People don't like what the saint does. They throw him in the river. He doesn't drown. He comes back. You know all these stories. But it's interesting that the assembly takes place at a certain, in a certain spot. We don't know where exactly, where they have fauna, well, idola. So where they have pre-Christian religion. So this reminds me very much about what is known in the North about assembly and central places. And we know that we have these pre-Christian temples because of the Stembre. So Held is, according to me, an important assembly central place for the hundred, because Comes account is someone who directs actually several centena or hundreds at this time. In the end, the saint is successful. That Amandus, I have to say. Amandus, with support by the king, King Dragobert, actually founds these two abbeys. Blondinium is the one here on the hill. And then the major one, the same abbeys where our merchants went. And what we see is, well, that those abbeys start to take over the role of the old assembly. There are market dolls. There is something like a ritual, annual market in honor of Saint Barthol. We don't know how old it is, but it reminds me very much of what the older Meryl Vincen assembly seems to have been. And it refers to what Martin Carver says that abbeys take over the ritual and assembly aspect. It refers in his study, of course, to Port Mahomet. But also what Richard Hodges says about Saint Vincenzo in Italy. It's the ideological aspect that directs the trade, or not, or at least where the trade takes place. A very remarkable thing is that in the 8th and 9th century, it's actually only in the abbeys that we find archaeology. This is one of the two abbeys, and it becomes a stone abbey in the middle of the 9th century, probably following the example of Saint Vincenzo in Northern Italy. You know how Richard Hodges sees Saint Vincenzo as the main abbey in the process where the abbeys become monumental buildings, and a very remarkable thing. This is pure of the material of that stone abbey from the 9th century, and it includes porcelain from China, tongue porcelain. So it is involved in long-distance trade at least. And to end this brings me back to the late 19th century. Then we have accounts, the account of Landers, who is related to Charlemagne as well as Alfred of Wessex. And he builds his own power position where the Carolingians have failed. I don't believe in Carolingian success, I believe in Carolingian failure in this respect. And this is a very rich account. He has a huge estate for himself with revenues, and he starts to build palaces. The important accounts are involved in the 2nd, late 9th century, early 10th century, and his song Ardnulf called the rich middle 10th century. And they refer to themselves as royalty. They want to be royal. They built a huge palace, for instance, here in Bruges, where they make a copy of the Dom of Aachen. This is their first power base. And they assemble not only probably all the governance over there, but also economy. The aula of the palace is not only the place where the governance is done, but is also the place where all the goods from the estates are brought. And it's outside at the gate of the palace, on the suburbium, that the goods from the estates from the count are sold, not in the palace, outside the palace. So we see governance and economy, and then hence we see a similar thing, the old habits from the Merovingian time, and then the V-shape, which is actually entirely comatol property. And it's over there that our merchant actually goes for his trade. Yeah, we have the annual market, but by the 10th century, it's V-shape that forms the core of the market town in development that would become this largest town in northern Europe. Just going quickly over there. This is by the way his second custom, I have to end. But to wrap things up, we see how economy and power go together, and how the old assembly in Gent, and the old gold aspect in Gent was transformed twice in relation to new power balances. First the monasteries, which were supported by the Carolingians, and then the Counts of Flanders. And the shipwreck merchant then, who had transformed the inalienable value in alienable wealth, and back again, was therefore not acting in a vacuum. He knew what he was doing. He knew how the game was played when he approached the saint. And we have to look also for Flanders, also for the Carolingian north, to the ancient association between gold, assembly, exchange, and trade, as an important motive for the development of trade and trade towns. And the rest you can read. Thank you.