Galbert's Taken: A Summary

To What Extent Can Galbert of Bruges’s The Murder of Charles the Good be Taken as an ‘Utterly Artless’ Account?

Although Galbert of Bruges’s De multro, traditione, et occisione gloriosi Karoli comitis Flandriarum (hereafter De multro) may initially appear to the historian to be a straightforward contemporary eyewitness account of events surrounding the murder of Count Charles the Good of Flanders, questions surrounding its authorship have divided scholarly opinion. In his 1891 translation to the text, Henri Pirenne referred to Galbert both as a ‘naïve’ author and a ‘transparent everyman’ who simply relayed factual information that he had seen first-hand. This belief led Pirenne to argue that Galbert’s account of the murder of Charles the
One of the most prominent examples of these is Galbert’s manipulation of time and the diegetic space within his account. This is particularly visible in the chapter relating to the direct aftermath of Charles’s murder when the Erembalds and their accomplices are searching throughout the castle of Bruges for their remaining enemies. Galbert’s narratological art is perhaps best seen here through the way in which he extends what Chatman calls the internal ‘chrono-logic’[28] with his protracted description of the death of Themard, the castellan of Bourbourg. This strange and drawn out account of the castellan’s death begins with Galbert simply telling us that; ‘They also killed the castellan of Bourbourg. First wounding him mortally, they afterward dragged him ignobly by his feet from the gallery into which he had gone up with the count, to the doors of the church and dismembered him outside with their swords. This castellan, however, after making confession of his sins to the priests of that very church, received the body and blood of Christ according to Christian