By way of preface and explanation to the interesting subject matter of this letter, let me first attempt a characterization of the Flemish Carpentier family group of the 12th and 13th centuries. They were the descendants of knights, according to their historian Jean le Carpentier, writing in the 17ty century. In later years their descendants had acquired land, and no doubt country estates to go with their new titles, like Sire de Daniel and Sire de Vannes. They were in a word, gentry. The Flemish and French knights of the early Middle Ages became minor lords with land in the later. Unfortunately this whole class of people had by the late 1200s grown poorer. Warlop in his THE FLEMISH NOBILITY BEFORE 1300, narrates their conditions. “In the evolution of the economic situation of the Flemish nobility in the second half of the twelfth and in the thirteenth century, a constant can be observed: a chronic lack of money.” (p. 298) “To get money they finally had to sell their rights and immovables to persons who disposed of cash: rich burghers and ecclesiastical institutions.” (p. 298) “Even worse was the case of Hellin III of Wavrin, steward of Flanders. He had not only sold his function to to Count Guy before 1283 but had so many debts that he married off one of his daughters to a rich burgher of Douai in the hope that the latter would help.” (p. 296) For the Carpentiers not far from the city of Douai, their solution was a simple one, they became the burghers. They became the controllers and administrators of the cloth trade itself, the industry that controlled the trading cities of Flanders in the late Middle Ages. The names of Carpentier weavers and drapers in the Flemish cities have come down to us, but the most interesting are those Carpentiers who administrated the trade and therefore the towns. They had seemingly built up their own wealth to the point where they now took up public office. They served under the most illustrious burgher and cloth merchant of the day, Jean Boine Broke (much has been writt en about this key player in the events of his day). It was exactly like a hundred years later, in England, with mercers Mayor Dick Whittington and Town Clerk John Carpenter. Many of their names survive in Flemish legal dispositions (in Recueil De Ducuments Relatifs L”Histoire DeL’Industrie Drapierre En Flandre, Bruxelles, 1909) like Potins Li Carpentiers, Pieres Li Carpentiers and Maroie Li Carpentiere. In the city of Ypres a Lippin le Carpentier would be listed in a letter to the King of France as one of the cloth merchant administrators of the city. At this time in Flanders one of the seminal events in western history took place, the Battle of the Golden Spurs, in which the members of the craft guilds (and principally the cloth makers) formed an army and defeated the French army, guaranteeing their own independence. It was this event that resulted in the cloth maker’s control of the Flemish cities. In a real sense all of this was a true milestone in the development of independent free enterprise and democracy. The Carpenters were in 1600s Massachusetts and the Carpenters participated in the creation of the free trading cities of Northern Europe. As C.A. Carpenter often says, the Carpenters are always independent and individualistic. Bruce Carpenter