Daffodils are shiny when polished: in search of new titles for blog posts

The frequent visitor and attentive observor may have noticed the addition of a few links to the my articles section, namely one listing every battle fought in the Low Countries between 1200-1500 I could find information on, and another in-depth article on the battle of Othée, concluding the related article on the siege of Maastricht in 1407-1408.
The first I wrote because I was annoyed no proper compilation of all these combats was available, so I scoured every book I had on the middle ages and the Low Countries, as well as doing some wiki searching. Sadly the Frisian Schieringer-Vetkoper civil war battles appear not to have been the subject of any study yet, and so I can't find anything in-depth on them, which is a shame as the period reveals some great generals, like Focko Ukena, who won three battles (a great achievement for anyone in the middle ages).

The article on Othée (and the one on Maastricht) were written because I'm working on a novel dealing with the siege, and wished to compile some of the information I had gathered. I have a lot more where that came from, but these mostly are rather uninspired genealogical data concerning the major families living in Maastricht at the time, and a few interesting anecdotes.
For example, Rutten Clencke (a peculiar name, even in Dutch) did some damage to the village of Wolder during a raid. This village was occupied by the Liegois, and so it seemed justified, but he also damaged property belonging to the lord of Mérode, who was one of the knightly lords fighting for John of Bavaria against the Liegois. Rutten Clencke was fined for his behaviour.
Obviously this fellow also makes an appearance in my novel, though I'll have to revisit the library to try and find out when he did this and how much he was fined for; I sadly forgot to note this down initially.

Another interesting turn of events was that the Liegois invaded the land of Heinsberg. Heinsberg was the principal mercenary captain in John of Bavaria's service, and the rebels tried to strike at him by laying waste his country, thus forcing him to abandon Maastricht. However, he had apparently expected this, and after doing some pillaging the Liegois were defeated by the militia of Heinsberg and knights left behind by their lord. Interestingly, the psychological effect of this action on the lord of Heinsberg becomes clear afterwards: he struck out very harshly against the rebels, and burned down many villages. Whether this was his strategy all along or partly inspired by a lust for vengeance I don't know - it was a common strategy after all - but I'd like to consider emotion played a part here.