Hollanders II

Who Were the Hollanders?

Between 1000 and 1299, a distinct people took shape in the low country between the North Sea dunes and the inland branches of the Rhine and Meuse. They were not yet "the Dutch" in any later sense. They were the inhabitants of a small county on the western edge of the German Empire, loose subjects of distant emperors and bishops, and their identity grew out of something closer to home than imperial politics: a daily argument with water. Earlier Frisian settlers, Frankish landholders, and newcomers drawn by the promise of fresh fields all fed into the mix. By the late twelfth century, neighbors and chroniclers were calling them Hollanders, the people of the wooded land, holt-land, that lay just behind the dunes.

Homeland and Way of Life

Their country was made, not found. Wide peat bogs stretched inland from the coast, soaked and useless until people began cutting long parallel drainage ditches, lowering the water table and turning sour moss into pasture and grain field. The work was shared, and it never ended. Once drained, the peat shrank, the surface sank, and the sea pushed harder against the dikes. Villages sat on man-made mounds called terpen or behind low earthen walls, and a single bad storm tide could wipe out a parish overnight. Cattle did better than wheat on this ground, so dairying mattered early. Eels, herring, and river fish filled out the table. Floors and shoes were wooden, because stone was a luxury that had to arrive by boat.

Warfare, Power, and Limits

The counts of Holland, a junior branch of an older noble line, grew steadily more ambitious and fought a long, untidy series of wars with their neighbors: the bishops of Utrecht to the east, the Frisians to the north who refused to be ruled by anyone, and the counts of Flanders to the south. Set-piece battles on dry ground were rare. Most fighting moved along rivers and inlets, with shallow boats carrying men between fortified houses and small brick castles, since proper building stone barely existed in the delta. Knights existed but counted for less here than in France; the wet ground swallowed cavalry. Floris V, who ruled in the second half of the thirteenth century, pushed his county hard against both the Frisians and his own great nobles, and was murdered for it in 1296 by men who had sworn loyalty to him. The lesson was hard to miss: a count's authority was always on loan.

Beliefs, Customs, and Society

Christianity was old here by 1000, brought centuries earlier by Anglo-Saxon and Frankish missionaries, but it sat lightly on a population still close to its Frisian past. Parish churches multiplied through the eleventh and twelfth centuries, often founded by local lords who then collected the tithes that came with them. Monastic orders, especially the Cistercians and the Premonstratensians, became major landowners and, just as importantly, skilled hydraulic engineers. The same monks who sang the daily offices also organized the digging of drainage canals. Society was unusually flat for its time. Because new land had to be made by anyone willing to dig, and because the counts needed settlers badly enough to bargain, free peasant tenures were common and serfdom never sank deep roots. A man who reclaimed a strip of bog usually kept it. That memory of independence outlasted the medieval county itself.

Contacts, Conflicts, and Legacy

The Hollanders sat at a junction. River traffic from the German interior reached the sea through their territory; coastal shipping from England, Flanders, Norway, and the rising Hanseatic towns had to thread their inlets. Small ports such as Dordrecht and Haarlem, along with the young settlement around the dam on the Amstel, grew as places where cargoes were transferred from one kind of vessel to another, and as fishing harbors for the herring shoals that ran along the coast. Wool came in from England, cloth from Flanders, timber and grain from the Baltic, salt from the Bay of Biscay. By 1299, when the male line of the counts of Holland died out and the county passed to their relatives in Hainaut, the foundation of what later writers would call a seafaring country was already in place: drained land, free farmers, a habit of working together against the water, and a quiet certainty that the way out of the delta was by ship.