IN GENERAL TEXT BOOKS, Early-medieval Frisia is presented as a rich, long stretched out but in itself coherent, region along the North Sea coast boasting much trading activity. Its landscape between Bruges and Bremen is thought to have been highly maritime, with many local trade settlements having access to the sea. In this paper, we venture to question both its coherency and its maritime character for the period AD 650–850 by adopting a spatial approach. This approach is threefold. First we reconstruct Frisia in the geographical sense. We describe the main types of landscape and define the boundaries of the districts or pagi that together constituted Frisia. Against this background, we then take a look at the supposed trade settlements, to discover that outside the well-known emporia in border positions along major rivers and coasts, no such ever existed. Up to the tenth century, trade transactions that fed the day-to-day economy apparently did not need permanent separate trade centres. This absence of a real hierarchy of settlements strongly suggests that Frisia in its early days was a rural society building its welfare on agricultural production. Our third objective is to get some grip on the political coherency of the Frisian lands and their population groups in the seventh and early eighth century. We do so by focusing on the conditions for the development of large landownership, which are found to have been more favourable in the sandy coastal area of the later Holland than in the clay or terpen districts east of the Vlie. This then gives at the end room to develop a few thoughts on the possible West Frisian or ‘Holland’ power base of the heathen Frisian king Radbod (Redbad) and his predecessor, Aldgisl.

Introduction

Early-medieval Frisia and the phenomenon of Early-medieval Frisian trade are often mentioned in the same breath. What they have to do with each other, however, is not easy to determine and it is therefore no wonder that this relationship has been under discussion for a long time. In research on Anglo-Saxon England, the literature shows that it is not problematic to speak of visiting traders. For the Frisian regions this seems somewhat more difficult, precisely because the trade is known as ‘Frisian’.