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7666 results in Regional history before 1500

Page 44 of 384

  • 6 - How ‘English’ is the Early Frisian Runic Corpus? The evidence of sounds and forms

  • Edited by John Hines, Nelleke IJssennagger
  • Book:
    Frisians and their North Sea Neighbours
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    25 August 2018
    Print publication:
    30 September 2017, pp 93-124

  • Summary

    In my habilitation thesis (Waxenberger 2010) I considered, amongst other things, the earliest runic inscriptions in England, from the period c. ad 400–650. By comparing them to the later inscriptions I found that the English runic corpus can be divided into two sub-corpora: a small Pre-Old English (Pre-OE) corpus (Fig. 6.1) and a larger Old English (OE) one (Fig. 6.2).

    At the inception of runic writing in England, the Pre-OE inscriptions were written in the pre-fuþorc, which was based closely on the original Common Germanic (CGmc) fuþark (= ‘older fuþark’) of 24 characters with some enlargement and modifications (which are discussed in the course of this paper) during the period c. ad 400–610/650; that is, down to the time of the Caistor-by-Norwich brooch (c. ad 610–50). This inscription is of the utmost importance because it shows the new runes with their new phonemic sound-values for the first time. I regard the period of c. ad 610/650 as the beginning of Old English because all the relevant sound-changes were completed by then (Waxenberger, forthcoming, ch. 3). It is crucial to note that the Pre-OE inscriptions reflect early sound-changes that had otherwise only been reconstructed on linguistic principles in handbooks that did not take runic inscriptions into account.

    Since the academic discussion on the question of whether or not there was ever an ‘Anglo-Frisian unity’ has been rekindled (see Nielsen 1994 for an overview), it seemed methodologically justified to build on the findings for the Pre-OE corpus and see to what extent the Frisian corpus shows congruence with it. Therefore I use the soundchanges of Pre-OE as a framework and examine how the Frisian runes and the soundvalues they represent fit into that frame. I also look at some of the rune-forms in order to shed more light on the characteristics of the Frisian corpus. It is stressed that this is work in progress. The difficulties of such an undertaking need to be made clear from the outset.

    The periodization of Old Frisian compared to Old English

    Compared to other Germanic languages such as English and German, the attestation of a historical stage of Frisian is relatively late.

  • 1 - Palaeogeography and People: Historical Frisians in an archaeological light

  • Edited by John Hines, Nelleke IJssennagger
  • Book:
    Frisians and their North Sea Neighbours
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    25 August 2018
    Print publication:
    30 September 2017, pp 5-24

  • Summary

    The story of Frisia and the Frisians is one of a changing landscape, people, identity and name, as well as one of constant connections across the North Sea. For an understanding of the pre- and proto-historical Frisians and their archaeological traces, we first consider the changing landscape that they inhabited. We then look into the historical and archaeological sources that can tell us something about them, before turning to their connections across the North Sea.

    The Frisian landscape and its use

    In the course of recent millennia, the geomorphology of the Netherlands has seen major changes. An insight into the contemporary landscapes is indispensable to understanding the physical environment of the peoples who at different times considered themselves to be Frisians, or were so labelled by others, and what opportunities it offered. This was understood as early as the 16th century, when maps were drawn showing the Low Countries as they were believed to have been in the Roman Period. In recent decades an important research tradition has arisen in the Netherlands of compiling palaeogeographical maps, representing past landscapes on the basis of all available geological, paedological, archaeological and historical evidence. Such maps by definition are continually ‘work in progress’. Every new excavation revealing archaeological or geological evidence, as well as detailed studies of archaeological or historical data, prompts adjustments to them. But, broadly speaking, the current maps are well substantiated (Vos 2015).

    Geographically, the coastal zone of historical Frisia in the Netherlands can be divided into two different parts: the Holland coast in the west, and the northern Netherlands (see also Dijsktra and de Koning, this vol.). In the west, the interior is protected by a sturdy belt of sand dunes. However, in the northern part of the west, most of the dune belt has been eroded away by the sea (Woltering et al. 1999; Dijkstra 2011). Initially, the mouth of the Rhine cut through the dunes at Katwijk, and further north a breach appeared at the Marsdiep, possibly in the 10th century ad. Although the Rhine mouth offered opportunities for controlling waterborne traffic, the great emporium of Dorestad evolved a considerable distance upstream (van Es 1990; van Es and Verwers 1980; 2009; 2015). The cores of what later became the islands of Texel and Wieringen consisted of Pleistocene boulder-clay outcrops.

  • 5 - Power and Identity in the Southern North Sea Area: The Migration and Merovingian Periods

  • Edited by John Hines, Nelleke IJssennagger
  • Book:
    Frisians and their North Sea Neighbours
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    25 August 2018
    Print publication:
    30 September 2017, pp 75-92

  • Summary

    The southern North Sea area of the 5th to 7th centuries ad can be seen as an important ‘cultural bridge’ linking two power blocks: the late Roman Empire and its Frankish successor kingdom to the south, and the Scandinavian kingdoms to the north. This paper discusses how such a bridge function is reflected in the material culture found along the southern North Sea coasts of the Netherlands, Germany and south-eastern England, and how this material culture relates to the rise of kingdoms and the expression of group identities. The discussion will focus on jewellery and other ornaments of gold and silver, which can be assigned to five ‘cultural phases’ (Nicolay 2014, 234–63). First, the cultural relations with surrounding areas, as reflected in the ornaments’ shape and decoration, will be examined for each phase. Second, an attempt will be made to link the geographical distribution of ornaments that were executed in a specific style to the expression of group identity at a regional or supra-regional level – as a reflection of the extent of specific elite networks, which are assumed to represent the territories of early-medieval kingdoms.

    The premise for this analysis is the assumption that access to gold and silver in earlymedieval Europe was limited to a small group of people. It was regional or supra-regional kings who controlled the importation of these precious metals, which probably reached the North Sea world both as political gifts and through a more commercial form of longdistance exchange (for the latter, see Näsman 1991). Besides these ‘horizontal’ relations among leaders, networks of ‘vertical’ relations were established and consolidated by the distribution of valuable items as gifts between leaders (the patrons) and their followers (the clients) (Bazelmans 1999). As members of the royal and lower retinues would have their own groups of followers, this resulted in the well-known pyramidal structure of patron–client relations, in which a person's status was directly related to his or her ‘distance from the king’.

    Gold and silver were exchanged not only as gifts, but probably also as a form of currency between members of the elite and their followers – as indicated by the frequent occurrence of gold coins not transformed into jewellery.

  • Preface

  • Edited by John Hines, Nelleke IJssennagger
  • Book:
    Frisians and their North Sea Neighbours
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    25 August 2018
    Print publication:
    30 September 2017, pp xiii-xiii

  • Summary

    To celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the First International Symposium on Frisian Runes and Neighbouring Traditions, which met in January 1994 at the Fries Museum (Museum of Friesland) in Leeuwarden (The Netherlands), a second international conference devoted to the early-medieval Frisians and their neighbours was organized with a wider remit: to combine and integrate discussions of archaeology, history, historical linguistics, legal history and palaeogeography, as well as runology. The conference Across the North Sea: North Sea Connections from ad 400 into the Viking Age was held in the new premises of the Fries Museum in Leeuwarden from 5 to 8 June 2014.

    Over the course of the twenty years from 1994 to 2014 many new insights had been gained that merited discussion in an international and multidisciplinary context, with a new generation of scholars able to contribute substantially. Although again held at the Fries Museum, the conference took place in the entirely new museum building that had been opened in the heart of Leeuwarden, the capital of Friesland, a province of the modern Netherlands, in 2013.

    Both the new museum and this early major conference provided the opportunity to take stock of the status quo in research concerning the enigmatic Frisians, and related peoples and areas, in various disciplines. It also provided an opportunity for the collective exploration of possibilities, problems, lacunas and pressing issues for future scholarship, with the express purpose of stimulating and launching a new and effective round of research into Early Medieval Frisia. The multidisciplinary, international character and diachronic scope of the conference sought to promote a fully cross-disciplinary approach to enable understanding of the field to break free of over-specialized and constrained perspectives.

    This publication is just part of the harvest of this event, and is intended to advance the appreciation of the long-distance and maritime contacts that were fundamental to the flourishing of the Frisian identity and culture throughout this period. By publishing a selection of papers that reflect the topics and current developments in them in English, making some discussions and data available to an international readership for the first time, we aim to stimulate the international study of the topics.

  • 11 - A Comparison of the Injury Tariffs in the Early Kentish and the Frisian Law Codes

  • Edited by John Hines, Nelleke IJssennagger
  • Book:
    Frisians and their North Sea Neighbours
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    25 August 2018
    Print publication:
    30 September 2017, pp 223-242

  • Summary

    This paper aims to compare the injury tariff found in the Law of King Æthelberht of Kent (the Kentish Law or Ab) dated c. ad 600 with the injury tariffs in the Frisian legal tradition. This tradition comprises both the injury tariffs in the Lex Frisionum, written mainly in Latin towards the end of the 8th century, and the tariffs written down in Old Frisian law manuscripts dating from the 13th to 15th centuries. Close cultural and linguistic connections have been observed between Anglo-Saxon England and Frisia. Furthermore, a sometimes exclusive relation between Kent and Frisia has been suggested. In this paper I scrutinize these connections with regard to injury tariffs. In addition, I look into the status of research and where the possibilities for future research lie. It will become clear that trying to find exclusive Anglo-Frisian parallels or even reconstruct an Anglo- Frisian proto-tariff is useful but also tantalizing: the goal seems within our reach but we never quite get there.

    Honour and revenge

    Injury tariffs are texts in which various types of possible injuries and harms that can be inflicted on a person are listed, accompanied by an amount of money which was due to the victim. Their nature and origins are discussed in more detail in the following section. Before discussing them, and why the Kentish and Frisian traditions deserve to be compared, however, the rationale behind injury tariffs needs to be addressed. Essentially, the goal of these texts was to make it possible to buy off revenge. They are a product of the institution of blood money (wergild: ‘man price’ in Germanic), allowing a killer to pay a certain amount in goods (money, valuables, land, cattle, houses) to the next of kin of the victim of a homicide. Paying blood money can obviate a blood feud in which many lives would be lost and which could disrupt a society for years (Netterström and Poulsen eds 2007). Combined with ritual acts and taking a certain amount of time (Miller 2006, 108), sometimes even as much as a year, the institution of wergild effectively makes it possible to restore peace between two families. Blood money is in use by various cultures all over the globe.

  • Introduction: Frisians – Who, When, Where, Why?

  • Edited by John Hines, Nelleke IJssennagger
  • Book:
    Frisians and their North Sea Neighbours
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    25 August 2018
    Print publication:
    30 September 2017, pp 1-4

  • Summary

    Wherever and whenever present-day scholars attempt to analyse and discuss a named ‘people’ of the Early Middle Ages such as our ‘Frisians’, they are dealing at one and the same time with a phenomenon that was thoroughly real and of great significance in its own time and yet also one that is intrinsically slippery and deceptive, if not downright illusory, in key respects. It has now long been the familiar and conventional understanding of the peoples of that period – often referred to as nationes in contemporary Latin sources, and nowadays frequently as ‘ethnic groups’, in connection with a phenomenon of ‘ethnogenesis’ – that they are constructions, formations which were dynamically adapted to needs and opportunities provided by changing circumstances, while what these groups certainly were not is substantially solid and fixed entities that lived purely organically and reproduced themselves naturally, generation succeeding to generation. Indeed, a recent study implies that a necessarily endless process of identity-formation is a feature of history and archaeology we can handle with more confidence than we ever should think in terms of the presence and functioning of completed ethnic identities (Pohl 2013).

    Of a significance equal to the questions listed in the title above for the definition of the focus of the present volume, therefore, has to be the historical context in which the attempt is made to present and examine ‘the Frisians’, and their neighbours. The principal chronological range is a period of four to five centuries, from the beginning of the 5th century ad into the 9th: a long period, falling between the end of the maintenance of effective Roman imperial rule in western Europe and the impact of the Scandinavian Viking expansion and incursions that began at the end of the 8th century. Of course, evidence from both before and after that period sheds light upon aspects of it, and is included here too where appropriate. The 5th century was, however, indisputably at the heart of a convulsion in Europe, marked primarily by the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West. The consequences of that fall were massive, both socially and economically. Across western Europe, the Roman structures of government were replaced by ‘barbarian’ kingships – mostly Germanic in terms of language, albeit several had Turkic elements too.

  • 7 - The Geography and Dialects of Old Saxon: River-basin communication networks and the distributional patterns of North Sea Germanic features in Old Saxon

  • Edited by John Hines, Nelleke IJssennagger
  • Book:
    Frisians and their North Sea Neighbours
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    25 August 2018
    Print publication:
    30 September 2017, pp 125-148

  • Summary

    North-West and North Sea Germanic: fluid perceptions

    The Germanic languages witnessed a rapid series of changes between the 4th century and the 7th: from the fairly homogeneous North-West Germanic ‘Gallehus’ idiom of the 4th century, the language split into a number of dialects, which had developed fairly well recognizable linguistic identities by the time of their first attestations, dated approximately to the late 7th century (Nielsen 2000, 288–93). An important focal point of linguistic innovations (phonological and morphological) lies in the region around the North Sea, and their spread affected the adjacent dialects of Old English, Old Frisian and, to some extent, Old Saxon, which are, therefore, commonly referred to as the North Sea Germanic languages. In particular, the similarities between Old English and Old Frisian are so striking that they led earlier researchers to assume a common Anglo- Frisian unity on the Continent, which later, after the migration of the Angles and some of the Saxons to Britain, split into two languages (e.g. Siebs 1889). The perception of the affinity between North Sea Germanic languages changed entirely with Kuhn's (1955) ground-breaking paper, in which a new grouping of Germanic dialects was postulated and the concept of North-West Germanic linguistic unity – lasting approximately until the Migration Period – was introduced. A few years later, in line with Kuhn's hypothesis, DeCamp (1958) revised the understanding of the emergence of Old English dialects, showing that the bulk of the dialectal variants in Old English post-date the colonization of Britain and therefore do not reflect earlier continental dialect or tribal configurations (see also Nielsen 1998). Consequently, the new interpretation of the mutual relations between these dialects evolved into the modern perception of North Sea Germanic as a group of language varieties, participating to a lesser or greater extent in a series of linguistic innovations that have their geographical origin in the North Sea area (cf. Stiles 1995). These innovations can be dated to the period during and after the migration of the Germanic tribes to Britain. The familiar division into English, Frisian and Saxon is the result of a gradual geographical reorganization of linguistic features, which led to the enhancement of linguistic boundaries and eventually to the emergence of distinct linguistic identities (Århammar 1990; Versloot 2014a).

  • 3 - Frisian between the Roman and the Early Medieval Periods: Language contact, Celts and Romans

  • Edited by John Hines, Nelleke IJssennagger
  • Book:
    Frisians and their North Sea Neighbours
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    25 August 2018
    Print publication:
    30 September 2017, pp 43-52

  • Summary

    Language and history

    Languages expand and contract over time and space. For obvious reasons, this phenomenon attracts linguists, who study language change and its mechanisms. What is less familiar is that this study, apart from its contribution to purely linguistic matters, can yield information which is relevant to historians and archaeologists. This article deals with one type of information: demographic history. More specifically, this contribution centres around the fact that languages spread in two ways:

  • 1. As a result of the propagation of the genes of their speakers – that is, by the multiplication of children speaking the language of their parents and migrating into a new area. If in a previously inhabited area a language primarily spreads in this way, speakers of that language join and often replace speakers of a previously existing language. The result is demographic discontinuity. An example is the expansion of European languages, particularly English, in North America at the expense of Native American languages.

  • 2. As a result of the acculturation of people who previously spoke another language. In this case, it may require only a small number of speakers migrating into a new area in order for the natives to adopt that language and, ultimately, often to abandon their native language. The result of this type of language expansion is demographic continuity. An example is the expansion of French in modern-day Brittany at the expense of Breton.

    • Normally, the expansion of a language is a blend of both mechanisms, one outweighing the other as a matter of degree. In the case of the expansion of European languages at the expense of Native American languages, demographic replacement strongly outweighed acculturation (cf. Padel 2007, 228–9). In the case of French and Breton, the situation is the reverse (cf. Ternes 2011, 436–9).

    The expansion of Latin in the Western Roman Empire is a well-known example of a language that spread primarily as a result of acculturation, although it should be added that it went hand in hand with a minor expansion of people from central Italy. In this particular case, Latin was so successful that it replaced almost all other native languages on Western Roman territory.

Frisians and their North Sea Neighbours
  • From the Fifth Century to the Viking Age
  • Edited by John Hines, Nelleke IJssennagger
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    25 August 2018
    Print publication:
    30 September 2017
  • From as early as the first century AD, learned Romans knew of more than one group of people living in north-western Europe beyond their Empire's Gallic provinces whose names contained the element that gives us modern "Frisian". These were apparently Celtic-speaking peoples, but that population was probably completely replaced in the course of the convulsions that Europe underwent during the fourth and fifth centuries. While the importance of linguistically Germanic Frisians as neighbours of the Anglo-Saxons, Franks, Saxons and Danes in the centuries immediately following the fall of the Roman Empire in the West is widely recognized, these folk themselves remain enigmatic, the details of their culture and organization unfamiliar to many. The Frisian population and their lands, including all the coastal communities of the North sea region and their connections with the Baltic shores, form the focal point of this volume, though viewed often through comparison with, or even through the eyes of, their neighbours. The essays present the most up-to-date discoveries, research and interpretation, combining and integrating linguistic, textual and archaeological evidence; they follow the story of the various Frisians through from the Roman Period to the next great period of disruption and change introduced by the Viking Scandinavians.John Hines is Professor of Archaeology at Cardiff University; Nelleke IJssennagger is Curator of Archaeological and Medieval Collections at the Fries Museum (the Frisian Museum).Contributors: Elzbieta Adamczyk, Iris Aufderhaar, Pieterjan Deckers, Menno Dijkstra, John Hines, Nelleke Ijssennagger, Hauke Jöns, Egge Knol, Jan de Koning, Johan Nicolay, Han Nijdam, Tim Pestell, Peter Schrijver, Arjen Versloot, Gaby Waxenberger, Christiane Zimmermann.

  • 12 - Cultural Contacts between the Western Baltic, the North Sea Region and Scandinavia: Attributing runic finds to runic traditions and corpora of the Early Viking Age

  • Edited by John Hines, Nelleke IJssennagger
  • Book:
    Frisians and their North Sea Neighbours
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    25 August 2018
    Print publication:
    30 September 2017, pp 243-272

  • Summary

    On the basis of the artefactual finds and structures, and based on contemporary or later written sources, early trading centres are generally conceived of as meeting places and melting pots of people from different cultures. A highly vivid sketch of the multicultural network of communication formed by the trading centres of a ‘Northern Arc’ ranging from the North Sea region to the eastern end of the Baltic and into Russia is drawn by Stéphane Lebecq (2007). In his overview, he touches on the exchange of goods from the 7th century through to the 9th, the different forms of economic enterprises in that period, and the impact of Viking expansionism. The jigsaw pieces of his panoramic picture are taken from chronicles, the historical accounts of Ohthere's and Wulfstan's voyages, and from archaeological excavations at the most prominent of these trading centres, including Dorestad, Hamwic, Ribe, Hedeby and Birka.

    Interestingly, though, while drawing this picture, he never asks about the actual form of communication between the merchants and manufacturers coming from many different regions all over north-western Europe. This omission may be explained by the fact that, in most cases, neither the written sources which are drawn on to shed light on the political and religious history of these places nor the archaeological finds and structures provide any evidence of the languages and dialects spoken by the people living on these sites. The historical sources confine themselves to the most basic external information: thus Rimbert, describing the trading centre at Hedeby in his Vita Anskarii (ch. 24), only mentions ‘the great variety of people from all over the world’. Adam of Bremen offers more detail in his description of Birka (Gesta Hammaburgensis Ecclesiae Pontificum, I.60). He explicitly mentions Danes, Northmen, Slavs and people from Samland (on the Baltic coast). Helmold of Bosau names not only Slavs as inhabitants of the Baltic trading centre of Jumne/Jomsburg but also a ‘mixed population of Greeks and barbarians’, together with – as he calls them – ‘Saxons’ (Chronica Slavorum, II.22).

    These selective references show that the historical sources usually only give names of groups, tribes or peoples, or even stereotypical group-labels, such as ‘barbarians’ as opposed to Greeks.

  • 8 - Between Sievern and Gudendorf: Enclosed sites in the north-western Elbe–Weser triangle and their significance in respect of society, communication and migration during the Roman Iron Age and Migration Period

  • Edited by John Hines, Nelleke IJssennagger
  • Book:
    Frisians and their North Sea Neighbours
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    25 August 2018
    Print publication:
    30 September 2017, pp 149-172

  • Summary

    Even today, the waterways of the seas and rivers provide important signposts to the infrastructure of world-wide trade, transport and communication. Likewise in the 1st millennium ad, the maritime routes along the coasts, together with the rivers and streams and the almost undefined land routes (Bischop 2000, 27) that marked the landscapes of northern Europe through bogs and wet valley bottoms provided the practical foundations for regional and trans-regional communication and the transportation of goods (Jöns 2009, 390–1; Nørgaard Jørgensen 2003, 195; for an overview, Siegmüller 2011; Siegmüller and Jöns 2012, 575–6; 2011, 98). Together with the land routes and the inland waters that connected these to areas lying further inland, they formed a regular network of communication routes (Ellmers 2005, 74–5; 1999, 597; Jöns 2009, 389).

    Archaeologically, the importance of the waterways in goods exchange can be demonstrated through the distribution of foreign goods (cf. Brather 1996, 46). For the first half of the 1st millennium ad this can be seen particularly through objects of provincial Roman origin in the areas located north of the limes (e.g. Eggers 1951; Lund Hansen 1987; Erdrich 2001; 2002). The mapping of these objects reveals the greatest concentrations in the vicinity of major watercourses and by the coasts (most recently Siegmüller and Jöns 2011, 98; Jöns 2009, 389–91).

    Research into the archaeologically tangible basic structure of regional and transregional communication, which has been pursued particularly vigorously around the Baltic area during the past twenty years, has been able to show that, during the whole of the 1st millennium, control of the land routes and waterways can be seen to have had great social significance. In this light, attention has been paid in many places to the establishment of landing places (Ulriksen 1998; 2004), trans-shipment sites and beach markets (Thomsen et al. 1993), which served as portals between long-distance and internal transport. The significance of the communication and transport routes and of control of these links can also be recognized in the relatively frequently discovered construction of ramparts, canals, sea-barriers and blockades in rivers and lakes in southern Scandinavia (see Nørgaard Jørgensen 2001; 2003).

  • 2 - The Anglo-Frisian Question

  • Edited by John Hines, Nelleke IJssennagger
  • Book:
    Frisians and their North Sea Neighbours
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    25 August 2018
    Print publication:
    30 September 2017, pp 25-42

  • Summary

    A major issue in mid-19th-century European politics was the ‘Schleswig-Holstein question’, of which the later British Prime Minister and former Foreign Secretary Lord Palmerston is famously alleged to have said:

    Only three people were completely acquainted with the truth: the Prince Consort, who is dead; a German professor, who is in a lunatic asylum; and I, who have forgotten all about it.

    The disputed matters in fact involved the succession to the dukedoms of Schleswig and Holstein, and the conflicting interests of the Danish crown and Prussian/German nationalists. The anecdote of Palmerston's quip is, alas, probably apocryphal: it emerged in the earlier twentieth century, when, not least in the shadow of the Great War, it was intellectually fashionable to caricature the Victorian statesman as a laconic patrician (Grant Robertson 1918, 156; Strachey 1921, 308; cf. Lorne 1892, 210 and 221–2). The Anglo-Frisian question may not be as arcane as the Schleswig-Holstein question, nor as amenable to exploitation for either political or satirical ambitions of this scale. Nonetheless the analogy is more than merely playful, in that clarifying what exactly the problem is, is indeed the key issue.

    Of course, there cannot be just one question, or one answer. On the contrary, even the most superficial idea of what might be meant by the Anglo-Frisian question is likely to involve recognition of the fact that close similarities between England and Frisia, two areas only around a hundred sea-miles apart across the North Sea, exist in quite diverse features of the populations and their cultures: their language; aspects of their material culture; their early laws; and more. An initial proposal for how to formulate the question could therefore be whether there is any deeper explanation for these similarities other than proximity. Is there, very simply, anything special in the relationship, either in terms of its origins or in terms of its role? After all, both England and Frisia have long been equally close neighbours to the French people and state, and to the Francophone Continent, yet with clear contrasts in most of the cultural characteristics which can be claimed to show some degree of ‘Anglo-Frisian’ relationship.

  • 4 - ‘All quiet on the Western Front?’ The Western Netherlands and the ‘North Sea Culture’ in the Migration Period

  • Edited by John Hines, Nelleke IJssennagger
  • Book:
    Frisians and their North Sea Neighbours
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    25 August 2018
    Print publication:
    30 September 2017, pp 53-74

  • Summary

    For a long time, the only claim the western Netherlands had to participation in the 5th-century adventus Saxonum was based upon a handful of Anglo-Saxon pots in three cemeteries in the Rhine estuary. Recent research, however, dates these pots to the 6th century, thus beyond the initial period of migrations from Old Saxony (Niedersachsen) to Britain. Together with other differences in material culture, this clearly reveals a contrast to developments in the terpen area of Friesland and Groningen. The internal partition in the Lex Frisionum into three parts also points to regional differences (see further Knol and IJssenagger, and Nijdam, this vol.). Even within the region of West Frisia, the modern provinces of North and South Holland, regular archaeological distinctions can be found. Bazelmans (2009, 332–3) has already pointed to the fragmented ethnicity the different coastal regions must have had, following the crisis in habitation they all went through between the late 3rd and early 6th century ad.

    At the same time there were some shared characteristics in the Frisian coastal region, such as brooches of the Domburg Type (Deckers, this vol.). How does this all add up to a coherent picture of the habitation history of the Dutch west coast in the Migration Period? In this paper a general outline is presented of the recent research of both authors as part of the former ‘Frisia Project’, taking an interdisciplinary approach (Dijkstra and van der Velde 2011; Dijkstra 2011; de Koning 2003; 2012).

    An introductory warning about geographical terminology is required, however. In German studies present-day Friesland is called ‘West Frisia’, to distinguish it from the German East and North Frisia (e.g. Bos 2001, 490 and map 1). This is confusing, because in the Early Middle Ages the littoral of the western Netherlands was known as Frisia as well, and its inhabitants as Fresiones or Fresiones occidentales (West Frisians). The name Holland did not come into regular use until c. 1100, reserving the name West-Friesland for the northernmost part of Holland until the present day (Blok 1969). Consequently we prefer to refer to modern Friesland as Middle Frisia (Fig. 4.1).

Page 44 of 384