XII
Friesland and Its Capital
Leeuwarden is the most important town in Friesland; therefore its capital. Also it is the only place in the province that is really worth a protracted visit. On the way from Stavoren you may wander up the coast a short distance to Hindeloopen, once famed for its highly decorated furniture and the many-colored costumes of its natives; you may stop off at Sneek and see its stadthuis and its waterpoort, better examples of which you will have already seen in North Holland; you may journey over to the coast town of Harlingen—a much less interesting fishing port than Volendam—breaking the trip at Franeker to see the wonderfully ingenious astronomical model of the workings of the solar system which took one of the more inventive citizens of the place, Eise Eisenga by name, seven years to construct; but all of these especial features, and more, can be seen and studied in Leeuwarden.
When you enter the interior of Friesland you will be penetrating one of the three or four provinces of Holland that are not overrun with tourists. Even in its capital an American is more or less of a curiosity and he may expect to be stared at until the people stumble over each other, almost, in their well-meaning efforts to divine his nationality; but he may console himself in the thought that they will be just as curious, if not as humorous, to him as he is to them.
Before the time of the terrific geographical convulsion responsible for the formation of the Zuyder Zee, there had been but one Friesland, stretching over much of the entire territory later known as that of the Dutch Republic, including Holland. Its inhabitants, the Frisians, were renowned throughout Europe for their physical prowess. Imbued with an unquenchable love for political independence, they had shaken off the yokes of the imperial counts and had formed the league of the seven “Sea Lands” in the eleventh century. After being subjugated for a time by Charlemagne, they suddenly rebelled, and in 1256 defeated and put to death the German king, William II of Holland. When the German ocean rolled in over the land, engulfing considerably more than a thousand Frisian villages, it separated kindred peoples, creating not only a geographical but a political chasm between them. West Friesland became absorbed in Holland, but East Friesland continued its career as a confederation of independently governed maritime provinces, until Saxony, hard pressed for funds, sold its sovereignty to the house of Austria for a paltry 350,000 crowns.
Then Charles V, Count of Holland, Emperor of Germany, King of Jerusalem, Sicily, and Spain, Duke of Milan, dominator of much in Asia and Africa and “autocrat of half the world,” established his predatorial authority, and “this little country, whose statutes proclaimed her to be ‘free as the wind as long as it blew,’ whose institutions Charlemagne had honored and left unmolested, who had freed herself with ready poniard from Norman tyranny, who had never bowed her neck to feudal chieftain, nor to the papal yoke,” finally forfeited her independent existence. Her peoples are the only Germanic tribe that have preserved an unaltered nomenclature since the time of the Romans; they will be Frisians to-morrow, as they were the day before yesterday.
The most prominent and characteristic feature of the Frisian costume is the headdress of its women—in fact, it is the only one extant worthy of any notice whatever, for the remainder of the make-up, not only of the men but of the women also, is commonplace and unattractive. This headdress consists of a kind of metal skullcap, as often made of gold as of silver, fitting closely at the temples and embellished at these points with a pair of spiral ornaments. Over this is worn a cap of white or light blue lace, having a so-called “tail piece” dangling down the back of the neck like the scoop of a fireman’s helmet. On top of all this, many of the women—as if their violent efforts to adapt the modern were wrestling with a series of sturdy determinations to retain the antique—will crown the sublime with the ridiculous by wearing an old-fashioned black “poke bonnet,” with the strings tied in a bow under the chin. These gold and silver head-pieces are handed down from one generation to another, and the gold ones, especially, are expensive; but that item does not curb the desire and ambition of every mother’s daughter in Friesland to own one, where the usual heirloom has not been forthcoming.
An admirable collection showing the evolution of the Frisian metal skull plate is on view in the Frisian Museum in Leeuwarden. Adapted first as a kind of hair ornament of two coin-sized flat pieces connected simply by a thin wire, its size developed gradually until the two small termini became consolidated into a single large one that covered the entire head of the wearer. The latest specimen in the Museum is decorated in front with a diamond-studded brooch, the whole costing in the neighborhood of $1,200.