The Evolution of States

by J. M. Robertson

The case of Holland is one of those which at first sight seem to flout the sociological maxim that civilisations flourish in virtue partly of natural advantages and partly of psychological pressures. On the face of things, it would seem that the original negation of natural advantage could hardly be carried farther than here. A land pieced together out of drained marshes certainly tells more of man's effort than of Nature's bounty. Yet even here the process of natural law is perfectly sequent and intelligible.

One of the least-noted influences of the sea on civilisation is the economic basis it yields in the way of food-supply. Already in Cæsar's time the Batavians were partly fishermen; and it may be taken as certain that through all the troubled ages down to the period of industry and commerce it was the resource of fishing that mainly maintained and retained population in the sea-board swamps of the Low Countries. Here was a harvest that enemies could not destroy, that demanded no ploughing and sowing, and that could not well be reaped by the labour of slaves. When war and devastation could absolutely depopulate the cultivated land, forcing all men to flee from famine, the sea for ever yielded some return to him who could but get afloat with net or line; and he who could sail the sea had a double chance of life and freedom as against land enemies. Thus a sea marsh could be humanly advantaged as against a fruitful plain, and could be a surer dwelling-place. The tables were first effectually turned when the Norse pirates attacked from the sea—an irresistible inroad which seems to have driven the sea-board Frisians (as it did the coast inhabitants of France) in crowds into slavery for protection, thus laying a broad foundation of popular serfdom.[725] When, however, the Norse empire began to fail, the sea as a source of sustenance again counted for civilisation; and when to this natural basis of population and subsistence there was added the peculiar stimulus set up by a religious inculcation or encouragement of a fish diet, the fishing-grounds of the continent became relatively richer estates than mines and vineyards. Venice and Holland alike owed much to the superstition which made Christians akreophagous on Fridays and fast-days and all through the forty days of Lent. When the plan of salting herrings was hit upon,[726] all Christian Europe helped to make the fortunes of the fisheries.

Net-making may have led to weaving; in any case weaving is the first important industry developed in the Low Countries. It depended mainly on the wool of England; and on the basis of the ancient seafaring there thus arose a sea-going commerce.[727] Further, the position of Flanders,[728] as a trade-centre for northern and southern Europe, served to make it a market for all manner of produce; and round such a market population and manufactures grew together. It belonged to the conditions that, though the territory came under feudal rule like every other in the medieval military period, the cities were relatively energetic all along,[729] theirs being (after the Dark Ages, when the work was largely done by the Church) the task of maintaining the sea-dykes[730] and water-ways, and theirs the wealth on which alone the feudal over-lords could hope to flourish in an unfruitful land. The over-lords, on their part, saw the expediency of encouraging foreigners to settle and add to their taxable population,[731] thus establishing the tradition of political tolerance long before the Protestant period. Hence arose in the Netherlands, after the Renaissance, the phenomenon of a dense industrial population flourishing on a soil which finally could not be made to feed them,[732] and carrying on a vast shipping trade without owning a single good harbour and without possessing home-grown timber wherewith to build their ships, or home-products to freight them.[733]

One of the determinants of this growth on a partially democratic footing was clearly the primary and peculiar necessity for combination by the inhabitants to maintain the great sea-dykes, the canals, and the embankments of the low-lying river-lands in the interior.[734] It was a public bond in peace, over and above the normal tie of common enmities. The result was a development of civic life still more rapid and more marked in inland Flanders,[735] where the territorial feudal power was naturally greater than in the maritime Dutch provinces. Self-ruling cities, such as Ghent and Antwerp, at their meridian, were too powerful to be effectively menaced by their immediate feudal lords. But on the side of their relations with neighbouring cities or States they all exhibited the normal foible; and it was owing only to the murderous compulsion put upon them by Spain in the sixteenth century that any of the provinces of the Netherlands became a federal republic. For five centuries after Charlemagne, who subdued them to his system, the Low Countries had undergone the ordinary slow evolution from pure feudalism to the polity of municipalities. In the richer inland districts the feudal system, lay and clerical, was at its height, the baronial castles being "here more numerous than in any other part of Christendom";[736] and when the growing cities began to feel their power to buy charters, the feudal formula was unchallenged,[737] while the mass of the outside population were in the usual "Teutonic" state of partial or complete serfdom. It was only by burning their suburbs and taking to the walled fortress that the people of Utrecht escaped the yoke of the Norsemen.[738]

Mr. Torrens M'Cullagh is responsible for the statement that "it seems doubtful whether any portion of the inhabitants of Holland were ever in a state of actual servitude or bondage," and that the northern provinces were more generally free from slavery than the others (Industrial History of the Free Nations, 1846, ii, 39). Motley (Rise of the Dutch Republic, as cited, pp. 17, 18) pronounces, on the contrary, that "in the northern Netherlands the degraded condition of the mass continued longest," and that "the number of slaves throughout the Netherlands was very large; the number belonging to the bishopric of Utrecht enormous." This is substantially borne out by Grattan, Netherlands, pp. 18, 34; Blok, Geschiedenis van het Nederlandsche Volk, i, 159, 160, 305-11, Eng. tr. i, 203-8; Wauters, Les libertés communales, 1878, pp. 222-30. As is noted by Blok, the status of the peasantry fluctuated, the thirteenth century being one of partial retrogression. Cp. pp. 318, 319, as to the general depression of the peasant class. The great impulse to slavery, as above noted, seems to have been given by the Norse pirates in general and the later Norman invaders, who, under Godfrey, forced every "free" Frisian to wear a halter. The comparative protection accruing to slaves of the Church was embraced by multitudes. In the time of the Crusades, again, many serfs were sold or mortgaged to the Church by the nobles in order to obtain funds for their expedition.

The cities were thus the liberating and civilising forces;[739] and the application of townsmen's capital to the land was an early influence in improving rural conditions.[740] But there was no escape from the fatality of strife in the Teutonic any more than in the ancient Greek or in the contemporary Italian world. Flanders, having the large markets of France at hand, developed its clothmaking and other industries more rapidly than the Frisian districts, where weaving was probably earlier carried on;[741] and here serfdom disappeared comparatively early,[742] the nobility dwindling through their wars; but the new industrial strifes of classes, which grew up everywhere in the familiar fashion, naturally matured the sooner in the more advanced civilisation; and already at the beginning of the fourteenth century we find a resulting disintegration. The monopoly methods of the trade gilds drove much of the weaving industry into the villages; then the Franco-Flemish wars, wherein the townspeople, by expelling the French in despite of the nobility, greatly strengthened their position,[743] nevertheless tended, as did the subsequent civil wars, to drive trade into South Brabant.

In Flemish Ghent and Bruges the clashing interests of weavers and woollen-traders, complicated by the strife of the French (aristocratic) and anti-French (popular) factions, led to riots in which citizens and magistrates were killed (1301). At times these enmities reached the magnitude of civil war. At Ypres (1303) a combination of workmen demanded the suppression of rival industries in neighbouring villages, and in an ensuing riot the mayor and all the magistrates were slain; at Bruges (1302) a trade riot led to the loss of fifteen hundred lives.[744] When later the weaving trade had flourished in Brabant, the same fatality came about: plebeians rebelled against patrician magistrates—themselves traders or employers of labour—in the principal cities; and Brussels (1312) was for a time given up to pillage and massacre, put down only by the troops of the reigning duke. A great legislative effort was made in the "Laws of Cortenberg," framed by an assembly of nobles and city deputies, to regulate fiscal and industrial affairs in a stable fashion;[745] but after fifty years the trouble broke out afresh, and was ill-healed.[746] At length, in a riot in the rich city of Louvain (1379), sixteen of its patrician magistrates were slain, whereupon many took flight to England, but many more to Haarlem, Amsterdam, Leyden, and other Dutch cities.[747] Louvain never again recovered its trade and wealth;[748] and since the renewed Franco-Flemish wars of this period had nearly destroyed the commerce of Flanders,[749] there was a general gravitation of both merchandise and manufacture to Holland.[750] Thus arose Dutch manufactures in an organic connection with maritime commerce, the Dutch municipal organisation securing a balance of trade interests where that of the Flemish industrial cities had partially failed.

The commercial lead given by the Hanseatic League was followed in the Netherlands with a peculiar energy, and till the Spanish period the main part of Dutch maritime commerce was with northern Europe and the Hansa cities. So far as the language test goes, the original Hansards and the Dutch were of the same "Low Dutch" stock, which was also that of the Anglo-Saxons.[751] Thus there was seen the phenomenon of a vigorous maritime and commercial development among the continental branches of the race; while the English, having lost its early seafaring habits on its new settlement, lagged far behind in both developments. Kinship, of course, counted for nothing towards goodwill between the nations when it could not keep peace within or between the towns; and in the fifteenth century the Dutch cities are found at war with the Hansa, as they had been in the thirteenth with England, and were to be again. But the spirit of strife did its worst work at home. On the one hand, a physical schism had been set up in Friesland in the thirteenth century by the immense disaster of the inundation which enlarged the Zuyder Zee.[752] Of that tremendous catastrophe there are singularly few historic traces; but it had the effect of making two small countries where there had been one large one, what was left of West Friesland being absorbed in the specific province of Holland, while East Friesland, across the Zuyder Zee, remained a separate confederation of maritime districts.[753] To the south-west, again, the great Flemish cities were incurably jealous of each other's prosperity, as well as inwardly distracted by their class disputes; and within the cities of Holland, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, while intelligible lines of cleavage between trades or classes are hard to find, the factions of Hoek and Kabbeljauw, the "Hooks" and the "Codfish," appear to have carried on a chronic strife, as irrational as any to be noted in the cities of Italy. Thus in the north as in the south, among Teutons as among "Latins" and among ancient Greeks, the primary instincts of separation checked democratic growth and coalition; though after the period of local feudal sovereignties the powerful monarchic and feudal forces in the Netherlands withheld the cities from internecine wars.

The most sympathetic historians are forced from the first to note the stress of mutual jealousy among the cities and districts of the Netherlands. "The engrained habit of municipal isolation," says one, "was the cause why the general liberties of the Netherlands were imperilled, why the larger part of the country was ultimately ruined, and why the war of independence was conducted with so much risk and difficulty, even in the face of the most serious perils" (Thorold Rogers, Holland, p. 26. Cp. pp. 35, 43; Motley, pp. 29, 30, 43; Grattan, pp. 39, 50, 51). Van Kampen avows (Geschichte der Niederlande, i, 131) that throughout the Middle Ages Friesland was unprogressive owing to constant feuds. Even as late as 1670 Leyden refused to let the Harle Maer be drained, because it would advantage other cities; and Amsterdam in turn opposed the reopening of the old Rhine channel because it would make Leyden maritime (Temple, Observations, i, 130, ch. iii).

As regards the early factions of the "Hooks" and the "Codfish" in the Dutch towns, the historic obscurity is so great that historians are found ascribing the names in contrary ways. Grattan (p. 49) represents the Hooks as the town party, and the Codfish as the party of the nobles; Motley (p. 21) reverses the explanation, noting, however, that there was no consistent cleavage of class or of principle (cp. M'Cullagh, pp. 99, 100). This account is supported by Van Kampen, i, 170, 171. The fullest survey of the Hook and Cod feud is given by Wenzelburger, Geschichte der Niederlande, i, 210-42. As to feuds of other parties in some of the cities see Van Kampen, i, 172. They included, for example, a class feud between the rich Vetkooper (fat-dealers) and the poor Schieringer (eel-fishers). See Davies, i, 180.