weddings, and funerals, to the length of time a woman had been married, and if she was a mother, etc., etc., in endless and minute array. The town women have already discarded their costume, but it is still universally worn in the country round about. The ancient industries of Hindeloopen—alas! very degenerate nowadays—included a spécialité in furniture. It was of carved wood painted, and many specimens in Dutch and foreign collections still exist. Havard says of it:
“Its general forms have a very decided Oriental cast. Its decorations of carved and gilded palms and love-knots, relieved by the strangest paintings it is possible to imagine, have no equal except in Persian art. As a rule, the colors are loud and gaudy—red or pink, green or blue—but, strange to say, the whole appears harmonious. It is peculiar and striking but not disagreeable to the eye. Most of the single pieces of furniture, such as tables and stands, and sledges are ornamented with red and blue palms, around which are interlaced numbers of Cupids of dark rose-color, the whole on a red ground. Sometimes these constantly-recurring Cupids (always in dark rose-color) are placed among a bed of blue flowers against a background of red, lightened here and there by white dots and touches of gold. But this medley of discordant colors produces a harmonious and dazzling effect, which I can only liken to the cashmeres of India. This same style of ornamentation is adopted in private houses, though the colors are somewhat modified. Red yields to dark blue, and flowers, love-knots, and palms are toned down into soft blue, green, and white, on a background of the finest[197] shade of indigo. The effect thus produced is very curious. I cannot say it is fine or pleasant, but it is not disagreeable to the eye, and certainly possesses the advantage of not being vulgar or common.”
Stavoren, the former capital of Friesland, is one of the towns
whose traditional annals, like those of Medemblik, reach back into unhistorical times, and whose founder, Friso, a supposed contemporary and ally of Alexander the Great, built here a temple to Jupiter, and adorned his town with walls, palaces, and theatres. The fifth century of our era is its real earliest date, and then it was only what the first settlement of a barbaric clan always is—half-camp, half-village—but it had gained a footing which it never abandoned since. As the centuries passed, we find this town, at the mouth of the Flevum, “the capital and royal residence of Friesland,” and with a “considerable commercial and industrial reputation. Treaties of alliance and trade were entered into with the Romans, Danes, Germans, and Franks, who came to Stavoren to barter their goods.… The Flevum was easy to navigate, thus rendering the port convenient for commerce; able to hold a large fleet whose intrepid sailors explored distances in the North inaccessible to the vessels belonging to other nations. At this epoch the Zuyder-Zee was not in existence, and one could walk on dry land from Stavoren to Medemblik.… A palace was built at Stavoren (by Richard I.) which later on became the sumptuous residence of the kings, his successors,” and Charles, Duke of Brabant, journeyed to Stavoren with a numerous suite to see and admire its wonderful splendors. This was burnt in 808, but in 815 a still more splendid church was built by Bishop Odulphus. It was some Stavoren sailors who first passed through the Sound and opened the way into the Baltic, and the King of Denmark rewarded the town by exempting its ships from dues on entering Dantzic.
Treaties with Sweden and Scotland conceded to the town similar privileges, rendering the merchants of Stavoren able to enter the lists with those of the richest and most influential towns in the world. A sixteenth-century chronicler[198] —though we incline to take the statement as typical of the prosperity of the town rather than in its literal sense—says “the vestibules of the houses were gilded, and the pillars of the palaces of massive gold.” This, however, applies to the thirteenth century, the age of Marco Polo and general redundancy of imagination, colored by the traditions of the Arabian Nights. But it is true that Stavoren was one of the first towns forming part of the Hanseatic League, and even in the sixteenth century she still held the third rank. Her downfall was due as much to the nature of things as to adverse circumstances. Prosperity spoiled the haughty town: “Her inhabitants had become so rich and opulent that they were literally intoxicated with their success, and allowed themselves to grow insolent, exacting, and supercilious beyond endurance. They were called the spoiled, luxurious children of Stavoren—‘dartele ofte vervende Kinderen van Stavoren.’ Strangers ceased to trade with them, preferring the pleasanter manners of the inhabitants of Hamburg, Lübeck, and Bruges. In proportion as trade declined the spirit of enterprise forsook the population, and the town, once so rich and flourishing, now found herself reduced from the first to the tenth rank.” This happened in the fourteenth century, and by the sixteenth “there were scarcely fifty houses in a state of
preservation in this city, which formerly was the highest and noblest of all.” Its appearance at the present time is still more sad: “There are about a hundred houses, half of which are in ruins, but not one remains to recall in the vaguest manner the ancient glory of its palaces. It would be difficult to call the place a village even; it is more like one large cemetery, whose five hundred inhabitants have the appearance of having returned to earth to mourn over the past and lost glories of their country and the ancient splendor of their kings.” Outside the harbor is a large sand-bank, called the “Lady’s Bank,” which for several centuries has blocked up the entrance so that no great ships can enter, and tradition has seized upon this to point a moral eminently appropriate to the former proud merchants of this hopelessly dead city. It is said, and repeated by Guicciardini, that a rich widow, “petulant and saucy,” freighted a ship for Dantzic, and bade the master bring back a cargo of the rarest merchandise he could find in that town. Finding nothing more in requisition there than grain, he loaded the ship with wheat and returned. The widow was indignant at his bringing her such common stuff, and ordered him, if he had loaded the grain at backboort, to throw it into the sea at stuerboort, which was done, whereupon there immediately rose at that place so great a sand-bank that the harbor was blocked; hence the bank is still called “Le Sable,” or “Le Banc de la Dame.”
At Urk, a truly patriarchal fishing village, where “every one, as at Marken, wears the national costume, from the brat who sucks his thumb to the old man palsied with age,”
and where the inhabitants “consider themselves related, forming one and the same family,” and are “just as hospitable and polite as at Marken,” Havard spent a few very pleasant hours. This place is anterior to the Zuyder-Zee, and was already, in the ninth century, a fishing settlement on one of the islands in Lake Flevo. Havard thinks that the women, with their healthy beauty and graceful but evident strength, are good samples of the race that inhabited these lands a thousand years ago.
On entering the mouth of the Yssel the travellers left the tjalk and went across country to Kampen, admiring on their road the beautiful fields with the cows almost hidden in the long grass, the farms on little hillocks looking like miniature fortified castles, and the other farms surrounded by tall trees, where all is of a blue color, from the small milk-pails to the wheelbarrow, and the ladder leading to the loft. Kampen dates only from the thirteenth century, but it grew rapidly, and two hundred years later became an Imperial town, governed itself, and had the right of coining money. At the Reformation there was no breaking of images or destruction of works of art, neither was there any outbreak against the religious orders. Large, massive towers with pointed roofs overhang the quay and flank an enormous wall, through which an arched doorway leads into the town. The Celle-broeders-Poort dates from the sixteenth century, and is built of brick and stone, with octagonal towers, oriel windows, and carved buttresses, besides a gallery projecting over the door. This gate was named after the convent of Brothers of the Common Life, formerly situated in the street leading to the
Poort. The order has been made famous by the author of the Imitation. It was one of the most popular in the Low Country, and was founded at Deventer by Gerhard Groot, a young and luxurious ecclesiastic, whose life reminds one of De Rancé, and who, giving up his preferments, retired to his own house, where he lived with a few other men in apostolical simplicity. The services of his followers were invaluable during the plague, or Black Pest, in the fourteenth century. His successor was Florent Radewyns, a learned priest, also in high ecclesiastical favor, but who gave up his canon’s stall at Utrecht to embrace the life of a Brother of the Common Life. This institute is not unlike the original one of St. Francis of Assisi, founded in Italy a hundred years earlier; only these brothers lived by the work of their hands, mostly as copyists, and as revisers of the manuscripts scattered over the town, comparing them with the originals and rectifying the mistakes of inexperienced or careless copyists. Pope Gregory XI. sanctioned the regulations of the order in 1376, and in 1431, 1439, and 1462 Eugenius IV. and Pius II. confirmed the privileges of the rapidly-growing community, which counted convents by the score all over Holland. About this time they opened schools for the young, and “their instruction was everywhere courted, and their virtues, as well as their great talents, made them welcome even in the most distant countries. Their colleges were dedicated either to St. Jerome or St. Gregory, and multiplied with astonishing rapidity.… In their convent (at Brussels) they had a printing-office.” Their devotion to the poor and uneducated, and their endeavors to counteract the progress of the