See Holdt, Flensburg fruher und jetzt (1884).
FLERS, a manufacturing town of north-western France, in the arrondissement of Domfront, and department of Orne, on the Vère, 41 m. S. of Caen on the railway to Laval. Pop. (1906) 11,188. A modern church in the Romanesque style and a restored château of the 15th century are its principal buildings. There is a tribunal of commerce, a board of trade-arbitrators, a communal college and a branch of the Bank of France. Flers is the centre of a cotton and linen-manufacturing region which includes the towns of Condé-sur-Noireau and La Ferté-Macé. Manufactures are very important, and include, besides cotton and linen fabrics, of which the annual value is about £1,500,000, drugs and chemicals; there are large brick and tile works, flour mills and dyeworks.
FLETA, a treatise, with the sub-title seu Commentarius juris Anglicani, on the common law of England. It appears, from internal evidence, to have been written in the reign of Edward I., about the year 1290. It is for the most part a poor imitation of Bracton. The author is supposed to have written it during his confinement in the Fleet prison, hence the name. It has been conjectured that he was one of those judges who were imprisoned for malpractices by Edward I. Fleta was first printed by J. Selden in 1647, with a dissertation (2nd edition, 1685).
FLETCHER, ALICE CUNNINGHAM (1845- ), American ethnologist, was born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1845. She studied the remains of Indian civilization in the Ohio and Mississippi valleys, became a member of the Archaeological Institute of America in 1879, and worked and lived with the Omahas as a representative of the Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University. In 1883 she was appointed special agent to allot lands to the Omaha tribes, in 1884 prepared and sent to the New Orleans Exposition an exhibit showing the progress of civilization among the Indians of North America in the quarter-century previous, in 1886 visited the natives of Alaska and the Aleutian Islands on a mission from the commissioner of education, and in 1887 was United States special agent in the distribution of lands among the Winnebagoes and Nez Percés. She was made assistant in ethnology at the Peabody Museum in 1882, and received the Thaw fellowship in 1891; was president of the Anthropological Society of Washington and of the American Folk-Lore Society, and vice-president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science; and, working through the Woman’s National Indian Association, introduced a system of making small loans to Indians, wherewith they might buy land and houses. In 1888 she published Indian Education and Civilization, a special report of the Bureau of Education. In 1898 at the Congress of Musicians held at Omaha during the Trans-Mississippi Exposition she read “several essays upon the songs of the North American Indians ... in illustration of which a number of Omaha Indians ... sang their native melodies.” Out of this grew her Indian Story and Song from North America (1900), illustrating “a stage of development antecedent to that in which culture music appeared.”
FLETCHER, ANDREW, of Saltoun (1655-1716), Scottish politician, was the son and heir of Sir Robert Fletcher (1625-1664), and was born at Saltoun, the modern Salton, in East Lothian. Educated by Gilbert Burnet, afterwards bishop of Salisbury, who was then the parish minister of Saltoun, he completed his education by spending some years in travel and study, entering public life as member of the Scottish parliament which met in 1681. Possessing advanced political ideas, Fletcher was a fearless and active opponent of the measures introduced by John Maitland, duke of Lauderdale, the representative of Charles II. in Scotland, and his successor, the duke of York, afterwards King James II.; but he left Scotland about 1682, subsequently spending some time in Holland as an associate of the duke of Monmouth and other malcontents.
Although on grounds of prudence Fletcher objected to the rising of 1685, he accompanied Monmouth to the west of England, but left the army after killing one of the duke’s trusted advisers. This incident is thus told by Sir John Dalrymple: