Dutch. A linguistic history of Holland and Belgium

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Section 2 The Past
A. External history of the language

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Map 9: Tribal settlement in the Netherlands in the early Middle Ages. The map illustrates the situation by ± 800, the time of Charlemagne. Compare map 6 to see how much land was lost to the sea during the later Middle Ages.

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9 The effect of the Great Migrations on the Netherlands

A study of the history of the Dutch language is, in effect, a study of the language of the Franks as it was and is spoken along the Lower Rhine i.e. a study of Low Franconian. But the Franks were not the only Germanic tribe to take up residence within the borders of the Low Countries as we know them today; both Frisians and Saxons inhabit areas of the country as well. A knowledge of who the Franks, Frisians and Saxons were, and of when and where these peoples settled in this area, is essential to an understanding of the origins of the Dutch language. This chapter attempts to give a summary of the main historical events that ultimately led to the establishment of Franconian, Frisian and Saxon speech communities in the Netherlands in the early Middle Ages.

The origins of the Franks^1., like the origins of most of the Barbarians^2., are obscure. They did not become a political entity until the end of the fifth century. Whether the Tubantes^3. in the eastern Netherlands, the Canninefates^3. in North and South Holland and the Batavians^3. in the central Netherlands - all Germanic tribes which the Romans inform us were occupying this area when they arrived there in ± 55 B.C.^4. - were what we later come to know as Franks, is not at all certain, but it does seem likely. The same applies to the Chatti (Hessians), the Thuringians and the Chamavi of Germany for instance. It is, however, certain that these peoples were ultimately absorbed by the Franks when the latter took over the Netherlands and central Germany. The Frisians, whom the Romans also found living along the coast of the Netherlands on their arrival there, were definitely a separate Barbarian tribe and were then, as now, speaking a dialect closely related to Franconian. Many of the features that now distinguish Frisian from Dutch have in fact developed since the time of the Franconian conquest.

The Franconian homeland prior to their expansion into Roman Gaul was most probably between the middle and the lower Rhine between Cologne and Xanten and possibly stretching northwards into the east of the Netherlands between the

1. The origin of the term Frank is uncertain but it is possible it meant ‘bold, brave’.

2. The word Barbarian was first used by the Greeks to designate any non-Hellene. It has since been commonly used to refer to the Germanic peoples whom the Romans considered their cultural inferiors. The word is often used in English to render the Dutch/German word Germanen which I also use here as a synonym for Barbarian.

3. These names are preserved in the following geographic regions: Twente, Kennemerland, de Betuwe.

3. These names are preserved in the following geographic regions: Twente, Kennemerland, de Betuwe.

3. These names are preserved in the following geographic regions: Twente, Kennemerland, de Betuwe.

4. We owe much of our information about these peoples to the Roman Tacitus whose Germania appeared in 98 A.D. He, who had never himself ventured into Germania but who describes the way of life of the Germanen and gives a summary of the tribes, used the Bella Germana of Plinius (= Pliny ± 79 A.D.) as a source of information.

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Primitive Germanic tribes
The three-way division of the West Germanic tribes into Ingvaeones, Istvaeones and Herminones stems from the Roman historian Tacitus who was undoubtedly applying cultural or even simply geographic criteria but certainly not linguistic criteria. The reference to the Weser-Rhine and Elbe rivers relates to the possible original location of these peoples at the time of Tacitus (i.e. ± 100 A.D.) prior to their migration southwards in subsequent centuries.
Adapted from W. Walker Chambers and J.R. Wilkie, A Short History of the German Language, Methuen, London 1974, page 19.

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Rhine and the river IJssel.^5. The mouths of the Rhine and the Meuse may also have been in their hands at that time or this may have been a region of Frisian dominance.

The Franks first entered recorded history^6. when they crossed the limes⁷ in 256 A.D. and entered northern Gaul i.e. Belgium. From this time it seems the Romans abandoned the linear limes north of Xanten, replaced it with scattered castella along the rivers and withdrew to the interior, protecting in particular the all important road that ran from Cologne via Maastricht, Tongeren and Bavai to Boulogne. It is possible that the area north of this road i.e. Dutch-speaking Belgium and the Netherlands south of the Rhine was virtually evacuated by the Romans.⁸ By the middle of the fourth century the Franks had occupied a sizeable area within the limes with the consent of the Romans with whom they lived in close contact and in relative peace until the turmoil of the fifth century. They served in the armies of Rome, notably the Batavians among others, and their culture underwent a high degree of romanisation. They were after all occupying an area, and were soon to take over an even greater area of land, which had been previously populated by Celtic people who had been heavily romanised and are thus better called Gallo-Roman after their absorption by Rome. Celtic speech was destined to disappear under Roman influence, but on both sides of the Rhine Germanic speech was to maintain itself, not however without adopting a great deal of new vocabulary from the Gallo-Roman substrate it found in the territories it conquered. The kinds of

5. Historians have traditionally divided the Franks into Salian and Ripuarian Franks. The distinction is first made in eighth century sources, Salian referring to the coastal Franks (= salt, and thus those that occupied the southern Netherlands). The derivation of the term Ripuarian is uncertain (ripa = bank of the Rhine?), but the name refers in any case to the inland Franks along the Rhine. It is however now doubted whether such a division really existed. Nevertheless it is the so-called Salian Franks who emerge as the leaders in the fourth and fifth centuries, spearheading the invasion of Gaul: they had lived in closer proximity to the Romans for longer and the Ripuarians had remained hostile to Rome.

6. It must be remembered that we are dealing with a relatively ‘dark’ period in European history, as far as the Germanen are concerned, because of their lack of literacy. For some centuries, in fact until they were gradually converted to christianity from circa 500 A.D. on, we are entirely dependent on the literate Romans for information, and they only mention movements of Germanic peoples as and when these movements are of relevance to, or are known to them. Even then we are dependent of course on Roman interpretations of events and classifications of peoples. Once the Romans withdrew from the area, we had to wait for the arrival of christianity to provide us with written texts. It is a tragedy of history that Rome itself was only converting to christianity (Emperor Constantine's conversion ± 330 A.D.) at the time when it was being forced to withdraw from the Lower Rhine. Had Roman influence been felt a little longer, and thus the influence of a christian Rome, the Germanen of the area would possibly have been converted sooner and thus become literate sooner. The veil that now shrouds the movements of the Germanen in the fifth century might then never have existed.

7 The limes was the border of the Roman Empire which corresponded more or less with a line running from east to west along the Danube and then from south to north up the Rhine to its former mouth near Katwijk in Holland.

8 The Roman road mentioned here corresponds very closely to the original border between Germanic and Latin speech which is still preserved today, although with certain concessions to the latter, in the language border that runs through Belgium from the German border near Aachen to the coast of France near Dunkirk (see map 7).

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words the Franks borrowed from the Romans clearly reflect the Roman legacy in Germanic culture, e.g. ezel (donkey), keizer (emperor), keuken (kitchen), kool (cabbage), molen (mill), muur (wall), straat (street), tegel (tile).

The Franks become of interest to general European history from the time of the Merovingians (i.e. after the migrations, which reach their peak during the fifth century after the Romans have withdrawn from Germania). The Merovingian dynasty of the Franks is named after its semi-legendary founder Merovech. It is followed in the mid-eighth century by the Carolingian dynasty which is named after its greatest leader, Charles the Great (Charlemagne). The grave of the son of Merovech, Childerich (± 457-482), was found near Tournai in Belgium in 1653. The period is still ‘dark’, however, till the time of Childerich's son, Clovis (456-511). We have a continuous history of the Franks from this time on. We are dependent for much of our early information on Gregory of Tours (538-594) who, writing in Latin, is the chronicler of the Merovingian Franks, but even Gregory, writing as close to the actual time of the events as he was, is not very clear about the origins of the Franks.

All three kings so far mentioned ruled over only part of the people history later, from the eighth century, came to know as the Franks. Clovis, the first whose achievements are well documented, ascended the throne in 481 and during his reign the Franks pushed on into Gaul, Rome's influence in the area having been gradually whittled away during the fifth century by Barbarian tribes that began crossing the limes in great numbers in 406. As Clovis proceeded deeper into Gaul - there are no precise dates available for the Franconian take-over of Gaul - he conquered all other Germanic kings and subjugated the Gallo-Roman population to Franconian overlordship. The date of his conversion to christianity is the subject of much controversy, it being either 496, 499 or even as late as 506. In any event, with his conversion and the conversion of his subjects to the faith, came literacy. It was a Latin literacy of course, but for centuries literacy was to be limited to the clergy. Texts in the vernacular were firstly non-existent and even then quite rare for some time. Only in Carolingian times, in fact, were there sufficient texts in Germanic dialects for history to manage to preserve anything. The importance of the spread of christianity to the development of a written literature in the various dialects of West Germanic cannot be overemphasised.

By 508 Clovis was king of all the Franks, a Barbarian people that had by this time lived for centuries in close proximity to the highly civilised Gallo-Romans and which, during that time, had developed a culture which was a synthesis of both worlds. On the soil of Gaul the empire of the Franks developed a distinctive culture we can now call Franconian. For the time prior to that only archeological evidence is available and it is often difficult to distinguish between the Franks and other Germanic peoples, as we have seen. From a linguistic point of view, however, we are ‘in the dark’ for some time to come.

Having conquered Gaul south to the river Loire, and having founded his capital in Paris, Clovis embarked on a campaign to the east into central and southern Germany (including Switzerland and Austria) and south into Gothic Gaul.^9. Franc-

9. Although the Goths had been christian for longer than the Franks, having converted in the latter part of the fourth century while residing in the Balkans, they had adopted Arian christianity which Catholic christians such as the Franks considered to be a heresy. Thus Clovis' attacks on the Goths were also regarded as a religious crusade.

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onian expansion in these two directions was to be continued by successive rulers of the Merovingian dynasty. And from the time of Clovis' conversion to christianity, Franconian expansion took on more and more the air of a crusade. By the end of the sixth century, in the area north of the Alps, only the Frisians and the Saxons retained their independence from the Franks, and both these peoples occupied sizeable portions of the Netherlands.

The seventh century, the period of Franconian occupation of the western and central Netherlands, is the ‘darkest’ period in Dutch history. Dagobert I, king of all the Franks from 629-639, took on the conquest of the river mouths. What he began in the early seventh century would be completed in the late eighth century by the Carolingians. Under Dagobert the church took root in the Netherlands, chiefly in the present-day Belgian territories and Dutch Limburg, with St. Amandus being the main missionary of the southern provinces. Both the nobility and the church forced a gradual expansion northwards to the Old Rhine (see map 4); Dagobert built a church for a mission to the Frisians in Utrecht in 625. North of the Old Rhine, however, the Frisians undoubtedly occurred in greater numbers and expansion beyond that line was slow and had to be achieved by warfare. Any other tribes in the area that were not Frisian were, we can assume, either themselves branches of the Franks or were absorbed by the invading Franks from the south. It was particularly the coastal region, possibly even Zeeland, that the Frisians had settled. Even today the top of North Holland is still called West Friesland, (see p. 13)

There were continual rebuffs of Franconian expansion into the area by the Frisians and objections to the introduction of christianity in particular. The Anglo-Saxon mission to the Frisians began in 678. It is possible that the Franks commissioned Anglo-Saxon clerics, who had already played an important role in converting the Franks themselves and their newly conquered territories in central and southern Germany, to lead the Frisian mission because of their linguistic affinity to the Frisians. Both English and Frisian being Ingwaeonic dialects of Germanic (see p. 128), it is possible that the two were still mutually intelligible at that time or that the missionaries could at least learn Frisian with little difficulty.

Under Charles Martel (i.e. Charles the Hammer, 688-741), the last of the Merovingian dynasty, definite advances were made north of the Rhine against the Frisians under King Redbad (or Radboud) who died in 719. From that time on, the history of the northern Netherlands is dealt with in Franconian annals. The spread of christianity through these territories that accompanied the Franconian take-over also helped to clarify the situation somewhat. Under Charles Martel, Holland up as far as the Lauwers in Friesland in the west, and up to the river IJssel in the east, came under the Franks; there is no doubt that Friesland up to the Lauwers was definitely in their hands after the Battle of the Boorne in 734.

Willibrord (died 739), to whom there is a monument on the Janskerkhof in the centre of Utrecht, is regarded as the true father of the Anglo-Saxon mission to the Frisians. In 695 he arrived in Utrecht at the request of Charles Martel and was to be followed in turn by two other great names in this mission (later extended to the Saxons), namely Boniface (or Bonifatius, died 754) and Liudger (died 809), himself a Frisian educated at York. All three were to be active in Germany as well.

The conversion of Friesland up to the Lauwers was to be the work of Boniface and it would ultimately cost him his life. He had begun his work in the Netherlands

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in 716 and then went on to Germany where he became bishop of Mainz. He returned to the Netherlands later in life to continue the Frisian mission.

There are many Latin manuscripts from this time on, many still preserved in the archives of the monastery at Echternach in the Grand Duchy of Luxemburg, a monastery that Willibrord founded and where he died in 739. Utrecht is also quite well provided with manuscripts from the period for it is the oldest centre of Anglo-Saxon missionary activity on the Continent.

The conquest and conversion of Friesland east of the Lauwers - i.e. the present-day province of Groningen and the north of Germany - belongs to the history of Charlemagne and his struggle against the Saxons. Till his reign (768-814), the Lauwers and the IJssel had been the borders of the Franconian empire in the Netherlands. Beyond those limits lived the Saxons, a third linguistically closely related Germanic people who still occupy the territories today that they did at the time of Charlemagne. We know them to have been present there from at least 350 A.D., perhaps taking over areas in the east of the Netherlands left vacant by the Franks when they first moved over the limes into Belgium and Gaul. Once again, as with the Franks earlier in history, we do not know for sure what form of federation they had. The Saxons who inhabited the north of Germany were also approached on another front, namely from central Germany (Thuringia and Hesse), which the Franks had occupied during the Merovingian period. By the time of Charlemagne's campaigns against the Saxons, the last front to be fought in his holy wars of expansion, the whole western and southern periphery of Lower Saxony had been converted to christianity by Willibrord and Boniface. The Saxons were continually in revolt but their king Widukind was finally defeated in 785 and converted to christianity. Northern Germany to the Elbe was then subjected to Franconian rule. The missionary Liudger, a Frisian, was appointed to the area to convert the Saxons.

Bibliography

BLOK, D.P. De Franken. Van Dishoeck, Bussum, 1968.

This is the only book I know of in any language that deals lucidly and succinctly with the Franks and their effect on the Netherlands. There are various books in English that deal with the Franks in general, or the migrations in general, with passing references to the Netherlands:

WALLACE-HADRILL, J.M. The Barbarian West 400 - 1000. Hutchinson, London, 1967.

DIXON, P. Barbarian Europe. Elsevier/Phaidon, Oxford, 1976.