Frisians

“ Towards the close of the century they begin to figure much more prominently in Frankish writings. There is no doubt that by this time their territories had been greatly extended in both directions. Probably some Frisians took part with the Angles and Saxons in their sea-roving expeditions, and assisted their neighbours in their invasions and subsequent conquest of England and the Scottish lowlands. ”

“ It is well known that the greater part of the ancient Friesland has been swept away by the encroachments of the North Sea, and the disjecta membra of the Frisian race, pressed by the sea in front and more powerful nationalities behind, are found only in isolated fragments from the Zuider Zee to the coasts of Denmark. Many Frisians accompanied the Angles and Saxons to Britain, and Old English was in many respects more closely connected with Old Frisian than with any other Low German dialect. ”

“ But love of country is among the Frisians a passion. In their eyes there is no land like Friesland, and the fairest portions of the world cannot in Frisian estimation rank alongside their barren sandy islands. ”

“ Of English dialects the Frisian is nearest to Kentish, except in the northern Frisian islands, where it seems more akin to West-Saxon. I take this from Siebs, Zur Gesch. der engl.-fries. Sprache, in Paul’s Grundriss der germanischen Philologie, 2nd ed. i. 1153 ff., for a reference to which I am indebted to Professor Napier, who tells me that in his judgement Englishmen and Frisians would be quite intelligible to one another in the ninth century. There is a sentence of Frisian in Pertz, xxii. 576, which might just as well be Anglo-Saxon. ”

“ The traditional freedom of the people of this county, and the still older traditional freedom of the Frisians, confirm the other evidence, anthropological as well as philological, which connects Kent with ancient Friesland. The old laws of the Frisians declare ‘that the race shall be free as long as the winds blow out of the clouds and the world stands.’ [19]
The Frisians, with the Batavians of what is now Holland, came under the dominion of Charlemagne, who confirmed their laws and left them their native customs. ”

“ In the seventh and eighth centuries a great king of Northumbria or Frisia is likely to be king, not of one only, but of many allied tribes. I cannot therefore quite understand why some scholars reject so immediately the idea that the Eotens are not necessarily Frisians, but rather a tribe in alliance with the Frisians. For if, as they admit, we are dealing not with two compact units, but with two groups of tribes, why must we assume, as earlier scholars have done, that Eotenas must be synonymous either with Frisians or Danes? ”

“ It is at the bottom of the sea: forfeited, like the lava-stricken plains of Sicily, of Campania, and of Iceland, in the great game of Man against Nature—for it is not everywhere that Man has been the winner. The war of the Frisians against the sea has been the war not of the Titans against Jove, but of the Amphibii against Neptune.
Every Frisian—Friese as he calls himself—is an agriculturist, and it is only in the villages that the Frisian tongue is spoken. In the towns of Ripe, Bredsted, and Husum, small as they are, there is nothing but Danish and German. ”

“ The Frisians were spread over a large distance along the shore as far as the mouth of the Elbe, and in the west at least as far as the country north of Haarlem. In the time of the Romans they cannot have extended their power farther southward. ”

“ The “free” Frisians could not endure this Frankish outpost on their borders. Utrecht was attacked and captured, and the church destroyed. The first missionary to meet with any success among the Frisians was the Englishman Wilfrid of York, who, being driven by a storm upon the coast, was hospitably received by the king, Adgild or Adgisl, and was allowed to preach Christianity in the land. Adgild appears to have admitted the overlordship of the Frankish king, Dagobert II. (675) . ”

“ And when we have assumed, without evidence, that, at the period with which we are dealing, Frisians had occupied Jutish territory, we are then further asked to assume that, from this settlement in Jutish territory, such Frisians came to be called Jutes. Now this is an hypothesis per se conceivable, but very improbable. Throughout the whole Heroic Age, for a thousand years after the time of Tacitus, Germanic tribes were moving, and occupying the territory of other people. ”

“ Our special hearth and cradle is doubtless to be found in the immediate marchland of Germany and Denmark, but the great common home of our people is to be looked on as stretching along the whole of that long coast where various dialects of the Low-Dutch tongue are spoken. If Angles and Saxons came, we know that Frisians came also, and with Frisians as an element among us, it is hardly too bold to claim the whole Netherlands as in the widest sense Old England, as the land of one part of the kinsfolk who stayed behind. ”

“ Then Wulfram went back to Fontinella to get more monks, laborers, and lay brothers for his work in Frisia. The converted Frisians were beginning to realize the blessings of regular and well-ordered work. There were more and more laborers and fewer sea robbers and warriors. Nevertheless, the great mass of the Frisian people remained obstinate, following the example of the king and the great chiefs.
Among the gods whose wrath the Frisians most [172] feared was the god of the sea. The lowness of the land made frequent inundations inevitable. ”

“ Even among the Germanic populations, which were regarded as reduced under the sway of the King of the Franks, some, the Frisians and Saxons, as well as others, were continually agitating for the recovery of their independence. Farther off, toward the north, east, and south, people differing in origin and language—Avars, Huns, Slavons, Bulgarians, Danes, and Northmen—were still pressing or beginning to press upon the frontiers of the Frankish dominion, for the purpose of either penetrating within or settling at the threshold as powerful and formidable neighbors. ”

“ In connexion with the movements of the migration period the Frisians are hardly ever mentioned, though some of them are said to have surrendered to the Roman prince Constantius about the year 293. On the other hand we hear very frequently of Saxons in the coast regions of the Netherlands. Since the Saxons (Old Saxons) of later times were an inland people, one can hardly help suspecting either that the two nations have been confused or, what is more probable, that a considerable mixture of population, whether by conquest or otherwise, had taken place. ”

“ This is of interest in reference to the people of Northumberland, a county in which traces of Frisian occupation are strong. It is known that Frisians came to Britain among the Roman military, and Skene says that ‘of the Saxons who settled in Britain before the year 441, the colony which occupied the northern district about the Roman wall were probably Frisians.’ This may well have been the case, and the traces of people of this race which the Northumberland place-names supply may therefore be of older date than the time of Hengist and Horsa. ”

“ From such a country as ancient Frisia was, emigration, as the population increased, was a necessity. The story of Hengist and the custom of the expulsion of a number of the young people of his country may have reasonably prevailed in Friesland. Whether they settled in England under the names Angles and Jutes, or under tribal names of their own, it is certain that large numbers of Frisians must have become English colonists under the Saxon name. The old chroniclers are, indeed, at a loss whether to make Hengist a Frisian or a Saxon. ”

“ Of how and why the golden helmet is worn, this is the story:
In days gone by, when forests covered the land and bears and wolves were plentiful, there were no churches in Friesland. The people were pagans and all worshipped Woden, whom the Frisians called Fos-i-te'. Certain trees were sacred to him. When a baby was ill, or grown people had a disease, which medicine could not help, they laid the sick one at the foot of the holy tree, hoping for health soon to come. ”

“ The Frisians of Friesland represent one of these, our Anglo-Saxon ancestors another, the Old Saxons of Westphalia a third, the Low Dutch of Holland a fourth, the High Dutch of Bavaria a fifth, the Goths of the Old Ostrogoth and Visigoth conquests a sixth. Now the intestine movements of these different divisions have always been great; so that, although we shall rarely hear of any Germanic population having been overlaid by Slavonians or Kelts, the phenomenon of Saxons superseded by Low Dutch, Low Dutch by High and other similar displacements will be common. ”

“ Western limit.—This is formed by the Batavians and Frisians of the sea-coast, i.e., by the Batavians of Holland, Guelderland, and Overyssel, and, afterwards, by the Frisians of West and East Friesland, and of Oldenburg.
Here, however, the breadth of the non-Saxon area is uncertain. Generally speaking, it is broadest in the southern, and narrowest in the northern portion. The Frisian line is narrower than the Batavian, whilst when we reach the Elbe the Saxons appear on the sea-coast. Perhaps they do so on the Weser as well. ”

“ A revolution in the fortunes of the world had in fact opened. Scandinavian pre-eminence on the sea was even now passing away, as that of the Frisians had passed away two hundred years before. New lords of commerce seized the traffic of sea and land when the Normans, “citizens of the world,” carried their arms and their cunning from the Moray Firth to the Straits of Messina, from the Seine to the Euphrates. The Teutonic peoples that now girded the North Sea—Normans, Germans of the Hanseatic League, English—were to supersede Danes and Norwegians. ”

“ No name of any Kentish King is Danish.
3. No Danish forms for geographical localities occur in the county.
That the Kentish population has certain peculiarities is highly probable; and it is also probable [240] that similar peculiarities on the part of the population of Hants brought the two within the same category. And hence came the extension of the Jute hypothesis to the Cantware.
Were there Frisians in England?—The presumption is in favour of the affirmative; since the Frisians were eminently the occupiers of the German sea-coast.
Again—
1. A native tradition makes Hengist a Frisian. ”

“ He tells us of a people called the Pharadini, a name resembling Varini or Warings, allies of the Angles, who lay next to the Saxons. He mentions also the three islands of the Saxons, which are probably those known now as the North Frisian Islands, north of the coast where the Saxons he mentioned are said to have lived. This is the country that within historic time has been, and still is in part, occupied by the North Frisians. ”

“ But when the Frisians saw that but one man was following, they turned back and attacked him, but he defended himself well, and used the dyke to cover him behind so that they could not attack him on all sides. ”

“ Frēsena, 1094, Frȳsna, 1105, Frēsna, 2916: dat. Frȳsum, 1208, 2913) . To be distinguished, are: 1) North Frisians, whose king is Finn, 1069 ff.; 2) West Frisians, in alliance with the Franks and Hūgas, in the war against whom Hygelāc falls, 1208, 2916. The country of the former is called Frȳsland, 1127; that of the latter, Frēsna land, 2916.
Fr..es wæl (in Fr..es wæle, 1071) , mutilated proper name.
Frēawaru, daughter of the Danish king, Hrōðgār; given in marriage to Ingeld, the son of the Heaðobeard king, Frōda, in order to end a war between the Danes and the Heaðobeardnas, 2023 ff., 2065. ”

“ But a far sharper thorn in his side, and one which had troubled many a Count before, and was destined to trouble others afterward, was those unruly Hollanders, or Frisians, who dwelt in Scaldmariland, “the land of the meres of the Scheldt.” ”

“ The struggle with nature for a foothold in the lowland itself was harder in the north than in the south, and no doubt that is why the Teutonic Frisians led the way in industrial training. It was among them that the arts of weaving and dyeing were cultivated first to a notable excellence. As early as the age of Charlemagne (8-9th centuries) , Frisian robes, of white and purple woolen stuffs, are mentioned among the choice gifts which the Emperor sometimes sent to foreign princes, and even to the great caliph, Haroun al Raschid. ”

“ We can have no doubt that Saxons of some tribe or tribes were largely included among the settlers of a district afterwards known to its neighbours as Wessex, or the kingdom of the West Saxons. Among these, in a country with good harbours, there can be little doubt that Frisians, who were the people among the so-called Saxons most given to maritime pursuits, were represented. Such names as Emsworth and the river Ems in the south-east of the county remind us of Emden and the river Ems, close to Eastern Friesland. ”

“ But if the Flemish people borrowed from the Frisians in this matter, they soon outran their teachers and made the loom their own peculiar property. The shuttle, ere long, was in the hands of a very large part of the whole south Netherland or Belgian population, and they became almost a nation of weavers. The same Count Baldwin of Flanders who brought the Frisian weavers into Ghent established annual markets, or fairs, in various towns, which drew merchants from abroad, promoted trade and stimulated manufacturing industries throughout the country. ”