Medieval Flanders

David M Nicholas

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317901549
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia francesa

Cradle of northern Europe's later urban and industrial pre-eminence, medieval Flanders was a region of immense political and economic importance -- and already, as so often later, the battleground of foreign powers. Yet this book is, remarkably, the first comprehensive modern history of the region. Within the framework of a clear political narrative, it presents a vivid portrait of medieval Flemish life that will be essential reading for the medievalist -- and a boon for the many visitors to Bruges and Ghent eager for a better understanding of what they see.

Chapter One

The Sand that is upon the Seashore

Flanders Under Roman Rule

Although the Romans are now known to have occupied the southern Low Countries more thoroughly than was once thought, particularly before the third century AD, Flanders was far less Romanized than either northern France or the eastern Low Countries. As a frontier area along the coast and subject to pirate attacks, it was not densely populated, and Roman governance was skeletal.

The region that became Flanders was mainly swamp. The Roman civitates were farther south, along a northeast to southwest road. West of the Roman civitates was an alluvial plain that was subject to frequent flooding, with mounds a few feet above the tides that supported a few inhabitants who raised sheep and fished. Still farther south was a somewhat drier area, of 20–25 metres above sea level, with habitable plateaus separated by swampy valleys.

The Flemish coast, which is now straight and considerably west of its medieval location, had several broad river estuaries that fluctuated considerably with the tides. The Zwin, IJzer and Aa were the largest, and a bay near Bergues was already becoming a salt marsh when the Romans came. The coast was separated from eastern Flanders by an area of heavy clay covered with forest and marshes that extended northward from the Scheldt below Tournai toward the mouth of the IJzer. This region would effectively separate the two original nuclei of the medieval county, around Bruges and Ghent, until the second half of the eleventh century.¹

The population of Flanders at the beginning of the Christian era was primarily Celtic, with some Romans and a few Germans. The area seems to have shared most features of the pre-Roman La Tène culture, except, not surprisingly in view of its flat terrain, that it had few hill forts. There was agriculture and animal husbandry, in which sheep dominated. Fishing was very important, and the fish sauces of the Flemish coastal area became famous and were exported. Although the Celts had towns elsewhere, they did not have them in the Low Countries before the Romans, perhaps because coin was not used in the area, which is notably devoid of usable metals and minerals. Julius Caesar’s Commentaries give us some information about conditions in the first century BC. Caesar described the Belgae as the most ferocious of the Celtic tribes, because they were farthest from the Mediterranean, and merchants rarely got to them to make them effeminate. Along the North Sea coast in the Pas-de-Calais between the Aa and the Canche were the Morini, whose name means ‘sea folk’. The Atrebates (‘possessors of the soil’) were farther inland in what became Artois and Flemish Flanders as far south as the Canche.

The most numerous tribe in what became Flanders were the Menapii, who occupied a swampy area behind the Scheldt that Caesar’s army found very difficult to cross. Caesar thought them very powerful, but they seem actually to have had less internal cohesion than the Morini. He finally subdued the Menapii in 54, but they continued to wage guerilla warfare. He tells us much more about the Nervii than about the western tribes. They occupied the area between Scheldt, Rupel, Dijle and Lasne, dominating the smaller tribes of eastern Flanders and regions farther east.

Caesar’s discussion shows that the area that became Flanders was backward both economically and politically in comparison to the rest of the Low Countries in the first century BC. Ditches from camps of the first century AD have been found in Courtrai and Tournai. Tournai, which was just across the Scheldt from Flanders proper and would later become the capital of its civitas, was already important for quarrying in the first century. But far more public buildings survive from the southern towns of Gallia Belgica than from Flanders. Few Roman mosaics have been found, and all but one are in the territories of the Menapii and the Morini. There are few Roman inscriptions and reliefs north and west of a line running Senlis–Soissons–Saint-Quentin–Tongeren, all of them except Tongeren considerably south of Flanders. There is not even much evidence of pottery making in Flanders.

The main Roman roads were also south of Flanders. The northernmost was the Boulogne–Cologne route, which went through Thérouanne over Velzeke and Asse and Tongeren. There was a secondary coastal road that did cross the southern tip of Flanders. It branched from the Boulogne–Tongeren route east of Cassel and went to Aardenburg, while the Boulogne–Tongeren road crossed the southern tip of Flanders at Cassel and Wervik. Tournai developed where the Roman road to Cassel and eventually Courtrai over Wervik crossed the Scheldt, but its ties were directed more south and west than northward. Arras, Thérouanne and Bavai were south of the main road and were more Romanized than was what would eventually become ‘Germanic’ Flanders. The Boulonnais and Pas-de-Calais, rather than Flanders, were the areas from which boats set sail for England.

When Flanders became part of the province of Gallia Belgica after Caesar’s conquest, the Celtic tribal capitals became the centres of Roman civitates: Thérouanne and later Boulogne for the Morini, Arras for the Atrebates, and Cassel on a hill overlooking the Flemish plain on the southern border of the Menapii. It was the only civitas in what would become Flanders proper and served as a frontier fortress to protect the Romans against the northern tribesmen. The civitates were centres of governance and military administration.

In addition to the civitates, which were on or near the major links of communication, there were numerous smaller settlements or villages (vici). Most vici were agricultural markets, where farmers sold food and bought such local manufactures as pottery, bronze, iron work and leather. Buildings were of wood, half-timbering, or occasionally masonry. Wool was produced throughout Belgica, as indeed in most parts of Roman Gaul. Salt was refined from sea water along the coast, notably at De Panne and somewhat later near Bruges, where there had been an Iron Age settlement. More evidence of the Roman presence in Flanders comes with iron works at Destelbergen, near Ghent, and Waasmunster, in the northeast. Courtrai and nearby Harelbeke also had iron working from the mid first century AD until the late third. These places were still inhabited in the fourth century. The vici in the north may have been somewhat larger than those in the south, probably because the north had no cities and thus knew a more diffused industrial activity.²

Although the Roman fortifications along the Rhine were north of Flanders, they may have given security for peaceful development in Flanders, particularly during the Batavian uprising in the northern Netherlands in 69. The Flavian emperors (69–96) strengthened the Rhenish forts, and from their time onward the Flemish coastal area was gradually inhabited and Romanized. The tribes of the south rebelled only under duress, generally preferring the ‘Roman peace’ to the Germans.

But the area was only superficially Romanized. Picardy was the northernmost area with many Roman villas, and even there there was a substantial decline in the number of occupied sites after the fourth century. There is little evidence of Roman villas at any time in Flanders and only slightly more in the adjacent parts of Brabant. Of about 400 known Roman villas in modern Belgium, only a score were still occupied after the late third century. Particularly in northern and eastern Flanders, where villas existed around Aalst, Waasmunster and Belsele, they reverted to forest.³

By contrast, cloth making, which would be the keystone of the medieval Flemish economy, had evidently been practised since prehistoric times, fostered by the ease with which sheep could be raised on the dunes. Caesar mentioned most tribes having sheep herds. The Morini grew flax and made linen, and the Nervii made jackets. Woollen cloth from Arras was marketed in Asia Minor. A gynaeceum where soldiers’ uniforms were made was established at Tournai and persisted into the fourth century.⁴

There was also a constant risk of flooding. The first ‘Dunkirk transgression’ was receding only in Caesar’s time, followed by a ‘Roman regression’ in the first two centuries AD. Agriculture became more productive. Vici were established in Flanders between the second half of the first century and the second half of the third at Courtrai, Harelbeke, Wervik, Oudenburg, Wenduine, Bruges, Aardenburg and Ghent, and those at Wenduine, Oudenburg and Bruges had some industry.⁵ The most prosperous period seems to have been the second century, with many vici resulting from the growth of Roman civil administration, especially toll stations along the Cologne road. Navigable interior water and sea routes promoted a thriving trade with England and the Rhineland. Most of the Low Country vici did not survive into the fourth century. Those that did, such as Tongeren and Maastricht, had other economic ties to the surrounding rural area, and none of the larger ones was in what became Flanders.

The civil disorders that racked the entire empire beginning in the late second century quickly affected the Roman presence in the northwest, reducing a weak civilian settlement to one that was skeletal and almost exclusively military. Tournai was destroyed in 172, but some settlement continued. The Romans built coastal fortresses around that time at Oudenburg and Aardenburg in response to a growing problem of piracy. Oudenburg had an extensive layout, with both a civilian vicus and a military castellum.

Nonetheless, the region remained generally prosperous until the Franks broke the Rhine frontier near Cologne in 258–9, then struck the north and west of what is now Belgium before 275. Military engagements became endemic thereafter. Oudenburg was destroyed in 273. Virtually all civitas capitals and large camps that have been excavated show massive destruction during the third century. Excavations around Ghent suggest that the vicus of Ganda, a settlement with an artisan quarter, had been attacked in the late second century but was not finally abandoned until the last quarter of the third. It was fortified in the fourth century and in the sixth became the site of St Bavo’s abbey.⁶

But the Germans were not the Romans’ only problem. Roman civilian settlement in the southern Low Countries came between the first and second ‘Dunkirk transgressions’. Western coastal Flanders and Zeeland were again being flooded by the late second century and were deserted by the end of the third. Before 400, the area west of the Aa, Leie and Durme rivers had been depopulated, opening the way for the invaders. The flooding continued until around 600.

The Romans incorporated the much reduced coastline into the Saxon Shore, which was based in Britain but included both sides of the English Channel. Maritime Flanders and eastern England were thus a military and administrative unit at this time. The fort at Oudenburg was destroyed around 275 but was rebuilt and strengthened in the fourth century. The latest Roman graves at Oudenburg are from the beginning of the fifth century, when the second Dunkirk transgression cut it off from its hinterland. One of the two settlements at Bruges was also not flooded and was repopulated in the fourth century.⁷

The emperor Diocletian (284–305) divided Belgica into two provinces. Flanders and northern France were in Belgica Secunda, whose capital was Reims, which would be the metropolitan see of Flanders during the Middle Ages. Thérouanne remained the capital of the civitas of the Morini, but there were three major changes. Tournai replaced Cassel as the chief place of the civitas on the southern frontier, while Cambrai became the chief place of what had been the civitas of the Nervii, whose previous capital had been Bavai. Boulogne also became important strategically and a civitas, probably after the partial destruction of Thérouanne in 275.

Since the waterways had provided access for invaders, the Romans built small forts and towers along them, often on the sites of abandoned vici. All civitates and most vici had been fortified by the fourth century, many of them with walls of up to 3 metres or more. Most fourth-century settlements were considerably smaller than their predecessors, and the Romans established garrisons considerably north of Cassel, notably at Ghent, Bruges and Courtrai.

In striking contrast to all other parts of Europe that the Romans had occupied, the Christian churches in the Low Countries did not become nuclei of settlement across the period of the Germanic migrations in Flanders. When Christianity was legalized in the early fourth century, the civitas capitals probably became centres of the new faith and eventually bishoprics, as elsewhere. Yet the late Roman Low Countries provide strikingly little evidence of Christianity, which was always centred more in France. Christianity is known to have been practised at Tournai before its bishops first appear in written sources at the beginning of the sixth century, but there is no prior evidence from Flanders proper.⁸

Since most tribes moved southward along the major rivers, there is little evidence through the mid fourth century of Germans in the part of Flanders west of the Scheldt. Between the Scheldt and Leie was still mainly Roman and east of the Dender almost entirely Roman. But this situation changed abruptly. Franks serving as Roman federates occupied the area between the lower Scheldt and the Meuse from the period of Julian ‘the Apostate’ (361–63). By this time, Oudenburg, Aardenburg and Bourbourg were the only usable Roman forts left in northern Flanders, and of the interior routes, only the road linking Tienen with Courtrai and Cassel was usable, with fortifications at strategic intervals. The Boulogne–Cologne road was a border, with forts that had little civilian settlement.⁹ The Vandals, Suevi and Burgundians made a short-lived irruption in 406, then moved on, and northern Gaul had half a ce...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of genealogical tables and maps
• Abbreviations
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1. The Sand that is upon the Seashore
• 2. The Economic Development of Early Flanders
• 3. The Counts and the County, 918–1071
• 4. The Apogee of Flemish Power, 1071–1206
• 5. The Social and Economic Transformation of Flanders in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries
• 6. Economic Growth and Cultural Flowering in the Thirteenth Century
• 7. Foreign Trade, Diplomacy and Dependence: The Catastrophe of Medieval Flanders, 1206–74
• 8. A Half-Century of Crisis, 1274–1317
• 9. A Delicate Balance: The End of Dampierre Flanders, 1317–84
• 10. Economic Depression and World Economy in Flanders, 1315–84
• 11. A Change of Direction: Flanders in the Burgundian State, 1384–1467
• 12. The Flemish Economy in the Burgundian Period: Redirection and Retrenchment
• 13. A Burgundian Funeral and a Habsburg Epitaph: The End of Medieval Flanders, 1467–92
• Bibliography
• Genealogical tables
• Index