The Frisians are a people who live for the most part between the Lower Rhine and the Ems River along the North Sea coast in present-day northern Netherlands and northwestern Germany and on the adjacent Frisian Islands. Friesland (or Vriesland) is currently a province in the northern Netherlands. The region of East Friesland (Ostfriesland), now part of the state of Lower Saxony in Germany, includes the East Frisian Islands (see Dutch: nationality; Germans: nationality).
ORIGINS
The Frisians were originally a tribal people of Germanics in the region, referred to as the Frisii by the Romans. Their name is possibly from the Germanic Freisias related to Indo-European root prei-, “to love” (which also led to the name of the Germanic goddess of love, Freya, suggesting Frisians worshipped her). As a coastal people, they took part in wide-ranging trading networks from very early times, and their culture received influences from other parts of the Atlantic trade zone, which stretched from the western Mediterranean and Iberian Peninsula along coastal present-day France and the Atlantic coasts of the British Isles to their northern neighbors on the Jutland Peninsula. The land of the Frisians was part of the Atlantic megalith building zone, and from around 3500 b. c.e. dolmens, assemblages of huge boulders propped up against one another, began to be built, simultaneously with the introduction of farming. Such structures, which were built in areas where incoming farmers met dense populations of Mesolithic peoples exploiting the rich marine resources along the coasts, are thought to have been built in communal rituals aimed at reconciling and uniting groups practicing very different lifeways. The Frisians of the Iron Age were less warlike than the inland Saxons, and their energies were directed far more toward trade and fishing. However, the Frisians were known as sea raiders, as well.
LANGUAGE
Frisian is part of the West Germanic language group. It is a Low German language closely related to English. It has survived among inhabitants of the Dutch province of Friesland and in parts of northwestern Germany.
HISTORY
The Roman incursions into northwestern Europe had a profound effect on all of the Germanic tribes there, including the Frisians. Their military operations in the region, culminating in the establishment of the Rhine frontier, and their development of large-scale trading enterprises transformed societies here. In 476 C. E. the Romans established treaty relations with the Frisians as a means of stabilizing the frontier, and a kingdom of Frisia was eventually established. The Roman historian Tacitus of the first-second century in his Germania mentioned the Frisians as among the tribes he grouped together as the Ingvaeones. Trade with Romans, notably in the slaves so
C. E.
476 Frisian treaty with Rome
Fifth-sixth centuries Frisia occupied by Angles, Jutes, and Saxons; some Frisians migrate to Britain.
785 Frisians conquered by Franks under Charlemagne.
Eighth century Anglo-Saxon St. Willibrord works to convert Frisians.
1454 East Friesland becomes part of Holy Roman Empire.
16th century Frisians take part in Dutch resistance against Spanish Hapsburg regime.
1523 Hapsburg emperor Charles V reduces Friesland by force after Frisians resist rule of duke of Saxony.
1579 Friesland becomes part of Union of Utrecht (later the Dutch Republic). 1748 Friesland joins United Provinces of the Netherlands.
Necessary to the Roman economy, fostered the beginnings of a true market economy among Frisians, and trading towns grew. For a period after the collapse of the Roman Empire in the fifth century the homeland of the Frisians was occupied by the Angles, Jutes, and Saxons. Some Frisians invaded and settled in the British Isles along with the other northwestern Germanic tribes; the Angles, Jutes, Saxons, and Frisians became known collectively as ANGLO-SAXONS. After this migration the Frisians who remained in their homeland continued to have close relations with their relatives across the North Sea, particularly in East Anglia.
Frisians in the Middle Ages
The Carolingian FRANKS under Charlemagne conquered Frisia in 785. Before the conquest many pagan Frisians fled to what is today north Friesland—formerly the territory of the Angles who had migrated to Britain—and remained unconverted. They engaged in trade with East Anglia in England, especially with the trading town of Ipswich, among the largest towns in Anglo-Saxon England. Numerous pottery finds that have been made in Ipswich date to the seventh and eighth centuries, bearing impressed pagan motifs, even though East Anglia was officially Christian. Thus Ipswich was supplying pagan wares to the Frisians and may itself have been a pocket of paganism in Christian East Anglia. In general Frisians and East Anglians, some of the latter perhaps of Frisian descent, must have engaged for centuries in cross-cultural contacts that may never be known in detail. (The Frisian language is closer to English than to Dutch.) The Anglo-Saxon Saint Willibrord, aided by Saint Boniface, was apostle to the Frisians in the eighth century and with the backing of the Frankish king Pippin II established a bishopric at Utrecht.
During and after the Middle Ages the territory of Friesland passed into and out of the control of a number of northern kingdoms and states, including those of the counts of Holland and the duchies of Burgundy and of Saxony. Throughout this time, however, the Frisians stubbornly maintained their autonomy as a people and retained their own unique language. At the end of the 15th century Friesland was given to the duchy of Saxony by the Holy Roman Emperor. Because the duke of Saxony was unable to establish his authority over Friesland, it reverted to the empire, and the Hapsburg emperor Charles V reduced the province by force in 1523. Later in the 16 th century Frisians took part in Dutch resistance
Frisians time line
Against the Spanish Hapsburg regime (which was using the Netherlands as a staging area for war against England). Friesland joined the United Provinces of the Netherlands in 1748.
Enduring Identity
Modern Friesland is an important dairy and cattle-rearing region. The marshlands of the past have been transformed with canals and artificial lakes.
Part of the old Frisian territory is in present-day Germany, but the people there still speak the Low German Frisian language and maintain ties with Frisians in the Netherlands. There are also descendants of Frisians living on the coast of the Jutland Peninsula and nearby islands.
CULTURE (see also Germanics) Economy
During the Middle Ages cattle and sheep rearing were the most important means of support, supplemented by fishing, trading, and shipping. A cattle breed, the Frisian, still exists. A wool industry emerged through the manufacture of a coarse woolen cloth with a shaggy nap on one side, traded in large quantities to the English, who called it frieze. Because relatively little land was safe from flooding, imports of grain were important.
Government and Society: Lex Frisionum
The customary laws of the Frisians were written in 790 as the Lex Frisionum under the auspices of Charlemagne, who was compiling such bodies of law from the peoples he conquered in order to take local law into account in his effort
FRIULIANS
Location:
Northeastern Italy
Time period:
Second century b. c.e. to present
Ancestry:
Unknown
Language:
Friulian (Rhaeto-Romanic)
At promulgating a consistent law code for his empire. In common with other Germanic law codes that of the Frisians was based on a system of monetary fines to be paid for transgressions, which gave rise to the concept of wergild, “man price,” the amount of a fine based on status.
During the Middle Ages Frisians were able to resist incorporation in the feudal and manorial systems that dominated much of Europe, possibly because the challenges of farming their region made the land unattractive to lords who were seeking agricultural wealth. Frisian farmers retained the status of free peasants largely governing themselves according to the principle of folkright, the collective will of the people as embodied in rules and laws that had been established over time, interpreted by local assemblies.
Because their low-lying homeland was subject to frequent flooding, the Frisians constructed terpen, earthen mounds, on which to build their homes. Terpen functioned as small villages, and some of the larger of them had their own churches. Typically a terp with a church would have some 100 inhabitants—12 farms and four houses of craftsmen. Terps without churches would have had little more than three farms.
Of the many small Germanic tribes who have appeared in history the Frisians have been among the most tenacious in maintaining their identity as a distinct people. Their language has played a large part in this, but their territory, for so long marginal, as much sea as land, which required tenacity of its inhabitants but also spared them from encroachment, must also have fostered their stout autonomy and stubborn maintenance of their own folkright.
World History
