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Flemish Settlement in England, Scotland, and Wales.
EnglandBack in the 12th century, Flanders - a region of Belgium - had been devastated by floods and was becoming dangerously overpopulated. Many Flemings escaped to England. Initially welcomed, they soon began to irritate their hosts.
Henry I's solution to this little local difficulty was to shift them en masse to a remote farming settlement in south Pembrokeshire.
It was a move that created a divide in Pembrokeshire between the native Welsh and the incoming Flemish/English that exists to this day. The legacy of 12th century Flemish incomers is 'Little England beyond Wales'.
Castles were built - the Landsker Line stretched from Newgale to Amroth. The Chronicle of the Welsh Princes records "a certain folk of strange origins and customs occupy the whole cantref of Rhôs the estuary of the river Cleddau, and drove away all the inhabitants of the land". It was almost ethnic cleansing.
The influx of Flemings was so great the Welsh language was eradicated south of the divide. Flemish gradually gave way to English but with a distinctive dialect and accent - traces of which can still be heard today.
The region has kept its anglicised culture and sense of separation ever since. Until 19th century it was the only English-speaking area of Wales away from the English border.
...Before Caesar's conquest of Britain, there were Low Dutch people who had immigrated into Britain from Flanders, because of floods. The Frisians conducted most of Britain's import and export trade before the invasions of the Anglo-Saxons in the fifth and sixth centuries. In the eighth century, England was a centre of learning. Some missionaries, like Willibrod and Boniface, worked among the Frislans. Then in the ninth and tenth centuries, the learned people of England - Alcuin among them - were driven by the attacks of the Danes to the Continent. In the latter half of the tenth century, the foreign trade of London laid the foundations of its future commercial greatness. Because of its relations with the merchants of the Dutch towns of Tiel and Dordrecht - the greatest commercial centres of that time - England's prosperity increased.
Following the Norman Conquest, there came many Flemish weavers who had a large share in the development of England. Dutch immigrants started sheep-farming, which was to contribute so much to England's early greatness. The Flemish type of industrial organisation inspired the formation of the English guilds of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. In the twelfth century Dutch merchants had their own private wharves in London and were members of the Guildhall. At the time of the Conquest, many Anglo-Saxon refugees settled in the Low Countries. Time and again, Dutch soldiers have fought on English soil, where some of their descendants now are. In 1165, for example, Henry II fought the Welsh with Flemish and Brabant troops.
With Dutch help, England had, soon after the period of Edward I, become the chief wool-growing country in Europe and the services of the cloth manufacturers of the Netherlands were promised: "They shall feed on fat beef and mutton till nothing but fullness shall stint their stomachs." Again, thousands of weavers came over as instructors and assistants to the English. England at this time was still a farming country, and the capital and enterprise of the Dutch were also courted, with the result that such artisans as linen-weavers, feltmakers and clock makers were introduced. Dutch printing presses became famous at an early date.
The first complete English Bible came from Holland, and Caxton learned his trade in the Netherlands. Many English writers like Wyclif, Chaucer and Thornas More spent some time in Holland and many of their countrymen took refuge in the Netherlands during the Wars of the Roses. The closest relations between England and the Dutch existed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. England was still short of all sorts of manufactures and most of the trade was in Dutch hands; even English fish-markets were supplied by Dutch fishermen. All this stimulated a close contact with Dutch methods, institutions and industries.
Intense Dutch immigration prepared the way for a Dutch prince on the British throne and for a large part England owes its subsequent prosperity to the effect of religious persecutors in the Netherlands. In 1527, when England's population numbered 5,000,000, London alone had 15,000 Flemings. In 1562, 40,000 more arrived and as many in the following years. On the other hand, royal action against the Plymouth Brethren drove English Protestants to Holland; but Cromwell again sent for Dutch divines as teachers. Thousands of English Protestants were to help the Dutch in their fight with the Spaniards, and English religious separatists went to Leyden and some sailed from there with the Mayflower to found New England. The Quakers, like many other sects, were products of Dutch sectarianism. William Penn's wife and mother were Dutch.
Dutch gunsmiths, tapestry-makers, glaziers, printers and especially skilled drainage workers brought many new arts. Dutch engineers helped to drain the fens of Cambridgeshire, Suffolk, Norfolk and many other counties - one Dutch engineer alone reclaimed about 400,000 acres. Dutch immigrants helped to develop Manchester and the cotton industry; Newcastle and the manufacture of steel; and Sheffield, where they introduced knife-making. Dutch feltmakers laid the foundation of the hat industry; Dutchmen made the cables and cordage for the Royal Navy; they introduced paper, soap, saltpetre, silk and lace-making. They took to England that most important commodity - tea! (Continues)
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Scotland
For the Anglo-Flemish, the half century between the Norman Conquest of 1066 and the witnessing of that Glasgow Inquisitio which brought them into Scottish affairs in 1116 must have seemed like the summit of the world. After the awe-inspiring repulse of the Vikings by their fathers in Flanders, they had gone on in their own time to reach and sustain a pinnacle of achievement never known before in the history of a nation. Nationhood itself was a very young concept. Family bonds, loyalty to a liege lord, be he count, duke or king, the honour of a sacred cause, adherence to the chivalry code - these things were what bound men together, with national borders apt to be secondary to kinship, perhaps because they were so unfixed. Those Flemings who had followed Count Eustace II of Boulogne to England in 1066 and received their territories there from William of Normandy, were now being offered large tracts of Scotland because their Lady had become that country’s Queen.
Scottish families known, or which are believed to be, of Flemish origin include Baird, Bruce, Cameron, Campbell, Douglas, Fleming, and Murray, among others.
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Wales
Flanders suffered greatly after a series of storms, in 1106. Samuel Lewis wrote, "During a tremendous storm on the coast of Flanders, the sand hills and embankments were in many places carried away, and the sea inundated a large tract of country."
This led a large number of Flemings to seek asylum in England, where they were welcomed by Henry I. They settled in various colonies across England, but soon, Samuel Lewis wrote, they "became odious to the native population", and Henry I moved the Flemings to the remote farming settlement in the cantref, a district of Rhôs, in south Pembrokeshire.
This systematic planting of Flemish settlers by Henry I, and later Henry II, had significant consequences for the people of south Pembrokeshire. Geography Professor, Harold Carter looks at the effects, "If you look at the 'Brut y Tywysogyon' - the Chronicle of the Welsh Princes - it records 'a certain folk of strange origins and customs occupy the whole cantref of Rhôs the estuary of the river Cleddau, and drove away all the inhabitants of the land'. In a way you could almost call it a process of ethnic cleansing."
A line of over 50 castles and strongholds was built by the Normans and Flemish to protect south Pembrokeshire from the indigenous Welsh, who had been forced to move to the hilly country in the north of the county. The frontier of castles, known as the Landsker line - from the Norse word for divide - stretched from Newgale on the west coast to Amroth on the south east coast.
Two thirds of the fortifications were earthworks, with stone castles on or near navigable waters. The castle at Haverfordwest was built by the Flemish leader Tancred, soon after the Flemish arrived in 1108. Under its protection a settlement developed and the foundations were laid for a modern market town and commercial centre. The village of Wiston, five miles north-east of Haverfordwest, derived its name from another Fleming, Lord Wizo, who established a castle there, while Letterston was the settlement of the suitably nicknamed Letard Litelking ('Little King').
Tenby, on the south east coast of Pembrokeshire, grew in the 12th Century, when surrounding walls, a castle and a church were erected for the convenience of the Flemish colonists. The Flemish were experts in the woollen trade, and soon flourished in the area.
The Flemish occupied the more productive farming land in Pembrokeshire, south of the Landsker line, in the lowland areas. Here the land was fertile and warmed by the Gulf Stream, enjoying Indian summers, mild winters and early springs. Crops were ready two weeks before those in the north of the county, where the terrain was more mountainous.
Before the Norman Conquest, the majority of what is now Pembrokeshire would have been Welsh speaking. The Landsker line became a cultural and linguistic boundary which divided Pembrokeshire into two.
The influx of Flemings into south Pembrokeshire was so great that the Welsh language was eradicated and Flemish gradually gave way to English as the dominant language. However, it was a dialect spoken with a strong and distinctive accent and with a large vocabulary of words not commonly found elsewhere.
In 1930, P.V.Harris wrote that, "in many ways the dialect of South Pembrokeshire is the most fascinating in Britain, and owing to the country's remoteness, perhaps the least adulterated in recent years. Many of the words are pre-Chaucerian which have fallen into disuse elsewhere and some of the more familiar words still have the earlier pronunciation." Some examples of dialect words recorded by Harris in 1930 are: Budger' , A butcher, 'Catamouse', the bat, 'Catchypawl', the tadpole, 'Frost Candles', Icicles, and 'Sea-parrot', the puffin.
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