The Dutch (12 page)

After the excitement subsided, rumors spread that before starting their journey to Russia; the ships picked up embargoed arms in England and delivered them to the Schmalkaldic League of German Princes. The rumors were true, and Reylana Roulfs was also a major shareholder in that partnership. The profits from the sale of forbidden weapons in Germany and furs in the Netherlands were astronomical. The emperor, Charles V, began raising questions about the journey because he was about to go to war again against many of the Protestant German Princes who received the English arms. Reylana and her associates bribed the crown officials investigating the incident to report to the emperor there was little evidence that anyone had knowingly broken the law. The emperor was told that many of the people involved were the same persons who had been loyally acquiring Frisian war horses for his army. The emperor knew those horses would be difficult to obtain elsewhere and left the matter pass after issuing a order that no ships in the Hapsburg empires carry any arms to Germany in the future.

Once again Reylana wisely curtailed all venture activities to attract as little attention as possible. She used her profits to purchase two large tracts of vacant land adjacent to the boat yard which she titled in the names of their two sons. After this experience, Reylana tried to restrain her business activities and spend more time with the family, but soon became so depressed that even Henri urged her to resume her less dangerous ventures. That same year, Johanna Rudderman quietly passed away willing all her possessions, including the house and shipyard to “Her son Henri and her daughter Reylana.” Henri and the boys were devastated by the loss, but it was Reylana who was most affected by the good woman's passing. Johanna was her best friend and a surrogate parent to her sons. With her passing, Reylana understood that she would have to spend more time with her children and have less time for her own interests. Reylana didn't know that future events would make her personal sacrifice more complicated, difficult, and painful.

The populace welcomed the ascension of Jacobus van Weir as the new ruler of the Droger Land, almost as much as they mourned the passing of the Great Lord Derick. Jacobus' role in initiating the land reclamation was well known to his subjects who knew Derick's son to be an effective leader and a valiant warrior. The sudden return of much colder and wetter weather were erasing many of the earlier gains in agricultural in the south. Jacobus' reappointment of Brother Clovis to again supervise agricultural production was greeted with approval by the people. Despite the failure of almost half the grain crop the previous season, a few sunny days had allowed farmers to salvage vegetables and harvest enough clover to feed livestock. All knew building the extra grain silos had been an innovation championed by the new lord and his wife. Their foresight meant the Duchy had enough stored grain which was carefully rationed and had lasted until the spring planting. Fortunately, the price of Baltic wheat stayed stable because of bountiful harvests in the east where the weather remained unchanged. The emptied silos were already receiving shipments of Baltic grain at Lord Lucas's expense. It made the people confident that the Builder Lord Derick had groomed his son Jacobus well as his successor.

The birth of five healthy children and three possible male heirs had raised Lady Hester Goeden van Weir's vaunted status in the eyes of her subjects. Her grace and fertility easily won her acceptance as the matriarch of the realm. Her efforts to develop education for the Duchy's children made her beloved. She helped to create two more early schools for the boys of the most common born men and a small secondary school where the sons of the more prominent citizens could continue their education. A new early school for girls was under construction and the very idea that girls would be educated was well received by the matrons of the realm. In her desire to bring better education to the realm, Lady Hester needed to find qualified teachers for her schools. She wanted to staff each with Franciscan monks and nuns, although her in-laws knew that more clergy traditionally meant a rise in religious unrest. Her in-laws were well aware that some of the new clergy would come to proselytize the Catholic faith and its special interests. It was no surprise when the new clergy arrived and some quickly focused on two very different issues. The first was the rather lackadaisical adherence to the rules of fasting by the population; the second, the almost token fief paid to the church at harvest. At this time, the Catholic Church strictly required its members to fast one hundred and eighty days each year. Drogerlanders enjoyed eating well when food was plentiful, and never embraced the extreme orthodox tenet of fasting. In the entire Duchy, only a handful of people took any abstention seriously except during the holy days around Easter. With regard to the fief, the free farmers were well aware the church's share of their crops was but a quarter paid by serfs or peasants elsewhere. The people and the ruling family wanted that annual “contribution” to remain low. They newer clergy hoped to increase the fief to finance the construction of a monastery and convent.

The Catholic Church's universal prohibitions against meat and dairy products during times of fasting made abstention difficult in the interior of the Netherlands because of the decreasing reliance on grain as the main source of nutrition in the people's diet. With less access to fresh fish, and eating smaller amounts of grain, the inland Dutch were consuming larger amounts of poultry, meat, and cheese, the consumption of which was forbidden during times of fast. The overall public discontentment with fasting would contribute to the ultimate success of the future Protestant Reformation in countries that were less dependent on grain products to feed their populations. Both issues would soon open another window of conflict between the van Weir family and the Catholic Church. This dispute was surfacing well before the Protestant Reformation, at a time when the Catholic Church still reigned supreme over the kings, nobles, and the people of Europe. The van Weirs were experienced in such warfare. Before his death the great Lord Derick envisioned the conflict when his daughter-in-law Hester had first proposed staffing the schools with Franciscans.

Had his son, Jacobus, proposed opening new schools with religious teachers, Lord Derick would have refused him because of his awareness of the problems that would surely arise. Yet, he found it impossible to refuse Lady Hester anything. She had filled his household with the warmth that had been missing since his wife's death. By this time, two grandsons and a granddaughter was born to extend his bloodline. Lord Derick understood why the Duke of Ghent became captivated by this girl. For his last birthday, Hester had used her talents to give her father-in-law a gift that hung in the main hall of the castle for all to see. Using the mapmaker's bland map of the realm as a guide, she created a huge oil painting that depicted the entire Duchy. It showed a landscape of plenty in brilliant natural colors that highlighted the castle. The existing salt water marshes in the north remained but she had imagined a new great lake, rather than a swamp, as the boundary in the south. Derick loved her depiction of his beloved domain.

He decided Hester would have her schools, but he would take a few precautions to keep the churchmen in-check after his death. For each proposed school location, he limited construction to the school itself, a chapel and a small residency. He crafted a written agreement that allowed for the expulsion of the Franciscan order for intentional or unintentional disruptions to the domain. Derick demanded that the document be signed by the Head of the Franciscan Order before any monk or nun entered the Droger Land. The older lord recognized that even this high priest would eventually recant the agreement when the opportunity arose; the family had dealt with such church officials for a thousand years. This meant the Bishop must also be neutralized. Lord Derick paid an outright bribe to the Dutch Bishop for a document which kept the Church's fief at the current level for another hundred years. It also legalized his agreement with the Franciscans under Canon law. Finally, he ordered a search of the family's archives for the document from a previous Pope awarding the family the title “Defender of the Faith”. He imagined the document would be useful when the signed agreements were questioned by these same churchmen. He expected the questioning to begin upon his demise and wanted the “Defender” document at Jacobus' fingertips to prove the family's loyalty to the Catholic Church.

Meanwhile, Lord Jacobus and Brother Clover took an almost scientific approach to the new agricultural problems caused by the wetter and colder climate. They both had helped Derick in making crucial decisions about the use of the land and the storage of grain and knew those wise decisions allowed the Duchy to avoid famine as the most recent grain crops began to fail. Their population had suffered but had not starved. Brother Clover urged that they must work within the new weather patterns. The ex-monk had long ago convinced Jacobus that man and not God was the ultimate steward of the land. History told both of them that the Netherlands had seen such periods of foul weather in the past. They understood that nature, rather than God's wrath, controlled these cycles and openly shared these opinions with their farmers who were told to sow for the present conditions.

Despite the foul wet weather, the northern half of the Droger Land was producing abundant meat and dairy products and still shipping a surplus to the coast. The pastoral farmers were prospering. Their animals were producing leather, wool, and curd to meet the almost insatiable demands of Holland's burgeoning industries. It was the southern part of the Duchy, and on the island settlements, that the wet weather was causing the real disruptions. The main crop of grain was faltering when late summer storms caused the grain stalks to touch the ground, making the crop inedible for people and farm animals. The farmers in the south were forced by the natural events to rely on the production of two fields as the crops on the third perished. A single crop of winter grain meant purchasing great quantities of Baltic wheat or finding other food to replace the grain. The southern farmers needed to find a survivable third crop, one with commercial value that could be traded for grain and grown in any weather.

Lord Jacobus and Brother Clover knew that the Droger Land had two innovations for dealing with excessive water. The first was the patchwork of drainage ditches Wilhelm Wind built across the mainland and on the larger islands. Those ditches still removed the water after the heaviest of rains. The crops nearest them produced a reasonable harvest and escaped the nastiest affects of flooding. They protected the nearby fields from serious soil erosion and allowed the fields to dry quickly when the sun returned. The second great asset was the canal. It acted as a giant spillway keeping the water level from rising above the existing farmland, no matter how torrential the downpour. As they watched the excess water drain off the land, Lord Jacobus and Brother Clover could only admire the late Wilhelm Wind's genius and vision. They decided to gather hired men and vagrants to deepen and expand Willie's drainage system so that more water from heavy rains could be quickly dispersed.

Brother Clover singled out farmers with the wettest soil, strongly suggesting that more turnips and clover be planted instead of grain. Such farmers were instructed to plant commercial items that they were already growing in their gardens where grain had been grown. It was the beginning of a plan to dramatically increase the production of cash crops. Brother Clover knew that certain dye plants grew well in moist soil, as did the two important commercial crops of flax and hemp. Flax was in great demand by garment makers in the cities and was a cool season crop that was planted in April and matured by August. Hemp, used to make rope, could be planted any time and grew well in damp weather and new ways to process it were discovered. It also gave a good cash return when harvested, because rope was needed by the growing shipbuilding industry.

Soon Lord Lucas was forced to turn his attention from nature to the clergy who believed they had a more important calling. A few months after Derick's death, a delegation of five teaching monks, led by a firebrand priest imported from Brussels for the occasion, met with Jacobus in the grand hall. They made three demands. The first was that the church be given vacant land to build a monastery and convent to replace the residencies they claimed were inadequate. The second was for an immediate increase in the annual fief paid by farmers as compensation for the cost of the new buildings. The last demanded that Lord Jacobus utilize his soldiers to force the observance of all the fast days of God's Holy Church. Lord Jacobus respectfully allowed the imported spokesman to complete his presentation and when he finished he asked the priest a single question, “Good Father, who gave you permission to enter the Droger Land?” The priest replied, “God has sent me.”

After a few minutes of silence Lord Jacobus said, “All clergy who enter our domain are required to seek permission to visit this land, and in not doing so, you have broken our laws.” As prearranged, two soldiers removed the priest and placed him on the first salt barge heading for the coast. Lord Lucas told the remaining leaderless monks that the housing built for them was adequate, if not spacious for their needs, particularly since each was bound by a vow of poverty. He went on to tell them that the fief the church received from farmers was recently renegotiated and would not be changed. He also explained that his soldiers existed for the defense of his realm and would never be used against his people. The young Lord then reminded the priests that the Order had promised not to disrupt the realm; if they were unhappy, they were free to leave the Droger Land, and other arrangements would be made for teaching children. The remaining priests, surprised by the young Lords determination, said they wished to ponder his words. While he lived, Lord Jacobus never heard those requests repeated and the priests confined their activities to teaching. Jacobus was happy to let the matter drop for all his attention turned to another growing unrest that was spreading through the Low Countries. This turbulence would have fatal consequences and affected the continuity of the family's rule.

The changes in Flanders at this time were not only limited to agriculture. The region of Lady Hester's birth was in turmoil as the people themselves were experimenting with the very fabric that held the feudal system together. Craftsmen, bonded together in trade associations called “guilds,” were demanding political power and challenging the position of nobility within society. Every Flemish textile-producing city had a strong guild of weavers whose members served as part-time soldiers in the city's militia. The units were formed to protect each city from external threats, but there were times when a guild's military strength decided which noble would rule their metropolis. Sometimes, militias from different cities banded together to influence who would rule all of Flanders.

Flanders was a suzerain of the French King, giving him paramount control over the mostly autonomous region, but the Flemish people were devoted to the Kings and Queens of England across the channel. Their loyalty was based on economics, though the population's high Anglo-Saxon ancestry played a role in the equation. The Flemish textile industry made city dwellers rich but it relied on imported English wool for its survival. When these shipments of fleece were disrupted for any reason, Flanders experienced periods of chaos and discontent. The larger and richer cities of Flanders had purchased vast privileges and liberties from French Kings, which fueled the power of their militant guild members. These privileges allowed these weavers to adapt tactics and weapons that allowed common born men, to challenge the previously overwhelming military might of a formation of armored knights. Simple weapons such as the geldon (a long spear), or the Goedendag (a form of club with a spike at the end for thrusting) were found to be extremely effective against a heavily armored knight. When the thirteenth century began, a force of Flemish militiamen armed with such weapons defeated the French king's feudal army of knights and squires. That victory later inspired the Scottish triumph over the English at Brandenburg, where longer spears (called pikes) similar to the geldon were used by common born Scotchmen to rout an army of English knights.