Episode 43: The Pirate Den of Sluis

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When the treaty of Montils-lez-Tours was signed on October 30, 1489, “peace” was formally arranged between the French, the Habsburg ducal government under Albert of Saxony in the Low Countries and the rebelling cities of Flanders. Despite this, Philip of Cleves and Albert of Saxony seem to have read the treaty in very different ways and could not agree with each other about what it actually meant. Also, Bruges and Ghent, still the two most powerful Flemish cities, were not quite ready to accept the peace either, meaning instead of a peace, the situation in Flanders could better be described as a stalemate. Albert of Saxony would try his best to fix the economy of Flanders, whilst Philip of Cleves, ensconced firmly within the town of Sluis, would do his best to wreck it, living every kid’s dream and becoming a pirate. This continuing unrest in Flanders would directly lead to an outburst of violence in Holland, where finally, after 150 years of on-again off-again conflict, the Hook and Cod wars would come to an end.

Albert of Saxony attempts to re-establish order

To begin this episode, we first want to take a look at some of the reforms introduced by Albert of Saxony, aka Albert Animosus, in his attempts to re-establish order within Flanders. Albert proved himself to be a more politically and militarily capable regent of Flanders than Maximilian had been. Perhaps this is because he did not carry the weight of expectation nor hubris that Maximilian had shown. A few changes of the changes which he introduced almost as soon as becoming regent show that he had a more adept understanding of the socio-political complexities involved in ruling the Low Countries than the Habsburg prince had had. 

Foremost of these was that he attempted to create a body of advisors from within the States General, telling the respective territories to send deputies his way to serve on the board. It is unclear whether this advisory board ever functioned at full strength, considering the respective estates had to foot the bill to send their own representatives, but the intent was definitely there. When he wrote to the bailiff of Hainault requesting deputies be sent from that province, he said that it was “in order to provide daily with us for everything that might happen ... for as long as our lord, the king, is absent and to take notice of, aid and conduct the affairs of the province together with the deputies of the other provinces”. In other correspondence he said that the reason for having an advisory board, which he claimed to be Maximilian’s idea but which sounds pretty un-Maximilian-like, was so that “the Estates will know and understand that we wish them to be informed of everything.” The entire crisis that had erupted following the death of Charles the Bold had definitely served to enhance the reputation, role and importance of the States General in a fashion that would become extremely important for the future direction of the Netherlands. The idea of having them send advisors displayed Albert’s magnanimity towards them, and was a definite change of tack from the days of the duke riding rough-shod over them. When Holland failed to send deputies to him in May, 1489, he gave them a good old telling off, but in doing so also told them that he required the cooperation of the advisors from the different estates to make up for his own short-comings in understanding the functional details of Low Country politics. “...as you can well imagine, and seeing that we do not know the nature of these provinces, we cannot conduct by ourselves ... and we have never desired, nor do so now, to conduct the said affairs other than by your advice and judgement.”

Among the affairs that he had to bring resolution to, the issues of Flemish insurrection and French aggression were foremost on his list. In a long-term sense, however, the most pressing problem was the economic devastation wrought by the decades of war and revolt, but also by Maximilian’s manipulation of the currency in circulation in Flanders. You may recall from episode 41, he had raised the seigneurial tax on silver after it had been kept stable for over half a century until then. Maximilian had done this without consulting the States General, after they had refused to pay him an aide to help fund his military expenditures. By putting more base metal into each coin that was minted, less silver was used in their production and could thus handily go into the ducal coffers. This had been done in the past by Philip the Good and Charles the Bold, but not to such a dramatic extent as under Maximilian. In his essay “Debasement of the coinage and its effects on exchange rates and the economy: in England in the 1540s, and in the Burgundian-Habsburg Netherlands in the 1480s”, which, as you can tell by its catchy title, conducts a meticulous post-mortem into the manners and minutiae of the maelstrom of monetary mayhem in the middle ages, historian Peter Spufford goes into this in much greater detail than we ever could. But basically whereas Philip the Good and Charles the Bold would respectively make about 240 and 500 Flemish pounds groot per year by doing this, in 1488 alone Maximilian raised 19000 pounds groot from his mints by the debasement of the coins. This led to grave inflation, with Flemish coins losing 66% of their value compared to Rhenish florins in the space of just over 20 years, with most of that happening in the latter years of the 1480s. In addition, there were sky-rocketing food prices, the price of wheat doubled between 1487-1489, and the price of rye tripling in the same period. To add to the economic entanglement was the fact that Ghent was still minting its own coins - Coppenholes. Albert recognised that all of this caused “greater damage than the war.”

On December 14, 1489, a monetary ordinance was passed which was intended to remedy this situation. In contrast to Maximilian, Albert of Saxony and his close ally, Engelbert II, Count of Nassau, produced this after months of negotiations with the States General, and the resulting agreement was very much in favour of the nobility and clergy. Instead of gradually combating inflation, the ordinance basically tried to wind the clock back to the last years of Philip the Good’s reign, and made all the old coins which had been made during the debasement years worth one third the value they had previously been. As Peter Spufford writes, “the accompanying regulations dealt with the valuation of debts and obligations incurred at various dates during the debasement period since St John’s day in 1487, but lumped together all obligations entered into before that date, even though the coinage had been changed a number of times between 1467 and June 1487. The rates given were lopsidedly and decisively in favour of creditors, and those who were in receipt of sums fixed in money of account … an annuity of 10 pound groot which could have been met by payments of 40 Andries gulden early in 1487, and by payments of only 20 gulden in the second half of 1489, was now reckoned to need payments of 60 gulden.” So, great, just before Christmas, in 1489, those debts you needed to pay off suddenly became three times bigger than you had expected. As 16th century Flemish historian Emanuel van Meteren wrote of this, “no sooner was the rumour of the intended alteration of the coin spread abroad, than the unwanted sight was seen of debtors hurrying to their creditors with bags of money, insisting upon being allowed to pay their debts immediately, while the creditors carefully concealed themselves from the sight of their debtors, to avoid their offers of payment” Although this is delightful to read about, it must have been less delightful to live through. The following years would be filled with legal disputes between debtors and creditors as they tried to figure all of this out, and the States General would continue fiddling with the currency until 1496, when a stable coinage would finally be reached. This intervening period of uncertainty, however, led to the bankruptcy not only of many individuals, but also of entire towns, such as Amsterdam, Dordrecht, Leiden, Haarlem, Leuven, Diest, Lier, Brussels, Den-Bosch, Bruges, Ninove, Hulst, Ath and Sint-Truiden. So yeah, things weren’t great.

The ongoing problem of Philip of Cleves

Another problem facing Albert of Saxony was the issue of what to do about Philip of Cleves. As you will recall from the end of the last episode, Philip of Cleves had been forced to get out of Brabant as the tides of war turned against him, and holed himself up within the walls of Sluis. Although he had formally agreed to the Peace of Montil-lez-Tours, which had brought about an end to the Flemish revolt, Philip remained in close contact with Jan van Coppenhole in Ghent, as well as the city of Bruges. Both of these towns had also agreed to the peace, though had not yet formally submitted to the ducal government. On the day upon which the monetary ordinance was announced, Philip of Cleves paid a visit to Bruges and the next day went to Ghent. Given that he was pretty much controlling the seas around Zeeland with his navy and base at Sluis, the merchants of Bruges especially were somewhat at his mercy to ensure their trade would be able to continue. At the end of January 1490, Bruges opened its gates to Engelbert van Nassau and submitted to him, whilst Damme, located between Bruges and Sluis, submitted to Albert of Saxony. Ghent stubbornly refused their entry.

In the spring of 1490, ambassadors representing Albert of Saxony appeared at Sluis to speak with Philip of Cleves and to bring into effect the terms of the Peace of Montil-lez-Tours. Despite having agreed to the peace treaty, however, Philip of Cleves was not going to just humbly lay down his arms to the German armies. He had not been defeated militarily and, situated as he was behind the thick walls of Sluis and in total control of the naval arena, he was basically untouchable. Molinet outlines the details of this meeting, though gets the chronology wrong, placing it in 1491 rather than 1490. Albert of Saxony made two key demands of Philip. The first was that the city council of Sluis be replaced with people more amenable to the ducal administration, to which he agreed. The second demand was that Philip should hand over control of the city and its castles to Albert of Saxony. If they had been hoping for a simple, “Righto, here you go”, they were sorely mistaken. Molinet writes that Philip of Cleves began his response with, “I am very dumbfounded by the words that are being dictated to me at present”, before telling the ambassadors that he had been sent word from Charles VIII, the King of France, that he and Engelbert of Nassau had agreed that Sluis was to remain under Philip’s control “until the arrival of the two kings” [meaning Maximilian and Charles VIII]. After this, he launched into a lengthy rant explaining, once again, the sequence of events which had led to his swapping places with Maximilian inside Bruges and swearing to defend the peace against anyone who broke it. Philip of Cleves had stuck by all of his oaths, whereas Maximilian had proven that he could not be trusted to stick by any promises he had made. As George W Bush once most coherently said, “fool me once, shame on…shame on you…fool me can’t get fooled again.” Philip of Cleves argued that instead of being punished for his actions, he should actually now be getting rewarded by Maximilian for everything which he had done. It is pretty clear that Philip of Cleves intractable sense of honour was going to remain a rather large spanner in the ducal cog. In his biography of Philip of Cleves, A. de Fouw humorously points out that at the end of these discussions, Philip tried to demonstrate his good intentions to the duke of Saxony by giving him a living lion. ‘Sorry, I’m not going to just surrender and obey, but here you go…have a lion.’

A couple of weeks after these failed talks, another embassy was sent to Philip of Cleves, this time from the leading citizens of Bruges. They, too, tried in vain to get Philip of Cleves to depart from Sluis, but the stubborn nobleman continued to stand his ground, for much the same reasons as outlined before. He wanted to be ensured of the lands and titles (most importantly, control of Sluis) that he had held before the conflict with Maximilian had begun and he wanted to be guaranteed payments which he was owed due to these titles. The merchants of Bruges now found themselves in the unenviable position of being stuck between a rock (which is to say Philip of Cleves’ obstinance) and a hard place (being once again under the control of the Habsburg ducal government). As Joey Spijkers writes in his essay on this topic, “In the following months, Philip's garrison at Sluis and that of Albert of Saxony at Damme ensured that, whichever side the city was on, its connection to the international waterways was hampered”. With its trade strangled by opposing hostile forces, Bruges was in a lose-lose situation, which would make it very difficult for them to keep to the peace treaty which they had only just agreed to. Considering that this whole conflict had begun when they opportunistically kidnapped Maximilian, however, and that Philip of Cleves had done them quite the solid by subbing himself in to defend them, it’s difficult to feel particularly sorry for Bruges at this point.

Philip of Cleves has Adrien Vilain, Lord of Rasseghem, murdered

After several more failed rounds of negotiation attempts, Philip of Cleves became convinced that diplomacy was now useless and instead decided to turn to violence. On the 12th of June, 1490, he sent a messenger to Ghent to issue a vetebrief to Adriaen Vilain, the Lord of Rasseghem. We mentioned vetebrieven in episode 39. This was basically a letter that one knight, or city, would send to another, renouncing peace between them and telling them to expect imminent violence. Philip was irate about Rasseghem’s involvement in the negotiations of the Treaty of Montil-lez-Tours. Rasseghem had been intimately involved in the rebellion against Maximilian in Ghent and Philip of Cleves had fully expected that Rasseghem would defend his interests in Tours. All of a sudden, however, Rasseghem had begun pushing for peace with the Archduke. Philip believed that Rasseghem had been bribed by Maximilian to jump ship and accused him of doing everything he could to be a hindrance to Philip’s claims and having done the opposite of all that he had promised to do. Philip even suggested that Rasseghem had been involved in an assassination plot against him. In Philip’s eyes Rasseghem was, to put it simply, a traitor, and in this letter wrote that “henceforth he beware of himself and of his own, for where he could find him, he would kill him”.

The messenger passed this letter to Rasseghem at the Ghent town hall, in front of the bailiffs and aldermen of Ghent, as well as Engelbert of Nassau’s secretary. Rasseghem is said to have read the letter thoroughly, then openly questioned whether Philip of Cleves would actually have the temerity to follow through with this plan. With the benefit of our kind of hindsight, it seems pretty strange to question the conviction of a man like Philip of Cleves, who had shown pretty convincingly over the last year that he was, if nothing else, a man of his word. The messenger is said to have replied that “his master was not in the habit of threatening people if he didn’t mean it,” which is a very fifteenth century way of saying “er… what do you reckon?”. Probably somewhat perturbed by this response, Rasseghem departed Ghent that evening under the protection of a bodyguard of 14 soldiers to go back to his castle. This was not a bad call, but on the way they were confronted by a group of 8 of Philip’s men, who had been told that if they failed to carry out his plan they were to never appear before him again. Rasseghem’s bodyguards decided that the only bodies they actually wanted to guard were their own and ran away, leaving Adriaen Villain, the Lord of Rasseghem, to have seventeen vengeful holes poked into his body. Then, with a true sense of chivalric theatre, his attackers draped his body in black velvet and left it outside of his wife’s house in Ghent, illuminated by 8 torches, courtesy of Philip of Cleves. And to think that, only a few hours earlier, Rassaghem had legitimately asked whether the Lord of Sluis was a man of his word.

From this point, Philip of Cleves decided to wage a piratical war along the coast of Flanders. He issued letters of marque, which are basically instructions for people to fill their boots a-pirating against any hostile ship. These, he sent to a bunch of Danish warships which he had brought into his service. Very quickly, the waters around Flanders became inhospitable to any and every vessel that wasn’t with Philip. Any goods which were on their way to Flanders would be captured by roving pirates, brought to Sluis, and then put up for sale there. This war would make Philip of Cleves a lot of money, but it also ensured that he was making enemies up and down the North Sea as he greatly disrupted the flow of trade goods upon which the economies of the whole area depended. The only way skippers could ensure that they would not fall victim to the pirates was to sail under the escort of Philip of Cleves’s own navy, or that of Frans van Brederode, the young Hook nobleman who Philip had named as the stadhouder of Holland.

The Hook invasion of Holland from Rotterdam

We spoke about Frans van Brederode last episode when we were discussing the Hook and Cod conflict which had re-ignited in Holland and Zeeland. We skipped through this story quite a bit last episode as we were more concerned with Philip of Cleves, so let’s go back a bit and fill in a few of the gaps we left behind. A lot of the details known about this conflict come from the writing of Cornelis van Alkemade, an 18th century historian who wrote a book entitled Rotterdam heroics under the city guardianship of the young Sir Frans van Brederode. In November and December of 1488 Rotterdam and Woerden were both captured by different and only loosely-aligned groups of Hook partisans. Woerden was occupied by Jan van Montfoort, of Utrecht civil war fame. Rotterdam was taken by a group of Hook partisans who had sailed to Holland from Sluis, with the young noble Frans van Brederode at their head. From Rotterdam, they set about trying to bring more cities, towns and villages under their control. This included setting fire to the towns of Schoonhoven and Delfshaven, which left the citizens of those towns incredibly annoyed, a state of being that would come back to bite the Hook rebels in the backside. 

Other leaders in this uprising were Brederode’s brother and his cousin, as well as a man called Jan van Naaldwijk. In late March 1489, they set off to capture the town of Geertruidenberg. With a fleet of 17 ships and a force of around 800 men, they stole up towards the gates of the water-encircled town and, led by Jan van Naaldwijk, stormed the gate with axes and the masts of their ships, which they used as battering rams. They had support from people within the walls and, with their help, managed to break into the city and push their way up into the centre of town. Geertruidenberg was now under Hook control.

Two weeks later, the Hook army set out from this new stronghold and stormed into the area to the south, towards Breda. Along the way, they mauraded through the countryside, ravaging farms and villages. The drost, or bailiff of Breda did his best to counter this aggression, managing to capture some of the culprits, whereupon they were taken into Breda and beheaded. According to van Alkemade, there was a strong possibility of a treaty between the Hooks and the ducal government of Breda, but this disintegrated as word arrived that Albert of Saxony was on his way to give the attackers a good old fashioned spanking, with Geertruidenberg the first city on his Hook hit-list. It is difficult to say whether this was true, but by the end of April they had given up on holding Geertruidenberg and headed back to Rotterdam.

By June, 1489, Jan van Egmond III, the Maximilian-appointed stadhouder of Holland, had encircled Rotterdam and laid siege to it. It was not long before the city faced serious food-supply issues and subsequent starvation. Brederode responded by calling the town’s citizenry together in a call-to-arms of sorts. They would all need to participate in going out and obtaining provisions. On the 3rd of June a fleet of around 40 ships was assembled, under the leadership of Jan van Naaldwijk, and departed Rotterdam, managing to evade the blockade. They sailed eastward, up one of the great branches of the river Maas and soon turned onto another river, the Lek, right next to a polder that had recently acquired the name kinderdijk, which will one day be globally famous and far, far more renowned than the events that are about to unfold in our story. Anyway…

By the early light of the next morning they had arrived near the town with the delicious sounding name, Lekkerkerk, which they intended to raid. However, their departure had been noted by their Cod enemies, who controlled most towns and had the backing of the government. Word quickly spread between towns like Gouda, Dordrecht, Schiedam and Schoonhaven, all of which contributed towards a fleet of their own. This armada set out at around 2 in the morning, following van Naaldwijk and his Hook navy up the river Lek, reaching them mid morning. They met each other between Lekkerkerk and the town on the opposite bank, Streefkerk, and the Cod navy introduced themselves when one of their six warships rammed into a 40 man rowed vessel, sinking it and dooming its men to a drowned demise.

Several hours of fighting soon saw the Hooks walking down struggle street or, more in line with the context of this story, floating down the river of regret. The wind was blowing them north-east towards the town of Schoonhoven which, as mentioned, they had set fire to the previous year. The Schoonhoveners had not forgotten this and came out of their town screaming, to attack the Hooks from behind. Encircled, exhausted and having lost several hundred of their number, Naaldwijk and his Hook navy were defeated. He managed to escape, along with several hundred others, and found refuge in one of the few remaining Hook strongholds, the town of Montfort, before making his way back to Rotterdam.

The food situation in Rotterdam was now so dire that another attempt had to be hastily arranged to resupply the starving city. Late at night on June 17, 1489, Jan van Naaldwijk set off with a fleet of 1200 men for the Hollandse Ijssel river, heading north-east from the blockaded city of Rotterdam. They met secretly with a force of men from Woerden, who provided them with the much needed food stuffs. On the way back, however, just near the town of Moordrecht, they were met with an even more secretly hidden (and much larger) Cod and ducal navy, supported by Austrian mercenaries. They had somehow got the inside tip that this mission was under way and managed to set up a devastating ambush, suddenly appearing out of haystacks and barns and houses and completely catching the Hooks by surprise. The resulting battle lasted around five hours and was a truly terrible defeat for the Hooks. A bunch of their leaders were killed, Jan van Naaldwijk was captured and only about 300 managed to return to Rotterdam.

The news of their defeat ended whatever slim chance Frans van Brederode had of keeping the fighting spirit alive in Rotterdam. On the 23rd of June, Brederode and the remaining Hooks were permitted by Jan van Egmont III to leave the city, so long as they left “all the necessities of war behind”. So it was that last episode we saw Brederode limp off with a sad and hungry little fleet to Sluis in June 1489, where Philip of Cleves provided him succour, allowing the defeated Hook partisans to lick their wounds and regroup.

The defeat of Brederode and Montfoort

Okay, so with that diversion out of the way, let’s get back to where we are now in the Philip of Cleves story and how this ties together. Having refreshed and recharged under Philip’s protection in Sluis, Frans van Brederode was now right in the centre of the pirating action. His ships spent the best part of a year roaming around the seas off Holland and Zeeland, terrorising any other vessel they found and escorting them, voluntarily or not, to Sluis. This was, like we said earlier, having dire consequences for the city of Bruges. No matter which side of the conflict between Philip of Cleves and the ducal forces Bruges chose to be on, their access to the sea was cut off. If they sided with the ducal forces, Philip’s pirate navy would blockade the seas. If they sided with Philip, Engelbert of Nassau and his powerful armies were in Damme. Remember that Damme is right in between Sluis and Bruges, so this also meant Bruges would be cut off from the source of its riches. There was also rising discontent within the city as food prices had gone through the roof, supplies were running low and incomes within the city had plummeted due to the already existing economic hardships, exacerbated by Bruges’ blockaded position.

In May of 1490, an embassy of Bruges’ leading citizens departed to the ducal court at Mechelen to plead with Albert of Saxony, asking him to remove the garrisons from Damme. In response, Albert of Saxony remained as obstinately defiant as Philip of Cleves, remarking that he would not take his armies out of Damme until Philip had evacuated from the two castles and town of Sluis. Albert of Saxony then further compounded their misery by demanding that Bruges implement the monetary reforms of six months ago, which, remember, had basically devalued the currency by two-thirds. Ooof. That plea for help backfired badly. Bruges then sent ambassadors, including their sheriff, to Sluis to try and negotiate an arrangement with Philip of Cleves to get supplies into the town, but along the way they were arrested by Engelbert of Nassau’s men from Damme. At this point, there was so much discontent within the rank and file of Bruges’ lower classes that a bunch of aldermen and the cream of Bruges’ society decided that enough was enough and bailed. Once again, Bruges found itself in a popular revolt against the Habsburg ducal government. Who could have seen that coming! For now, however, we are going to resist every urge we have to talk about yet another Flemish revolt - happening within the context of a still-on-going Flemish revolt - and put Bruges to the side. Don’t worry, we’ll get into it in the next episode. 

So with things heating up again, Frans van Brederode took a fleet of 38 ships out of Sluis and sailed into the Zeeland delta, intent on continuing the Hookish harrying of Holland and Zeeland. They raided the islands of Overflakkee and Duyveland, before threatening to attack Dordrecht. Jan van Egmont, the stadhouder of Holland, needed the big guns of the ducal army to help deal with this situation. In June, he was able to persuade Albert of Saxony to head into Holland with an army and put an end to the Hook uprising under Jan van Montfoort, who had been causing all sorts of problems with his occupation of Woerden. Instead of targeting Woerden itself, however, Albert of Saxony decided that the better option was to go and lay siege to the town of Montfoort, where Jan van Montfoort’s wife, Wilhelmina van Naaldwijk, defended the town.

With Albert of Saxony now back in Holland, Jan van Egmont now had the opportunity to assemble a fleet to go and put an end to Frans van Brederode. On the 23rd of July, Egmont and his larger navy were able to confront Frans van Brederode in the Brouwershaven Gat, a tight sea channel near the town of Brouwershaven. Despite bravely resisting the attack, Frans van Brederode’s fleet was doomed when the tides dropped and 16 of their ships ran aground. They desperately tried to continue the fight on land, but Frans van Brederode was shot in the knee and captured. At this moment, the Hook uprising essentially dissolved. Jan van Naaldwijk and 9 other ships were able to remain afloat and fled back to Sluis, where they would rock up on the 28th of July, 1490 in a dishevelled heap. As for Brederode, he and the other several hundred captives were taken to Dordrecht where they were paraded through the streets while people threw abuse and detritus at them. He was then locked up in a tower called the Puttoxtoren. Before he could be tried, Brederode succumbed to his injuries on the 11th of August, 1490.

This turn of events was a slap in the face for Jan van Montfoort and his Hook occupation of Woerden, which was now the last real Hook stronghold. According to Joey Spijkers, after 4 months of siege Montfoort’s hometown was finally no longer able to hold out against Albert of Saxony when an enterprising farmer did the Dutchest thing possible, and redirected the waters which fed into town’s moat, thereby draining it. Aware that there would be no further support, assistance or reinforcement coming since the heavy loss at Brouwershaven and the end of that siege, Montfoort surrendered to Albert of Saxony on August 24, 1490. Montfort was made to kneel before Albert of Saxony bare-headed to beg forgiveness for his crimes. Once again, however, he was relatively leniently dealt with. Montfoort dropped his claims to the title of Lord of Purmerend-Purmerland, which had been given to Jan van Egmont and which, for him, had sparked this entire conflict. He was, however, allowed to retain his ancestral lands so…go figure. The chronicle of Naaldwijk quotes the ceremony “Lord, so far you have signed calling yourself the castellan of Montfort. The city is now in our hands. We give it back to you, and from now on, sign lord of Montfort”. Despite being allowed to keep the city, however, Montfoort was required to demolish its walls and not rebuild them for at least 10 years; he was also to have an army from Holland garrison the town, with the permission of the bishop of Utrecht, David of Burgundy.

The end of the Hook and Cod Wars

With this, the Hook and Cod wars in Holland were finally done and dusted, after nearly 150 years of on-again/off-again eruptions. Before we absolutely consign these conflicts to the chapters of the past, however, let’s just remind ourselves of what they mean for the History of the Netherlands. Perhaps most importantly, as Historian Maarten Aleva put it, let’s remember that, although we call them ‘the Hook and Cod wars’, “contemporaries described the conflicts as feuds of the nobility and not as war.”

There had been several phases and major events. The succession crisis of the 1340s between William V and his mother, the plight of Jacqueline of Bavaria in the 1410s, trying and failing to stave off the ambitions of her powerful cousin Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy, the Utrecht civil wars from the 1450s into the 1480s and this recent phase, under the stewardship of Frans van Brederode and his allies. Each phase was different from the other, as they occurred over the course of a century and a half. The fact is that these societies in the region changed drastically in those 150 odd years. By the way, if you are looking for our episode on the beginning of the Hook and Cod wars, then you are looking for episode 15 (Fuelling the Flames of Frisian Freedom). You won’t find a lot of detail on the original struggle between William IV and Margaret of Bavaria, behind whom the original factions first formed and came to be identified as Hook or Cod. In that episode, we dedicated a whole… paragraph to it, having chosen rather to focus more on the plight of Frisians in their own comparable, correlated and contemporary conflict. However, without wanting to be too braggadocious, it is pleasing to look back at what we said back then about the upcoming Hook and Cod wars before we started to bring them into our narrative. Yes, I am going to quote myself…

“...The underlying issues that will fuel the Hook and Cod wars are pretty much the same as what we saw cause the eruption of violence in Flanders… (Being the battle of Golden Spurs etc) The forces of urbanisation, growing trade wealth, and the demand of town citizens for rights had spread into Holland. Different groups and factions had emerged, who would ally themselves with whatever other parties they saw as sharing their interests.”

We feel pretty comfortable sticking by that assessment and feel that it holds up for the entirety of these conflicts, even as the main players and their differing dynamics and levels of power changed throughout. Towards the end of this conflict, many in Holland had become fed up with the partisan identities of the factions. This is probably best illustrated by an ordinance of the Amsterdam city council on December 26, 1481, which made it illegal for anyone to say “Thou art a Hook” or “thou art a Cod”. We can only imagine how awful the political discussions must have been over Christmas dinners in Amsterdam 1481 for this to have been deemed necessary the next day. Despite this particular case, these identities still lingered in Hollandish culture for long after, particularly in an expression used to describe an atmosphere of tension and conflict. If you are in a situation where things seem uncomfortable and on the verge of breaking into a fight…like Christmas dinner, then “Het gaat er Hoeks en Kabeljauws aan toe”. It’s about hooks and cods.

So with that, we will leave this chapter of Dutch history behind and, for this episode, leave things where they sit. Philip of Cleves is the pirate prince of Sluis, Bruges is back in revolt, France still exists and so is therefore still a threat, the English king has an eager eye on it all from across the channel and in Holland, even if the Hook and Cod conflict is apparently the over, the underlying issues behind it - urban power dynamics, lingering feudal social structures and the rise of mercantilism - will very much still remain with us. A lot of those issues will come to bear further north in Holland, as the bread and cheese folk make their way onto the scene. But that, ladies and gentlefolk, is for another time and for another episode of History of the Netherlands.

Sources Used

Monarchies, States Generals and Parliaments by Helmut Koenigsberger

’Debasement of the coinage and its effects on exchange rates and the economy: in England in the 1540s, and in the Burgundian-Habsburg Netherlands in the 1480s’ by Peter Spufford in Money in the Pre-Industrial World edited by John H. Munro

The History of Holland and the Dutch Nation: From the Beginning of ..., Volume 1 by Charles Maurice Davies

‘Politiek en economie: de crisis der late XVe eeuw in de Nederlanden’ by R. van Uytven in Revue belge de Philogie et d’Histoire / Année 1975, 53-4, pp. 1097-1149

Chroniques de Jean Molinet. T. 3 and T. 4

Philips van Kleef by A. de Fouw

‘Punished and corrected as an example to all’ by J. H. Spijkers

Rotterdamse heldendaden onder de stadvoogdy van den jongen Heer Frans van Brederode by Cornelis van Alkemade

Vaderlandsche historie. Deel 4 by Jan Wagenaar

De Vlaamse Opstand van Filips van Kleef en de Nederlandse Opstand van Willem van Oranje: Een vergelijking by Jelle Haemers and Louis Sicking

‘The Burgundian Netherlands, 1477–1521’ in The New Cambridge Modern History, chapter by C. A. J. Armstrong