Friesian Horse Association

The Country

“Friesland” (“Fryslan” in the Friesian language) is one of the twelve provinces of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, situated in the northwest of Europe. It covers an area of ten percent of the Netherlands 750,000 acres and it has only four percent of the population. The main source of income for the 550,000 inhabitants is agriculture. Over nine-tenths of the soil is permanent grassland on which the well-known black and white Friesian cattle are kept. Cheese, condensed milk and butter are exported. The much sought-after Frisian seed potatoes, grown on the arable land, are sold mainly to the countries around the Mediterranean Sea.

Friesland is an old country. 500 years B.C. Frisians settled along the borders of what is known now as the North Sea. Frisian horsemen served in the Roman Legions, e.g. the Equites Singulares of Emperor Nero (54-68), and in Great Britain near Hadrian's Wall, built in the year 120. A tombstone of a Frisian soldier, who had served in the Roman Army, has been found in Cirencester (Gloucestershire) in England. Around the beginning of our era, the area extending from Belgium (the Swin) to the Weser (in western Germany) along the coast of the “Friesian Sea”, as the North Sea was then called, was under Frisian jurisdiction. Later this area reached up to and beyond the borders of Denmark. The name “Friesian Islands”, in German “Friesische Inseln”, for the islands along the coast, still reminds us of this time. The Frisians were seafarers, tradesmen, horsebreeders and farmers. Before the Vikings also took to the seas (800-1000), they were the great seaborne traders. They sailed the Friesian Sea, the bordering rivers and the adjacent seas. In the English town of York they had a permanent trading post for centuries. Dorestad was their own trading town. Cloth was an important merchandise.

The gradual rising of the sea, caused by the melting of the ice on the poles together with the sinking of the earth, forced the Frisians to built mounds (Du.: terpen, wierden), on which they could build their houses and safeguard themselves against floods which came ever higher. One thousand of these mounds are known. Most towns and villages along the coast were built on them. Around the year when the territory of the Frisians was restricted to the North of the Netherlands and neighboring Germany, sea-walls kept the land free from the continually higher floods. Heightening the sea-walls, a process that has been carried out unremittingly through the centuries, is now again in progress. The sea-walls are now built up nearly four times as high as four hundred years ago. The height at Harlingen was then (1570) 2.60 m above N.A.P. and in 1977, after the latest construction activities, 9.70 m above N.A.P. (N.A.P.: “nauwkeurig Arnsterdarns peil” = “exact Amsterdam water-mark”, originally the average height of the water in the open lake called “IJ” at Amsterdam).

The territory of the “Westerlauwers Frisians”, as they are called now, is nowadays restricted to the province of Friesland in the northwest of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. Four of the five inhabited Dutch Friesian Islands form a part of the Province of Friesland. The Frisians have a language of their own which is spoken as a matter of course by four/fifths of the inhabitants. It has more in common with English than with Dutch. Typical for the silhouette of the flat landscape are the towers with saddle-roofs, the large head-neck-and-trunk-type farmhouses and the “stelpen” with living quarters, cattle-shed and stack for hay and corncrops, all covered by one large roof. From West to East the soil consists of clay, peat and sand, respectively, each of these nearly covering one third of the area. In the North and West the country is open. The South-West and the middle harbor the Friesian Lakes. The sandy soil in the East and South is more heavily wooded.

In this country lives the somewhat conceited Frisian, attached to tradition, sensitive, often passionate, who loves to meet others in sports and games and who has retained his Friesian horse through the centuries.