_How the Dutch helped shape Norfolk

For centuries there have been strong links between Norfolk and the Low Countries through trade, wool and weaving, culture and arts. Later Dutch engineers drained The Fens to turn it into rich agricultural land and created a lasting harbour at Great Yarmouth.

Was Norfolk joined to the Continent?

Norfolk was joined to the Continent. It was only the final thawing of the last Ice Age around 5000BC that separated us, but during the past few millennia there has been constant traffic between our shores and those of Europe. Some have been invaders, pillagers or colonialists, but our ties with the Low Countries have been largely friendly, not least because of important trading links.

Through to the 18th century Norwich was the second city of England. It was a busy cultural capital, heavily settled by those who had come over the North Sea, including the Dutch and Huguenots escaping religious persecution, and even emigres from the French Revolution. Yes, the North Sea has always been a carrier, not a barrier.

How did the Norfolk and Norwich Festival start?

People from the Netherlands and Low Countries helped create many of Norfolk’s trades, its arts, its printing achievements and its painting traditions. At the hub of Norfolk’s great and farm-filled wheel, Norwich sponsored painting, writing, music and culture in general. Today’s Norfolk and Norwich Festival, the oldest arts festival in the country, is testament to that immigration.

The Norfolk coast is as close to the Netherlands, just 113 miles, as it is to London and in medieval times it only took a day to sail to Amsterdam, but four days to travel to London. At that time Norfolk was isolated by muddy marshland and dense forest so Norfolk has always looked to the Continent.

In fact, even now with daily KLM flights from Norwich International Airport to Schiphol it’s still quicker to get to Amsterdam than London!

The relationship began with fish, going back a thousand years when fishermen from the Low Countries dried out their nets on a small sandbank off the Norfolk coast that eventually became the Great Yarmouth sandspit. One of the earliest records of herring fishing at Yarmouth is in the Domesday Book, 1085.

Over the next few hundred years the size of the herring catches grew and so did the fleet of fishing boats – it’s thought that at one point in the 13th century the Dutch had over 1,600 boats off the coast of East Anglia. 

Each year September 21st was known known as ‘Dutch Sunday’, celebrating the rituals of the preparation for the fishing season. The Dutch fished the North Sea off Great Yarmouth until St. Catherine’s Day (25th November).

This is depicted in John Sell Cotman's Storm on a Yarmouth beach (1831) with Dutch fishermen and their nets and windmills.

This 1821 painting by George Vincent captures the essence of the Great Yarmouth Dutch Fair in the early 19th century. The Dutch transformed Yarmouth’s fishing industry. The town became famous for its’ 'silver darlings', herring fish cured in a manner developed by the Dutch fishermen.

By 1830s with the Dutch fishing fleets gradually declined making way for the Scottish fleets and workers to make their mark. 

Trade with the Dutch flourished in the thirteenth century when wool was exported through the Broads to the weavers of Flanders. At that time Norfolk was at the forefront of mercantile trade in Britain – the county had one of the highest populations in the country, and Norwich was a wealthy city, second only to London.

Who were The Strangers in Norwich?

Although the Dutch and Walloon ‘Strangers’ invited to Norwich in 1565 by Queen Elizabeth I are the best-known of the Low Countries immigrants, the first Flemings were invited to Norfolk in 1338 to escape their French rulers and the Hundred Years War. 

Queen Elizabeth I referred to the ‘Strangers’ from the Netherlands as ‘England’s most ancient and familiar neighbours’. It’s unlikely she knew the last land link between England and the Continent was between Holland and Norfolk.

Why are Norwich City called The Canaries?

In the fifteenth century, protectionist tariffs, taxation and wars promoted domestic cloth-making – assisted in the 1560s by refugee Flemish weavers fleeing the Inquisition in the Spanish Netherlands, who brought with them their now-famous Canaries, remembered today in the nickname of Norwich City Football Club.

By the end of the 16th century there were over 4000 Protestant Dutch refugees in Norwich, accounting for almost a third of the population.

As well as the trades, skills and knowledge of weaving, the Dutch, through a man called Anthony de Solempne, also introduced printing.

Witnessing the plight of the Strangers sparked a new social conscience in the people of Norwich and a growing awareness of the social and religious injustices and led to the city being the first to introduce compulsory payments for poor relief, initiating the basic principles of the Elizabethan Poor Law of 1597. That spirit of reform and social justice continued in Norwich for many centuries.

The Canaries aren’t the only influences we retain: Dutch architecture, such as gable ends, can be found across Norfolk, but particularly in Norwich, Great Yarmouth and King’s Lynn. 

How the Dutch saved Great Yarmouth

Another Dutch engineer, Joas Johnson, helped save Great Yarmouth as a viable port. 

By the middle of the fourteenth century, the mouth of the River Yare was becoming unusable, through silting by the same coastal sands that are now one of the town’s main attractions. Over the next 300 years seven attempts were made to construct a new permanent outlet, called havens. 

Each new haven silted up after a few years and it wasn’t until Johnson was brought in that the problem was finally solved. His construction of a seventh haven, the final ‘cut’, made of stone and timber piers between 1559 and 1567 finally secured the harbour’s mouth.

His work lasted until 1962 when ‘The Old Dutch Pier’ was replaced by the current concrete structure, which resulted in Gorleston losing part of its beach (it’s back now and bigger than ever).

How were The Fens drained?

Between 1630 and 1653, Dutch engineer Sir Cornelius Vermuyden directed major projects to drain the Fens to create rich, peaty arable land, the first time this had been attempted since Roman occupation. Great sluices, dams and dykes were constructed to control the flow of water, connecting villages that were formerly little islands and docks amid the marshes and seawaters of a great archipelago.

Even before Vermuyden’s work, Dutch drainage experts were working in Norfolk – there is a 1525 Dutch inscription for a ‘Peter Peterson, dyke reeve’ at Haddiscoe church in south Norfolk.

Norfolk’s prosperous links with the Continent waned with the coming of the Industrial Revolution, but at least that means we still retain so many of our old buildings – they were never demolished for ‘progress’. And what many people don’t realise is that the Industrial Revolution was a product of the Agricultural Revolution that Norfolk helped create in the work of Thomas Coke, the first Earl of Leicester, at Holkham, who brought land reform, and Charles ‘Turnip’ Townshend, who brought four-crop rotation to Britain. And where did he copy it from? Waasland, in Flanders… continental Europe.

Two-horse ploughing from Holland replaced the heavy English eight-ox plough; turnips and Friesian cows came too – the latter particularly enjoying being fattened on Norfolk’s marshes.

And, of course, if one of the symbols of Holland is its windmills, then the same applies to Norfolk – except most of them aren’t windmills at all, they’re wind pumps to keep fields free from flooding. Inspired by the Dutch, the Netherlands and the Low Countries.