USA > New York > New York County > Harlem > Revised History of Harlem (City of New York): Its Origin and Early Annals. : Prefaced by Home Scenes in the Fatherlands; Or Notices of Its Founders Before Emigration. Also, Sketches of Numerous Families, and the Recovered History of the Land-titles > Part 4
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The national history counted its centuries before the Chris- tian era; its first known epoch was a barbaric age, devoted to war and the bloody rites of the Druids, or the religious mysteries of the Gauls, who, to propitiate their gods, immolated human captives. The Gauls were then divided into three nations,-the Belga, Celtæ, and Aquitani; the first being of German extrac- tion, and superior in physique, energy, and courage to the others. The Gauls told Cæsar that the ancestors of the Belga had crossed the Rhine at an early date and appropriated the fertile country north of the Seine and Marne, after driving out the Celta. These three nations were subdivided into independent tribes, as the Nervii, the Ambiani, the Veromandui, the Bellovaci, and the Suessiones, all of the Belga, and all tribes of Picardy, except the Nervii, which lay next northward.
Five centuries of Roman subjugation formed the second
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epoch, during which Gaul was civilized, through the influence of Roman law, letters and arts, and of Christianity. Clovis, king of the Franks, overthrew the Roman power in 486, and founded the monarchy, which, despite many convulsions, had subsisted for twelve centuries. A dismal period of anarchy ensued after the death of Clovis, and ended in the dethronement of his race. It was marked by the corruption of the church, which had allied itself to the civil power, and by the rise of mon- asticism, which spread over Northern Gaul in the seventh century.
The monarchy rose to great splendor and the dignity of an empire under the ambitious but wise Charlemagne, who added two kingdoms to France. But all this greatness vanished under his weak successors. Rent by internal dissensions, a general revolt of the nobles and the inroads of the piratical Normans, the mushroom empire soon fell asunder; its two acquisitions, Italy and Germany, resuming their separate existence, while France proper was resolved into numerous petty governments, which, ruled by hereditary dukes and counts under what was styled the feudal system, subsisted for centuries independent of each other, and so far of the crown as to. pay it scarcely a nom- inal homage. Thus arose among others, in the ninth and tenth centuries, the proud earldoms or counties of Flanders (from which Artois was subsequently taken), Hainault, Holland, and those which afterward united formed Picardy; besides the duchy of Normandy, founded by Rollo and his Norsemen out of their rich conquests.
This localization of power causing many domestic wars,- with the utter humiliation of the monarchy,-was, for a time, fatal to social order and progress. But this state of things ultimately found its remedy, in the perfecting of the feudal system, the restraining power of the church, the rise of the spirit of chivalry, and, above all, in the famous Crusades, whose object was to wrest the land of Palestine from the Mohammedan power. Con- ceived in a desire to end the cruelties inflicted by the Turks upon Christians going on pilgrimage to the Holy Sepulchre, and first set on foot in 1095 by a Picard called Peter the Hermit, these remarkable expeditions were repeated at intervals during two centuries. Monarchs took the field, and the chivalry of France and the Netherlands, including many from Normandy, Picardy, Hainault, Artois, and Flanders, bore a distinguished part. Directly productive only of disaster, a prodigious waste of life and treasure, and naught in return of which to boast, beside valorous deeds, but a brief occupation of Jerusalem by
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the crusaders, the Crusades, strange as it may seem, ultimately wrought out results highly beneficial to society. By impairing the strength and resources of the feudal chiefs, great and small, who had alike squandered all they had on these costly expedi- tions, the way was opened to the monarchy to regain, by degrees, its control; and to the cities, to cast off their allegiance to the counts or seigniors,-feudal masters, who had long oppressed them,-and to accept the protection of the king: nor were efforts for aggrandizement relaxed (a policy begun by Louis VI., crowned in 1108), till, by the use of diplomacy and force, supremacy had been regained over all the French territory which had revolted in the ninth century, excepting only the Netherland provinces lying north of Picardy. These, by a train of favoring causes, had fallen to the dukes of Burgundy, and, through them, to the crown of Spain; thus exposing to this rival power another and more accessible frontier, where no lofty Pyrenees opposed a difficult barrier, and which in subsequent wars between them became a principal theatre of hostilities.
But the elevation of the sovereign consequent upon the Crusades was no more marked than was that of the subject. Everywhere the bands which held the vassal to his lord were sun- dered, and the bondman went out free. The dissipated wealth of the feudal aristocracy had found its way largely into the coffers of the merchants, shipwrights, mechanics and manufac- turers. With the development of their energies and resources the cities rapidly advanced toward that high state of prosperity which they long enjoyed, until arrested by the persecutions and civil wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The church temporal flourished, or at least the clergy, who became rich and more arrogant ; the churches, with the monasteries or abbeys,- already enjoying princely endowments,-had added largely to their estates from those of the crusaders, who had mortgaged or sold them to the bishops, etc., and all this was augmented by the recovery of property alleged to have been stolen by the feudal lords. From this profusion of wealth at the church's command, supplemented by generous donations from the noble or affluent and innumerable offerings by the common people, were built the magnificent cathedrals of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; also countless new monasteries and cloisters. Out of all this again came benefits other than the spiritual,-which latter we would not undervalue,-masses of mechanics and workmen had bread, while the large demand for skilled architects and artisans became a powerful stimulus to many important branches of art.
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To the various home industries thus created, or quickened, were added at this period many useful arts,-not to speak of luxuries, -through the opening of commercial intercourse with the ori- ental countries by means of the Crusades.
Yet there ensued results of far greater magnitude,-least anticipated, though essential in the chain of progressive events,- when a nation, till then but little given to foreign commerce, and strangers to distant sea voyages, having become a thor- oughly maritime people, through the acquired arts of shipbuild- ing and of navigating the ocean, found in the opportune dis- covery of a new western continent so grand a field for exploration and conquest, and such alluring prospects of wealth, that, joining in the eager strife to seize and possess these advantages, they became unwittingly the advanced heralds of our American colon- ization.
The feudal system, under which during the Crusades and the many wars of the Middle Ages the military art had acquired such brilliancy, had crumbled to decay. The chivalry had long since passed its palmy days; though, still having the shadow of an existence in the famous semi-religious order of St. John of Jerusalem, instituted in the Holy City during the Crusades, or, as afterward called from the island made their retreat and headquarters, the Knights of Malta; as also in others of more modern creation,-in France, the Chevaliers des Ordres du Roi, and in the Netherlands, the Knights of the Golden Fleece .* But the spirit of chivalry,-born of generous impulses, yet perverted when the ardent soul of the knight-errant, aglow with martial fire and thirsting for bold adventure, could be moved to court any peril, in cause noble or trivial, merely to win an approving smile from his fair lady-love,-had lost its former prestige, but had developed a more general and enlightened philanthropy. Time had stripped feudalism of its essential feature,-the fasci- nating but onerous military service. The weakened nobility were no longer to be depended upon by the crown, and the feudal had given place to a paid soldiery. But while this hard condi- tion of the feudal compact, as regards the vassal, was thus annulled, much of the martial spirit, and even some of the grosser features of that system, survived. As the villages had generally sprung up either upon the estates and about the castles of the nobility, whose descendants still occupied them and were the
* Chevaliers des Ordres du Roi, or Knights of the King's Orders, was the gen- eral designation for the two orders, that of St. Michel, before noticed, and that of the Holy Spirit, the latter instituted by Henry III., in 1578.
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lords of the soil, or about ancient monasteries, which held the fee of the ample domains on which they were seated, the inhab- itants of these villages, mainly tillers of the ground, were largely tenants either of the nobility or clergy, and many of these peas- ants "to the manner born" were still under the old vassalage. In such case the poor ploughman or hedger sighed in vain for other employment or better wages; virtually tied to the soil, he was as much a fixture as his humble cottage, or the old village church where he had been christened, at whose altar he had so often bowed, and beneath whose shadow, with the forgotten of ages, his weary frame would rest at last. So oppressive were these bands, even in Picardy and Normandy, that, waiving the claim which birth and service gave him upon his lord for pro- tection and support, the bondman would often abandon his home to carve out a fortune elsewhere. And though at this time the relation of modern landlord had been widely substituted for that of the feudal superior, yet so slow was this process, and so strong a hold had the old system of servitude, that it survived till the French Revolution, when it was wholly abolished.
The more favored freemen within the cities and towns,- imbued with a spirit of progress as yet unfelt by the agricultural population, and engaged in lucrative pursuits,-bore more easily the heavy imposts levied by their sovereigns than had their pre- decessors the severer exactions of feudalism, though not indeed without many a protest. Society at large also felt their influ- ence, and mainly through their agency had been consummated the renaissance, as is called that remarkable and universal devel- opment, the expansion of industries, the diffusion of knowledge, the revival of letters and arts; all accelerated by that crowning invention, the printing-press. The common mind, liberated and awakened to higher impulses, ventured to roam in new channels of thought, touching even the intricate subjects of science, religion and human rights. Thus was society ripened for the great moral reform of the sixteenth century, which, as respects France and the Netherlands, was not more remarkable for the ability and piety of its advocates, for the breadth and power of its manifestation, than for the fiery ordeal to which its adherents were subjected, and the ultimate effects of this severity upon the welfare of other countries.
Momentous as was this struggle, both in character and con- sequences, we must confine ourselves to two distinct passages in its history which bear directly on our subject. The one will show by what remote causes and influences were gradually developed
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and put in motion the first efforts to plant the seeds of civiliza- tion upon the Harlem soil; the other, the circumstances under which the mass of the Harlem refugees were impelled to leave France and the Netherlands, involving one of the most affecting eras in the history of the Huguenots, but which, in view of its bearing upon our early colonization, has not been given its due prominence by our local annalists.
CHAPTER II.
AVESNES AND ITS EXILES.
T HE old province of Picardy took in a strip of the coast from Calais to the river Canche. But its major portion between the Canche and the Bresle, and through which flowed the Somme, stretched eastward, wedge-like, from the Channel to Champagne, having on the north the Walloon provinces of Artois, Cambresis and Hainault, and on the south Normandy and Isle of France. Its easterly sections, Thierache and Vermandois, were charm- ingly diversified by wooded heights, which, however, told of an earlier age, when the adjacent Forest of Ardennes,-the "Neur Pai," or "Black Country," of the Walloons,-spread its sombre shades westward over this region. About these heights four noted streams took their rise,-the Scheldt and Sambre, water- ing the Netherlands; the Somme and Oise, rivers of Picardy ; while the hills here diverged in four several chains, or ridges, which parted the respective valleys or basins of these rivers. Altogether, these formed a most remarkable feature in the topography of the country. Often rising to slight elevations, rarely did these ranges exceed an altitude which in our land of grander proportions would mark them as but ordinary hills; yet, with gentle slopes and summits mantled in woods or vine- yards,-and here and there some old chateau or castle rising to view,-they gave a charming variety and beauty to these minia- ture countries. One range, crossing the eastern borders of the Cambresis, where it formed the large and venerable forest of Mourmal, linked with stirring events soon to be noticed, skirted for some miles the valley of the Sambre; then from northeast wound about to northwest, cutting in halves the Duchy of Bra- bant, and parting the basins of the Scheldt and Meuse. Another chain,-diverging westerly, then northward, till ending at Cape Gris-Nez, on the Straits of Dover,-formed the bounds between Picardy and Artois. A third ran southwest, crossing Picardy obliquely, then westerly through Upper Normandy, to Cape La Heve, at the mouth of the Seine; while the fourth, stretching
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westward through Thierache to Champagne, formed in part the series of hills which environed that province and Isle of France,-the basin of the Seine,-then followed the southern borders of Normandy to Brittany. Within the shadows, so to speak, of these several hill ranges,-in Normandy, along the bor- ders of the Somme, in the basin of the Scheldt, and the valley of the Sambre,-were the homes of nearly all the French refugees, mostly Picards and Walloons, who came to Harlem.
In most of the externals of a genuine civilization and pros- perity, these were much in advance of the districts farther south. This was due jointly to their greater natural resources, and to the superior organism and spirit of the people. Artois and Picardy both abounded in grains, grasses, and fruits; the one signifi- cantly called the "Granary of the Netherlands," the other, the "Storehouse of Paris." Flanders was renowned world-wide for the products of her looms. Hainault,-the "Saltus Carbonarius" of the Romans (the coal forest),-was rich, not only in coal. but in iron, lead and marble; while the grazing lands, cornfields and orchards of Normandy were in unrivaled repute. More densely populated than the south, this northern section exhibited in its people a more manly development, both physical and mental: in stature, above the average height ; and more intelligent, logical. inventive and industrious; better fed, housed and educated. While plodding husbandry tamely drove the plow through the mellow soils of La Beuce and Toureine, gathered her vintages from Burgundy to Languedoc, and fed her flocks on the green meadows of Berry and the sterile heaths of Brittany and Les Landes; in the north, busy trade and manufactures, enlisting all the energies and resources of people and country, brought to most a competence and, to many, affluence. And even hus- bandry, better rewarded for its toil, was more ambitious and successful.
No class of Gallic blood was more remarkable than the Walloons,-a people at the present day numbering nearly two millions, and mainly included within France and Belgium. Time has wrought but slight change among them, but we needs must describe them as they were. Theirs was a belt of country ex- tending eastward from the river Lys, beyond both Scheldt and Meuse, and embracing French or Walloon Flanders, most of Artois, the Chambresis, Hainault, Namur, Southern Brabant, and parts of Liege and Luxemburg. Within the last lay the principality of Sedan, stretched along the east side of the Meuse, on which the city of Sedan, its strong capital, was seated. A
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fruitful region and, in the sixteenth century, an independent Protestant state, it attracted many of the persecuted Walloons during the religious troubles of that period. The northern limits of the Walloon country would have been nearly defined by a line drawn from the city of Liege, on the Meuse, to Calais. On the south it was bounded by Picardy, Champagne and Lor- raine, provinces which in the times referred to composed the French frontier .*
The Walloons were a hardy, long-lived race, tall, stout, and muscular; in which respects, quite unlike the ordinary French, they compared better with their neighbors, the Flemings, but again were readily distinguished from the latter both by their physiognomy and their speech, which last was a crude French patois, spoken by them unchanged for centuries, and still in common use among them. Of strong intellects, manly bear- ing, a sagacious, practical and laborious people, they were also noted for the plainness of their tastes, manners and dress. These several traits were clearly traceable to their ancestors, the old Belgæ, their descent from whom was also unmistakable in their coolness and pertinacity, so in contrast with the excita- bility and fickleness characterizing the French of proper Celtic blood. It was these qualities, combined with a natural love of arms, and the courage inherited from their ancestors,-whom Cæsar describes as the bravest of all the Gauls,-that made the Walloons such famous soldiers. Ever tenacious of their rights, and thus excessively litigant, they were yet hospitable and social, possessing much of the French vivacity. In domestic life they lacked no element of solid, homespun comfort: the plain, sub- stantial domicile, roofed with tile or thatch; a bare floor, but genial hearth stone, with ample pile of blazing wood, or turf. as it suited; the oaken board, set with brown ware or pewter,
* The term Walloon is derived from the word Gaul, which the Germans, by an ctymological substitution of W for the Latin G, changed into Wahl, and in the plural Whalen; the low Dutch making it Waal and Waalen. But we observe that both Ger- man and Dutch, in speaking of the Walloons, more commonly used the adjective form, saying the Walsche -- that is, the Walsche people. The old Germans applied this term indiscriminately to all the Romanized people along their western and southern borders, not the Gauls only, but the Romans; giving their several countries the name of Walschland, as the Germans designate Italy even to this day; and which term is also traceable in the Swiss canton of Vallais, in the old canton of Berne, north of Lake Leman, or Geneva (embracing the Pays, now canton, of Vaud), and (skipping the two provinces of Alsace and Lorraine, early overrun by German tribes) as far to the north as Walloon Brabant. The French themselves used the term Walloon (by them written Wallon, or Ouallon) only with reference to the French-speaking people_of Belgic descent, occupying their northern frontiers, within the Walloon country. The term Walsche was so restricted by the Hollanders; and by Walschland. or Walslant, as they wrote it, they meant the Walloon country, and not the more distant Pays de N'aud, as was wrongly held by Mr. Vanderkempt, who should have been better, in- formed, in making his translation of the Dutch records at Albany. Almost any of the old Dutch histories will show the correct usuage, but one will suffice: Van Meteren, Amsterdam, 1652, fo 1.40, etc.
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with goodly supply of simple, wholesome food,-this satisfied the Walloon ambition in the line of living. Song, or instru- mental music, of which they were excessively fond, commonly enlivened the social hour. They were very devout, and, as a people, intensely attached to the Roman ritual.
The Walloon emigrations of the sixteenth century, already referred to, went largely by way of the Scheldt, the Meuse, and their affluents, to Holland. Skirting interiorwise the districts which were the homes of our refugees, the Meuse flowed north- erly, then swept westward around Brabant, reaching the sea by several outlets between the insular parts of South Holland. It is unsurpassed for bold and grand scenery, which beginning near Sedan, is heightened to the sublime as it reaches Namur, where the Sambre enters it. Towering walls of rock, now bare, now clad in rich foliage, rise on either side; while here and there huge cleft or ravine opens to view some far-reaching and romantic vale, or dark unfathomed dell,-fitting retreat either for fabled sprites or fairies, or stern feudal chiefs, who once took tribute of each passing vessel. Weird stories are woven around its fantastic forms and crumbling castles; for example, the popular legend of the Fox and Wolf, drawn seemingly from that fierce encounter of the year 900, when the shrewd Renard, Count of Hainault, with his compatriots, slew the tyrant Zwendi- bold, King of Lorraine. But stranger tales were those of the sixteenth century, of crafts richly freighted,-but not with mer- chandise,-stealing down its favoring current, bearing the victims of persecution, Protestant Walloons from the adjacent districts, to a land of safety. One such family of exiles will claim our notice and enlist our sympathies.
The famed and picturesque Sambre was a principal branch of the Meuse, and had its sources in that wild corner of Picardy called Thierache, which joined upon Hainault. Flowing north- erly, it entered the province just named, near the border of the Cambresis, soon passing the city of Landrecy; whence taking its course northeasterly through a rugged, wooded country, it left again the confines of Hainault before joining the Meuse. A league below Landrecy it received the Petit Hepre, and, sev- eral miles beyond, the Grand Hepre; these sister streams gently coursing their way, in nearly parallel currents, down from the principality of Chimay, a few leagues eastward. Between these two streams lay the land of Avesnes, an ancient baronial estate, whose chief town, seated on the Grand Hepre, six miles from its mouth and eight leagues directly south of Mons, is one with
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the present Avesnes, capital of an arrondissement of the same name in the department Du Nord, France. Paris is 123 miles to the southwest.
The town lay mainly upon the left, or south bank, of the river, which was not navigable, and within an uneven but, here, quite open country, save that to the north of the town the view was intercepted by the Hedge of Avesnes, as was popularly called a line of pretty heights studded with forest trees, a spur of the historic Ardennes, and which followed the course of the stream westward to the Sambre.
This old town dated from the eleventh century, when Werric, surnamed "With the Beard," a bold feudal chieftain, lord of Leuze, near the Haine,-and who had inherited the lands between the two Hepres, given to his ancestor by the Count of Hainaut,- erected a castle upon the most northerly of these streams, mid- way between its outlet and the even then venerable abbey of Liessies, which was seated on the same stream six miles above the castle. About this castle the town had grown up. As a "key of Hainault," it was guarded with jealous care by the later counts, its lords paramount ; but cut off, in a manner, by the "Hedge," was much exposed to aggression from the French bor- der, which was less than two leagues distant. Nor was it spared, during a long period in which its ownership was vested in titled subjects of France, from too often becoming common plunder ground; since among these warlike proprietors were some of the most renowned knights of the chivalric ages, whose varied and often stern fortunes it had largely shared. But at the period of which we write it had withstood the rude blasts of five cen- turies; trusting to the old Latin chronicle left by Baudouin of Avesnes, who laid him to rest in 1289.
The old clock in the belfry, that so faithfully struck the hour, was not all that was striking about the town: equally so, to the eye, was the prevailing architecture,-plain, durable, betraying its Walloon character, if not a high antiquity. Solid as the old stone houses at our Kingston or Hurley, built by the Walloon settlers, few of the buildings were grand, or even ornamental ; and the streets were ill-arranged,-only one, near and parallel with the river, running its whole length, crossed midway by another at right angles,-while most of the other angles were any- thing but right; and around the venerable cathedral St. Nicholas, in the eastern, and plainly the oldest, section of the town, some of its "squares" took the most eccentric and original forms,-cir- cular, wedge-like and awry! Yet, "oppidum elegans admodum
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