| Popis: |
For well over a hundred years historians specializing in agrarian institutions of the Middle Ages have suggested that the vast land reclamation characterizing the eleventh and twelfth centuries in western Europe contributed to the emancipation of the common man. By the early eleventh century a fortuitous coincidence of physical and economic developments combined to make Maritime Flanders, then only a belt of windblown sand and aqueous waste extending from Bourbourg to Antwerp, the center of feverish activity by counts and ecclesiastical establishments to reclaim land from moor, marsh, dune, and sea. In the nineteenth century such Belgian scholars as Alphonse Wauters, Kervyn de Lettenhove, and Leon Vanderkindere eloquently praised the communes rurales of medieval Belgium which lamentably, they said, were destroyed by feudalism. From the beginning there were free communities in Maritime Flanders; soon they spread throughout all of Flanders. But these centuries of freedom, it should be understood, began in the eleventh, not in the fifth century. |
