Discontinuity and connections

THE BEGINNING of the present-day Frisians lies in the fifth century, when new inhabitants, conventionally called ‘Anglo-Saxons’, arrived in the virtually abandoned terp region of the northern Netherlands. The Frisians that are mentioned by Roman authors such as Tacitus (Germania, 34–5) and Pliny (Naturalis Historia, 16.2), and who inhabited the coastal areas of the present provinces North-Holland, Friesland and Groningen, had largely abandoned the area in the third century, moving probably to the south, where they may have joined Frankish groups (Taayke 2000).

In areas bordering the coastal salt-marsh area, in particular in Pleistocene northern Drenthe, inhabitation was continuous in this period, although maybe diminished (Nicolay and Den Hengst 2008, 584; Nieuwhof 2008b, 291–2). The correlation between continuity or not and these different landscapes is suggestive of the causes of the abandonment of the coastal region: changes in the landscape, especially increasing problems with drainage, may have been the stimulus. The salt marshes had developed over the centuries under the influence of the relative sea-level rise that the coastal areas from northern Germany to Flanders experienced from the beginning of the Holocene (Kiden et al. 2002; Vos and Knol 2015). The younger, northern parts were therefore much higher in elevation than the older salt marshes bordering the inland peat bogs. That caused increasing drainage problems in these older areas during the second and third centuries AD. While the terp settlements were well adapted to marine inundations that went as quickly as they came, long-term drainage problems were much harder to live with; they may have been the primary push-factor. The collapse of the Roman Empire was probably a pull-factor; it did not cause abandonment (in that case, inland areas would also have been abandoned), but it did provide new opportunities for the terp dwellers whose homelands had become too wet. Once the older and lower areas were abandoned, the well-drained parts of the salt marsh in the north also became less attractive because communities there lost a large part of their social network, and the social fabric disintegrated (Nieuwhof 2011). The remaining inhabitants, with some exceptions, left the area no later than AD 325 (e.g. at Wijnaldum: Gerrets and De Koning 1999, 99–106).