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From the Margins to the Mainstream: Dutch History to 1384 - The Merovingian and Carolingian Periods - Society in the Early Middle Ages

5 important questions on From the Margins to the Mainstream: Dutch History to 1384 - The Merovingian and Carolingian Periods - Society in the Early Middle Ages

New migrants from Germania and southern Scandinavia slowly moved into the Low Countries in the decades and centuries after the Roman retreat.
This was seldom the movement of large tribes moving lock, stock and barrel to a new home, but smaller groups splitting off from older settlements in search of new prospects.

The Franks may have thought of themselves as belonging to a single bond of kinship - they were, after all, descendants of the semimythical King Merovech, through whom their "Merovingian" leaders claimed legitimacy - but the fact that the Franks lived in small, autonomous communities meant that political life was initiallly quite decentralized.
A local figure with enough personal authority might become the equivalent of what sixth-century writers called a grafio, but in a context of sparsely populated settlements with little hierarchy that position would have been a far cry from the elevated title of "count" (graaf) in later age.

The Angles and Saxons who moved into Frisia and parts of Holland by about 600 may have intermarried with possible remnants of the old Frisian population; in any event, the new inhabitants, too, became known as the Frisians.
The Saxons, moving into the eastern Netherlands somewhat later, also lived next to, and mixed with, the indigenous inhabitants.

These Germanic groups initially shared a similarity of language that made it possible, if not necessarily easy, for them to understand each other.
In time, more modern forms of the Dutch language stemmed from a long-term interaction among Frankish, Frisian and Saxon.
The inhabitants, moreover, shared a common material culture that extended over much of northwestern Europe and held many of the same cultural practices, such as the extensive use of burial mounds that now constitute the best-preserved testaments to their presence.

The chief settlement, established in the seventh century by the Frisians at the site of an old Roman fort and strategically situated on the fork of the Lek and the Rhine, was Dorestad.
For about two centuries it was the leading trading center of the region, its ships traveling down the rivers of Europe or across the sea, utilizing its networks with merchants in the Baltic and Mediterranean.

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