Mediaeval maps of Alkmaar show the old city lying at the edge of the Schir-meer, or lake, and in place of the primeval pagan shrine, a Christian church with an abbey near by. In the tenth century Alkmaar was the chief city in Kennemer land, with a castle and the abbey of Egmond not far away. So early as 1143 it had a mint and coined money. Of even more enduring value than old Alkmaar's gold and silver, now vanished except an occasional relic, have been the chronicles written by the monks. For these all historians are perpetually grateful, for they form the chief fountain of North Netherlandish story.
In a word, this is a classic soil, seat of the city, Castle, seaport, and monastery of the Egmonds, - one of the oldest and most illustrious families of the Netherlands. The name, from Engen mond, meaning narrow mouth, refers, it is said, to the oldest ancestral seat near some branch of the Rhine, which, with small aperture, emptied into the sea. The name of that Count Egmont who in youth, beauty, and plenitude of fame, fell victim on the scaffold to the jealous hatred of Alva and the cruel perfidy of Philip II., glorified in art find the drama and her the pens of Schiller and Motley, and set in enduring marble in Brussels, is but one on a long and lustrous roll. Warriors, statesmen, and scholars of the Egmont line shine on the pages of Dutch history during eight centuries.
Securing a carriage, Lyra and I rode out to Egmond-op-den-Hoef, that is, Egmond-on-the-Farm, where once rose lofty and lordly towers, square and round, against the blue sky. On the surface of the wide moat were mirrored crow-stepped gables, pointed roofs, windows, portholes, and square-topped walls. The massive structure was L-shaped. At the north, on a little island, were the stables and stores of fodder, the other areas containing the numerous buildings which fronted on two open courts. The walls were from three to five feet thick. A stone bridge with three arches crossed the moat opposite the entrance. On two pinnacles, between the front main towers, set two lions holding the shield of Egmond, while higher in the air floated the red end gold banner. Van Lennep and Hofdijk, in their beautifully illustrated book on the noteworthy castles in Nederlend, give plan, picture, and arms. First upreared and encircled with water in 1307, often attacked, fired, and rebuilt, this castle was, during the Dutch and Spanish war, wholly destroyed.
What we actually saw was no more than a morsel of the old burg. A bit of a corner, a fragment of brick wall eight or ten feet high and less in its other dimensions, stood in a dry field amid stubble. Yet this scanty token appealed to the imagination.
I asked the driver to take me to the ruined abbey church where some of the counts of Holland lie in dust, and to point out the site of the cloisters where the Benedictine monks, a thousand years ago, began writing Netherland's annals. Our Dutch Jehu was neither interested nor informed. In the village I began questioning the natives, one of whom, a boer with intelligent face, immediately led me off the main street into a lane. Then, showing me a line of houses with gardens and stables inside a brick inclosure, he said, in very English-like Dutch, "Dat is de klooster waal."
To such use had the historic remnant come! Founded by Dirk I., Count of Holland, and first built of wood in A. D. 889, the abbey was fired by the pagan Frisians, but under Dirk II., it was re-erected in brick. Many a famous abbot ruled here. Terrific were the struggles of ambition and for power between counts and bishops, dukes and popes. The library of manuscripts and printed books gathered within its walls was very large for the age. When, in 1576, it became a centre of reaction and danger to the patriot cause in the war of independence, the furious iconoclasts gave its precious treasures to the flames. Fortunately, the cloister annals had been copied and preserved elsewhere.
Amid the grunt of pigs I pictured to myself the cowled brethren listening to crusader, knight, traveler, or survivor of some Norse massacre, shipwreck, or sea-flood, as these told their stories, end then writing these out for posterity. Thanks to the old cell-brothers! Our age no longer needs them, but how could the Middle Ages have done without them? Their literary equipment consisted of a goose-quill, an ink-horn, dressed pigskin, and an oak desk. Their Latin was not unexceptionable. Their Dutch was rude, but these cloister annalists were the first historiographers of the nation.
From Egmond Binnen we rode seaward over to the Egmond-aan-Zee, or Egmond-on-Sea, where was a sort of embrasure in the mountainous sand walls that form the defenses of North Holland, - the only gate or pass in the sand mountains between the Helder and Wijk-aan-Zee near Beverwijk. We found a little fishing village and a summer hotel where picnic folk from Alkmaar could obtain bread, steaks, cheese, and beer. An Englishman, in the crowd of men who stood around swathed in woolen and shod in wood, lamented the decay of the fisheries here, telling us that instead of the seventy or eighty "bums" which the village owned within his time, not more than a dozen remained now. I had to ask him to define the term "bum," though I imagined the word to be the same as in bumboat, or bumbarge, which we have borrowed from the Dutch. All will remember Carlyle's use of the word in his "Chartism."
Egmond-aan-Zee had its glorious age in the fourteenth century, when the abbey, tower, port, and lordship were all blooming like the tulips of later time, and riches came from soil and sea. Here, within sound of the waves, were founded not a few famous families. Their names fill the Dutch annals of valor and learning, and, though in much altered forms, may be read on American doorplates. To this seaside village, from Germany, came and labored Domine van Mekelenburg, whose learned son Hellenized his name into Megapolensis, and came to America in 1642. He preached the gospel to the Mohawk lndians as well as to the Dutch emigrants. He watched over the infancy of the colony of New Netherland, and saw its surrender. His literary friend, Domine Selyns, wrote his epitaph. Both were among our first American men of letters.
We rode down near the lighthouse to see the colossal lion, ever looking seaward and sentinel-like, symbolizing the bravery of the young hero, Van Speyk, who at Antwerp, in 1831, blew up his ship rather than surrender. In temperament wonderfully like our own Cushing of Albemarle fame, Jan Carel Josephus van Speyk, born in Amsterdam in 1802, was educated in the orphan house. He began to follow the sea at eighteen, voyaging to the West Indies. Entering the navy and serving five years as a lieutenant, he was decorated for his bravery in the Belgian war of 1830, and given command of a gunboat. Driven ashore in a storm in 1831, and surrounded by a crowd of Belgians in boats, he fired his pistol into the magazine, blowing himself, his friends and foes, and his unlowered flag high into the air. A fragment of his corpse was laid to rest under his monument in the New Church in Amsterdam near the dust of De Ruyter and other admirals. I have seen his sword and relies reverently preserved in his orphan childhood's home. It was the frigate Van Speyk that was sent to join in the Columbian quadri-centennial in New York city and bay in 1893.
Before returning to Alkmaar we visited something more ancient than the Egmont name. The story of Frisian Christianity is inseparably connected with the name of Wilfrid, who, educated at York, sailed for Rome, and was driven by contrary winds on this coast. He preached here the gospel in the seventh century, when no interpreters were needed. Afterward a synod was held at Austerfield, in A.D. 702, which deposed and excommunicated him, but he regained the favor of his superiors. It was in the little Norman church of St. Wilfrid that William Bradford, the future Pilgrim Father and Governor of New Plymouth, was baptized in 1590. He also on crossing the sea, had stormy experiences. After Wilfrid came Wilbrord and Boniface, making a trio of a "Apostles of the Frisians" and pioneers of Dutch Christianity. Wilbrord enjoys most fame in popular tradition. He is commemorated in art all over the kingdom, from Flushing to Dokkum, where his successor was martyred.
We meet Wilbrord's statue or picture in every Catholic church, and hail him on bas-reliefs over the doors. November 6 is his great festal day. The cloister carvings in stone, at Utrecht, represent him busily engaged in cutting down the trees sacred to pagan deities. Many-tongued legend recounts his wonderful works. Evidently he was more fond of pure cold water than the Egmonts or Brederodes. We find Saint Wilbrord's wells in Walcheren, but here at Heilo is the most famous put, or well, of all. It lies back of the village church, protected by handsome open iron-work. We taste the water. It is not equal to Cochituate, Croton, or Schuylkill; but, after a millennium, who expects nectar?
The golden afternoon sunlight bathed the landscape and helped imagination to summon, out of the oblivion of a thousand years, the work of this good servant of that Christ who first announced his personality and mission to a woman, while sitting at the well-curb in Samaria. Wilbrord, a Saxon, was born A.D. 657, in Northumbria, in England, and spent thirteen years in Ireland in study under those wonderful Irish missionaries who once filled Europe with gospel light. Two of them, Egbert and Wilbert, had been in Frisia, preaching in vain during two years. Wilbrord not only learned Frisian, but went on his mission forearmed. He toiled for the bodies and souls of the Frisians, and grandly succeeded. Not to know about Wilbrord is, when in Holland, at least, to argue one's self unknown, and thus lose much enjoyment when amid Dutch art and ecclesiastical history.
Driving homeward with stimulated imagination and nerves tingling with the delicious coolness of the sweet air, we came suddenly to a standstill. Our own heavy two-horse chariot and a light and low team had come into collision. A big Dutchman, whip in hand and mounted on a box set up on wheels and drawn by four dogs, was most rapturously illustrating the glory of motion. Which Jehu was to blame, I should not be willing to decide, but within ten ticks of the watch the brick road was strewn with howling dogs and the debris of timber and harness. The two-legged creatures immediately began swearing at each other in Dutch. Fortunately, the war ended in words only. The total losses were a shaft and portion of one dog's hair and cuticle, lacquer from one wheel-spoke of our carriage, and, on the part of both drivers, temper. Despite bits in their mouths, one cannot steer curs as safely as horses, and in this fact, probably, lies the philosophy of the collision.
Certainly, the trouble could not have arisen because of any misunderstanding of the law of the road. British folk turn to the left, Dutch and Americans to the right. In all the British colonies, except those founded on the Atlantic coast, the rule was and is "to the left." Because of misunderstandings and divers inheritances, there have been many collisions on land, and, as I remember, the sinking of the U. S. S. Oneida man-of-war by the mail steamer Bombay in the Bay of Yedo.
Why the exception in America? Numerous and long have been the controversies and theories put forward to account for the patent fact. The explanation nearest to hand seems to lie in this, that the Dutch rule has always been, "Turn to the right, as the law directs." For centuries that law has been written in municipal ordinances, as in those of Amsterdam dated April 7, 1663. In other places the custom is older than law in script. The Pilgrims who lived eleven years in Holland simply followed in New England what one of them, Bradford, calls "The Laudable custom of the Low Countries." In this, as in so many things, they set as the precedent to New England the law to which they had been already accustomed in Holland. In the Middle States the people followed the ancestral precedent in Patria. In Virginia the custom came in when the code of "Lawes Divine, Morall, and Martaill," based on that formed by the Dutch government for the republican army of Maurice, was introduced by Sir Thomas Dale.