The birth of a benevolent state? Fighting poverty, cultural heritage and legal history

In July 2021 no less than three historic sites in the Netherlands, actually three groups of sites and buildings, have been officially recognized as UNESCO World Heritage Sites. The Dutch part of the Lower German limes, the northern frontier of the Roman empire, the defense line of the Nieuwe Hollandse Waterlinie with water, sluices and fortifications around Holland from Amsterdam to Dordrecht, and the Koloniën van Weldadigheid, the “Colonies of Benevolence”, a number of settlements for poor people who could escape from slums and start to build a new life working hard in the northern province Drenthe. Both the limes and the Waterlinie have figured here already long ago. Last year I mentioned the Koloniën van Weldadigheid briefly in a post on Dutch digital archives. This nineteenth-century project deserves more attention here.

Not just fighting poverty

The Koloniën van Weldadigheid, the Colonies of Benevolence, should attract attention with their very name. The use of the word benevolence surely rings a bell and points to some larger governmental objective or aim. The word colony should serve as a remainder these settlements were developed during a colonial period in Dutch history. After the French Revolution it was a near miracle space should have been given to a new Dutch state. The old Dutch Republic had given away for a revolutionary republic, but soon afterwards its territory became just a number of departments in the Napoleonic empire. Mainly thanks to a few politicians, among them Gijsbert Karel van Hogendorp, a new Dutch kingdom including both present-day Belgium and the Netherlands could come into existence in 1814 and gain European recognition at the Congress of Vienna.

Portrait of Johannes van den Bosch, around 1829 – painting by Cornelis Kruseman – Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum

The Colonies of Benevolence were created under the strict supervision of general Johannes van den Bosch (1780-1844). Van den Bosch served between 1798 and 1808 with the Dutch army in the Dutch East Indies. On his way back to Europe he was taken prisoner by the British. Only in 1813 he returned to the new Dutch kingdom. In 1818 he started with his plan to start opening the wildernesses of the province Drenthe for agriculture. Adding settlements for poor people was a secondary development. In 1823 he became a government official. After a year in the Dutch West Indies he became the governor-general of the East Indies (1828-1834), and from 1834 to 1839 he served as a minister of the colonies. In the East Indies he introduced the cultuurstelsel, a system of forced labor on plantations bringing much profit to Dutch firms, investors and state finances. His life was indeed a matter of colonies and forms a part of Dutch colonial history. The recent biography by Angelie Sens, De kolonieman. Johannes van den Bosch (1780-1844), volksverheffer in naam van de Koning (Amsterdam 2019) aptly called him in its title a colony man.

A strange mixture

A farm in Veenhuizen – photo Miranda Drenth

The Colonies of Benevolence included four locations in Drenthe (Veenhuizen, Wilhelminaoord, Frederiksoord, and Boschoord), two in Overijssel (Willemsoord and Ommerschans), and two in Belgium, Wortel and Merksplas. In 1818 Van den Bosch founded a private organisation, the Maatschappij van Weldadigheid, for his agricultural plan. Already in 1819 a first pilot colony was formed at the Westerbeek estate in Frederiksoord. There is a separate website for the museum of this colony, the Proefkolonie. Veenhuizen (1823) and Merksplas (1822) were founded as penal colonies. Since 2018 Veenhuizen is home to the Nationaal Gevangenismuseum, and Merksplas, too, has become a prison museum. Van den Bosch’s society founded also two agricultural schools.

The history of these places is certainly colorful, and thus it is interesting to look at the motivation for entering them into the World Heritage Register. On July 27, 2021 the Dutch UNESCO branch published a web page about the registration of the colonies. Kathleen Ferrier, member of the Dutch committee and a politician, stressed the uniqueness of the initiative to help people breaking with poverty and building a new existence for themselves, even if the colonies did not succeed immediately in abandoning poverty. She views it as an experiment in social history. The registration of the World Heritage Centre rightly uses more sober and meaningful wordings. Urban poor were relocated to a far away region. The original colonies failed to get sufficient income, and thus the scheme was developed to bring in beggars and to found two special penal colonies. There were guards to supervise the doings of people. At its highest point some 11,000 people lived in the Dutch colonies, and some 6,000 people in the two Belgian settlements. Very revealing is the original geometrical pattern of the colonies. The word panoptical serves as a reminder of Jeremy Bentham’s proposals for prison reform.

The international UNESCO website does not mention the existence of archival records digitized by the Drents Archief. Last year I wrote briefly about Alle Kolonisten (All Colonists, the nifty subset of the project Alle Drenten. These digitized records can even be searched with an English search interface. Archives are mentioned in the English nomination dossier (2020; PDF, 21 MB) where you can find also a rich bibliography, but without any reference to the exact archival inventories at the Drents Archief. Luckily the website Alle Kolonisten figures at page 164, and at the website the inventories are duly listed, as are records elsewhere not included among the digitized records. The dossier makes space for Bentham (pp. 78-81), and also for foreign initiatives inspired by the Dutch colonies, and not just for the French project at Mettray with among its directors Alexis de Tocqueville, but also for instance the Innere Mission in Hamburg (pp. 165-170).

Walking though the Colonies of Benevolence

This post is my first contribution after a silence of three months. I will not bother you with a full explanation, I have been simply busy doing other things, in particular describing archival records. One of the much missed recurring features at my blog is the walking historian. As a small solace I will look here with you at two students who made a walking tour of the Netherlands in 1823. Dirk van Hogendorp (1797-1845), a law student who was the son of the renown politician Gijsbert Karel van Hogendorp, and Jacob van Lennep (1802-1868), the brilliant son of a professor of classics and history at the Amsterdam Athenaeum, wrote respectively a concise diary and letters, and an extensive diary. In 2000 appeared an edition in modernized Dutch of these travel accounts, De zomer van 1823. Lopen met Van Lennep. Dagboek van zijn voetreis door Nederland, edited by Geert Mak and Marita Mathijsen (Zwolle 2000; revised edition, 2017). In 2000 Geert Mak also presented a television series of his attempt at walking in the traces of Van Lennep and Van Hogendorp. You can still watch online the two episodes on the colonies (no. 5, “Charity and discomfort”, and no 6, “Who does not work will not eat”).

People were generally quite aware of the high rank of both young men making in 1823 a kind of inspection tour of their country, no doubt reporting about their meetings and views to authorities and influential people. Actually the two men walked only in the northern half of the Netherlands. On July 5 they visited Frederiksoord, and on July 15 they saw Ommerschans. As graphic as their reports of the meetings at both colonies is their description of the backward province Drenthe with in many parts scarcely any normal road. Before getting the status of a province Drenthe had been often called just a landschap (landscape) … The digitized versions of Van Hogendorp’s and Van Lennep’s diaries can now be found at the resources subdomain of the Huygens Institute, Amsterdam.

In this post I tried to kindle your interest in a transnational project for social reform with a clear legal component, the foundation of penal colonies at a safe distance of urban society.The remaining buildings in the Netherlands and Belgium form indeed cultural heritage with many dimensions. The archival heritage needed to be highlighted here. The two Leiden students looking at the colonies in 1823 were definitely among the Dutch urban upper class, and it is their very bias, too, which makes their views interesting for historians. In the aftermath of the Napoleonic period the new Dutch kingdom had a hard time awakening from it and assessing its position. What could serve the new state best? King Willem I acted as an autocrat with patriarchal characteristics, and Van den Bosch’s plans suited him. The general’s plan showed a military grip on people and things. The royal benevolence served first of all the king, and much less the nation, apart from his canal building scheme.

What became of the two walking students? Van Hogendorp became a lawyer serving as a substitute attorney-general and as a judge at two courts. Van Lennep became a prolific writer and a society figure, taking up causes and getting involved in a cause célèbre, the publication of the pamphlet-like novel by Eduard Douwes Dekker about the exploitation of the Javanese by the Dutch government, and at the same time depriving its author of his copyright. The history of the Colonies of Benevolence shows a state doing an attempt at social engineering, and at the same time colonizing its own rural interior. This history helps you to look sharper for the impact of having a colonial empire, and it is great to detect numerous wider connections and intersections in it.

A few words

The Old Supreme Court Room, later the Law Library, in the Capitol, designed by Benjamin Latrobe – image: Digital Public Library of America / Digital Library of Georgia

This year I waited long, perhaps too long, before finally writing something about the sequence of events from election, confirmation and the attack at the Capitol to the inauguration of a new president of the United States. I will not take on the mantle of a prophet seeing the future by looking into the past to explain anything about these momentous events. By now so much words have been devoted to them, and to the foreseeable future, that I will not bother you with my personal views on this situation. Instead I will simply give here an overview of my posts concerning the United States published here in the last years. You will see a number of themes that can be easily connected with the latest events and developments in the United States.

In order to alleviate to some extent any disappointment I will add here a short paragraph on an institution that came very much into sight this month. In fact I plan to look in an upcoming post on a number of similar institutions in other countries.

(Almost) a nutshell guide to American legal history

The best thing to do is probably to give here a commented list with some of my blog posts concerning or touching upon the United States:

• Studying the American constitution (November 25, 2020) – on the ConSource and Quill projects
• Against racism, for justice (June 15, 2020)
• Deciphering letters about slavery and abolition (August 28, 2018) – a post about the crowdsourcing project Anti-Slavery Manuscripts of the Boston Public Library at Zooniverse
• A new resource on the legal histort of violence in the United States (April 12, 2018) – a post about the historic gun laws database at Duke University
• Hide and seek: Finding “hidden” collections (January 9, 2018) – a post about the CLIR project for “hidden” collections, with some attention for projects on legal history
• Picturing the law (September 20, 2017) – a post about two exhibitions concerning legal iconography
• Mapping the legal past (August 24, 2017) – with a paragraph on historical GIS maps for the United States, in particular for documenting slavery
• Preserving presidential lives and legacies (January 24, 2017) – a post written after the 2017 inauguration on the history of presidential libraries
• The legal world around American slavery (October 24, 2016) – a review of the Slavery in America and the World database in open access created by HeinOnline
• Looking far and beyond origins (January 28, 2016) – not only originalism, but also colonial history are the subjects in this post
• Claiming the streets. Legal history, riots and upheavals (December 9, 2011)

When you click on the word United States in the first paragraph of this section you will be led to all my posts with this tag, and hopefully you can be happy with my selection. For me it was rather interesting to see how often I wrote about America at my blog. At my legal history website Rechtshistorie you can pick your choice among the links for the United States on the pages for digital libraries and archives.

A brief look at a particular institution

At the very heart of the events at January 6, 2021 in Washington, D.C. was the United States Capitol Police (USCP). Tragically, an officer of this federal police force died in the events, but more tragically on that day the USCP did at first not succeed in protecting the Capitol. The USCP did not employ its full sworn strength of 2,000 women and men. On the history page of its website the USCP explains it came into existence in 1800, but only after a number of incidents an act was passed in 1828 for its formal establishment. Among the incidents was the attack by the British army destroying the Capitol, a fact not mentioned on this page. This part of the USCP website has not yet been updated. You will bear with me being a legal historian for noticing on that page the merger with the Library of Congress police in 2009. The website of the White House Historical Association has a section on the events in August 1814.

Is it possible a part of the USCP was actually deployed around the Library of Congress on January 6, 2021? I can understand no blog post about the events of January 6 has yet appeared at In Custodia Legis, the official blog of the Library of Congress Law Library. I cannot help noticing the USCP does not have a motto beyond Protect and Secure Congress, but the Latin motto surely has a very similar intention. Legal historians will at some point in time start writing about the events of 2020 and 2021, and in view of the mass of written and audiovisual materials an early start at preserving materials is not amiss. The digital life of materials is sometimes suprisingly brief! The Library of Congress should be one of the places to preserve the memory of these troubled times. It is reassuring to see how the services of this library and in particular the Law Library have grown in recent years. Even faithful visitors of its website can be surprised by the wealth of materials made accessible online in 2020.

I suppose as an historian you should feel an itch when writing about current events, if only to remember your own views take form within the present, influenced no doubt by the past. The present enables you to see a few things at close hand, but even so often you will have difficulties to see larger developments and to stand at the right distances for seeing vital connections, ruptures and continuities. Interpreting facts will come soon enough. As for other interesting police forces and their history they will appear here, too, in 2021.

Ten years of blogging

Ten years ago I started this blog. Five years ago I wrote the post ‘Legal history with a Dutch view’ about my blogging experience, and much of it still holds true today. The experience of sharing ideas, pointing to interesting projects and websites, the way people comment on my posts, and of course my own perspectives continue to strengthen this blog. In this post I will also look at my work since 2016.

The last five years attention to digital initiatives has become one of the most prominent features of my blog. Some readers may have thought I spent too much time surfing the web! I can assure you I do look at old documents, too. This month I have finished working on the project started at Het Utrechts Archief by the late Kees van Kalveen (1938-2018) for a new and very detailed finding aid for the holdings of castle Hardenbroek. On December 19, 2019 the finding aid will be presented at the beautiful building in the inner city of Utrecht, the premises of the former Benedictine St. Paul’s Abbey, for centuries also home to the provincial tribunal of Utrecht. Last year the Procesgids Hof van Utrecht was published, a guide to the procedure of this court.

In 2016 I started to assist Kees van Kalveen in his massive task to create a structure for the dispersed collections of castle Hardenbroek which had arrived at Het Utrechts Archief and the collections donated by members of the Van Hardenbroek family. This house and family archive is truly a conglomerate of archival collections. Van Kalveen decided to describe whenever possible important registers in much detail. He created extensive specifications for a number of heraldic armorials. The sheer number of letters was daunting. A more general approach had to prevail to describe and organize them. An example is a bundle with fifty letters by Christian Trotz, the first Dutch professor of natural law [Het Utrechts Archief, finding aid (toegang) 1010, Huis Hardenbroek, inv.no. 689]. These letters formed essential materials for the PhD thesis of C. Korbeld, Over de vryheit van gevoelen en spreken den rechtsgeleerden eigen. Leven en werk van Christiaan Hendrik Trotz (1703-1773) (Nijmegen 2013).

During the project most of these collections could be consulted by all those interested, because for some parts inventories existed. A year ago my count of the total number of items stopped at at least 6300 items, but I did note also my thought it might be 6900 items, in the end a correct assumption. Next week we will add an online version of the new finding aid for castle Hardenbroek to the website of Het Utrechts Archief. Its presentation coincides with the farewell to Kaj van Vliet, for almost two decades chief-archivist and also the main collaborator on this project.

However, in my posts since 2014 the digital turn surely influences the choice of subjects and my approach to them. It is a change and a challenge to face squarely, because the ways we see legal history and the ways we deal with questions and problems have changed. The visibility, accessibility and durable existence of digital projects are matters of real concern. This autumn I added a page about digital humanities to my legal history portal Rechtshistorie, after launching it in August in a German version at my Glossae blog concerning a fragment of a twelfth-century manuscript with preaccursian glosses to Justinian’s Digest.

Another familiar figure at this blog, the walking historian, has indeed walked less often these years. Biking tours have not been frequent either. In some posts I did look at archival records from castle Hardenbroek, thus offering you a preview of for example a seventeenth-century decree of the Holy Office and the bill for the trials and administration of the actions against the Dutch statesman Johan van Oldebarnevelt and his closest supporters. Hardenbroek figured also in my post on manors, towers and castles in Utrecht. A post about the houses where members of the Van Hardenbroek family lived became a part of my series of seasonal posts around the Janskerkhof square in Utrecht, yet another traditional feature.

Legal iconography is another subject dear to me, but I have written less often about it in the last five years than before 2014. I suppose such developments follow patterns in time. I am sure I will return to legal iconography. One of the clearest aims at my blog since its start in 2009, concisely called “spanning centuries, cultures and continents”, remains a spur to look beyond geographical and cultural borders. Another aim, looking at themes such as injustice, violence and inequality in history and the way law dealt with them or was a part of the problem, should stay visible here, too. Hopefully you, my dear readers, will stay with me!

Clairvaux, a monastery and a prison

Every now and then you across projects which attract immediately your curiosity. In Autumn 2018 the blog L’agenda du médiéviste alerted to an online documentary with the title Le cloître et le prison. Les espaces de l’enfermement, “The monastery and the prison. Places of confinement”. The website of this project was launched on September 26, 2018. The documentary is the fruit of the Enfermements project in which several French institutions work together. Not only the abbey of Clairvaux did function as a prison, other locations have a similar history. In this post I will look both at the documentary and the project website.

Between walls

The medieval abbey of Clairvaux occupies a special place in the Enfermements project. The abbey was founded in 1115. In 1808 it became a prison which functioned until 1971. The official closure is announced for 2022. 900 years of Clairvaux’s history were celebrated in 2015. The medieval manuscripts of Clairvaux are held at the Bibliothèque municipale de Troyes and can be viewed online. Alas the special portal Bibliothèque virtuelle de l ‘abbaye de Clairvaux for these manuscripts does not function currently. You can find the medieval cartularies of Clairvaux using CartulR, a resource of the IRHT/CNRS. Archival records of this abbey are also held in Troyes by the Archives départementales de l’Aube. Among its digitized collections the AD de l’Aube presents fifteen late medieval registres de l’officialité de Troyes, registers of the official, the ecclesiastical judge of the bishop.

The website of Le cloître et le prison has six main sections. The Avant-propos explains the goals and background. The glossaire is a glossary with not just terms from the monastic and incarcerated life in France. Even the Rasphuis and Spinhuis in Amsterdam are mentioned. You had best navigate this glossary using the icon on the rather small top bar of your screen. A chronology of Clairvaux helps you to see developments in their succession. In the bibliography you will find information about archival documents and images, printed sources and scholarly publications.

The section with videos, Visite vidéo, takes most space in the exhibition, and equally in the helpful sitemap. Jean-François Leroux, already forty years president of the association to save the cultural heritage of Clairvaux, acts as a guide in the videos. There is no question about the quality of his calm explanations, but sometimes he seems somewhat tired, but in comparison with other more enthusiastic reporters this might well be a pleasant change. At a number of turns the team of this portal does not hesitate to use materials from other prisons, even from outside France.

The tour of the premises starts with the location nowadays called Le Petit Clairvaux, the site of the first monastery, sometimes nicknamed by medievalists Clairvaux I. The nine following sections deal with the main site, starting with the cloister walls. For each items a short motto has been chosen, often with verbs opposing each other. For the eight section, Quartier punitive, the verbs Surveiller – punir, survey and punish, are a choice clearly referring to the study by Michel Foucault. Apart from the videos each section has an accompanying text, photos and at least one archival document. There are also some interviews with experts of the team. The navigation of the website is stylish, with a key and lock for the main menu, and in the video section a quill pen to go to the menu with the ten sections of Clairvaux. It was possible to follow the preparations for project at Twitter (@enfermements), but it has been very quiet after August 2018.

If you look at the screen print of the chronology you can gather already two elements from the long history of Clairvaux, the ongoing construction, demolition and reconstruction of the buildings and its place in French history. The chronology mentions under the year 1834 the incarceration of political prisoners, but with examples from the late nineteenth century, Auguste Blanqui between 1872 and 1879, the anarchist Peter Kropotkin in the years 1883-1886, and even Philip of Orléans in 1890, albeit in his case lodged away from other prisoners.

In this virtual exhibit the most interesting element, the comparison of monasteries and prisons, is the central element. I feel hard pressed to focus here on one particular aspect. It is exactly the variety of aspects which is brought here into view. When you remember the title of the study by Uwe Kai Jacobs, Die Regula Benedicti als Rechtsbuch: Eine rechtshistorische und rechtstheologische Untersuchung [The Rule of St. Benedict as a book of law. A study in legal history and legal theology] (Cologne, etc., 1987) it is less surprising to look at monks and nuns as persons living under a strict regime with punishments for transgressions on premises clearly designed to make such things possible. You might want to read also the study by Elisabeth Lusset, Crime, châtiment et grâce dans les monastères au Moyen Âge (Turnhout 2017). The strength of the virtual exhibit is the combination of videos showing the present locations at Clairvaux with explanations about both periods as an abbey and as a prison and proper use of historical document and images. The intuition that places with a common dining room or canteen are an institution or a company is not new!

Looking behind and beyond walls

The abbey of Clairvaux is not the only famous building in France which at a certain point was turned into a prison. In Paris the Conciergerie first was a palace, the Palais de la Cité which for centuries housed the Parlement de Paris, with only a number of prison cells. During the French Revolution it became a full-scale prison. The abbey of Port-Royal in Paris served as a prison between 1790 and 1795. Between 1793 and 1863 the abbey at the Mont-Saint Michel was home to a prison. The abbey of Notre-Dame de Fontevraud, once the royal abbey of the Plantagenets, was used as a prison between 1812 and 1963. You might try to find more examples at the website of the Centre des Monuments nationaux, but somehow the search function did not work correctly.

At this point one should by all means invoke the various services of the bilingual Criminocorpus platform (CNRS), strangely absent in the production of this audiovisual project. At this portal you can read both as a PDF and in a browsable version the Guide des archives judiciaires et pénitentaires en France (1800-1958) by Jean-Luc Farcy. He puts these monasteries converted into prisons in a group of prisons for those having to serve long terms, typically in old castles, fortresses and some abbeys. Clairvaux served in this quality for several French départements. Criminocorpus has virtual exhibits on Fontevraud and on Paris prisons after the fall of the Bastille.

It is really interesting to explore this virtual exhibit around the abbey of Clairvaux. The partnership of organizations for cultural heritage, archival institutions, research groups and communication design offices succeeds in telling an intricate history in a way earlier generations would not have thought feasible or sensible. Let Le cloître et le prison be one of your guides to the wealth of stories about this famous monument!

Syria’s cultural heritage online, a case for open access

From October 22 to 28 the yearly Open Access Week will be held. Around the world there are initiatives to create open access in various forms. Institutions can choose for degrees of openness for their digital collections. The debate about open access to major scholarly journals is very important for the future of science and its presence in society. In some cases open access is most helpful in tracing, monitoring and preserving cultural heritage. For Syria this is even absolutely vital. In this post I would like to look at some projects aiming to preserve Syria’s cultural heritage. The war in Syria has taken the lives of too many people. Invaluable objects from its long history have been destroyed, and the same fate threatens today.

Syria’s cultural heritage

The UNESCO has created the Observatory of Syrian Cultural Heritage. Its name sounds like The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. This UNESCO observatory looks at buildings, movable heritage and intangible heritage, and it launches initiatives for their protection. You can find also information about the actions of UNESCO partners such as ICOM. The ICOM is home to the Observatory on Illicit Traffic in Cultural Goods and the Intangible Cultural Heritage & Museums Project, and ICOM has created other portals as well. ICOM works together with The Blue Shield, an organization which helps the coordination for saving and protecting cultural heritage in emergency situations. The UNESCO lists also other initiatives which aim specifically at Syria, some of the well-known, for example The Aleppo Project and the Damascus History Foundation. I could not help noticing Scanning for Syria, an international project led by Leiden University for scanning archaeological objects at Tell Sabi Abyad in the field and creating virtual reconstructions. You can find publications resulting from the excavations in open access in the Leiden University scholarly repository.

An important resource for finding such initiatives for Syria is the Syriac Reference Portal, but today I could not reach this website. Luckily I bookmarked a number of websites. The Syrian Heritage Archive Project has been created by the Museum für Islamische Kunst in Berlin and the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut. Some of the results can be seen in the iDAi Gazetteer, an interactive map system which is connected with other georeferenced resources. The information for objects in Syria can be approached in several ways, in particular using iDAI objects.

The Open Access Week mentions at its website many groups and events, but the very word Syria is sadly missing. It makes me more eager to proceed here to initiatives which offer more substantial contributions for Syria. Syri-Ac is a portal to resources for the Syrian language, literature and culture. There is a generous links section and a scholarly bibliography. Among the valuable sections the overview of digitized Syriac manuscripts stands out. You can use a sortable or a faceted version. The sortable version shows concise descriptions of the contents, and you can perform keyword searches. The faceted version allows you to filter quickly for languages, holding institutions, authors and genres.

The E-ktobe: manuscrits syriaques catalogue created at the IRHT/CNRS (Paris-Orleans) gives currently detailed descriptions of a restricted number of Syriac manuscripts. No doubt this resource will grow in strength. One of the largest online collections with Syriac manuscripts with manuscripts actually held in Syria is presented in the Virtual Hill Monastic Museum and Library, better known under its acronym vHMML. You can view manuscripts after registration. No registration is needed for the palaeographical introduction to Syriac scripts in the online School of the HMML. A perhaps unexpected number of digitized manuscripts and fragments containing items in Syriac can be found at the portal of the International Dunhuang Project, but thanks to Syri-Ac you are alerted to nearly 650 fragments. The Dunhuang project deals mainly with Tibetan texts and manuscripts found in the Chinese town Dunhuang.

Epigraphy is a scholarly field with a tradition for researching a part of Syria’s cultural heritage. Searchable Greek Inscriptions has an overview of online resources for Greater Syria and the East. In particular but not exclusively Palmyra is mentioned among the resources. The Università Ca’ Foscari in Venice has created The Ebla Digital Archives for royal inscriptions from the third millennium BCE found in Ebla/Tell Mardikh. The closeness of Syria to ancient and modern empires comes into view at the Hethitologie Portal Mainz which deals with cuneiform inscriptions found in modern Turkey and northern Syria. The Khalili Research Centre of Oxford University is responsible for OCIANA, the Online Corpus of the Inscriptions of Ancient Northern Arabia, an area which covered at least a part of southern Syria.

One of the general resources for Latin inscriptions is the Photographic Database within the Epigraphic Database Heidelberg. You can also search for images of inscriptions at the EAGLE portal. With the EAGLE mobile app you can take photos of inscriptions in situ and compare them with the database.

Finding more

This post could be much longer, but maybe it is important to realize projects can easily be overlooked. Initiatives do not come from just one country. Some countries have institutes in the Middle East which watch developments in Syria carefully, others follow the Middle East since decades both on location and from the outside. The American School of Oriental Research (ASOR) in Alexandria, Virginia, has created the platform ASOR-Syrian Heritage with reports on damage inflicted to cultural heritage. The ASOR has a digital archive for its rich history in archaeological excavations. The University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, has an extensive digital collection with photographs from the library of the American Geographical Society and also the Wisconsin Palmyrean Aramaic Inscription Project. Damage to archaeological sites in Syria is discussed in particular by the Association for the Protection of Syrian Archaeology. Monuments of Syria preserves literally images of the situation in 2011 and gives links to a number of resources. These are just a few of the websites you, too, can find using the ever-active Ancient World Online blog maintained by Charles Jones. Access to Mideast and Islamic Resources is an online journal which helps you to find just what it promises

Just as we cannot take open access as granted, we cannot afford to think every project concerning Syria can be traced easily. Online maps such as the one concerning the civil war in Syria or a similar map at Edmaps are ready at hand, but you need to search for other resources. It is a lucky situation the results of research in the filed of Classical Antiquity can almost always be found in open access. In Europe many people can benefit from an autumn holiday week. For those who like to sit behind a computer screen or surf with a tablet there is every chance to discover next week lots of resources in open access about a country which goes through a dark period in its long history. For me it would suffice if this post invites you to find out more yourself.

Preserving presidential lives and legacies

How can you put the inauguration of a new president of the United States in a sensible perspective on a blog dealing with legal history? Is it the historian’s duty to say something about the near future or should I refrain at all cost from making predictions? One element in determining the role of a president in history are the presidential libraries and museums created in memory of deceased presidents or even by living former presidents. Starting with the library commemorating Herbert Hoover there are now fourteen institutions which aim at preserving important papers and objects and presenting the deeds and legacies of presidents. In this post I will search for information concerning facts and materials in connection with legal history. Last week I spotted the section on presidential libraries and museums at the website of the American National Archives, but it seemed wise not to hurry into action immediately.

The website of the National Archives hosts the Federal Register which preserves also Public Papers of Presidents. For five presidents you can start here looking at online sets with presidential papers, from Ronald Reagan to Barack Obama. In 1957 the Office of the Federal Register started to publish series of publications of presidential papers in print. The National Archives guide you also to other institutions with presidential collections. Pride of place among them goes to the Library of Congress with 23 collections. A number of these collections has been digitized by its Manuscript Division. It is most useful to look at the guides to presidential papers provided by the National Archives. There is even a search interface to search with one action in all fourteen presidential libraries together. I urge you to look in particular to the history of the presidential libraries and the legislation enacted about them.

A short tour of presidential libraries

Interestingly there is even a second institution dealing with the papers of Herbert Hoover (1874-1964), the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and it is only logical to start here with the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library and Museum in West Branch, Iowa. The sheer variety of materials presented on the website gives a fair indication of the possible width of a presidential library and museum. For brevity’s sake I will focus here on Hoover’s period as a president (1928-1933), but it is instructive to see materials, too, even before the period his work as Secretary of Commerce in 1921. Hoover became known nationwide and internationally thanks to his efforts since 1914 for the Commission for Relief in Belgium. The library has eleven collections documenting aspects of his work as a president. Hoover’s campaign for the presidency is documented, too, at West Branch. By the way, its location in Iowa is a reminder of the geographical division of the presidential libraries. You can locate them on a clickable map at the website of the National Archives.

The Hoover Institution was founded at Stanford in 1919 by Hoover himself. By the way, he was among the first students of Stanford University when it opened in 1891. It holds collections for his life and work before 1921 and after the end of his presidency, and thus it figures here only briefly, however interesting its activities and collections are. In a way it embodies a part of Hoover’s vision and promotes it for this century.

It is not entirely surprising that Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s decision in 1938 to create space for a library documenting his presidency and to donate his presidential papers to the federal government forms the start of the modern presidential collections. The FDR Presidential Library and Museum is located in Hyde Park, NY. A fair part of the collections in this library has been digitized. Using the Franklin search engine you can look at your screen not only at documents created by Roosevelt himself, but also at materials concerning Eleanor Roosevelt and Henry Morgenthau Jr, and there are preset selections on a number of themes. The presence of many photographs in these digital collections reminds you of the impact of the representation of power, law and government. Think only of presidents signing a law… The museum of this institution, as any museum, creates a space set free to focus attention on a particular theme or on particular objects. In this case it fosters an image of an era. They often succeed more readily in evoking essential characteristics of a period than documents can do. However, viewing a particular record can bring you a sense of immediate contact with the past.

Presidents of this century come into view with the George W. Bush Library and Museum in Dallas, TX. It is combined with the Bush Center. At this moment the Barack Obama Presidential Library is only a website preluding to its opening in Chicago within a few years. Certainly one of the most salient features of Bush’s library is the Situation Room. Not just for school children and researchers this space fires the imagination. We all have seen sometimes movies with scenes set in a presidential room during national and international crises, but the real one is not the kind of medium size conference room. The Secure Video Transmission Site has been recreated at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, Simi Valley, CA. The Bush Library offers you also a digital library, a guide to the events of 9/11 and a good overview of other relevant resources.

This list of the George W. Bush Library ends with other resources ends with a most vital piece of legislation for the theme of this post, the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA; 5 U.S.C. 552). Presidential libraries and museums are subject to a number of laws and regulations. Four of them deal with presidential transitions. The Office of Presidential Libraries administers the network of these libraries and takes also action to create presidential projects for presidents leaving office.

It is tempting to linger longer at the websites of one or more presidential libraries instead of trying to give here a more balanced view. I suppose that when you look a bit longer at their websites you will find materials which are more closely connected with legal history. My choice should give you an idea of the holdings of such institutions and their context. As is my common practice I have put in web links at many turns to lead you to online resources to help you in your research. Once upon a time the virtual world was indeed another world, but after 25 years the Internet is just one of the online media in our current world. The links are for your use, and you should not feel troubled to leave my blog and visit them!

As for any presidency it will be most interesting to follow the new president’s actions. His actions should be set within in the framework of the Constitution of the United States, checked by the legislative powers of the Congress and the power of the Supreme Court. The Library of Congress has created a fine overview of presidential inaugurations. Its Law Library should be your port of call to find information about both current American and foreign legislation. In the world’s largest library you can find an incredible mass of information about law and justice in other countries, too. The law librarians’ blog, In Custodia Legis [In the Custody of the Law] is one of the services alerting you to many aspects of their collections and ongoing work to retrieve information for anyone’s use. There is no doubt that in due time we will distinguish the legacy of any president from his other actions. However, it is a true concern where the promises made during the campaign will lead the United States of America and the world at large. As for predicting the future as a historian the old wisdom that politics will touch you sooner or later still holds true, as will visions of law and justice.

Powers around the corner: Musing about old houses

Many blogs honour the tradition of a seasonal post for the end of the year. Alas I cannot offer you recent pictures of Utrecht with snow, but over the years I have found another thread for my contribution to this genre. A bit of frost and foggy weather brought me in the right mood for it! The main squares in Utrecht are not very large. The Vredenburg square named after a sixteenth-century fortification has become quite small. The Domplein square is not much more than the space between the remaining choir of the former cathedral and the Domtoren. Only the Janskerkhof is a real square around a church. The Janskerk was a collegiate church with houses for the canons around the churchyard and in adjacent streets. Even to my own surprise the Janskerkhof comes into view here at many turns. In this post it has even an unexpected role in the work I do at present at Het Utrechts Archief, the municipal and provincial archives of Utrecht. Much of my knowledge comes from the website Huizen aan het Janskerkhof [Houses at the Janskerkhof] created by Caroline Pelser.

The Hardenbroek family and the Janskerkhof

N. Chevalier, Gondolas in the Drift near Janskerkhof 12 during a feast given by the Portuguese servants of the count De Tarouca in 1714 – Utrecht, Het Utrechts Archief, cat. no. 32392

At Het Utrechts Archief I assist in the creation of a new and very extensive finding aid for the archival collections from the castle Hardenbroek near Cothen and the families connected with its owners. I mentioned this castle in June in my post about manors and castles in Utrecht. Caroline Pelser gives for four houses at and near the Janskerkhof documentation in which members of the Hardenbroek family appear, I will focus on one particular house, but let’s start with three other houses. In 1684 Johan van Hardenbroek and his wife Florentina van Mathenesse, scion of a rich family connected with Rotterdam, rented one half of the house with the current address Janskerkhof 12, now used by the Molengraaff Institute for Private Law. Near this building is a relief in honour of Willem Molengraaff (1858-1931), a famous law professor, as you can see on my photograph in an earlier post.

A century later, in 1788, Florentina Elisabeth van Hardenbroek rented the house at Drift 11. Its most famous inhabitant was Christophorus Buys Ballot (1817-1890), the founder of the Dutch meteorological institute and still known for Buys Ballot’s law, one of the few meteorological laws. This house, too, eventually became for some time home to a university institute; it houses now the office of a charitable institution.

The Voorstraat is the street around the north and west side of the area once forming the immunity or precinct of the chapter of St. John. At Voorstraat 79 Karel Gijsbert Jan van Hardenbroek rented in 1911 a room as a student at Utrecht University. Currently the building is united with Voorstraat 77, at the corner with the Boothstraat leading directly to the Janskerkhof, and used for a restaurant.

However inglorious Voorstraat 79 might now be, with Janskerkhof 2 you encounter one of the most impressive buildings around the Janskerkhof. It lies directly adjacent to the building used by the States of Utrecht, the Statenkamer, the premises of a former Franciscan convent. Recently the buildings of the Statenkamer have served Utrecht University for many years as the home of the Law Library, yet another familiar spot for the readers of this blog. Janskerkhof 2 has the strongest connection with the Van Hardenbroeks. The house came in the seventeenth century in the possession of Cornelis Booth, a city councillor who was very interested in the history of Utrecht. He did not sell this house when he moved to the house which is now Boothstraat 6 at the north side of the Janskerkhof. His manuscripts kept at Het Utrechts Archief are invaluable sources for the history of the town and province Utrecht (collections no. 355, Verzameling Buchel-Booth, and no. 759, Familie Booth).

In 1766 the States of Utrecht bought the house at Janskerkhof 2 in order to enlarge the premises of the Statenkamer, but in 1774 they sold it to Gijsbert Jan van Hardenbroek (1719-1788), member of the Ridderschap, the gentry forming the Second Estate in the States of Utrecht. When he became its president in 1781 the members convened in his house they started calling the Ridderschapshuis. In his will he stipulated the gentry would inherit his house. In 1824 a nephew, Ernest Louis van Hardenbroek (1774-1843) lived in it. Only in 1850 the Provinciewet made an end to the function of the gentry in the provincial states. The former members of the gentry formed a society under civil law and used the Ridderschapshuis until 1880. In 1881 at last the building of the former Statenkamer at Janskerkhof 3, since 1816 owned by Utrecht University, was connected to Janskerkhof 2. Hence a later inhabitant, A.A.W. Huybrecht (1853-1915), a zoologist and a pioneer of modern embryology, lived directly next door to his lecture hall and laboratory. A short article by L.M. Rutgers van Rozenburg about Janskerkhof 2, ‘Geschiedenis van het Ridderschapshuis te Utrecht (1781-heden)’. Maandblad Oud-Utrecht 56 (1983) 172-174, can be read online. Utrecht University Library maintains the online bibliography for the history of Utrecht in which you can find more publications about many subjects touching Utrecht, sometimes enhanced with links to digital versions.

Portrait of Gijsbert Jan van Hardenbroek – Castle Hardenbroek – photo: A,J. van der Wal, Rijksdienst voor het Cultureel Erfgoed, object no. 400.410

Gijsbert Jan van Hardenbroek is the best documented member of the Van Hardenbroeks, The new inventory will show many aspects of his activities in various functions, For example. he was not only a very active member of the States of Utrecht, but also member of the Staten-Generaal. It is tempting to give here teasers from the archival records at Het Utrechts Archief. They shed new light on his memoirs edited by F.J.L. Krämer and A.J. van der Meulen, Gedenkschriften van Gijsbert Jan van Hardenbroek, heer van Bergestein, Lockhorst, ‘s Heeraartsberg, Bergambacht en Ammerstol, president der Utrechtsche ridderschap, gedeputeerde ter Generaliteitsvergadering enz. (1747-1787) (6 vol., Amsterdam 1901-1918).

Being the lord of Bergambacht and a castle in this village resulted in a number of archival records which are essential for studying this location and the area around it in the current province South Holland. Looking at his house in Utrecht so closely connected with his functions helps to see his castle Hardenbroek in the right perspective. However, other Van Hardenbroeks are every bit as interesting as this remarkable member of a family tracing its ancestors back into the fourteenth century. If you want to pursue the history of the houses at the Janskerkhof in more detail you can use the online version at the Digital Library for Dutch Literature of the descriptions given in the standard work by Marceline Dolfin, E.M. Kylstra and Jean Penders (eds.), Utrecht. De huizen binnen de singels (2 vol., The Hague 1989). Caroline Pelser has added links to the specific sections in this work for a particular house at the end of each web page.

The new inventory of the family and castle archive Van Hardenbroek is the result of nearly twenty years work by C.A. van Kalveen, and I am happy to help him finishing it at the Utrecht archives. One of my colleagues at Het Utrechts Archief, Floortje Tuinstra, has written an article about the houses rented by the delegations negotiating from 1712 to 1714 the treaties of the Peace of Utrecht [‘De Vrede van Utrecht gelokaliseerd. Huisvesting van de diplomaten’, in: De Vrede van Utrecht. Jaarboek Oud-Utrecht 2013, 69-94]. Her article alerted me to the etching with the gondolas in the Drift canal. Houses at the Janskerkhof and surroundings streets, too, served as residences for some of the delegations. If you would like to find more images of the Janskerkhof, the Ridderschapshuis and the Statenkamer, you can search for them at the website of Het Utrechts Archief, and also in the image database of the Dutch Heritage Agency, the Memory of the Netherlands and the Atlas van Stolk. Last but not least I should recommend the website of Caroline Pelser and her very useful overview of sources concerning not only the Janskerkhof but in particular the legal history of both the town and province Utrecht.

Of manors, towers and castles

Living near Utrecht with its beautiful old inner city and many monuments from earlier centuries can make you wish to look around this town in the heart of the Netherlands to find more monumental buildings or remains of them. People watching last year on television the start of the Tour de France from Utrecht may have looked at some point to a spectacular aerial photo of a castle and the park around it. The castle of Haarzuilens is the largest castle in my country, and it is really in a class of its own. Since 2013 I live almost in the backyard of the former manor Huis Voorn of which only the two eighteenth-century dovecotes survive, a memorial of seigniorial rights, worthy of a post here. Some castles show all the archetypical elements of the fairy castle with one or more towers, battlements and a moot surrounding the premises. Some are accompanied by follies, nineteenth-century – or even earlier – fake buildings, some have become themselves to a large extent reinvented houses.

Thus many buildings are only castles by virtue of their name. The importance of castles for legal history is surely their connection with jurisdiction and rights, and in my country even with the very shape of newly cultivated grounds, in particular in marshy regions. In this post the walking historian rides again! In fact I did ride to these houses by bike. Most of my examples will come from the southeast corner of the province Utrecht, the Kromme Rijngebied, an area named after an old meandering branch of the Rhine. Along and near the Langbroekerwetering, a stream made for drainage of this originally swamp area, there were some forty fortified houses, and luckily for you I will not visit them all, but you might become curious for more indeed.

A tour of castles in Utrecht

Let’s start with a most imposing tower at Den Ham near Vleuten, nowadays part of the city of Utrecht. In the mid-nineteenth century most of the fortified house around it has been demolished. The freestanding tower with seven floors is the largest one still standing in my country. The tower is actually for sale, now for only (!) € 1,750,000. I did not put here on purpose a picture made in January 2015, but it can serve to remind you of the problem of heating an old building enough to be comfortable for people in our century! The fortified house ranked as many other stately buildings in Utrecht as a ridderhofstad, literally a knightly manor giving its owner entrance to the States of Utrecht as a member of the gentry. This rule only developed during the sixteenth-century when a first version of a list was published. Thus the States of Utrecht tried to deal with the proliferation of castles, manors and other major private homes and possible claims to qualify for its membership.

The range of castles and manors in the province of Utrecht goes from the tower of Den Ham to almost fairy-tale castles such as Haarzuilens, but I would like to look here at an example closer to the Kromme Rijn river, Heemstede near the former village Houten, now a garden-city to the south-east of Utrecht. Its splendid outlook could convince you it was always as grandiose as it looks now. However, its present incarnation is in fact just a faithful copy of the original building which was destroyed by fire some fifteen years ago. It is now home to a hotel. The surrounding grounds have been converted into a golf course. The Amsterdam-Rhine canal with its busy traffic runs close to it.

Near the village of Odijk is castle Beverweerd. Until a few years ago it was home to a public school. As you can gather from my picture it is situated in lush surroundings. From the meadow across the castle it becomes clear a number of medieval elements have been added quite recently. Adding such elements is not a new development, it follows closely practices starting in the nineteenth century. I will show you an example in the next section of this post.

Another tower not far from Odijk is located almost at the beginning of the Langbroekerwetering, the main stream created to develop the marshes into a cultivated area. Sterkenburg, “strong fortress”, certainly looks as a stronghold. The flag at the top of the tower adds an element familiar from television series with tales about courageous knights and damsels in distress. Alas I could not take a photograph closer to this fortified house because the trees surrounding it make it impossible to view this house completely. To the left of the tower is the main building. In order to make up for the lack of details I could think of nothing else but turning around and taking a picture of the dovecote in the meadow adjacent to Sterkenburg and its grounds. To be sure, this dovecote is indeed a nineteenth-century folly, but something more is the matter in the south-east corner of the province of Utrecht. During the seventeenth and eighteenth century it became fashionable for rich Dutchmen to buy old castles and manors as summer houses.

A matter of rights

Buying yourself as a landowner a nice large summer resort is one thing, gaining access to the States of Utrecht by getting hold of a place with the eagerly sought rank of a ridderhofstad was surely as important. The presence of other buildings around your reinvented castle or old manor helped to show off your wealth, the sheer size of your landed property. In the case of follies or other embellishments your taste, too, became visible.

Some castle-like manors suggest a particular right. In the village of Cothen Huis Rhynestein is located at the Kromme Rijn river directly opposite to the village church. Not only a manor, but also a gate survive. The local situation might suggest the lords of Rhynestein did nominate the vicar of this parish. In his book Het Kromme Rijngebied in de middeleeuwen (Zutphen, 1993), the most important and detailed study on the medieval geographic and institutional history of the Kromme Rijn area Cees Dekker showed at many turns that you cannot reach any of such easy conclusions. The sheer number of institutions and people with claims and rights in this area is truly bewildering. Only long familiarity with the relevant archival collections, the experience and all other qualities of a medievalist-archivist par excellence which Dekker impersonated, and a keen personal knowledge of this region could bring his research to bear such rich fruits.

Often the key to in-depth knowledge of a castle is getting hold of its archives. Castle Hardenbroek has been and still is in the possession of its founders, probably at least since the early fourteenth-century, with the exception of a dire period of nearly a century when the family had been forced to sell the ancestral home. Twenty years ago the castle archives were entrusted to the care of Het Utrechts Archief, the combined municipal and provincial archives of Utrecht. Hardenboek is located in the village Driebergen-Rijsenburg, but it is actually very close to Langbroek and Cothen.

A note on Dutch archival collections

Many archival collections of castles and manors in the province Utrecht are kept at Het Utrechts Archief, a central point in this small province, and not in the smaller regional archives at Amersfoort, Breukelen, Woerden and Wijk bij Duurstede. Luckily the portal site of the Utrechts Archiefnet makes it possible to search directly in the online finding aids of both Het Utrechts Archief and the four regional archives in the province of Utrecht. Lately the arrival at Utrecht of a very substantial number of archival records for Hardenbroek from the Nationaal Archief in The Hague and the Gelders Archief in Arnhem has given a new push to finish the new inventories for Hardenbroek that will replace the provisional finding aids published in 2000. I use the plural inventories on purpose. In a way the new finding aids will open the road closed by the beautiful gate on my picture.

You can find more about Dutch castles for example at the website of the Dutch center for castles and manors with a good links section and also at Kastelen in Nederland. There is a special website Utrechtse buitenplaatsen for manors and castles in the province Utrecht. Relevant images can be found online for example in the image database of the Rijksdienst voor het Cultureel Erfgoed, the Dutch National Service for Cultural Heritage that has also created a database to search for monumental buildings. Het Utrechts Archief offers online access to almost all its finding aids. You might still benefit from the printed guide to archives in the province Utrecht by A.N. Beets, H.L.Ph. Leeuwenberg and J.G. Riphaagen (eds.), De archieven in Utrecht (Alphen aan den Rijn 1985), the eleventh volume of the series with overviews of Dutch public archival collections (PDF, 9 MB). At present only the volumes 3 to 14 of this important series with a deceivingly long title, Overzichten van de archieven en verzamelingen in de openbare archiefbewaarplaatsen in Nederland, are available online at the Digitale Bibliotheek voor de Nederlandse Letteren, however among them at least also the last volume, the guide to private archival collections in the Netherlands [H.J.H.A.G. Metselaars (ed.), Particuliere archieven in Nederland (1992)]. The volumes for Drenthe and Gelderland have not yet been digitized, but the separate volume concerning archives in Amsterdam can be viewed online. Even if you have no particular interest in the history of castles and manor these invaluable guides merit your attention for legal history, because the volumes start with a map of jurisdictions before 1795. Sometimes the venom is in the end, but here there is a bait waiting for you!

Legacies in brick

Somehow the walking historian has not appeared at all here this year, but I did certainly walk in 2015 at various locations. One of my recent tours led me to a subject fit for a new contribution. In the old inner city of Utrecht you can spot among the nearly one thousand historic buildings at least three buildings with a clear connection to lawyers from the sixteenth and seventeenth century. Two of them still have a function connected with the aim of their founders. In this post I would like to introduce you to the three buildings, their background and to the lawyers who founded them.

The Bruntenhof

The first foundation I would like to show you is the Bruntenhof, a charitable foundation created in 1621 by Frederik Brunt. Its buildings have been lovingly restored between 1979 and 1983. For some reason the very sign at the entrance “ANNO 1621” has not yet been renewed after recent painting work. You can find a lot of information about old buildings in Utrecht in the Utrechts Documentatiesyteem (UDS), with maps, old and modern photographs, research notes and scans of relevant publications about historic buildings. At present the Bruntenhof is a property of the Utrechts Monumentenfonds, a foundation which owns more than one hundred historic buildings. Their website gives a good succinct overview of the history of the Bruntenhof. Frederik Brunt used the garden of his own home Klein Lepelenburg as the space for his foundation with fifteen small houses called cameren, “chambers”, houses with just one room. Brunt also made provisions for fuel, food and other means of livings, and this made his foundation uncommon. His heirs did something which Brunt must have intended but had not dictated. As a Roman Catholic living in a protestant country he wisely did not say anything about religion in the foundation charters, but he wanted poor Roman Catholic widows to live in the Bruntenhof.

I tried to find more information about Frederik Brunt, but apart from genealogical information nothing did surface immediately. Interestingly, I did find online the registration of his death (“Mr. Frederick Brunt, licentiaet”) on March 30, 1622 in a transcribed register for the tolling of bells of Utrecht Cathedral (register van overluiden) between 1614 and 1651 [P.A.N.S. van Meurs, Overluidingen te Utrecht 1614-1651]. This register mentions often the occupations and academic degrees of the deceased, and thus you might use it also to find quickly other lawyers in Utrecht during the first half of the seventeenth century. It was surprising to find this register among other digitized resources for the history of Utrecht at GeneaKnowHow in its section for digitized sources. There is a much more reliable modern transcription of a similar register for the years 1562 to 1614 which shows the sums paid for tolling the bells. For quick information about persons not included in biographical dictionaries such registers can be quite useful. The time the bells tolled and the amount of money often show the status of the deceased. J.W.C. van Campen, for many decades head of the municipal archive of Utrecht, made many notes about the area around the Bruntenhof and the Brunt family [Utrecht, Het Utrechts Archief (HUA), Verzameling historisch werkmateriaal, no. 666].

The Gronsveltcameren

Smaller than Brunt’s foundation are the six cameren, one-room buildings erected in 1652 to fulfill the will of Johan van Gronsvelt who had stipulated this should happen when his wife died. A stone in the building indicated he was a barrister at the Court of Utrecht. The register mentioned above puts his death at August 5, 1642. These houses stand originally in the Agnietenstraat, but they had to move in the eighteenth century for another foundation, a combination of orphanage and surveyors school, the Fundatie van Renswoude (1754). In 1756 the houses were rebuilt in the Nicolaasdwarsstraat near the Nicolaaskerk (St. Nicholas). An inscription with a chronogram in it to show the year to those people who know this kind of riddle. The second half of this inscription merits attention, Uit liifde puur gesticht door loutre charitaat / Tot Bystand van de lien om Godswil anders niit, “Founded from pure love by charity alone / As a support of people for Gods will and nothing else”. A second inscription below it tells us about the removal in 1756.

When walking here in November an acquaintance pointed to the difference in the model of the rain gutters which according to her had to do with the religious background of the people living in a particular house. In fact there had been a fight over the management of this foundation and after a split-up maintenance was done differently ever since. Nos. 1, 2, 5 and 6 were maintained since 1719 by the Roman Catholic almshouse, the other two by the original foundation. In 1746 the almshouse itself was split into an “Old Catholic” office responsible for the houses 5 and 6, and a Roman Catholic office for nos. 1 and 2. After the removal of 1756 different ways of maintenance continued. A housing corporation currently owns the Gronsveltcameren.

Of course I have looked at the inventory of the archive of the provincial court of Utrecht kept at Het Utrechts Archief, but there is no separate register of advocates and barristers. However, with the third lawyer we will look at a person whose legal practice, too, will come into view.

Evert van de Poll, a veritable founder

At the other side of the Nicolaasdwarsstraat is a much older building, a former monastery, the location of one of the foundations created by Evert van de Poll. Den VIII^en Septembris mr. Evert van de Poll, raet ende advocaet van de edele heeren Staten sLants van Utrecht, II uren met Salvator, XII gl. reads the notice in the account for the tolling of bells in 1602. The fine history of Utrecht University Library published in 1986 did tell the story of the books which entered in 1602 the municipal library, the core of the university’s library founded in 1636, but the exact date of Van de Poll’s death was not known thirty years ago.¹ The books from Van de Poll’s legacy were inscribed with a note “Ex dono Ev. Pollionis”. However, the authors duly noted a notice from 1609 about his foundation of a workhouse for the poor. His explicit aim was to help and educate poor children in order to prevent them becoming vagabonds and people without work whose live would end badly.

This text echoes the very inscription found above the entrance of the workhouse, “(…) hating all idleness (…) erected for those who prefer to win a living with work above empty begging (…)”. The archive of this foundation at Het Utrechts Archief is not very large, and thus it is well worth pointing here to a resolutieboek, a register with decisions of the board of directors for the period 1634 to 1751 kept in the Dutch National Archives in The Hague as part of the archival collection of the Calkoen family [NA, Familiearchief Calkoen, inv. no. 1687]. In the eighteenth century the workhouse did not function properly anymore, and the main purpose became providing poor people with some money (preuve), paid with the rents coming from four apartments created in the former workhouse. Van de Poll founded a second workhouse at Amersfoort, and a small archival collection survives at the Nationaal Archief.

Let’s look here somewhat longer at Evert van de Poll. He was probably born around 1560. His father had been the city secretary of Utrecht, and his mother was the sister of Floris Thin, the advocate of the Dutch Republic. In 1580 he started studying law in Leiden, and in 1587 he matriculated at Heidelberg. In 1597 he had become the advocate of the States of Utrecht. Recently John Tholen wrote in the year book of the historical society Oud-Utrecht about the humanistic interests of Van de Poll who exchanged letters with Justus Lipsius, and had even lived two years in his house.² In Utrecht van de Poll lived in a large house on the spot of the present-day building at Drift 21, one of the houses formerly belonging to the canons of the collegiate chapter of St. John’s.³

Again at the Janskerkhof

The banner image of Huizen aan het Janskerkhof

The website Huizen aan het Janskerkhof of Caroline Pelser gives a nice overview of the consecutive possessors of Van de Poll’s house near the Janskerkhof. Interestingly Van de Poll inherited the house in 1580 from Floris Thin. Nowadays Drift 21 is part of the inner city location of Utrecht University Library. Van de Poll’s printed books and manuscripts are at the modern building of this library on the campus east of the old city, where they are kept within the Special Collections. At her website Caroline Pelser has created a most useful index of important online finding aids at Het Utrechts Archief concerning law and justice in Utrecht, with also links to digitzed printed accounts of some cases heard and verdicts given at Utrecht in the seventeenth and eighteenth century, and last nut not least digitized printed ordinances for court procedure, both for the municipal court and the provincial court.

We have looked here at three lawyers and their contribution to Dutch society after their death, and surely more can be said about them and about their colleagues, but for now we have come to the end of this walk. The Janskerkhof has figured at my blog already several times, in particular in some seasonal postings. This year winter seems far away. In December the weather at Utrecht has even broken all records since 1901 for high temperatures. Anyway it is fitting indeed to end this year’s contributions again at and near the Janskerkhof. The States of Utrecht convened since 1579 in a former Franciscan convent at the Janskerkhof, in the twentieth century for thirty years home to the law library of Utrecht University. Between 1597 and 1602 Evert van de Poll must have visited this building often. A part of the Janskerk was since 1584 home to the city library and from 1634 onwards until 1820 for the university library. Next year I would like to look somewhat longer at Van de Poll, his books and his activity as a lawyer. I hope you liked this tour of Utrecht, and welcome here again in 2016!

Notes
1. D. Grosheide, A.D.A. Monna and P.G.N. Pesch (eds.), Vier eeuwen Universiteitsbibliotheek Utrecht, I: De eerste drie eeuwen (Utrecht 1986) 37-40.
2. John Tholen, ‘Zonder pracht of pomp : Evert van de Poll en zijn verlangen naar de muzen’, Jaarboek Oud-Utrecht 2012, 69-90.
3. Marceline Dolfin, E.M. Kylstra and Jean Penders, Utrecht. De huizen binnen de singels. Beschrijving (The Hague 1989) 330-335.

Images, words and the law

However seducing texts are as sources to gain new knowledge, images do rightfully claim our attention, too, nay stronger, they are even more seducing and intoxicating than texts. Legal iconography is the auxiliary science to history and law which studies the uses and abuses of imagery in law and justice. A few months ago I was attracted to a building with both images and texts in an intriguing combination. Very close to it is a statue of a man who has been responsible as few others before him for introducing images as an educational tool. Here I would like to share with you a few thoughts about this building and about the role of images in teaching and research.

The town hall at Naarden

This summer I visited the town of Naarden, some twenty kilometers to the south-east of Amsterdam. Jacob van Deventer’s map of Naarden, part of the cartographic project for the Spanish king Philip II, shows a town with medieval city walls, no match for the modern weapons of the sixteenth century. During the Dutch Revolt Spanish armed forces attacked Naarden in 1572 with brutal force. The soldiers murdered the inhabitants and destroyed the city almost completely. The Grote of St. Vituskerk with its famous painted wooden vaults survived. Afterwards Naarden became a fortified town, even an archetype of the Dutch fortification system, as you can see when visiting the Vestingmuseum.

Among the buildings rebuilt in Naarden after 1572 is the town hall in Dutch Renaissance style, completed in 1601, almost thirty years after the tragic events. Whatever form the medieval town hall might have had, its new incarnation still looks splendid. On the facade not just blazons and statues all convey their particular visual message, Three texts have been added to bring yet another message.

On closer inspection two of these texts are really two versions of the same message. The Latin text to the left has been superbly condensed into Early Modern Dutch. The Latin reads: Quidquid erit superanda / omnis fortuna ferendo est, “whatever the event may be, every turn of fortune has to be subdued by bearing it”, a quote from Vergil’s Aeneid (V,710). Surprisingly the Dutch is much more condensed, but succeeds in adding also a significant twist: Ist lyden ist vreucht / Draeght soo’t God vuegt, “be it suffering or joy, bear it when God brings it”. Here classical Antiquity is invoked at the service of the civil authorities, but at the same time subtly christianised.

The pious overtones are much clearer in the inscription below the tympanum above the entrance, Godt regiert al anno 1601, “God governs everything, in the year 1601”. The tympanum is crowned by allegorical statues representing Faith, Hope and Justice, the latter in the middle portrayed in the familiar way of a blindfolded woman with a balance and a sword. On the top of the left part of the facade is an allegorical statue of Love, the right part is crowned by the Dutch lion. The blazons below the first floor windows are those of the county of Holland (a lion rampant), of prince Maurice of Oranje, and West-Friesland. In the tympanum you can see the blazon of the Habsburg emperors, the Austrian Doppeladler, the double eagle, which is also the blazon of the city of Naarden.

Emblems: combining images and text

Combining texts and images is of course not something new, but in a way it is here at least a bit unexpected. At first the brief Latin proverb and its wonderful crisp and concise Dutch rendering led me to speculate about a very particular influence. Justus Lipsius (1547-1606), the great Flemish political theoretician who taught some years at Leiden was also known as an editor of Tacitus. He influenced Pieter Cornelisz. Hooft (1581-1647), a prolific author and for forty years bailiff of Muiden Castle near Naarden. He wrote his Nederlandsche Historiën, a history of the Low Countries in difficult prose, clearly modelled on Tacitus’ works. Hooft published in 1611 Emblemata amatoria, a volume of emblems, symbolic images with a motto and didactic verses. However, we must rule out this argument as a possible source of influence for the decoration of the town hall in Naarden, simply because Hooft was much too young in 1601 to exercise any influence. I was genuinely surprised, too, to find Vergil as the author of the quote, not Tacitus. Instead one could perhaps better look at the early works of Hugo de Groot (1583-1645). A search for possible direct influences at Naarden can be quite long. A quick search for Dutch literature citing Vergil’s words in the Digitale Bibliotheek voor de Nederlandse Letteren (DBNL) brought me to Jacob Andriesz. Boelens (1554-1621), a burgomaster of Amsterdam often active on special missions in the early seventeenth century whose motto was Superanda omnis fortuna ferendo. It is a tantalizing hint which needs further corroboration.

The literary genre of emblematic literature was launched by one of the most famous humanist lawyers, Andrea Alciato (1592-1550) with his volume Emblemata (first edition Augsburg: Steyner, 1531). In 1529 he had already published Selecta epigrammata Graeca Latine versa (..) (Basel: Bebel, 1529; online in Göttingen). It is intriguing to look for an emblem which might have influenced the choice of a text at Naarden. Access to early editions of emblem books is much helped by four major online projects, at Glasgow for Italian and French books, at Utrecht for Dutch books, mainly from the seventeenth century, the project Emblematica Online of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the Herzog-August-Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel, and the Biblioteca Digital de Emblemática Hispánica of the Universidade da Coruña.

Et toleranda homini tristis fortuna ferendo est, Et nimium felix saepe timenda fuit. Sustine (Epictetus dicebat) et abstine. Oportet Multa pati, illicitis absque tenere manus. Sic ducis imperium vinctus fert poplite taurus In dextro: sic se continet a gravidis.

The online collections at Glasgow has a separate section for Alciato. The first line Et toleranda homini tristis fortuna ferendo est of an emblem appearing in the section Fortitudo of Alciato’s collection comes closest to the quote from Vergil. In the edition Venice 1546 you will find this as no. 34, the emblem Anechou kai apechou / Sustine et abstine, at fol. 29v. In later editions this emblem has either no number or it appears with a different number, and thus it is really necessary to indicate exactly which edition you happen to use. For our emblem you would find it for example in the Paris 1550 edition on page 41. The image shows a farmer who keeps bulls away from cows. The Glasgow project has a useful list of the mottos and their occurrences in the main editions of Alciato’s text, and the Alciato website by William Barker is also most helpful in tracking emblems, mottos and verses; you can even find an English version of this emblem. However, this is only a possible indirect source or inspiration behind the choice for a verse with an admittedly more pointed and direct meaning, The emblems in the section Fortuna might be the first spur for searching a text, in particular the emblem Semper praesto esse infortunia.

Teaching by images

Why do I refer here at length to Alciato’s work and the role of images in connection with the town hall in Naarden? Across the street with the town hall of Naarden is the Grote or St. Vituskerk, and between the church and the town hall is a statue commemorating the Czech theologian, philosopher and pedagogue Jan Amos Comenius (1592-1670). From 1656 onwards he had found a refuge at Amsterdam. Comenius had contacts in Naarden, and he was buried in a church at Naarden. The Comeniusmuseum keeps his memory alive. Among his works are books such as the Ianua linguarum reserata [The open entrance of languages] (1631) which developed a new model for teaching Latin and other languages, and the Didactica magna (1633-1638), his opus magnum with a new comprehensive view of children’s education. The possible connection between Comenius and legal iconography is offered in particular by his Orbis sensualium pictus [The world of senses in images] (1658), the first book recommending and exemplifying the systematic educational use of images. In this work he uses for example pictures to help children learning the alphabet. In the space of this posting I can at least point you to the Bibliothek für Bildungsgeschichtliche Forschung in Berlin. Its digital library contains among other things early illustrations from pedagogical works.

More than a century before Comenius Alciato and others had introduced first a learned public and later also a wider public to a very successful combination of images and texts. The taste for this genre was at least sometimes mirrored by architecture. Alciato brought to the new emblematic literature his own legal background which made it a potential useful resource for anyone looking for outspoken combinations of images, concise proverbial sayings and often exquisite poetry. Somehow the presence of this literary genre makes it far more conceivable that lines from classical poetry can embellish buildings. As for which specific emblems collection provided Dutch people the clue for their choice I suppose you will need to look at many different collections, not just the Latin collections, but also those in Dutch and French, and even collections published in Spain.

Promises of more…

Sofar we have only looked at the facade of the town hall in Naarden. It would be really interesting to look also inside the town hall at the interior where you can find for example two seventeenth-century paintings in the city court room. I am sure you cannot separate them completely from the intriguing facade. The digital portal Memory of the Netherlands offers you a very quick entrance to images of both inside and outside the stadhuis at Naarden. Some photographs are already a bit older and reflect to some extent earlier scholarly approaches. For further research you will no doubt benefit from the resources at the municipal and regional archives in the Gooi- en Vechtstreek, located in Naarden and Hilversum.

This week I saw the 2013 online exhibition The Nomos of Images. Manifestations of the law in picture atlases and photo archives created by the Photothek of the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence. Some images in this virtual exhibition come from the Sammlung Karl Frölich at the Max-Plank-Institut für europäische Rechtsgeschichte in Frankfurt am Main, a collection with photographs taken between 1930 and 1950 which eventually will be digitized. In my view it can be most helpful to use both older resources and new materials to help research in the field of legal iconography. This post gives only some indications of directions you might choose for further investigations, but hopefully it helps you to get a taste of them.

A postscript

At the blog Interfaces/Livres anciens de l’Université de Lyon appeared on November 24, 2014 a very interesting contribution about Comenius, ‘Comenius, un pédagogue de l’avant-garde’. This year the digitization of the Sammlung Karl Frölich has been completed. In 2015 I have published a post about this collection.