History of the Netherlands

Friesland was an autonomous anomaly in Europe, free from the feudal obligations that had so deeply entrenched themselves in society everywhere else. For years the Frisians just rocked along, doing the...

30 Sep 201946min

By the mid-1300s the fractured mini-states of the lowlands were being pulled apart by competing political and economic interests, warfare, dynastic struggles and the Black Death. The resulting instabi...

16 Sep 201940min

The Flemish victory over the French at the Battle of the Golden Spurs led to a vast change in social structures, but that battle did not finish or solve the issues between Flanders, France and England...

2 Sep 201950min

At this stage in our journey through the History of the Netherlands we have emerged into the 1300s: a century which for a long time, has been seen as the most awful century to have been alive in weste...

12 Aug 201946min

Today we are going to break the pattern of the last few episodes and make the outrageous move of not talking about Belgium. I know, crazy right. We’ve gone on a lot about the social changes which were...

15 Jul 201942min

In the late 1200s many of the trends and forces that we've been exploring, such as feudalism, urbanisation and industrialisation erupted in a spectacular clash between Flanders and France. Flanders wa...

1 Jul 201958min

Today we are taking you on an epic adventure, being passed from hand to hand and from group to group, throughout medieval Flanders, as wool. You read that correctly. Wool. Yes, it might seem strange a...

17 Jun 201945min

We break away from the main chronology of the series a little bit, to zoom out and re-focus on one particular topic: how exactly, in the space of roughly 500 years, this empty swamp land was transform...

3 Jun 201940min