we can merely indicate this curious state of things; nor may
we enter on many mysteries of social government which the most
learned find a difficulty in solving. What were the rights of
the nobles in their connection with these freemen? What ties of
reciprocal interest bound the different cantons to each other?
What were the privileges of the towns?--These are the minute
but important points of detail which are overshadowed by the
grand and imposing figure of the national independence. But in
fact the emperors themselves, in these distant times, had little
knowledge of this province, and spoke of it vaguely, and as it
were at random, in their diplomas, the chief monuments of the
history of the Middle Ages. The counts of Holland and the apostolic
nuncios addressed their acts and rescripts indiscriminately to
the nobles, clergy, magistrates, judges, consuls, or commons of
Friesland. Sometimes appeared in those documents the vague and
imposing title of "the great Frison," applied to some popular
leader. All this confusion tends to prove, on the authority of the
historians of the epoch, and the charters so carefully collected
by the learned, that this question, now so impossible to solve,
was even then not rightly understood--what were really those
fierce and redoubtable Frisons in their popular and political
relations? The fact is, that liberty was a matter so difficult
to be comprehended by the writers of those times that Froissart
gave as his opinion, about the year 1380, that the Frisons were
a most unreasonable race, for not recognizing the authority and
power of the great lords.

The eleventh century had been for the Netherlands (with the exception
of Friesland and Flanders) an epoch of organization; and had nearly
fixed the political existence of the provinces, which were so long