West Flanders
West Flanders lies on the coast of the North Sea. It is drained by the Leie and Yser rivers and can be divided roughly into three regions.
Up
until the 7th century much of the land along the seacoast was
submerged on-and-off by the sea. As a result it became covered by a
thick layer of heavy sea clay, which remains and affects agriculture
there to this day. Much of that submerged land was reclaimed, between
1200 and 1600, by building dykes and smaller drainage canals that
crisscross a strip of land 10 to 15 kilometers broad along the
coastline, producing 'polders' of
usable land, sometimes lying below sea level.
At first this land, because of residual salt in the soil,
could be used only for pasture sheep but as it gradually become
desalted and enriched with sheep dung, monks who lived in large
monasteries along the coast began cultivating the land. Nowadays the
crops grown there include sugar beets, grain and flax. About a third
of this reclaimed land was used for pasturing cattle and geese.
Inland from that coastal strip, on a line can be drawn
starting roughly some 15 kilometers south of Brugge at Torhout and
running eastward to Tielt and Gent and then towards Antwerp. North of
this line the soil is sandy. In the 19th century the most important
crop there was potatoes and later on vegetables. It is also a region
where chickens and pigs were raised. A considerable part of the land
was covered with woods called 'het Houtland'. These woods have long
yielded timber products.
Around
1870 when the railway began connecting towns the 'tourist' visitors
to the woods became an important source of local income in both West
and East Flanders. The railway allowed people easier access to the
large farms in northern France to supplement their incomes by
seasonal field work and it also improved access to the factories of
Gent and northern France became easier.
South of the above line the soil is a sandy loam
deposited during frequent floodings of the North Sea several million
years ago. There tobacco and especially flax was grown. Up until the
mid-19th century there was in West Flanders a strong cottage-based
industry of growing flax and spinning and weaving linen cloth from
it.
1During
the late 18th and early 19th century all of Flanders, but
particularly West Flanders was impacted by international processes
that affected much of Western Europe. These include a large increase
in population, rapid industrialization and chronic rural crises that
lead to an exodus from the countryside into towns and cities that
because they offered employment in factories that were taking over
formerly successful rural cottage industries. Belgium, particularly
Flanders, followed Great Britain in having huge population increases
due to falling death rates and increased birthrates: in the period
1813 -1913 the population of West
Flanders
rose by 175%! In Flanders inherited land was dividing, causinga
progressive decrease in the size of farms. Although already observed
in the 16th century this subdivision was aggravated by the rise in
population, resulting in the reduction of the size of 60% of farms in
some regions including West Flanders to 1 hectare, a barely viable
size. As a result the livelihood of many farmers became precarious,
there was much 'hidden' unemployment and there was a rise in the
numbers of landless domestic staff and daylabourers
('dagloners').
This occurred both on large farms which were particularly strongly
represented in fertile regions and in the towns. In some regions many
unemployed sought financial assistance.
Paradoxically
this rural crisis affected the fertile parts of the country such as
Flanders more those in less fertile parts to the east of a
north-south line from Antwerp to Brussels. In this heath country, the
'Kempen', farming had long been oriented toward subsistence. In
contrast in more fertile West and East Flanders
farming was directed more toward the market.
Harvest
failures in
1844 -1845 exacerbated problems in Flanders. These failures started
with a rape and wheat crop failure, followed by potato blight in
1845, and then of wheat, rye and potatoes again in 1846. Because of
the resulting shortages
food
prices
rocketed -
the price of rye, the staple grain used in bread, trebled between
1845 and 1847, while wages remained static or fell. The high prices
encouraged the import of cheaper grains of somewhat better quality
from 'Amerika' thus further lowering prices in
Belgium. (The word 'Amerika' was then used generically, meaning all
of North America.) This stimulated many farmers to emigrate to U.S.A.
and Canada, many on the Red
Star Line,
with the expectation of cheap land and better harvests of better
quality that yielded higher
incomes.
Some
emigrant
farmers
could write
home to say they, as the head of a family had received 160 acres of
high quality land in
Manitoba,
Canada
for $10!
(Words
to the right from this advertisement2
read:
"in the
great northwest of 'Amerika' 200 million acres of free homesteads.
Heads of families will received 180 acres free. Any other male
'colonist' who has reached the age of 18 years also receives the same
amount of land."
Although it
took an enormous aount of labour to 'break the sod' and to bring this
land into production, the work this took was not describe in letters
to his family in the 'old country', only the 'good parts' of their
experience in 'Amerika', encouraging other family members and his
former neighbours to emigrate. Many of their descendants still live
near Swan Lake, St.Alphonse, Mariapolis and Bruxelles,
Manitoba.
1From
'Rural economy and indigence in mid-nineteenth-century Belgium' by
Dominque A.G. Vanneste, Journal of Historical Geography,
23,1 (1997) 3-15. Ivan Beernaert provided the story of
the above emigrant, his great-uncle.
2Posted
in rural Belgium in the late 1800s. Courtesy of the Provincial
Archives of Manitoba.
OR Read more about emigration