the counts of his nomination as so many officers charged to require obedience to the laws of the country, but themselves obliged in all things to respect them.  But the counts of Holland, the bishops of Utrecht, and several German lords, dignified from time to time with the title of counts of Friesland, insisted that it carried with it a personal authority superior to that of the sovereign they represented.  The descendants of the Count Thierry, a race of men remarkably warlike, were the most violent in this assumption of power.  Defeat after defeat, however, punished their obstinacy; and numbers of those princes met death on the pikes of their Frison opponents.  The latter had no regular leaders; but at the approach of the enemy the inhabitants of each canton flew to arms, like the members of a single family; and all the feudal forces brought against them failed to subdue this popular militia.

The frequent result of these collisions was the refusal of the Frisons to recognize any authority whatever but that of the national judges.  Each canton was governed according to its own laws.  If a difficulty arose, the deputies of the nation met together on the borders of the Ems, in a place called “the Trees of Upstal” (Upstall-boomen), where three old oaks stood in the middle of an immense plain.  In this primitive council-place chieftains were chosen, who, on swearing to maintain the laws and oppose the common enemy, were invested with a limited and temporary authority.

It does not appear that Friesland possessed any large towns, with the exception of Staveren.  In this respect the Frisons resembled those ancient Germans who had a horror of shutting themselves up within walls.  They lived in a way completely patriarchal; dwelling in isolated cabins, and with habits of the utmost frugality.  We read in one of their old histories that a whole convent of Benedictines was terrified at the voracity of a German sculptor who was repairing their chapel.  They implored him to look elsewhere for his food; for that he and his sons consumed enough to exhaust the whole stock of the monastery.

In no part of Europe was the good sense of the people so effectively opposed to the unreasonable practices of Catholicism in those days.  The Frisons successfully resisted the payment of tithes; and as a punishment (if the monks are to be believed) the sea inflicted upon them repeated inundations.  They forced their priests to marry, saying that the man who had no wife necessarily sought for the wife of another.  They acknowledged no ecclesiastical decree, if secular judges, double the number of the priests, did not bear a part in it.  Thus the spirit of liberty burst forth in all their proceedings, and they were justified in calling themselves Vri-Vriesen, Free-Frisons.