The situation was similar in the borderland towns in the duchy of Cleves. We have been able to identify sixty-six individuals in these towns who had migrated from the neighboring Netherlands and joined Reformed congregations. More than 70 percent came from small- and medium-sized towns across the border in the eastern Netherlands not far away, mostly in Guelders, eastern Brabant, and Limburg. Kleverlands, the local Lower Franconian dialect, was a form of sixteenth-century Dutch that was closer to the dominant Brabantine form than to either the Middle Low German spoken in the Hanseatic cities or the High German spoken further to the south and east.
1 High German spread relatively slowly and nonlinearly in Cleves. Tervooren, Van der Masen tot op den Rijn, 316–25. There was greater linguistic distinction in government documents than in society because scribes and notaries were often trained to write in forms of Dutch and German used by government chancelleries, whose members were often educated at Leuven or Cologne. Cornelissen, Kleine niederrheinische Sprachgeschichte, 34–52. The high proportion of migrants from Guelders should not be surprising, since residents there were more culturally, politically, and socially oriented to the Holy Roman Empire than they were to the Burgundian heartlands of the Low Countries.
2 Aart Noordzij, “Against Burgundy,” in Stein and Pollmann, Networks, Regions and Nations, 111–29; Raingard Esser, “Upper Guelders’s Four Points of the Compass: Historiography and Transregional Families in a Contested Border Region between the Empire, the Spanish Monarchy, and the Dutch Republic,” in De Ridder, Soen, Thomas, and Verreyken, Transregional Territories, 23–41. Most adults in Guelders had also already lived under the rule of Duke Wilhelm of Jülich-Cleves-Mark-Berg, who had also held the duchy of Guelders from 1538 to 1543. These individuals from the Netherlands often migrated within family networks, such as the group around Ernst Witten, from Harderwijk, who fled his home late in 1568 and moved eighty kilometers southeast to Emmerich. Migrants also sometimes had relations—and in the case of nobles, even property—in and around these towns, as was the case of the Van Randwijck family who moved from Nijmegen to Gennep—a “migration” of only seventeen kilometers.
3 Schipper, “Across the Borders of Belief,” 42–47.In terms of their occupations, too, the Dutch Reformed migrants in Cleves’ hometowns were not significantly different from their hosts. An astonishingly high percentage of those whose occupation can be identified were ministers (35 percent)—a result of the fact that unsafe conditions in Catholic-majority communities caused high turnover among Reformed pastors, and the congregations themselves were small. Outside of that, most migrants with known occupations did not make up a uniform group: they were a motley assortment of bakers, cobblers, clockmakers, soldiers, cloth bleachers, and boat pilots. For a short time in the 1570s, Emmerich had a few printers, though these operations were never large.
4 See Valkema Blouw, Dutch Typography; Pettegree, Emden, 87–108. Professionally as well as linguistically, the Dutch immigrants in Goch, Gennep, Kalkar, Emmerich, Xanten, and Rees tended to resemble their neighbors.
The Reformed congregations that developed within these towns cannot be called “foreign” or “Dutch” churches in any straightforward sense, as scholars have sometimes done.
5 Van Booma, Communio clandestina; Van Schelven, De nederduitsche vluchtelingenkerken, 301–8; Kipp, Landstädtische Reformation. All constituted a mix of locals and migrants. The Bürgermeister of Goch, Peter von Hegenrath, even served as an elder for the Reformed church.
6 Kessel, “Reformation und Gegenreformation,” 71. City judges were also members of Goch’s church. In the Cathedral city of Xanten, three
Gemeinsfreunde (a local office charged with representing citizens’ interests) were members of the Reformed congregation in 1581.
7 Kessel, “Reformation und Gegenreformation,” 74. Two leaders of the Rees congregation, Johannes von Altena and Dietrich von Ryswick, came from important Clevish patrician families, while a leader of that church from Utrecht, Gilles Spaens, was one of its few Netherlanders.
8 Kessel, “Reformation und Gegenreformation,” 70; Schipper, “Across the Borders of Belief,” 47–50. In Emmerich, Bürgermeister Johan Maschap was a member of a mixed local/migrant congregation in 1588. His influence probably explains how it came to be that the supposedly secret church managed to worship in the city hall.
9 Kessel, “Reformation und Gegenreformation,” 37, 70–71. With local benefactors and considerable social ties linking them across the border region, linguistic, social, and cultural divisions were not central to these congregations.
10 Dutch Catholics fleeing places that had been captured by Protestant rebels integrated into local Catholic parishes in Emmerich, Kalkar, and Kevelaer. Janssen, Dutch Revolt and Catholic Exile. On the multiconfessionalism in Cleves, see Fuchs and Reitmeier, “Konfession und Raum.”