Modern English has a number of expressions that refer to the Dutch in an unflattering way: Dutch courage, Dutch treat, Dutch comfort. There are others; "to be in Dutch with someone" means to be in trouble with that person; "to talk like a Dutch uncle" means to criticize a younger person or subordinate1 in a very Yank way to that person's face; "to use double Dutch" means to speak either in gibberish like a child imitating a foreigner, or in an unknown language—possibly for devious purposes. Yet in modern times there are few nations with a more enduringly postive image among the citizens of English-speaking nations than Holland. Think of the Dutch? Who has anything against tulips and cheese?
Obviously it hasn't always been that way. When the ancestors of today's Englishmen left the European continent for the isle of Britain in the fifth century AD, the Germanic kinsmen they left behind became, a thousand years later2, the Dutch and Flemish peoples. The closest relative of modern English among the other Germanic tongues is Frisian, a minor language spoken in the northern Dutch province of Frisland. It is important to understand that Dutch (or a dialect very like it) was the lingua franca of northern Europe during the Middle Ages. For 300 years the Hanse, a powerful league of wealthy towns in what are now Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany, dominated the sea lanes between Novgorod and London, and the language that they used followed their trade.
England was important for the Hanse as a source of wool, which Dutch and Flemish weavers turned into cloth and exported throughout Europe. English and Duleh sailors mingled in the trading centres of the North Sea or served on ships together. A fair number of Dutchmen settled in eastern England, where the Dutch derived surnames Holland, Fleming, Snyder (a tailor or a sheep-shearer), Webster (a weaver) and Cooper (a barrel-maker) an common, indicating the presence of Dutch immigrants or Dutcl" trades.
Independent and defiantly Protestant by the late 1500s. Hollanders emerged as the greatest commercial power of the 17th century, with a far-flung trading empire and ships on every sea. At home they created the first "middle-class" society of educated- articulate' people interested in international business and the new sciences, and more inclined to spend their money on domestic comfort than on public display. Three times they went to war with the English, their archrivals4 for command of the ocean, and gave as good as they got. Ironically, the century ended with Britain ruled by a Dutch monarch, William [f|. who owed his position to his marriage with an English princess. From this century date many of the negative English expressions involving the Dutch.
As a result of this prolonged contact, English absorbed several hundred Dutch words. Many are connected with water, ships and shipping (skipper, deck. dock, yacht, buoy. scow. dam. dike) or with medieval trade (freight, stockfish, hawker, huckster). The 17th century words coffee and tea are not of Dutch origin, but the Dutch passed them on. Several Dutch loanwords concern bloodshed activities (smuggle, freebooter, waylay, flout, quack, ways to move about (skate, sled, sleigh, sledge, wagon, brake) or drinking—medieval and early modern Netherlanders were notorious consumers of booze (a Dutch word). The words gin hops bung, drunkard, sip, slurp, snarl, snack, frolic, babble' and bully all from Dutch, conjuring up a vision of sailors on a drunken spree in a 17th-century seaport. They must not have admired the English.
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