Pre-industrial Brussels

The intimate relation to its soil and topography is marked by Brussels’ older name, Broekzele, a contraction of the Old Dutch ‘bruoc’ (marsh) and ‘sella’ (dwelling), revealing the city’s history as a settlement near the Senne wetlands. The lower swampy impenetrable clay layer of the river bank gave way to wide areas used as pasture land but very early on also as washing, drying and colouring grounds for textile manufacturing.

On the right bank of the Senne, hills go up more steeply and the soil contains a significant sand fraction, as a result of which water infiltration was considerably higher and the land less suitable for cultivation. The eastern hills of Brussels, were typically covered with woods. The Sonian Forest is the largest remaining part of this historical woodland that was used as common forestry land or as an energy resource.

Throughout the Middle Ages, the earldoms of Flanders and Brabant (of which Brussels was the capital) were able to build their economic prosperity on the intensification of agriculture. The traditional use of common land for farming activities had disappeared early. Waste lands and large forests were rare (with the exception of the Sonian Forest), the land was well cultivated, the population dense, and commerce was highly developed in the towns [Rowntree, 1910, p. 28].

On the Senne’s left bank, height differences go up gently and the soil is predominantly loam, introducing Brussels’ ‘garden’ or main agricultural hinterland ‘the Pajottenland’[2], bordered between the Senne and Dender river valleys. As early as the ninth century, collective lands (kouters) here marked the contours of a triennial rotation of crops, combining winter grains (wheat or rye) as the cultivation for one year, summer grains (barley or oats) the following, while the lands were kept fallow on the third [Rowntree, 1910, p. 28 and Dehaene, 2013, pp. 94-95].

Grains would for a long time remain the most important produce, later combined with the cultivation of potatoes. Livestock was mainly at the service of the work on the fields through the production of manure and pulling power [CAG]. For centuries, it made of Belgium primarily an agricultural country. ‘Bishops, abbots, and nobles alike drew their wealth from the land, whose fertility increased wonderfully, especially in Flanders and Hainaut, the granaries of Belgium.’ [Rowntree, 1910, pp. 15-16]. It gave way to a wide diversity in land ownership and land tenure, roughly divisible into four main categories [Rowntree, 1910, pp. 31-32]: lands owned by the Church (up to one third of all land according to Vandervelde [1900]; noble estates; land bought for investment by traders and bankers; and a considerable amount of  land owned by the farmers themselves.

When we look at old maps of Brussels, we do not only see large arable lands, forest or pasture land. Most peculiar are the many small gardening plots. These first originated within the walls of inner-city convents which housed besides these ‘market gardens’ also kitchen gardens, orchards and small pasture lands. However, as early as the 14th century onwards, mention was also made of this small-scale market-gardening craft outside the city’s fortifications. Its members lived at the edges of what was known as the Broekland (marshland, marais), hence their name ‘Boerkozen’ or ‘Maraîchers’ (literally meaning ‘swamp dwellers’, but today also still the main French word for ‘market-gardener’ or ‘horticulturalist’), demonstrating the close relationship between the landscape’s water table and the cultivation type. They were also called Warmoezeniers [3], indicating that they predominantly cultivated potherbs and beets for the city’s population [4]. On the 1777 Ferraris or the 1819 map by Guillaume de Wautier, one can see the steady growth of numerous small-scale plots fanning out around the city’s core. These were only a few acres large and were used for the professional cultivation of, explicitly, a wide variety of vegetables and fruits, usually in beds. The position of these plots was deliberate, as it made both use of the water-rich soil and the richer urban market. The ‘boerkozen’ mainly produced for the early market, intended for the merchants and shopkeepers in the city.

The first maps of Brussels show an agricultural system where cultivation diversity and division of labour stem mainly from differing soil conditions, water availability and the proximity of a stable market. Gardeners grew on the meers land close to the city, while farmers sowed grains on kouters more uphill (ager), peasants bred animals on the common pasture land of the dries (saltus) and beer brewers and woodmen were active in the city’s eastern forests (silva). There seems to be a strict spacial distribution between this ‘ager’, ‘salts’, and ‘silva’. In order to maintain the fertility of the soil, resources were exchanged between these three worlds [5]. As we have seen, leaving fields fallow, a strategy that consisted of leaving depleted agricultural land to the laws of nature within the three-field system or for many more years, was common in the Brussels territory. In this way, nature’s capacity to build up soil fertility through ecological succession was used to (partially) restore soil fertility and then taking it back into agricultural use.

Other strategies tried to compensate soil depletion in agricultural fields by harvesting nutrients elsewhere - thereby creating geographies of difference [Shiel, 2006]. Nutrients were for example harvested in river bank grasslands (in the form of hay and animal manure) as was probably also the case along the Senne marshlands, or in the built environment (in the form of human manure and other organic waste streams). Flanders was also known for the use of human manure or the so called ‘engrais flamand’ for restoring soil fertility [Vandermaelen 2019]. In Brussels, a street cleaning service was responsible for emptying latrines - common sewage pits usually located in courtyards or gardens. The faecal matter was taken to a so-called Ferme des boues [6], a sewage farm north of the city centre, transformed there into ‘urban manure’, sold to farmers and transported by waterway to the neighbouring fields, where the boerkozen were in dire need of extra fertilizer as they were predominantly cultivating biomass extractive and water intensive vegetables [Kohlbrenner, 2014]. Until well into the 19th century, excrement had a market value and constituted a substantial source of revenue for the municipal administration. As such, the Ferme des boues ensured a metabolic link between the city and its fields.

The cities of Bruges, Ghent and Brussels, or the states of Flanders, Brabant and Hainaut were strong European centres for innovation, trade, and art during the Middle Ages. In the sixteenth century the large towns, having flourished industrially, politically, and commercially, began to decline. The severe measures taken to suppress religious disturbances led to emigration. For three centuries, in which the old states had no count nor king of their own, but were governed in turn from Madrid, Vienna, Paris, or The Hague. The social and industrial activity was thus based in the country and the smaller communities, which were busy and prosperous. It was in this period of administration from elsewhere, as Rowntree argued, in which patriotism and public spirit were forced back upon themselves, that the Belgian became absorbed in local interests. 

It perhaps also marked the biggest difference between the Belgian territories and the Netherlands. Although both countries share the common ecosystem of a river delta, and centuries of common history, up until today, it differs widely in where political power is centred most heavily. Whereas the plural Nederlanden was forged out of a collection of city-states, Belgium’s true political power stemmed more from its communal, rural based organisation [7].