The Blackfaces of Ravenstein

The town began as a toll post. In 1360 Walraven van Valkenburg, vassal of the Duke of Brabant, had his castle near Herpen pulled down and a new one built on the bank of the Meuse, where he could levy toll on the river traffic more easily. The duke besieged that castle in vain in 1364. In 1380 Reinout van Valkenburg, a half-brother of Walraven, granted town rights to the settlement that had grown up around it.

Where the name comes from has never been settled. The tourist office favours rave, meaning moat, and stein, a noble stone house; others simply hear the founder’s first name in it. Heraldry took a third road and turned it into a picture. When the High Council of Nobility confirmed the municipal arms on 16 July 1817, the blazon ran: argent, a raven sable standing upon a stone azure. Canting arms, then — raven plus stone. On the oldest town seal the bird was already perched there, on two round stones, beside the little shield of Philip of Cleves.

The neighbouring villages adopted that picture as an insult. In his collection of folk tales from North Brabant, Willem de Blécourt noted under the heading Ravenstein a single dry word as the nickname for the inhabitants: ravens.

The Land of Ravenstein was a patchwork of villages along the Meuse and out on the heath, with two chief places: Ravenstein itself and Uden. It formed no part of the Duchy of Brabant, administratively or territorially, and could therefore stay independent after 1648 while the neighbouring Meierij of ’s-Hertogenbosch became Dutch State land. From 1630 it was in the hands of the Catholic house of Palatinate-Neuburg. Freedom of worship returned, monastic orders that had fled the Republic found shelter there, and Catholics from across the border came over to hear mass.

Such a territory has its other side: a border that is close everywhere and a jurisdiction that stops somewhere. In the second half of the seventeenth century a band of former soldiers made the Land unsafe. They were called the blackfaces, because they blackened their faces with soot before setting out to rob. Their captain was Jacobus van der Schlossen, Kobus to everyone. The band hid in the vast woods of Slabroek near Uden, in what is now called the Maashorst.

Whatever the officers of the law tried, Kobus slipped through their fingers every time, and everyone knew why: he had made a pact with the devil. When they once nearly had him, he leapt with a splash into a moorland pool and changed before their eyes into a clump of bulrushes. The water went on bubbling — brobbelen in the local speech. That spot in the Maashorst is still called the Brobbelbies.

The town itself appears in the stories too. One night Kobus broke into a rich house in Ravenstein. A dog began to bark, people came out into the street, and on the cobblestones the fleeing robber made poor progress. Then he saw a cart of flour sacks going past and jumped up behind. At the town gate the cart was searched, but nobody saw him: he had turned himself into a sack of flour. At Huisseling, so they tell it there, he changed into a pollard willow, against which the village constable came to relieve himself — and Kobus was left with wet feet.

Reality was harsher. Van der Schlossen was seized and spent three months in the dungeon of Ravenstein, where the parish priest Marquerink is said to have brought him to repentance. In July 1695 he was executed. The duties and the costs of that execution were divided over the whole Land: the five Meuse villages had to provide the transport of the condemned man to the place of judgement. About the place itself the accounts differ — the gallows field near Elft on the border with Escharen, or the market square of Ravenstein.

On the scaffold he is said to have left the assembled crowd two pieces of advice. Never send your children to a market or a fair without money, for that is how I learned to steal. And: keep a dog, for it was dogs that drove me off most often at night.