Qualla: Eersel

Eersel: Introduction

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dennistw, CC BY 3.0. In the year 712, a man named Aengilbertus - son of the late Gaobertus, with the approval of his brother Verengaotus - signed away the property of a domain called Ereslo to the missionary Saint Willibrord, who in turn handed it on to the Abbey of Echternach in Luxembourg. The scribe copying the charter into the Codex Aureus of Echternach made a small mistake and wrote Eresloch instead of Ereslo, but the name is recognisably the same place: the high ground in the Kempen now known as Eersel. Almost no other Dutch town has paperwork going back that far, signed by a saint, preserved in a Luxembourg gospel book.

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Image: Dennistw | CC BY 3.0

Eersel: Bronze Age, Burial Mounds, Eburones

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Janwillemvanaalst, CC BY-SA 4.0. Three and a half thousand years ago, the first people known to have lived in this corner of North Brabant built burial mounds - the sepulchre hillocks of the Tumulus culture. The Urnfield culture followed, and an urn full of cremation ashes turned up in a field called Schadewijk,...

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Image: Janwillemvanaalst | CC BY-SA 4.0

Eersel: A Square Built for Carts and Horse-Trading

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Spotter2, CC BY-SA 3.0. After 1203 the region became part of the Duchy of Brabant, and Eersel - sitting on the crossroads of the Leuven-'s-Hertogenbosch and Antwerp-Turnhout routes - found itself useful. Traders needed somewhere to stop, eat, sleep, and stable their horses. The old Frankish triangular c...

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Image: Spotter2 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Eersel: The Travelling Trade of the Teuten

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Thijs Hz, CC BY 4.0. After the Middle Ages the region got poorer, and from roughly 1500 to 1800 the villages of the Kempen barely grew. But people had to make a living, so a class of itinerant tradesmen arose - the Teuten. They were not gypsies; they kept their families and their houses in places lik...

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Image: Thijs Hz | CC BY 4.0

Eersel: The Tower, the Chapel, and the Organ

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Michielverbeek, CC BY-SA 4.0. Three buildings sketch most of the town's religious history. The Sint-Willibrorduskerk - the church of Saint Willibrord, namesake of the saint to whom Aengilbertus once gave the domain - had its first written mention in 1480, with a tower from the second half of the 14th century....

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Image: Michielverbeek | CC BY-SA 4.0

Eersel: Cigars and the Postwar Boom

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Johfrael, CC BY-SA 3.0. By 1900 the bush land around Eersel was being cleared and turned to farming, and a cigar industry took hold in the town. During the interwar economic crisis it was the cigars that kept unemployment manageable - hard work for modest pay, but work that did not disappear. Eersel rem...

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Image: Johfrael | CC BY-SA 3.0