Qualla: Woerden

Woerden: Introduction

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jacob van Deventer (c1500-1575), Public domain. Beneath the Saturday cheese market in the center of Woerden, archaeologists found a Roman ship. They were digging a parking garage in 2003 when the contractors hit something that should not have been there: timbers from a cargo vessel that had been moored at the northern edge of the empire nearly two thousand years earlier. The site sat on a slight rise above the surrounding bog, the only solid ground for miles. The Romans built a fort here in the 40s AD and called it Castellum Laurum. The Dutch built a cheese market on the same spot eighteen centuries later. Both groups knew a good location when they saw one.

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Image: Jacob van Deventer (c1500-1575) | Public domain

Woerden: The Northern Edge of Rome

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jan dijkstra, CC BY-SA 3.0. The Oude Rijn was a frontier once. Castellum Laurum stood on its bank as part of the limes, the line of forts that marked where the Roman Empire stopped and the cold forests of Germania began. The first castellum went up in the 40s AD, burned during the Batavian rebellion of 69, ...

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Image: Jan dijkstra | CC BY-SA 3.0

Woerden: Bishop or Count

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CC BY 1.0. After Rome fell, the empire that mattered here was the church. The Bishop of Utrecht claimed Woerden in a tenth-century inventory with a single line of Latin: In UUrdin totum Sancti Martini. In Woerden, everything belongs to Saint Martin. But the Counts of Holland were rising alo...

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Image: CC BY 1.0

Woerden: Jan the Baker

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dicklyon, CC BY-SA 4.0. Erasmus probably spent four years of his boyhood in Woerden, in the household of his father the local priest. A generation later another Woerden son made a more dangerous choice. Johannes Pistorius - Jan de Bakker, named for his father's other trade - returned home from Leuven in...

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Image: Dicklyon | CC BY-SA 4.0

Woerden: Cheese on the Square

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit The original uploader was P.H. Louw at Dutch Wikipedia., CC BY 2.5 nl. Since 1885, every Saturday in spring and summer, wheels of Gouda are stacked on the marktplein in the city center and traded the old way - by handshake, with the price agreed by clap of palm against palm. Woerden sits in the heart of the region that produces the cheese the rest o...

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Image: The original uploader was P.H. Louw at Dutch Wikipedia. | CC BY 2.5 nl

Woerden: Quiet Town with Loud History

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Globe-trotter, CC BY-SA 3.0. Today Woerden is a commuter town, fifteen kilometers from Utrecht, thirty-two from Amsterdam. About 720 people lived inside its walls when it received city rights in 1372. The population has grown but the medieval street plan is still legible: a moat, a wall line, the steeple of ...

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Image: Globe-trotter | CC BY-SA 3.0