HAINAULT, one of the nine provinces of the kingdom of Belgium, bounded E. and N. by Namur, Brabant, and Flanders, which are also Belgian provinces, and to the S. and W. by the French départment du Nord. The name is doubtless derived from the little river Haine, which runs nearly due east and west past the town of Mons, aυd falls into the Scheldt not far from Condé. Hainault is well-wooded and hilly in the east and south-east, where it is partly covered by the Ardennes; the rest of the province is a pleasantly diversified, fertile, and well-cultivated plain land, which produces all kinds of cereal crops, flax, tobacco, chicory, and beetroot. The long and narrow coalfield which, with some breaks, stretches from Aix-la-Chapelle to the sea near Boulogne, passes through the middle of Hainault, underlying a district of about 190,000 acres; its centre is about Mons, whence it extends westward to Valenciennes, eastward to Charleroi. At this latter town, named after Charles II. of Spain, who built it in 1666, are iron and copper works; marble and building-stone are also largely quarried in Hainault; the manufactures of the province are vigorous and good; ironware and cutlery, woollen and linen goods, glass, porcelain, and a variety of other articles are made, and are exported largely into France. Hainault, with a population of 956,354 inhabitants in 1876 (the largest in this respect of all the provinces), has an area of near 1400 square miles, and is therefore somewhat thickly peopled; for administrative purposes it is divided into six arrondissements, of which that of Mons is the chief; the others are Tournai, Charleroi, Ath, Soignies, and Thuin; these again are subdivided into thirty-two cantons....
Formerly the county was nearly twice as large as the present province. In Caesar’s days it was inhabited by the Nervii, and did not get its present name till the 7th century, before which time it had become a county under its own lords. This dignity, at first more or less elective, became hereditary in the 9th century. Throughout the early Middle Ages Hainault was a purely agricultural district, owned by a numerous and very quarrelsome and disagreeable nobility; it possessed also no less than fifteen abbeys. It was famous in legend and history as the chosen land of chivalry, and Froissart, himself a native of Valenciennes, faithfully reflects the character of his fatherland. In the 11th century Baldwin V. of Flanders occupied it, and Baldwin VI., by marrying the heiress to the county, permanently added it to the territories of his house. It was his descendant Baldwin IX., count of Flanders and Hainault, who proclaimed himself first Latin emperor of Constantinople in 1204. In 1300 John of Avennes, count of Hainault, became also count of Holland by right of his mother Adelaide, sister of William II. of Holland; it was his granddaughter Philippa who in 1326 married the Prince of Wales, afterwards Edward III. Hainault went with Flanders, till it was occupied by Philip “the Good” of Burgundy in the war which lasted from 1424 to 1427. It finally fell to the house of Burgundy on the death of the unfortunate Jacoba in 1436. With the other territories of Charles the Bold it passed with Mary of Burgundy in 1477 to the house of Austria, and remained theirs till the peace of the Pyrenees in 1659, when part of the southern portion of the county λvas ceded to Louis XIV.—a cession confirmed and enlarged at Nimwegen in 1678. Thenceforth there are two Hainaults, the French and the Austrian, the latter answering to the present Belgian province. French Hainault (now a part of the department du Nord) had as its ancient capital Valenciennes; its other towns are Condé, Cambrai, Maubeuge, Le Quesnoy, Landrécies, Avesnes, Givet, Charlemont. Philippeville, which owes its name to Philip II. of Spain, having been transmuted out of a village called Corbigny into a town by Charles V. in 1555, was restored to the Netherlands in 1815. Austrian Hainault was overrun by the French in 1793, and annexed to France as the department of Jernmapes in 1794; in 1814 it was made part of the kingdom of the Netherlands; and in 1830, as a matter of course, in the division of that kingdom, it became one of the provinces of the Belgian half.
The chief authorities are the Baron de Reiffenberg’s Monuments pour servir à l’histoire des Provinces de Namur, de Hainault, et de Luxembourg, 1844-1848, and Jacques de Guise’s Antiquitéz du pays de Haynault.
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