Stins

A stins (Dutch, pl. stinsen; from West Frisian stienhûs [Dutch steenhuis] "stone house", shortened to stins, pl. stinzen)^[1] is a former stronghold or villa in the province of Friesland, the Netherlands. Many stinsen carry the name "state" (related to English 'estate').

A stins and the surrounding state used to belong to a permanent group of hoofdelingen/heerschapen, which were prominent, rich land-owning citizens.^[2] From the 1300's, these noblemen had their bases of power in the cities or large villages, their families owned a few hundred hectares of fertile farmland divided over several dozen tenanted farms.^[2] The noblemen married one another as much as possible, on a material and culturally equal level, in order to prevent the loss of property and honour by inheritance.^[2]

Around 1498, when the period of Frisian Freedom drew to a close, the system of "stins en state" was superseded by the grietman/grietenij system. From about 1498 until 1851, there were a total of 30 grietenijen in Friesland and 11 cities. Most stinsen were demolished in the mid-1800's, when maintenance became too expensive. Several surviving stinsen are now used as museums.

Stinsen also appear in East Frisia, and are known as borg (pl. borgen) in the province of Groningen.

• List of stins in Friesland
• List of castles in the Netherlands

Media related to Stins in Friesland at Wikimedia Commons

• Stinsen in Friesland

You can help expand this article with text translated from the corresponding article in Dutch. (February 2019) Click [show] for important translation instructions. View a machine-translated version of the Dutch article. Machine translation, like DeepL or Google Translate, is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into the English Wikipedia. Do not translate text that appears unreliable or low-quality. If possible, verify the text with references provided in the foreign-language article. You must provide copyright attribution in the edit summary accompanying your translation by providing an interlanguage link to the source of your translation. A model attribution edit summary is Content in this edit is translated from the existing Dutch Wikipedia article at [[:nl:Stins]]; see its history for attribution. You may also add the template {{Translated|nl|Stins}} to the talk page. For more guidance, see Wikipedia:Translation.