Tulipomania - Mike Dash [44]
In the seventeenth century almost all Dutch artisans worked long hours for low wages. When the day’s work was done and they could finally go home, it was to cramped and sparsely furnished one-or two-room houses that were in such short supply that rents were high. Even the national diet was monotonous. To people trapped in an existence such as this, the idea that one could earn a good living by planting bulbs and sitting back to watch them grow must have been irresistible.
For many years most artisans had begun their working day before dawn and finished it after dusk. By 1630 the clamor that arose from city workshops as they opened for business in the small hours of the morning was so great that several towns had been forced to pass decrees forbidding fullers from beginning work before two in the morning, and hatters from starting any earlier than four. Blacksmiths suffered the greatest restrictions; their smithies were so noisy they remained closed by order until the bell that announced daybreak had been rung.
During these long days Dutch artisans were sustained by nothing more than snacks of cheese and raw pickled herring and a dinner, taken in the middle of the day, which typically consisted of the national dish, a meat stew known as hutespot that was made of chopped mutton, parsnips, vinegar, and prunes boiled in fat. A good hutespot was supposed to be left to simmer for at least three hours, but when times were bad and the work was hard, it was often cooked for no more than an hour, so that when served, it was still—in the words of one appalled French visitor—“nothing more than water full of salt or nutmeg, with sweetbreads and minced meat added, having not the slightest flavor of meat.”
For many of the Dutch, though, even a poor hutespot was at best an occasional luxury. Those who could not afford meat lived on vegetables and the sticky black rye bread of the time, which was sold in huge loaves weighing twelve pounds or more; in poorer households, the mother might buy a single one of these loaves to feed her whole family for a day. Even when other food was available, Dutch eating habits were generally very conservative. Seafood, for example, almost always meant either herring or cod; mussels, though available, were despised as the poorest sort of food, and the servants at one grand house were so disgusted at being asked to eat salmon that they begged their mistress to promise she would not serve it to them more than twice a week.
With dinner over, work began again immediately and lasted at least until dusk—much later, if it was possible to continue under artificial light. During the Golden Age fourteen-hour days were thought perfectly normal, and at Leiden in 1637 hard-pressed cloth workers who had just worked a sixteen-hour shift needed money so badly that they asked to be put on overtime. Nor was there much time off; everyone worked six days a week, and one of the less welcome results of the Reformation had been the abolition of a good number of holidays that had previously been celebrated on saints’ days.
The artisans rarely complained about this because they were paid by the hour. The money they could earn thus varied according to the number of hours it was possible to labor in a week, so a job that generated a little surplus income in the summer might become one that paid not much better than starvation wages when the days closed in for winter. Even when times were good and the days were long, the pay in most jobs amounted to something between half a stuiver and two stuivers an hour, and hundreds of thousands of Dutchmen worked long and hard for a guilder a day or a little less. The upshot was that at a time when Sunday working was not permitted and a family of five needed a minimum income of 280 guilders a year simply to avoid starvation, a Dutch artisan in regular work often expected to earn an annual wage of no more than 300 guilders.
Those who did take home more than this were not necessarily much better off. Most of the trades in which an