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By Root 179 0

artisan could hope to earn a decent living were still controlled by guilds, which imposed considerable dues and expected their members to contribute to the costs of the frequent banquets and receptions that marked the course of a guild’s year. A good number of artisans who had successfully completed the lengthy and poorly paid apprenticeships that were expected of them never could afford to pay such sums and had to remain journeymen all their lives. Even at the height of the Golden Age, when wealth was pouring into regent coffers from investments and the rich trades, the master craftsmen of the republic, who had surmounted every obstacle and joined their chosen guild, were generally so poor that they could not afford to hire apprentices of their own to help them.

From this perspective it is obvious that although the United Provinces were rich, few of those who lived there could be considered wealthy. Some artisans did earn good livings, it is true, and even the poorer ones were paid something like twice as much as the poor of other countries. But taxes and prices were correspondingly high throughout the republic. Those who did have jobs worried constantly about money, and their wives generally had to work to supplement the family income.

A typical Dutch family, then, had little money to spare and would have owned relatively few possessions. If they were artisans and citizens of one of the great towns, like more than a quarter of the population of the republic, they probably lived behind a door made of oak, waxed or painted green, in one of the small, neat houses that lined the crowded streets. The interior would almost certainly have been kept scrupulously clean—the Dutch fetish for cleanliness was something almost every traveler remarked on, and it was not at all uncommon for a house to be permanently damp from repeated scrubbing and for any visitors to be required to wear straw slippers over their outdoor shoes to keep out dirt. But it would also have been relatively bare. An artisan household might boast a table, a plain cupboard, some tableware, and perhaps a few straight-backed chairs (which sold for a guilder apiece). It took a long time to scrape together enough money to purchase the most expensive item of household furniture, a bed. The cheapest varieties, known as cupboard beds because they were set into a wall to help retain warmth, were so small that they required their occupants to sleep in a sitting position, and even these cost ten or fifteen guilders; only members of the merchant class could have afforded a modern freestanding bed at the enormous price of a hundred guilders. Among the artisans, children slept on couches or boards, or in drawers under their parents’ bed, and when they reached the age of fourteen, they too were expected to find work and contribute what they could to the household.

By 1630, moreover, the precarious prosperity of the artisan class was increasingly under threat from the flood of Protestant refugees arriving from the south. Even in the previous century the people of the United Provinces had begun to realize that their republic was becoming crowded, since most of the cultivable land, and thus much of the population, was concentrated in the three relatively fertile provinces that lay at the heart of the country: Holland, Gelderland, and Utrecht. (One other reasonably prosperous area lay to the south, where the people of Zeeland mostly earned a living from the fisheries, but the remaining provinces were not capable of supporting many people.) With the arrival of tens of thousands of immigrants from the southern Netherlands, most of whom were seeking work, the population had swollen to some two million people. The fact that many of the southerners brought their wealth with them certainly helped ease the burden, but even so overcrowding became a significant problem, and those who were not already wealthy could see that their chances of ever prospering were increasingly limited.

Opportunities did exist, and people could see them and badly wanted to take them, but “whenever there is