Tulipomania - Mike Dash [63]
Once a newcomer’s eyes had become somewhat accustomed to the murk, however, he would have seen that the tavern was packed and lively. Some of the details, which would not have struck a contemporary Haarlemmer as in any way unusual, might seem odd to modern eyes. One was the requirement to surrender weapons at the door, the result of one too many knife fights in the past. (Dutchmen of the Golden Age had a dangerous passion for this sort of combat—“a hundred Netherlanders, a hundred knives,” as a contemporary proverb bluntly warned.) Another was the quality of the paintings displayed on the walls. Works of art were so ubiquitous in the Golden Age, and prices so low—a matter of a few stuivers or a guilder or two in some cases—that it was very common for taverns to display fine canvases or tapestries and allow them to yellow and blacken in the smoky air.
Most remarkable of all, though, was the sheer scale of the debauchery within. Even at a time when drinking was universal and drunkenness commonplace, the Dutch were Europe’s most notorious sots. Beer was cheap—a whole evening’s drinking could be enjoyed for less than a guilder—and Sir William Brereton found scarcely a sober man among the denizens of the Dutch taverns he visited. Even the English, no mean drinkers themselves, complained of the Hollanders’ appetite for beer and accused the Dutch of exporting the habit of drunkenness to Britain.
Virtually every Dutchman, in fact, frequented one tavern or another, as did many of the less genteel women and a good number of children. The atmosphere within these establishments was both convivial and inclusive, although there was a general suspicion, in many of the less salubrious establishments, that the staff were engaged in a systematic attempt to defraud their customers—which occasionally they were. As well as the usual tricks of shortchanging sozzled patrons or watering down their beer, some innkeepers colored wine with sunflower or stuffed cloths into the bottom of their pitchers to reduce the amount of drink they would hold. Visitors to such estabishments—at least those who avoided being bilked—were frequently appalled by the systematic way in which Netherlanders set about becoming intoxicated. Dutchmen seldom drank alone; they came in company or would be welcomed into one of the groups already working their way through vast flagons of beer. Typically the consumption of each new round would be prefaced by a toast, which was one of the rituals that the tulip traders adopted with enthusiasm. “These gentleman,” the Frenchman Théophile de Viau observed of the habitués of one tavern he visited, “have so many rules and ceremonies for getting drunk that I am repelled as much by the discipline as by the excess.”
It was, in any case, all but impossible to avoid beer in the seventeenth century. The water was generally undrinkable—that would certainly have been true in Haarlem, thanks to the bleacheries—and tea and coffee were little-known luxuries; wine was relatively expensive. Beer was drunk with every meal: warmed and spiced with nutmeg and sugar at breakfast time, on its own at lunch and supper. Naturally not all the beer consumed in Haarlem was very alcoholic—it was brewed in two strengths, “simple” and “double,” the former to quench thirst, the latter to intoxicate—but what there was was drunk in quantity. At the turn of the century, when the population of Haarlem was only thirty thousand men, women, children, and babes in arms, the consumption of beer ran at about 120,000 pints a day, which is five and a half million gallons a year, a third of which was drunk in taverns. To