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The Impact of Land Accumulation and Consolidation on Population Trends in the Pre-industrial Period: Two Contrasting Cases in the Low Countries

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From the late middle ages onwards, many regions of western Europe experienced heightened inequality in the distribution of land via consolidation of property in the hands of interest groups. What happened to those unfortunate rural people who lost their land to wealthier or more powerful interest groups? Commonly a connection has been drawn between land accumulation and population decline or stagnation in the countryside, yet this outcome was not always inevitable, as demonstrated in this article. While land consolidation was sometimes the motor setting in motion outward migration to the cities, for example, this comparative study shows that some rural societies were better 'set up' to retain their landless populations than others.
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The impact of land accumulation and consolidation
on population trends in the pre-industrial period:
two contrasting cases in the Low Countries*
D. R. Curtis
Utrecht University
Abstract
From the late middle ages onwards, many regions of western Europe experienced heightened
inequality in the distribution of land via consolidation of property in the hands of interest
groups. What happened to those unfortunate rural people who lost their land to wealthier or
more powerful interest groups? Commonly a connection has been drawn between land
accumulation and population decline or stagnation in the countryside, yet this outcome was not
always inevitable, as demonstrated in this article. While land consolidation was sometimes the
motor setting in motion outward migration to the cities, for example, this comparative study
shows that some rural societies were better ‘set up’ to retain their landless populations than
others.
From the late middle ages onwards, many regions of western Europe experienced
heightened levels of inequality in the distribution of land caused by the consolidation
of property in the hands of various interest groups.1There was no one set path to land
accumulation: there were many routes. In some cases (particularly in areas that had
once known strong formalized manorialism) inequality in the distribution of land was
connected to the long-term maintenance of inequitable structures inherited from
the middle ages. Large landlords retained control over the land, farming it out at
competitive prices and leading in the ‘Brennerian’ sense to innovation and agricultural
specialization.2Already-wealthy noble and aristocratic families carefully enlarged
landed estates through tactical marriage.3Elsewhere land accumulation was achieved
by urban encroachment into the countryside, whereby wealthy urban burghers or
institutions expropriated land from rural-dwelling peasants, or instead invested capital
in new land reclamation schemes.4Another route was land accumulation evident
within the layers of rural society itself; new distinctions were made between ordinary
smallholding peasants and those peasants who were able to ‘better themselves’ by slowly
* The author is grateful to Bas van Bavel (Utrecht),Auke Rijpma (Utrecht), Richard Paping (Groningen) and
Otto Knottnerus. Thanks are also due to Peter Solar (Vesalius College, Brussels) for comments made dur ing the
Low Countries Conference 2011 (Antwerp).
1A theme recurrent in the papers published in Rural Economy and Society in North-Western Europe, 5002000,
ed. B. van Bavel and R. Hoyle (Turnhout, 2010).
2R. Brenner, ‘Agrarian class structure and economic development in pre-industrial Europe’, Past & Present,
lxx (1976), 3075; ‘The agrarian roots of European capitalism’, Past & Present, xcvii (1982), 16113,atpp.1023.
3K. McFarlane, The Nobility of Later Medieval England (Oxford, 1973), pp. 7980,1523; H. Habakkuk, ‘The
rise and fall of English landed families, 16001800’, Trans. Royal Hist. Soc., xxix (1979), 107207,at p.192.
4J. Richards, The Unending Frontier: an Environmental History of the Early Modern World (Berkeley, Calif., 2003);
S. Ciriacono, Acque e agricoltura:Venezia, l’Olanda e la bonfica europea in età moderna (Milan, 1994), pp. 20842.
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Copyright © 2014 Institute of Historical Research DOI: 10.1111/1468-2281.12050
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consolidating property – effectively becoming ‘les coqs du village’.5Often this kind of
interpretation is linked less with forced expropriation, but instead voluntary and active
participation in fluid land markets.6
In that case, what happened to those unfortunate rural groups (often impoverished)
who lost their land to wealthier or more powerful interest groups? The aim of this
article is to explore the demographic and settlement impact of land consolidation on
pre-industrial rural communities. In the literature, a common connection has been
drawn between land accumulation and strong population decline or stagnation in the
countryside. Features associated with this downward demographic trend include high
unemployment and a paucity of opportunity for work, impoverishment, settlement
collapse, and a general trend of movement (permanent or temporary) towards the city
in search of work. Indeed, it was a central tenet of a famous thesis by Charles Tilly
that pre-industrial agricultural labourers were more migratory and more likely to be
involved in rural-urban movement than landholding peasants who were ‘relatively
immobile’.7Other scholars such as Jerome Blum also noted the connection between
the incidence of permanent or temporary migration from countryside to city, mainly
by the impoverished and the landless in search of work.8
Frequently land consolidation and the contraction and stagnation of rural
settlements have been framed in a story of exploitation and repression by increasingly
powerful cities with formalized jurisdictions over their close rural hinterlands.9For
example, urban expropriation of rural property-holders in the late medieval Florentine
contado, coupled with harsh fiscal oppression and the imposition of the onerous
demands of mezzadria (sharecropping), led to mass migration from the countryside
into Florence.10 As a result, village settlements collapsed and farm plots were
5See G. Duby, L’Economie Rurale et la vie des campagnes dans l’Occident medieval (2vols., Par is, 1962), ii. 524,
591; R. Hilton, The English Peasantry in the Later Middle Ages (Oxford, 1975), pp. 401. On the opening up of
new stratifications within village communities, see M. Bourin, ‘Peasant elites and village communities in the
south of France, 12001350’, in Rodney Hilton’s Middle Ages: an Exploration of Historical Themes, ed. P. Coss,
C. Dyer and C. Wickham (Oxford, 2007), pp. 10114; R. Hilton, ‘Les communautés villageoises en Angleterre
au moyen âge’, in Les Communautés Villageoises en Europe occidentale (Auch, 1984), pp. 11828.This was even more
so by the early modern period (see K. Wrightson, ‘Aspects of social differentiation in rural England, c.1580
1660’, Jour. Peasant Stud.,v (19778), 3347).
6J. Whittle, The Development of Agrarian Capitalism: Land and Labour in Norfolk, 14401580 (Oxford, 2000),
pp. 31415; P. Coote and D. Parker, ‘Agrar ian class structure and the development of capitalism: France and
England compared’, in The Brenner Debate, ed. T. Aston and C. Philpin (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 7990,atp.85;
P. Glennie, ‘In search of agrar ian capitalism: manorial land markets and the acquisition of land in the Lea Valley,
c.1450c.1650’, Continuity & Change, iii (1988), 1140,atpp.1420; B. Campbell,‘Population pressure, inheritance
and the land market in a 14th-century peasant community’, in Land, Kinship and Life-cycle, ed. R. Smith
(Cambridge, 1984), pp. 87134.
7C. Tilly,‘Migration in modern European history’, in Human Migration: Patterns and Policies, ed. W. McNeill
and R. Adams (Bloomington, Ind., 1978), pp. 4874,atp.53. See also M. Flinn, The European Demographic System,
15001820 (Baltimore, Md., 1981), p. 23; D. Gr igg, The Dynamics of Agricultural Change: the Historical Experience
(1982), pp. 11013.
8J. Blum, The End of the Social Order in Rural Europe (Princeton, N.J., 1978), p. 111.
9S. Epstein, ‘Cities, regions and the late medieval crisis: Sicily and Tuscany compared’, Past & Present, cxxx
(1991), 350; ‘Town and country: economy and institutions in late-medieval Italy’, Econ. Hist. Rev., xlvi (1993),
45377,at pp.4669.
10 M. Nenci,‘Ricerche sull’immigrazione dal contado alla città di Firenze nella seconda metà del XIII secolo’,
Studi e Ricerche,i (1981), 13977; W. Day Jr., ‘Population growth and productivity: rural-urban migration and the
expansion of the manufacturing sector in 13th-century Florence’, in Labour and Labour Markets Between Town and
Countryside (Middle Ages–19th Century), ed. B. Blondé, M. Galand and E. Vanhaute (Turnhout, 2001), pp. 82110.
2 Land accumulation and population trends in the pre-industrial period
Copyright © 2014 Institute of Historical Research
abandoned.11 The rural poor eventually swelled impoverished suburbs of Florence,
often to the south and the east.12 A similar trend can be seen in many of the city-states
of northern Italy in the transition from the late middle ages to the early modern
period as urban expropriation of peasant lands became a general phenomenon.13
Commons were encroached upon.14 In Lombardy, 57 per cent of the land in the
Cremonese contado was owned by burghers of Cremona (and that excludes urban
ecclesiastical institutions), while in the Venetian terraferma, urban citizens owned
between half and two-thirds of the land.15 A similarly high proportion of the land was
controlled by urban interest groups in the late medieval territories of Parma, Piacenza,
and in particular, Bologna.16 As a result, newly proletarianized rural-dwellers had little
option but to migrate to the various cities and towns in search of food and work.17 In
fact, it has been shown that in tougher economic periods, the swarm of rural people
upon the cities in search of work and food was so great that many urban governments
chose to close their gates to avoid beggars and vagrants.18 Of course, widespread
rural-urban migration put more pressure on those who decided to remain in the
countryside, as peasant assistance in the maintenance of complex hydraulic works
completely unravelled.19 The consequence was increased susceptibility to flooding, in
turn causing a vicious cycle of outward migration.20
The association of land consolidation with downward demographic trends in the
countryside has also been a feature of literature much later in the pre-industrial
11 D. Herlihy, ‘Santa Maria Impruneta: a rural commune in the late middle ages’, in Florentine Studies: Politics
and Society in Renaissance Florence, ed. N. Rubinstein (1968), pp. 24276; C. Klapisch-Zuber,‘Villagg i abbandonati
ed emigrazioni interne’, in Storia d’Italia: i documenti, v, ed. R. Romano and C. Vivanti (Turin, 1973), pp. 31169;
C. Klapisch-Zuber and J. Day, ‘Villages désertés en Italie: esquisse’, in Villages désertés et histoire économique:
XI–XVIII siècle, ed. R. Romano and P. Courbin (Paris, 1965), pp. 41959,at pp.4378,4423.
12 E. Faini, ‘Da Bagno a Ripoli a Firenze (e ritorno)’, in Alle porte di Firenze: il territorio di Bagno a Ripoli in
età medievale, ed. P. Pir illo (Rome, 2008), pp. 4156; ‘L’emigrazione dal Valdarno Superiore a Firenze nel XII
secolo: una storia mancata’, in Storie di una pieve del Valdarno: San Romolo a Gaville in età medievale, ed. P. Pirillo
and M. Ronzani (Rome, 2008), pp. 10521.
13 There is an overview of urban land accumulation in G. Cherubini, ‘La proprietà fondiaria nei secoli
XV–XVI nella storiografia italiana’, Società e Storia,i(1978), 933.
14 L. Chiappa Mauri, ‘Riflessioni sulle campagne lombarde del quattro-cinquecento’, Nuova Rivista Storica, lxix
(1985), 12330,atp.129; G. Panjek,‘Beni comunali: note storiche e proposte di ricerca’, in Venezia e la terraferma
attraverso le relazioni dei Rettori, ed. A. Tagliaferri (Milan, 1981), pp. 37182; R. Rao, ‘Risorse collettive e tensioni
giurisdizionali nella pianura vercellese e novarese (XII–XIII secolo)’, Quaderni Storici, cxx (2005), 75376 and ‘Lo
spazio del conflitto. I beni comunali nel Piemonte del basso Medioevo’, Zapruder,xi (2006), 825.
15 S. Epstein, ‘The peasantries of Italy’, in The Peasantries of Europe from the 14th to the 18th Centuries, ed.
T. Scott (1998), pp. 75109,at p.89. On late medieval urban land acquisition in the terraferma of Venice, see
G. Gullino,‘Quando il mercante costrui la villa: le propr ietà dei Veneziani nella ter raferma’, in Storia di Venezia:
Dal Rinascimento al Barocco, iv (Rome, 1994), 875924; D. Beltrami, La penetrazione economica dei veneziani in
terraferma: forze di lavoro e proprietà fondiaria nella campagne venete dei secoli XVII e XVIII (Venice, 1961).
16 L. Arcangeli,‘Giurisdizioni feudali e organizzazione territoriale nel Ducato di Parma (154587)’, in Le corti
farnesiane di Parma e Piacenza, 15451622, ed. M. Romani (2vols., Rome, 1978), i. 91121,atp.97; G. Chittolini,
La formazione dello stato regionale e le istituzioni del contado (Turin, 1979), pp. 2615.
17 D. Curtis and M. Campopiano, ‘Medieval land reclamation and the creation of new societies: comparing
Holland and the Po Valley, 8001500’, Jour. Hist. Geography (2013), forthcoming.
18 J. Gutton, La Société et les pauvres en Europe, XVIe–XVIIIe siècles (Paris, 1974), pp. 1046.
19 M. Campopiano,‘Rural communities, land clearance and water management in the PoValley in the central
and late middle ages’, Jour. Medieval Hist., xxxix (2013), 37793.
20 On the floods in northern Italy, see E. Guidoboni, ‘Human factors, extreme events and floods in the lower
Po Plain (northern Italy) in the 16th century’, Environment and History,iv (1998), 279308; G. Alfani, ‘Population
and environment in northern Italy during the 16th century’, Population, lxii (2007), 55995,at p.581.
Land accumulation and population trends in the pre-industrial period 3
Copyright © 2014 Institute of Historical Research
period.21 In the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Beaujolais area of France
was converted to wine cultivation through urban finance; three-quarters of the land
passed into non-residents’ hands leading to the mass exodus of rural dwellers.22 Other
areas of France such as the Beauce and the countryside close to Toulouse also
experienced a shift from rural to urban landownership, but on a less pronounced
scale.23 In early modern England, a contrast was drawn between depopulated ‘closed’
parishes dominated by engrossing landlords (eager to get rid of agricultural labourers
to reduce the poor rate) and those ‘open’ parishes which were overcrowded with the
poor and formed convenient pools of labour.24 Cottages were destroyed and labourers
driven into towns.25 High levels of rural-urban migration after proletarianization have
been plotted for parts of Wallonia26 and the Ruhr Valley of Germany,27 and also in
Paul-André Rosenthal’s classic focusing on France in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries.28 During the later part of the eighteen-hundreds, more than one-fifth of
Sweden’s inhabitants departed the countryside for the city, leaving whole villages
deserted and heavily stagnating communities.29 The concept of ‘flight from the land’
has similarly been invoked by scholars focusing on nineteenth-century Prussia and
Germany, including most famously Max Weber.30 In Andalusia, dismantlement and
expropriation of vast expanses of the commons worsened the economic condition
of the poor to such an extent that many emigrated in droves to nearby towns and
even the provincial capital.31 The difficult conditions for rural people caused by
expropriation of their land by wealthy or powerful interest groups were often
exacerbated by ‘pull’ opportunities offered by the cities.32 Indeed, in an influential
theory posited by Tony Wrigley for England, he showed the interconnectivity of the
21 On the general process, see L. Lucassen and J. Lucassen, ‘The world we lost: European migrations
15001830’, in Leaving Home: Migration Yesterday and Today, ed. D. Knauf and B. Moreno (Bremen, 2009),
pp. 1124.
22 E. Gruter, La Naissance d’un grand vignoble: les seigneuries de Pizay et Tanay en Beaujolais au XVIe et au XVIIe
siècles (Lyon, 1977), pp. 8391.
23 J. Jacquart, La Crise Rurale en Ile-de-France, 15501670 (Paris, 1974), pp. 7245; G. Béaur, La Marché foncier à
la veille de la Révolution: les mouvements de propriété beaucerons dans les régions de Maintenon et de Janville de 1761 à
1790 (Paris, 1984), pp. 186204; G. Frêche, Toulouse et la région Midi-Pyrénées au siècle des lumières (vers 1670–vers
1789)(Paris, 1974), pp. 1648,1912; P. Goubert, Beauvais et le Beauvaisis de 1600 à1730: contribution à l’histoire
sociale de la France du XVIIe siècle (Paris, 1960).
24 J. Martin,‘The parliamentary enclosure movement and rural society inWarwickshire’, Agricultural Hist. Rev.,
xv (1967), 1939,at pp.223.
25 B. Holderness, ‘“Open” and “close” parishes in England in the 18th and 19th centuries’, Agricultural Hist.
Rev., xx (1972), 12639,at p.130; R. Lawton, ‘Rural depopulation in England and Wales’, in English Rural
Communities: the Impact of a Specialized Economy, ed. D. Mills (1973), pp. 195219,atpp.2278.
26 M. Oris, ‘Cultures de l’éspace et cultures économiques parmi les populations urbaines liégeoises au xixe
siècle’, in Les Chemins de la migration en Belgique et au Québec du XVIIe au XXe siècle, ed. Y. Landry and others
(Louvain, 1995), pp. 16572.
27 S. Hochstadt, Mobility and Modernity: Migration in Germany, 18201989 (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1999); J. Jackson,
Migration and Urbanisation in the Ruhr Valley, 18211914 (Atlantic Highlands, N.J., 1997).
28 P.-A. Rosenthal, Les Sentiers Invisibles: éspace, familles, et migrations dans la France du 19e siècle (Paris, 1999).
29 J. Rydström, Sinners and Citizens: Bestiality and Homosexuality in Sweden, 18801950 (Chicago, Ill., 2003),
p. 55.
30 A historiography provided in O. Grant, Migration and Inequality in Germany 18701913 (Oxford, 2005), p. 34.
See also the older R. Heberle, ‘The causes of rural-urban migration: a survey of German theor ies’, Amer. Jour.
Sociology, xliii (1938), 93250.
31 D. Gilmore, ‘The class consciousness of the Andalusian rural proletarians in historical perspective’,
Ethnohistory, xxiv (1977), 14961,atp.154.
32 Emphasized in L. Lucassen and W. Willems, ‘Why people want to live in the city: looking back’, in Living
in the City: Urban Institutions in the Low Countries, 12002010 (2012), pp. 21626.
4 Land accumulation and population trends in the pre-industrial period
Copyright © 2014 Institute of Historical Research
‘push’ and ‘pull’ factors by emphasizing links between land accumulation and industrial
development.According to Wrigley, agricultural progress and the consolidation of large
farms in England led to increased demand for manufactured products and services,
which set in motion flight to the city undertaken by proletarians in search of
non-agricultural work.33
The importance of this topic is illustrated by its relevance to present-day concerns.
In ‘underdeveloped’ and ‘developing’ countries,34 rural people who have lost their land
or do not have enough land to eke out a living are increasingly turning towards the
cities. Even in ‘developed’ countries, the vulnerability of rural settlements has arguably
increased in the twentieth century with the dissemination of a highly dominant urban
culture, the development of technological solutions, and the fact that so many rural
people are now divorced from the agricultural productive process.35 Isolated mountain
regions have been highlighted as particularly vulnerable in this regard.36 Indeed, a
major concern of governments in both ‘developed’ and ‘underdeveloped’ nations is the
skewed distribution of people towards main centres, while the peripheries suffer from
depopulation, the so-called ‘brain drain’ (flight of young educated people), and an
elderly remainder to support.37 Not only this, but mass rural-urban migration is also
seen by scholars as increasing the vulnerability of cities and towns, as the ranks of the
poor become confined to huge slums with poor infrastructure – places such as Sao
Paolo and Mumbai being extreme examples.38
Given the importance of the topic, this article aims to explore the link between land
consolidation and rural population movements a little more closely by recourse to
empirical comparative case-study analysis. The reason for this is that while land
consolidation has been frequently found in the literature to have been linked to
downward demographic trends (caused mainly by outward rural-urban migration), this
outcome was not always inevitable – something not explicitly appreciated widely
in the scholarly literature. There were some cases in certain regions of pre-
industrial western Europe where an inequitable distribution of land did not lead to
population contraction – actually quite the opposite. For example, eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century southern Italy (and other parts of the Mediterranean such as
33 E. Wrigley,‘Men on the land and men in the countryside: employment in agriculture in early-19th century
England’, in The World we have Gained: Histories of Population and Social Structure, ed. L. Bonfield, R. Smith and
K. Wrightson (Oxford, 1986), pp. 295336; ‘Urban growth and agricultural change: England and the continent
in the early modern period’, Jour. Interdisciplinary Hist.,xv (1985), 683728. This is a view influenced by E. Jones,
‘Agricultural or igins of industry’, Past & Present,xl (1968), 5871.
34 Terms used in calculating the ‘Human Development Index’.
35 See, in general, M. Bunce, Rural Settlement in an Urban World (1982). For a specific recent study, see
F. Collantes, ‘The decline of agrarian societies in the European countryside: a case study of Spain in the 20th
century’, Agricultural Hist., lxxx (2007), 7697.
36 F. Collantes, El declive demográfico de la montana Espanola (18502000). ¿Un drama rural? (Madrid, 2004);
F. Collantes and V. Pinilla, ‘Extreme depopulation in the Spanish rural mountain areas: a case study of Aragon
in the 19th and 20th centur ies’, Rural Hist.,xv (2004), 14966.
37 See skewed demographic profiles in rural Africa where women, children and the elderly are
over-represented, in M. Yacoob and M. Kelly,Secondary Cities in West Africa: the Challenge for Environmental Health
and Prevention (Comparative Urban Stud. Occasional Paper Ser., xxi, 1999), p. 5. Similarly see distorted
populations in Russian villages described in J. Pallot, ‘Rural depopulation and the restoration of the Russian
village under Gorbachev’, Soviet Stud., xlii (1990), 65574,atp.655.
38 F. Kruger, ‘Taking advantage of rural assets as a coping strategy for the urban poor: the case of rural urban
interrelations in Botswana’, Environment & Urbanization,x (1998), 11934; P. Jacobi, ‘Environmental problems in
Sao Paolo: the challenge for co-responsibility and innovative cr isis management’, Jour. Contingencies & Crisis
Management,v(1997), 1319; M. Pelling, The Vulnerability of Cities: Natural Disasters and Social Resilience (2003),
p. 59.
Land accumulation and population trends in the pre-industrial period 5
Copyright © 2014 Institute of Historical Research
Andalusia) exhibited high levels of polarization in the distribution of land, in part
connected to the long-lasting dominance of feudal structures there but also the
imposition of large grain-estates known as latifundia.39 The great grain barons
consolidated their position in the nineteenth century, in some cases owning thousands
upon thousands of hectares of land. However, the emergence of latifundist estates in
southern Italy also occurred simultaneously with great upward population surges,40 as
agricultural labourers became crowded into large agricultural towns (often referred
to as agro-towns).41 This population growth did not cease until the mid twentieth
century, as rural people moved from the Mezzogiorno towards northern Italy and
America in search of work.
In that sense, while land consolidation may in many cases have been the motor
which set in motion outward migration towards the cities, depopulation could have
been avoided or limited within certain pre-industrial societies: some societies were
essentially more resilient than others.Thus, a basic hypothesis formulated and tested in
this article is that land consolidation may have had divergent effects on population
trends in the countryside, and this was closely dependent on the arrangement of rural
societies themselves. In other words, this article considers the capacity of different rural
economies to maintain and retain their labouring (and often landless) population – a
test performed by contrasting two historical cases in the northern part of the Low
Countries where peasant expropriation, land consolidation and a transition to a rural
economy dominated by large farms occurred (see Figure 1). This is a significant test
because, while the scholarly literature on rural-urban migration and rural depopulation
is extensive, scholars have tended not to compare decline with resilience.
In the western Betuwe (located within the central Dutch river area (see Figure 2)),
rural society by the sixteenth century became characterized by a sharp division
between a group of successful large tenant farmers and a mass of impoverished landless
agricultural proletarians. In a later case, the Oldambt region of Groningen (the furthest
north-eastern point of the present-day Netherlands (see Figure 7)) was transformed
from an independent society of free peasant farmers with a shallow hierarchy in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries into a society characterized by a sharp division
between a group of prosperous ‘gentleman’ farmers and a mass labouring poor by the
late eighteenth century. Increasing inequality in the distribution of land did not
produce the same demographic effects, however. While in the western Betuwe the
emergence of a class of prosperous large tenant farmers occurred simultaneously with
39 F. Snowden, Violence and Great Estates in the South of Italy: Apulia, 190022 (Cambridge, 1986); T. Tentori,
‘Social classes and family in a southern Italian town: Matera’, in Mediterranean Family Structures, ed. J. Perstiniany
(Cambridge, 1976), pp. 27385; P. Arlacchi, Mafia, Peasants and Great Estates: Society in Traditional Calabria
(Cambridge, 1983), pp. 12398; M. Rossi-Doria, ‘The land tenure system and class in southern Italy’, Amer. Hist.
Rev., lxiv (1958), 4653.
40 N. Colclough, ‘Var iation and change in land use and settlement patterns in south Italy: Ascoli Satriano
17001990. The making of a southern agro-town’, Hist. and Anthropology, xxi (2010), 117. A wide spread of
immigrants into the ‘agro-towns’ of Apulia has been noted for the 18th and 19th centuries (see S. Russo,
‘Uomini e colture: questioni di carte’, in Storia e misura: indicatori sociali ed economici nel mezzogiorno d’Italia (secoli
XVIII–XX), ed. R. De Lorenzo (Milan, 2007), p. 81; S. Russo, ‘La cerealicoltura del Tavoliere e la montagna
Appenninica (secoli XVIII–XIX)’, in Economie del tempo: persistenze e cambiamente negli Appennini in età moderna,
ed. A. Calafati and E. Sori (Milan, 2004), pp. 11725; S. Russo, ‘I lavoratori delle masserie: geografia della
provenienze’, in Il paesaggio agrario di Cerignola fra settecento e ottocento (Cerignola, 1999), pp. 2931).
41 A. Blok, ‘South Italian agro-towns’, Comparative Stud. Soc. & Hist.,xi (1969), 12135; G. Labrot, ‘La città
meridionale’, in Storia del mezzogiorno, viii, ed. G. Galasso and R. Romeo (Rome, 1984), pp. 21592,atp.221;
G. Djurfeldt,‘Classes as clients of the state: landlords and labourers in Andalusia’, Comparative Stud. Soc. & Hist.,
xxxv (1993), 15282,at pp.1745.
6 Land accumulation and population trends in the pre-industrial period
Copyright © 2014 Institute of Historical Research
the stagnation and contraction of the village communities, the rise of a group of large
‘gentleman’ farmers in the Oldambt occurred simultaneously with rapid settlement
expansion and demographic growth. Around 20,000 people lived in the western
Betuwe in the late fourteenth century, but even though this population figure was at
a real nadir after the Black Death, in the early seventeenth century it was still almost
10 per cent lower – real long-term stagnation and no recovery. In contrast the Oldambt
had a population of roughly 10,000 at the beginning of the eighteenth century, but by
the end of the nineteenth century this total had increased by 300 per cent to over
40,000.
It is argued in this article that pre-industrial rural populations were more likely to
have been preserved regardless of land consolidation and increasing inequalities if
the rural economy and society were flexible enough to allow other employment
opportunities to develop. Generally there needed to be at least one of a combination
of opportunities including (a) wage labour, (b) proto-industry or non-agricultural
opportunities and (c) a welfare system, as well as (d) an absence of an urban ‘pull’.
The western Betuwe population reacted negatively to increasing inequality in the
distribution of land as a result of (a) a lack of opportunity for wage labour, (b) a
Figure 1. Location of the Oldambt and the western Betuwe in the northern part of the Low
Countries (with significant towns located)
Land accumulation and population trends in the pre-industrial period 7
Copyright © 2014 Institute of Historical Research
Figure 2. The central Dutch river area with the western Betuwe located
Source: ‘Kaart van het arrondissement Tiel, waaronder behoren de Bommelerwaard, de Tielerwaard, en een gedeelte van de Betuwe’ <http://
www.archiefeemland.nl/collectie/kaarten-en-ontwerptekeningen/detail?id=10225d26-dc46-11df-a9e7-7590f0316edd>[accessed 21 November 2013].
8 Land accumulation and population trends in the pre-industrial period
Copyright © 2014 Institute of Historical Research
lack of opportunity for proto-industry or non-agricultural occupations, (c) the
dismantlement of the commons, and (d) the ‘pull’ of the urban economies of Holland.
In contrast, the Oldambt population actually increased despite land consolidation as a
result of (a) plentiful opportunity for wage labouring (up to a point), (b) the wealth of
opportunity to pursue proto-industrial and non-agricultural occupations in a flexible
and diverse economic portfolio, (c) the quality of and access to poor provisions, and (d)
the lack of ‘pull’ of the stagnant urban economy of Groningen.The article is divided
into three sections. First, the two paths towards land consolidation are traced in the
respective areas. Second, the divergent demographic trends (simultaneous with land
consolidation) are discussed. Finally, an explanation is given as to why two areas had
different capacities for retaining their rural populations, many of whom had lost their
land.
The western Betuwe was from an early stage in the middle ages a society characterized
by unequal distribution of property and power; the transition from the late middle ages
to the early modern period simply shifted the composition of social and economic
stratification. From the earliest manors laid down in the Merovingian period up to the
end of the thirteenth century, there was an unequal relationship between powerful
manorial lords (with large landownership) and their rural subordinates – their tenants
or serfs. Although manorialism disappeared during the fourteenth century, later in the
sixteenth century there emerged new inequalities between large tenant farmers and the
mass ranks of landless agricultural labourers.
It was originally thought that the classic bipartite manor of large demesne and
associated serf tenements was completely absent in the northern parts of the Low
Countries, though recent work has done much to dispel that notion – they were
certainly present in the Dutch river area.42 The medieval manors of the western
Betuwe were a mixture of classic bipartite arrangements (though with numerous
variations in form and organization) and ‘type dispersé’, which consisted of a small,
often fragmented, demesne with scattered tenant properties.43 Demesnes were
exploited with unfree labour taken from the local settlements straddling the Linge
River,44 and then increasingly in the high middle ages supplemented by wage labour.
In order to make the system work, serfs were given land to support themselves, which
consisted of scattered plots in the open fields on the highest and driest lands close to
42 Original view in A. Verhulst and R. de Bock-Doehaerd, ‘Het social-economische leven tot circa 1000’, in
Algemene geschiedenis der Nederlanden, ed. D. Blok, W. Prevenier and D. Roorda (Haarlem, 1981), pp. 183215.
Studies revising this position include A. Buitelaar, De Stichtse ministerialiteit en de ontginningen in de Utrechtse
Vechtstreek (Hilversum, 1993), pp. 12132; B. Braams, Weyden en zeyden in het broek: middeleeuwse ontginning en
exploitatie van de kommen in het Land van Heusden en Altena (Wageningen, 1995); E. Palmboom, Het kapittel van
Sint Jan te Utrecht: een onderzoek naar verwerving, beheer en administratie van het oudste goederenbezit (elfde-veertiende
eeuw) (Amsterdam, 1992); C. Dekker, Het Kromme Rijngebied in de middeleeuwen: een institutioneel-geografische studie
(Utrecht, 1983), pp. 15061; W. van Es, J. van Doesburg and I. van Koningsbruggen, Van Dorestad naar Wijk bij
Duurstede: het ontstaan van een stad ca. 6001500 na Chr. (Abcoude, 1998).
43 The diversity of manors near the Rhine is discussed in A. Verhulst, ‘La diversité du régime domanial entre
Loire et Rhin à l’époque carolingienne’, in Villa, Curtis, Grangia: Landwirtschaft zwischen Loire und Rhein von der
Romerzeit zum Hochmittelalter, ed. W. Janssen and D. Lohrmann (Munich, 1983), pp. 1338.Curtes and ‘type
dispersé’ granges are addressed in R. Fossier,‘Les granges de Clairvaux et la règle Cistercienne’, in Citeaux in de
Nederlanden,vi (1955), 25966,at p.265.
44 On these river-edge settlements, see R. den Uyl, ‘Dorpen in het rivierengebied’, Bulletin van de Koninklijke
Nederlandse Oudheidkundige Bond,xi (1958), 97114; J. Renes and G. van de Ven, ‘Siedlung und Landschaft im
östlichen Rhein-Maas-Delta’, Siedlungsforschung, vii (1989), 1739; J. Harten, ‘Dor pen in het rivierengebied:
speurtocht naar planning’, Nederlandse Geografische Studies, lxviii (1988), 15576.
Land accumulation and population trends in the pre-industrial period 9
Copyright © 2014 Institute of Historical Research
the villages.45 The remains of these arable complexes are visible in the landscape today
and have turned up considerable amounts of medieval pottery.46
However, in line with a general process seen across much of manorialized western
Europe, the manorial mode of exploitation and signorial jurisdictions began to wane
in the thirteenth century. For example, the large landowning abbey of Marienweerd
had trouble controlling seventy men on its manor at Zoelmond in 1259, who refused
to accept their serf status and deserted.47 By 1300, manorialism had almost completely
vanished, and bipartite manors with dependent serfs had disappeared.48 Some of the
settlements began to collapse with the decline of the manorial structures.49 In many
parts of western Europe, the waning of serfdom coupled with the effects of the
Black Death created a host of newfound freedoms for previously repressed rural
communities.50 Not so in the western Betuwe, however. Despite the collapse of the
manorial system, the powerful former manorial lords and large ecclesiastical institutions
maintained their dominance over landownership distribution – property structures
were entrenched over the long term. Between 1300 and 1600, a time of great social
and economic upheaval in western Europe, land in the Dutch river area continued to
be distributed unequally in the hands of certain social groups: the large ecclesiastical
institutions such as the abbey of Marienweerd, local aristocratic families, and to a lesser
extent territorial lords and the urban bourgeoisie and institutions. Peasants and farmers
in the western Betuwe owned between a fifth and a quarter of the land in the period
13001550 (see Table 1).
The stability in this imbalanced property distribution between the late middle ages
and the early modern period maintained inequality on a landownership level, but also
inadvertently stimulated a polarized distribution of land at the user level by providing
ripe conditions for the emergence of short-term leasing. Already the rapid decline of
manorialism had paved the way for the establishment of clear inalienable property
45 D. Blok, ‘De enken’, Driemaandelijkse Bladen,x(1958), 15; J. Harten, ‘Oude nederzettingsvormen in de
Bommelerwaard’, in Het landschap van de Bommelerwaard, ed. H. Berendsen (Amsterdam, 1986), pp. 26790,at
pp. 735.
46 T. Weijschedé, R. Exaltus, A. Koomen and B. van Bemmel, Gaafheid van bodem en relief gemeente Lingewaal
en gemeente Geldermalsen: kennisinstrument bij de relatie culturhistorie en ruimtelijke ontwikkelingen (Wageningen, 2006),
p. 33.
47 B. van Bavel, Goederenverwerving en goederenbeheer van de abdij Marienweerd, 11291592 (Hilversum, 1993),
pp. 2278. Fleeing serfs were common in 13th-century Europe; for a comparative example, see E. Jones, ‘Some
Spalding priory vagabonds of the 1260s’, Hist. Research, lxxiii (2000), 93104.They were also present even earlier,
for example in Wallonia (A. Joris, La Ville de Huy au moyen âge (Paris, 1959), pp. 47984).
48 B. van Bavel, Manors and Markets: Economy and Society in the Low Countries, 5001600 (Oxford, 2010), p. 86;
J. Kuys,‘Dagelijkse heerlijkheden in de Bommeler- en Tielerwaard tot omstreeks het midden van de zeventiende
eeuw’, Bijdragen en Mededelingen Vereniging Gelre, lxx (1978/9), 135,atp.3.
49 J. Oudhof, ‘Sporen en structuren’, in ‘Huis Malburg’ van spoor tot spoor: een middeleeuwse nederzetting in
Kerk-Avezaath, ed. J. Oudhof, J. Dijkstra and A. Verhoeven (Amersfoort, 2000), pp. 32952; A. Botman and
M. Kenemans, ‘Sporen en structuren’, in Twaalf eeuwen bewoning langs de Linge bij De Stenen Kamer in
Kerk-Avezaath, ed. A. Verhoeven and O. Brinkkemper (Amersfoort, 2001), pp. 59130.
50 E.g., in C. Dyer, An Age of Transition? Economy and Society in England in the Later Middle Ages (Oxford, 2005);
C. Dyer, ‘The ineffectiveness of lordship in England, 12001400’, Past & Present, cxcv (2007), 6986; G. Bois,
Crise du féodalisme: économie rurale et démographie en Normandie orientale du début du 14e siècle au milieu du 16e siècle
(Paris, 1974); R. Hilton,‘A crisis of feudalism?’, Past & Present, lxxx (1978), 319; J. Ragnar Myking, ‘Peasants’
land control in Norway’, in Land, Lords and Peasants: Peasants’ Right to Control Land in the Middle Ages and the
Early Modern Period – Norway, Scandinavia and the Alpine Region, ed. T. Iversen and J. Ragnar Myking (Trondheim,
2005), pp. 322,atp.20; L. Genicot,‘Cr isis: from the middle ages to modern times’, in Cambridge Economic History
of Europe, i (Cambr idge, 1966), pp. 70321.
10 Land accumulation and population trends in the pre-industrial period
Copyright © 2014 Institute of Historical Research
rights, informed by the slow infiltration of Roman law.54 Indeed, the multiple
stakeholders who characterized access to land in manorialized or ‘feudal’ societies
hindered transfer between parties.55 The continued dominance of large landownership
by former manorial lords and ecclesiastical institutions after the collapse of formalized
manorialism in the late middle ages increased the likelihood of a system of short-term
leasing emerging as it stopped the peasantry getting its hands on a higher share of
land.56 If peasants had been able to secure a larger share of land through the decline
of manorialism in the western Betuwe, short-term leasehold would never have become
so influential as small peasants were more likely to cling onto their land and work it
themselves. Furthermore, peasants with restricted capital were much less likely to make
financial investments in their farms, slowing the commercialization of agriculture.57
Thus, from the thirteen-hundreds onwards, large landowners stopped directly
managing their estates and began leasing them out to local peasants and farmers. We
know much about this process thanks to the survival of a number of ‘lease books’
belonging to the abbey of Marienweerd, a large landowner in the western Betuwe.58
Initially this did not lead to land consolidation at the user level; perhaps even the
opposite. Landowners subdivided large portions of their estates into randomly scattered
51 2% of land was common, 2% unknown.
52 1% of land was common.
53 1% of land was common.
54 On this issue, see B. van Bavel,‘The organisation and rise of land and lease markets in northwestern Europe
and Italy, c.10001800’, Continuity & Change, xxiii (2008), 1353; ‘The emergence and growth of short-term
leasing in the Netherlands and other parts of northwestern Europe (11th–17th centuries): a chronology and a
tentative investigation into its causes’, in The Development of Leasehold in Northwestern Europe c.12001600, ed.
B. van Bavel and P. Schofield (Turnhout, 2008), pp. 179213.
55 L. Genicot, L’Economie Rurale Namuroise au bas moyen âge (4vols., Louvain, 1974), i. 12559.
56 In contrast to parts of late medieval England, for example, where peasants purchased or leased demesnes
of manorial lords with declining fortunes (see R. Lomas, ‘The priory of Durham and its demesnes in the 14th
and 15th centuries’, Econ. Hist. Rev., xxxi (1978), 33953,at pp.341,345; M. Mate, ‘The farming out of manors:
a new look at the evidence from Canterbury cathedral priory’, Jour. Medieval Hist., ix (1983), 33144;
F. Du Boulay, ‘Who were farming the English demesnes at the end of the middle ages?’, Econ. Hist. Rev., xvii
(19645), 44355).
57 B. van Bavel,‘Land, lease and agriculture: the transition of the rural economy in the Dutch river area from
the 14th to the 16th century’, Past & Present, clxxii (2001), 343,atpp.2930.
58 For the possibilities and limitations of this source, see B. van Bavel, ‘Pachtboek, pachtcontract, legger,
pachtrekening-courant en rekening: typologie en interpretatie van de laat-middeleeuwse bronnensoorten met
betrekking tot de verpachting van grondbezit’, in Vander rekeninghe: bijdragen aan het symposium, ed. J. Smit,
D. den Boer and J. Marsilje (The Hague, 1998), pp. 99110.
Table 1. Social distribution of landownership in the western Betuwe, 1300–1600 (%)
c.1300 c.1400 c.1500 c.1600
Aristocratic/noble 48 45 35 34
Ecclesiastical institutions 11 15 18 18
Lay or charitable institutions 4 7 13 15
Urban 68911
Rural peasants/farmers 27 24 24 22
Total 9651 9952 9953 100
Adapted from: B. van Bavel, Transitie en continuiteit: de bezitsverhoudingen en de plattelands-economie in het westelijke
gedeelte van het Gelderse rivierengebied, ca. 1300–ca. 1570 (Hilversum, 1999), p. 427.
Land accumulation and population trends in the pre-industrial period 11
Copyright © 2014 Institute of Historical Research
parcels of about three hectares each.59 In 1442, there were 172 different tenants using
Marienweerd land, many of them small farmers. By the sixteenth century, however,
an entirely inequitable distribution of lease land had developed, characterized in the
landscape by a dispersal of large isolated farmhouses positioned in the centre of
coherent blocks of land, which contrasted with a series of stagnating villages situated
on the old settled sites close to the Linge River.60 How did this happen? One of the
reasons was the flexible, fluid and unrestricted nature of the leasing system from the
late middle ages onwards – there were not many ‘rules to the game’ here. Quite simply,
the farmer who paid the highest price at public auction for the piece of land secured
the tenancy.61 Thus, although each parcel of land went up for lease every six to ten
years, often it would stay in the same families’ hands for generation upon generation,
if they were able to out-compete any rival bids from neighbours with inferior
resources. The farmhouse and farm complex of ‘Rijsen Ooijen’ near Meteren is one
example of considerable continuity in both ownership and occupation, despite being
farmed through a short-term lease.62 In the course of the fifteenth century, tenant
farmers became more selective about which parcels they wanted to lease, and with
clever organization and patient management over the long term, they could orient
their plots into coherent farm units.63 By the sixteenth century, there were numerous
large isolated farmhouses in the western Betuwe.64 The stability of these farms was
reinforced by favourable relationships between landlords and tenant farmers, who were
offered favourable credit conditions and low rents during periods of crisis such as
exceptionally poor harvests.65
59 Van Bavel, p. 29.
60 On the settlement development, see D. Curtis,‘Pre-industrial societies and strategies for the exploitation of
resources: a theoretical framework for understanding why some settlements are resilient and some settlements are
vulnerable to crisis’ (unpublished Utrecht University Ph.D. thesis, 2012), ch. 5.
61 For public auctions in the river area, see J. Kuys, De ambtman in het kwartier van Nijmegen (ca. 12501543)
(Nijmegen, 1987), pp. 1649. For public auctions in the Land van Culemborg, see Hoofdstukken uit de Nederlandse
rechtsgeschiedenis, ed. F. Cerutti (Nijmegen, 1972), p. 192. For public auctions in the general Rhineland, see
P. Nève, ‘De overdracht van onroerend goed in de middeleeuwen’, Ars Notariatus, xxxii (1985), 2337,at
pp. 279; D. Kastner, Das Schoffenbuch der Stadt Zülpich und die Urkunden des Stadtarchivs (Cologne, 1996),
pp. 1214.
62 E. van Olst, ‘Rijsen Ooijen, een historische boerderij in de Tielerwaard’, in Stichting Historisch
Boerderij-Onderzoek; Jaarverslag 1987 (Ar nheim, 1988), 2853,at p.30.
63 On the rearrangement of the layout of large farms (formed on Marienweerd’s land), see for the Haag
Spijk (Buurmalsen), Gelders Archief Arnhem (hereafter G.E.L.A.), AMtB 2,1170,no.68, fos 5v–6r, no. 69,
fo. 3,no.73,fo.177,no.74, fos. 1334,no.171. For Treeft (Buur malsen), see G.E.L.A., AMtB 2,1170,no.68,
fo. 6r, no. 69;Cartularium der abdij Marienweerd, ed. J. de Fremery (The Hague, 1890), no. 363; G.E.L.A., AMtB
1,0283,no.9. For Ganshoevel (Marienweerdse Veld), see de Fremery, nos. 49,51,347; G.E.L.A., AMtB 2,1170,
no. 68, fos. 2,6r, no. 73,no.38; G.E.L.A., Oud Archief Tiel, 0001, nos. 8527. For De Woerd (Mar ienweerdse
Veld), see de Fremery, no. 349; G.E.L.A., AMtB 2,1170,no.68, fos. 1r–8r, no. 38. For Dijstelcamp (Marienweerdse
Veld), see G.E.L.A., AMtB 2,1170,no.68,fo.3v, no. 73.
64 Van Bavel, ‘Land, lease and agriculture’, p. 31; B. van Bavel, ‘Elements in the transition of the rural
economy: factors contributing to the emergence of large farms in the Dutch river area (15th–16th centuries)’,
in Peasants into Farmers? The Transformation of Rural Economy and Society in the Low Countries (Middle Ages–19th
Century) in the Light of the Brenner Debate, ed. P. Hoppenbrouwers and J. L. van Zanden (Turnhout, 2001),
pp. 275338.
65 As seen elsewhere in the Low Countries, in A. van der Woude, ‘Large estates and small holdings: lords and
peasants in the Netherlands during the late middle ages and early modern times’, in Grand domaine et petites
exploitations en Europe au moyen âge et dans le temps modernes, ed. P. Gunst and T. Hoffmann (Budapest, 1982),
pp. 193207,atpp.1945; J. Jansen, Landbouw en economische golfbeweging in Zuid-Limburg 12501800: een analyse
van de opbrengst van tienden (Assen, 1979); C. Baars, De geschiedenis van de landbouw in de Beijerlanden (Wageningen,
1973), pp. 1224,2004.
12 Land accumulation and population trends in the pre-industrial period
Copyright © 2014 Institute of Historical Research
The emergence of a group of successful tenant farmers by the sixteenth century had
a negative side, however.As a result of consolidation of lease land into the hands of the
few, many rural dwellers ended up without access to even one morsel of land. As large
farmers brought their land into consolidated units, this accumulation came at the
expense of smaller farmers, many of whom lost the means of production and became
proletarianized.66 The average size of lease holdings doubled from seven hectares in
1442 to fourteen hectares in 1580, while the actual number of tenants decreased from
172 in 1442 to ninety-three in 1580.67 As Figures 34show, in 1442 there were no
tenant farmers with more than forty hectares but by the middle of the sixteenth
century farms of over forty hectares took up around 42 per cent of land belonging to
the abbey of Marienweerd.While in 1442 over 80 per cent of the land was distributed
in farms of three to twenty hectares and worked by the peasant household, in 1550 this
figure had dropped to just a third. The proportion of land farmed in large units
was also even higher than the lease books suggest, given that nobles and religious
institutions such as Zennewijnen (sixty-eight hectares) or Marienweerd (fluctuating
around the 360-hectare mark) continued to exploit farms or demesne directly.68 Across
the whole of the western Betuwe, by the end of the sixteenth century there were
around 100 farms of more than forty hectares.69
66 The band of landless labourers is well discussed in B. van Bavel,‘The transition in the Low Countries: wage
labour as an indicator of the rise of capitalism in the countryside, 14th–17th centuries’, in Cross, Dyer and
Wickham, pp. 286303; ‘Rural wage labour in the 16th-century Low Countries: an assessment of the
importance and nature of wage labour in the countryside of Holland, Guelders and Flanders’, Continuity &
Change, xxi (2006), 50332.
67 Van Bavel, Marienweerd,p.396.
68 Van Bavel, Transitie,p.575; G.E.L.A., Abdij Marienweerd te Beesd 2,1170,no.67,no.116, fos. 356.
69 Van Bavel, Marienweerd,p.396.
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
Up to 2 3–6 7–10 11–20 21–40 40–80 80+
Farm sizes (h)
Tenants (%)
1456
1550
Figure 3. Sizes of tenant farms leased from the abbey of Marienweerd, 14421550 (divided by
total number of tenants)
Sources: G.E.L.A., AMtB 2, 1170, nos. 68, 73.
Land accumulation and population trends in the pre-industrial period 13
Copyright © 2014 Institute of Historical Research
The path towards land consolidation in the Oldambt was different to that in the
western Betuwe in that it started out as a freer, more independent, and more egalitarian
society – and remained that way until the first half of the eighteenth century.
Manorialism or feudal structures never found a foothold in the northern coastal
marshes, and many of the peasant farming societies vigorously defended their
autonomy in the early modern period in the face of perceived encroachers such as the
urban government of Groningen. It was only in the second half of the eighteenth
century that real inequality in the distribution of land took off. Indeed, inequality was
quite extreme by the nineteenth century, characterized not only by economic gaps
but also by a social or cultural chasm between ‘gentleman farmers’ and a mass of
impoverished agricultural labourers. Such inequality set the stage for a tradition of
radical socialist politics at the beginning of the nineteen-hundreds, leading to labourer
strikes in 1929.
The medieval history of the Oldambt is not well-trodden ground due to the paucity
of sources, although we do know through palaeo-botanical and archaeological
evidence that all farms and houses were moved back onto safer sandy ridges away from
the coast, as the Dollard Sea broke through significant dikes in 1508.70 Former villages
and farms were submerged under water.71 During the sixteenth and seventeenth
70 For an excellent list of drowned settlements, see O. Knottnerus, ‘Verdwenen dorpen’, Groninger Kerken,
xxviii (2011), 38.
71 H. Halbertsma, ‘Sporen van verdronken dorpen en verlaten Cistercienser kloosters, Dollardgebieden
(Groningen)’, Berichten van de Rijksdienst voor het Oudheidkundig Bodemonderzoek, iii (1952), 1820; R. Bärenfänger
and H. Groenendijk, ‘Versunkene Siedlungen am Dollart’, Archäologie in Niedersachsen,ii (1999), 11619;
J. Molema, ‘De opgravingen op het kerkhof van het verdronken dorp Scheemda’, Palaeohistoria, xxxii (1990),
24770.
0
5
10
15
20
25
30
35
40
45
Up to 2 3–6 7–10 11–20 21–40 40–80 80+
Farm sizes (h)
Area of the western Betuwe (owned by Marienweerd) (%)
1456
1550
Figure 4. Sizes of tenant farms leased from the abbey of Marienweerd, 1442–1550 (divided by
total area)
Sources: G.E.L.A., AMtB 2, 1170, nos. 68, 73.
14 Land accumulation and population trends in the pre-industrial period
Copyright © 2014 Institute of Historical Research
centuries, displaced peasants had to set about the task of reclaiming the marshes into
productive land once again. They achieved this through favourable jurisdictions over
the waste (recht van opstrek) which allowed peasants to colonize as far as they wanted
into the marshes in a long narrow strip.72 Although the Oldambt is famous in Dutch
historiography as a place of smouldering discontent between farmers and labourers,
this author’s reconstruction of property at the user level shows that inequality was not
high during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In 1630,1660 and 1721, the Gini
index for distribution of land in the Oldambt was 0.54,0.56 and 0.54 respectively,
which was equitable when compared with the figure of 0.85 for the Betuwe in 1550.73
Figures 56show that the number of very large farms did increase from two in 1660
to six in 1721, but still they only represented 6per cent of total land. Furthermore,
there was no proliferation of tiny holdings associated with agricultural labourers. In
fact, the number of very small landholders decreased between 1630 and 1721, and
represented an even smaller proportion of the total land – less than 1per cent in 1721.
Sharp divides between rich and poor were still a thing of the future.
However, by the time of the next great property survey in 1832 (the cadasters),
inequality in the distribution of land was on a whole new level. By 1832 the Gini
index was 0.83, far more polarized than the figure of 0.54 in 1630. To highlight this
level of inequality further, this Gini index for the Oldambt was 0.03 higher than was
recorded for the Florentine contado of 1427 – a rural region renowned for its polarized
72 On this process, see P. Hoppenbrouwers, ‘Grondgebruik en agrarische bedrijfsstructuur in het Oldambt na
de vroegste inpolderingen (ca. 1630–ca. 1720)’, in Het Oldambt, ii: Nieuw visies op geschiedenis en actuel problemen,
ed. J. Elerie and P. Hoppenbrouwers (Groningen, 1991), pp. 7395.
73 Curtis, ‘Pre-industrial societies’, pp. 221,287. On the Gini index, 0is a society with a totally equal
distribution of resources, while 1is a society with resources entirely in the hands of one interest group.
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
Up to 2 3–6 7–10 11–20 21–40 41–80 80+
Farm sizes (h)
Landholders (%)
1630
1660
1721
1832
Figure 5. Farm sizes in the Oldambt, 1630–1832 (divided by total landholders)
Sources: Groninger Archieven (hereafter G.A.), Archief Staten van Stad en Lande, nos. 2133, 2139–41,
2143; G.A., Kadaster, 1832.
Land accumulation and population trends in the pre-industrial period 15
Copyright © 2014 Institute of Historical Research
0
5
10
15
20
25
30
35
40
45
Up to 2 3–6 7–10 11–20 21–40 41–80 80+
Farm sizes (h)
Area of the Oldambt (%)
1630
1660
1721
1832
Figure 6. Farm sizes in the Oldambt, 16301832 (divided by total area)
Sources: G.A., Archief Staten van Stad en Lande, nos. 2133, 2139–41, 2143; G.A., Kadaster, 1832.
Figure 7. Groningen province
16 Land accumulation and population trends in the pre-industrial period
Copyright © 2014 Institute of Historical Research
distribution of land and wealth.74 While in 1721 there were still only six farmers with
more than eighty hectares, comprising just 1per cent of the total Oldambt area, in
1832 almost a third of the Oldambt was in the hands of thirty-one exceptionally large
farmers. Furthermore, another third of the Oldambt was in the hands of large farmers
holding between forty-one and eighty hectares, which meant two-thirds of the
Oldambt was controlled by a local farming elite. A big division had opened up
between 2per cent of the population who farmed a third of the land, and the 62 per
cent of the population who farmed fewer than two hectares each. In fact, many of
these lowly sorts did not even have two hectares, often growing vegetables in tiny
gardens.The trends generally follow what Richard Paping has shown in other areas of
the Groningen claylands.75 It was a real polarization in fortunes, only exacerbated
though the nineteenth century.
The classic contrast between the successful wealthy farmers and poor disadvantaged
agricultural labourers became more pronounced, the former residing in large
farmhouses of aristocratic grandeur in design, and the latter confined to small sombre
hovels, sinking into the mud on the peat edges of the Dollard. Numerous travellers
to the Oldambt in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries commented with
surprise on the size and splendour of the farms.76 The large farmers of the nineteenth-
century Oldambt were interested in science and philosophy, were influenced by new
agronomist ideas from the university, had hoards of books and paintings, and were
anxious to turn economic success into political influence.77 The most fortunate farmers
went on not only to dominate village politics but also to get involved in provincial
affairs.78 In contrast to grand farmhouses out on the polders, a network of small
74 D. Curtis, ‘Florence and its hinterlands in the late middle ages: contrasting fortunes in the Tuscan
countryside, 13001500’, Jour. Medieval Hist., xxxviii (2012), 47299,at p.483.
75 R. Paping, Voor een handvol stuivers: de levensstandaard van boeren, arbeiders en middenstanders op de Groninger
klei, 17701860 (Groningen, 1995), pp. 714.
76 Nationaal Archief Den Haag, Archief familie van Hogendorp, no. 186; J. van Lennep, Nederland in den
goeden ouden tijd zijnde het dagboek van hunne reis te voet, per trekschuit en per diligence van Jacob van Lennep en zijn
vriend Dirk van Hogendorp door de Noord-Nederlandsche provintien in den jare 1823, ed. M. E. Kluit (Utrecht, 1942),
pp. 915; J. Marshall, Travels through Holland, Flanders, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Lapland, Russia, the Ukraine and
Poland in the Years 1768,1769, and 1770 (4vols., 1772), i. 190; A. Fischer, Lotgevallen op eene reize van Riga, over
Holland, door Spanjen en een gedeelte van Italien (Amsterdam, 1802), p. 18; D. de Roo van Alderwerelt, ‘Een reis
door Friesland, Drente, en Groningen in het jaar 1845’, De Vrije Fries, xlviii (1968), 529,atp.22; I. Botke,‘Hier
werd ons oog verrukt. Het oordeel van vreemdelingen over de Groninger boer in de negentiende eeuw’, Stad
en Lande: Cultuur-Historisch Tijdschrift voor Groningen,iv (1995), 1319.
77 See I. Botke, Boer en heer: ‘de Groninger boer’ 17601960 (Groningen, 2002); ‘“K had nooit in mijn stoutste
dromen eenigzins gedacht”: de wording van een nieuwe plattelandselite’, in De Groninger boer: de wording van een
nieuwe plattelandselite 17751875, ed. I. Botke and H. Maring (Leeuwarden, 1999), pp. 560; I. Botke, ‘Provinciaal,
maar niet zonder smaak. Schilders, ververs, glazenmakers en de Groninger boerenwoning in de eerste helft van
de negentiende eeuw: een verkenning’, Veenkoloniale Volksalmanak. Jaarboek voor de Geschiedenis van de Groninger
Veenkolonien, viii (1996), 937; ‘Van de boer hangt alles of: de Groninger landbouwer in eigen en ander mans
ogen, 18001900’, in Rondom de reductie: vierhonderd jaar provincie Groningen 15941994, ed. P. Boekholt and others
(Groningen, 1994), pp. 287308; L. Boer, ‘Een Oldambster herenboer op het Haagse pluche: J. F. Zijlker
(180568) en het Oldambt’, Veenkoloniale Volksalmanak. Jaarboek voor de Geschiedenis van de Groninger Veenkolonien,
xi (1999), 922; W. Doornbos, ‘De Groningers en hun boeken’, Gruoninga. Jaarboek voor Genealogie, Naam- en
Wapenkunde, xli (19967), 16070; A. Schuur man, Materiële cultuur en levenstijl. Een onderzoek naar de taal der dingen
op het Nederlandse platteland in de negentiende eeuw: de Zaanstreek, Oost-Groningen, Oost-Brabant (Wageningen, 1989).
78 W. Formsma, Beklemrecht en landbouw: een agronomisch-historische studie over het beklemrecht in Groningen, in
vergelijking met ontwikkelingen elders (Groningen, 1980), pp. 98108. This was also a feature in Friesland (see
M. Blauw, Van Friese grond: agrarische eigendoms- en gebruiksverhoudingen en de ontwikkelingen in de Friese landbouw
in de negentiende eeuw (Leeuwarden, 1995), pp. 2513).
Land accumulation and population trends in the pre-industrial period 17
Copyright © 2014 Institute of Historical Research
villages (Drieborg or Ganzedijk, for example) grew up on the Dollard edges, often on
peat leased by large farmers to secure a constant base of settled labour.79
Thus, if the Oldambt still exhibited a more equal distribution of land in 1721,why
had the region descended into fierce political antagonism and strikes as a result of
sharp inequalities by 1929? While in the western Betuwe this was linked to the
proliferation of the short-term lease, in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
Oldambt it was connected to two developments in property structure: first, the
incursion of urban capital into the region from the late seventeenth century onwards
and the investment in land reclamation; and second, the increasing importance of a
form of long-term hereditary leasing known as beklemrecht.
Land consolidation in the Oldambt was perpetuated in the first instance by
increasingly high levels of absentee landownership, particularly through investment by
urban institutions and wealthy burghers. By creating a database from the fiscal registers
of 1721 (see Table 2), it is calculated that urban social groups owned around 44 per
cent of the land in the region.80 Just a third of the land was owned by non-noble local
people (that is, peasants or farmers), and the proportion of landowners who farmed the
soil they owned was even lower, at 29 per cent (because some land was owned by
rural-dwelling rentier widows). In total, 71 per cent of land in the Oldambt was used
by a third party.
79 The settlement pattern of the labourers is noted in A. Schuurman, ‘Tussen “beschaving” en “verwildering”:
de ontwikkeling van de materiele cultuur van de boeren in oost-Groningen in de negetiende eeuw’, in Eler ie
and Hoppenbrouwers, pp. 10533,atp.117. For examples of peat-plot leases, see G.A., NV Ennemaborg te
Midwolda, 16601964,402, nos. 63,355.
80 The verpondingen do not give all the explicit occupational or social categories of landowners. This
information had to be extracted from cross-referencing a number of works (G.A., ‘Lijst van gezagsdragers
vermeld in het Regeringsboek afkomstig uit het Gemeente-archief Groningen, 1594–ca. 1811<http://
files.archieven.nl/5/f/1700/1700_16.pdf>[accessed 20 June 2013]; S. Abels, Doopsgezinde families in het Oldambt
(15201811)(Eexterzandvoort, 2002); Boerderijen en hun inwoners in Noord- en Zuidbroek, ed. T. Boelema-Diddens
(Zuidbroek, 1990); De boerderijen in het ‘Wold-Oldambt’: Scheemda, Midwolda, Ekamp, Meerland, Heiligerlee,Westerlee,
Meerden, ed. S. H. Albers and others (2vols., Scheemda, 1997); H. Feenstra, Spinnen in het web: Groningse regenten
in relatie tot het omringende platteland tijdens de Republiek (Assen, 2007)).
81 Comprising Hunsingo, Fivelingo and the N.-W. Kwartier (other areas of Groningen) from the ‘grastallen’
of 1755, found in Paping, Voor een handvol stuivers,p.184.
82 7% in the hands of provincial or ‘Ommelanden’ administration.
83 23% in the hands of provincial or ‘Ommelanden’ administration.
Table 2. Social distribution of landownership in the Oldambt, 1721 (%)
The Oldambt,
1721
Groningen clay-areas,
175581
Western Betuwe,
c.1600
Aristocratic/noble 312 34
Ecclesiastical institutions 13 17 18
Lay or charitable institutions 11 15
Urban 44 22 11
Rural peasants/farmers 33 25 22
Total 9382 7783 100
Source: G.A., Archief Staten van Stad en Lande, no. 2143.
18 Land accumulation and population trends in the pre-industrial period
Copyright © 2014 Institute of Historical Research
The problem with the fiscal registers, however, is that we cannot make a systematic
comparison of the social distribution of landownership in 1721 with the situation in
1660 or 1630. We can compare the size of farms at the user level, but not the social
composition of ownership.The reason for this is that the 1721 verpondingkohier is the
only version which explicitly separates owners and users.84 Thus, all we can say at
present is that there was a high level of urban landownership in the Oldambt in 1721.
Whether that was already the case much earlier, we cannot be sure. However, through
indirect evidence it is suggested here that the city of Groningen and its burghers
probably expanded their landownership in the Oldambt from the late seventeenth
century onwards.
The expansion in urban landowning was highly likely given the increased urban
finance put into the reclamation of new polders (see Figure 8). These new polders
were not created in the same way as the ‘older ones’ (peasant farmers using the recht
van opstrek into the wastes). Instead, city institutions and burghers provided large
amounts of capital investment to employ large pools of labour for the reclamation
tasks, in the process digging new dikes and incorporating new drainage mills.85 The
Drieborg Kroonpolder was reclaimed from the sea in 1696 and then the Stadspolder
in 1740; its name indicating the role that the city played in the reclamation process.86
A map from 1699 shows the extent of the newly won land around Midwolda,
Oostwold and Oostwolder Hamrik, and a map from 1690 shows land reclaimed around
Beerta, Nieuwe Beerta and Ulsda.87 If urban landownership in the Oldambt was high
in 1721, then further reclamation projects only increased that percentage, as seen from
84 R. Paping, ‘De Groningse verpondingsregisters’, Broncommentaren,iv(1985), 31039,atp.331.
85 M. Schroor, Wotter: waterstaat en waterschappen in de provincie Groningen 18501995 (Groningen, 1995), p. 58.
86 See the map in G.A., Kaartenverzameling, no. 1307.
87 G.A., Kaartenverzameling, nos. 9901.
Figure 8. Development of the polders in the Oldambt region, c.15501923
Land accumulation and population trends in the pre-industrial period 19
Copyright © 2014 Institute of Historical Research
charters showing large portions of land from these new polders being sold to officials
of the city in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.88 Despite financial difficulties
in the nineteenth century, the city of Groningen owned over 400 hectares on the
Oldambt polders in 1832.89 The city also had rights to the water behind the polders.
Why were urban groups able to invest so heavily in the Oldambt from around the
late seventeenth century onwards? Certainly it had very little to do with direct
application of jurisdictions, since the people of the Oldambt had enjoyed a long
tradition of independence and autonomy. Much of this came from the peculiar
geographical and environmental conditions in the east of the province, as the Oldambt
was separated from the city by a large area of difficult peat and marshland, almost
impassable in places and made more problematic by the terrible roads.90 Up to the
sixteenth century, the farmers of the Oldambt had rarely used the Groningen market
for trade, which explains why market-monopolies (stapelrecht) only applied for the
Ommelanden (the area of the province where the city of Groningen had jurisdictional
rights), and not for the Oldambt.91 Oldambt producers instead always looked east
towards Emden, for example the Grijzemonniken monastery shipped 25,000 kilos of
barley to the Westfalen in exchange for wheat in 1493.92
Groningen tried in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to bring the Oldambt to
heel, but was met with stubborn resistance. For example, the city attempted to improve
the transport connections to the Westfalen by building canals through the Oldambt.93
The first efforts in the late sixteenth century were not successful and were met with
great protest by the people of the Oldambt, but by 1612 the city was connected to the
region by a canal. Much of the seventeenth century was marked by bitter battles
and the revolt of the Oldambt people against the increasing urban influence and
sanctions.94 Farmers were anxious to avoid the demands of stapelrecht and tolls on peat
and beer.Another problem was that the new dikes which drained the peat lands ended
up building water pressure on an already over-burdened system, and many farmers saw
their lands flooded.95 The city tried to invoke jurisdictional rule over the Oldambt
through a series of ‘quasi-signorial’ rights, while the Oldambt farmers looked to
ancient precedents as their claims to autonomy.96
88 G.A., Losse stukken register Feith, meest charters, 12461864,2241, nos. 353,371,456,467,499,535,668,
766,776,854,880,903,909,936-7,944,957,1017,101920,1029.
89 G.A., Kadaster, 1832.
90 O. Knottnerus, ‘Culture and society in the Frisian and German North Sea coastal marshes (15001800)’,
in Eau et développement dans l’Europe moderne, ed. S. Cir iacono (Paris, 2004), pp. 13954,atp.144.
91 J. van den Broek, ‘Graven bij Stootshorn: de verbinding tussen Groningen en het Oldambt gedurende de
oorlogsjaren 15801594’, in Stad en regio, ed. G. Collenteur and others (Groningen, 2010), pp. 99113,at p.100.
92 Ostfriesisches Urkundenbuch, ii, ed. E. Friedländer (Emden, 1881), no. 112.
93 M. Schroor and O. Knottnerus, ‘De opstand 156896’, in Geschiedenis van Groningen, ii, ed. M. Duijvendak
and H. Feenstra (Zwolle, 2008), pp. 1367.The transport networks in the Oldambt were improved substantially
in the course of the 19th century (see M. Clement, Transport en economische ontwikkeling: analyse van de
modernisering van het transportsysteem in de provincie Groningen (18001914)(Groningen, 1994)).
94 C. Dijkstra, ‘De Oldambten tegen de stad – een vruchteloze strijd’, Groningse Volksalmanak. Historisch
Jaarboek voor Groningen (1974/5), pp. 3958.
95 M. ‘t Hart, ‘Rulers and repertoires: the revolt of a farmers’ republic in the early modern Netherlands’, in
Challenging Authority: the Historical Study of Contentious Politics, ed. M. Hanagan, L. Page Morch and W. te Brake
(Minneapolis, Minn., 1998), pp. 197212,atp.202.
96 Dijkstra, pp. 568. On invoking historical precedents from Hapsburg rule, see A. de Blécourt, Oldambt en
de Ommelanden: rechtshistorische opstellen met bijlagen (Assen, 1935), p. 361. The invoking of old land rights from
1471 is described in H. Feith, ‘Geschiedkundig ber igt van de vorenstaande oud-Oldambster en Reiderlandsche
landregten van 1471 en 1327’, Pro Excolendo Jure Patrio,vi (1846), 74567.
20 Land accumulation and population trends in the pre-industrial period
Copyright © 2014 Institute of Historical Research
Groningen managed to gain a foothold in the Oldambt from the late seventeenth
century onwards, not by direct application of jurisdictions or powers, but by increasing
its economic and political stranglehold over other parts of the province. It achieved this
in three ways. First, in some parts of the province, the city began easily to acquire
property outside its walls.This was in part aided by the Reductie van Groningen in 1594,
which saw a large proportion of confiscated monastic property end up in city hands,
particularly in the fens.97 By 1755,22 per cent of the Ommelanden was in the hands
of urban elites and institutions such as gasthuizen, a figure which increased when
urbanites of the Ommelanden acquired properties from the provincial administration
from 1764 to 1773.98 Second was the implementation of market staples in the
Ommelanden. Third, the city developed an efficient taxation system on property.99
Investment in the expansion of the Veenkolonien allowed it to exploit this avenue,
particularly from the sixteen-hundreds.100 Its profits from the peateries came to be
substantial under this intensification of activity.101 In 1619, the city received all the
jurisdictional rights of exploitation in Westerwolde.102 As well as the benefits of peat
extraction, the tax on newly reclaimed land represented 4per cent of the city’s income
in 1600.103 In 1608, the city bought over 100 hectares of peat land from peasant farmers
in the parish of Zuidbroek, and between 1614 and 1628 purchased peat lands in
Foxhol, Kropswolde, Kolham and Slochteren, so it owned the rights to a wide
expanse of fenland stretching across the border between Drenthe and Groningen.104
New boundaries were drawn between city-owned peat and the peat lands of local
farmers.105 In sum, Groningen institutions and its administrators were in a good
position finally to subject the Oldambt to the city’s influence in the late seventeenth
century, mainly as a result of the huge power that it had built up over the centuries
by exploiting other parts of the province.
Thus, although increased urban investment in landownership in the Oldambt had
not led to extreme inequality in the distribution of land at the user level by 1721,it
laid the foundations for later disparities between rich and poor by providing a
favourable institutional context for the perpetuation of the beklemrecht lease from the
middle of the eighteenth century. Urban institutions and burghers were never going to
exploit the lands that they owned in the Oldambt themselves (not on a wide scale), and
so their increased influence in the area made a lease contract like beklemrecht more
97 H. Hurenkamp, ‘Groningen van stadstaat tot stad van het noorden’, in Collenteur and others, p. 45.
98 Paping, Voor een handvol stuivers,pp.1815.
99 M. Muller, Een economische geschiedenis van Europa vanaf de vroeg middeleeuwen tot omstreeks 1980 (The Hague,
1988), pp. 501.
100 M. Schroor, ‘Een vlucht voorwaarts: bespiegelingen rond de economisch-geografische politiek van het
stadsbestuur van Groningen in het begin van de 17 de eeuw’, in Historisch Jaarboek Groningen (Groningen, 2003),
pp. 3758. For urban influence on the development of this region, see J. Voerman, Verstedelijking en migratie in
het Oost-Groningse veengebied 18001940 (Assen, 2001).
101 M. Gerding, Vier eeuwen turfwinning: de verveningen in Groningen, Friesland, Drenthe en Overijssel tussen 1550
en 1950 (Wageningen, 1995), p. 360.
102 H. Keuning, De regio Groningen (Groningen, 1974), p. 49.
103 M. Schroor, Stadsstaat Groningen: de Groninger stadsrechten en buitenbezittingen 16122000 (Groningen, 1999),
p. 46. See also I. Matthey, ‘Op fiscaal kompas; een bijdrage tot de economische geschiedenis van het gewest
Groningen in de 17een18e eeuw, met toespitsing op de dorpen in de huidige gemeente Stedum’, in
Westeremden; het verleden van een Gronings terpdorp (Groningen, 1975), pp. 195360,atp.231.
104 G.A., Losse stukken register Feith, meest charters, 12461864,2241,no.307; A. de Blécourt, Het
stadsmeierrecht in de Groninger Veenkolonien, i (Groningen, 1907), p. v; G.A.,Archief Veenkantoor, no. 384. See also
Hurenkamp, p. 45.
105 G.A., Losse stukken register Feith, meest charters, 12461864,2241, nos. 582,1151.
Land accumulation and population trends in the pre-industrial period 21
Copyright © 2014 Institute of Historical Research
likely. Beklemrecht was a long-term hereditary lease which gave full inalienable rights of
the land to the tenant farmer, and it could not be split into smaller pieces without
the consent of both parties. In a contract from 1739 it was noted that land under
beklemming should follow a hereditary line with the tenant and could be used at the
tenant’s own pleasure, with a fixed yearly rent that could not be lowered or raised, and
included a one-off purchase fee.106 The precise combination of urban investment in
land and the crystallization of a culture of long-term hereditary leasing set the stage
for the establishment of extreme inequalities in land distribution within the Oldambt
at the local level. From the mid eighteenth century onwards, farmers enjoyed high
prices for their agricultural products, yet paid rents which were fixed and could not be
raised by the (often urban) owners of the land. Indeed, prices for grain were at their
highest around 1800 and two or even sometimes three times as high as they were in
1700.107 As a result a local farming elite was able to establish itself by investing
their increased surpluses in their own commercialized enterprises – capital-intensive
production, the avaricious consolidation of more lease land, investment in better
hydraulic systems, and the construction of grandiose farmhouses. Land accumulation
was further aided by the cattle pestilences of the late seventeenth century and
the disastrous Christmas Floods of 1717, which tended to wipe out remaining
smallholders.108 Large farmers were aided in difficult times by their political
connections and social networks within the villages, where they were able to secure
credit.109 This formed the background to the conversion of most pastoral land to
arable, and the emergence of the great ‘gentleman’ grain farmers of the Oldambt.110
As noted in the introduction, the consolidation of land by interest groups in the
pre-industrial period often led to a decline in rural populations and a contraction in
village settlements, as the loss of the means of production and impoverishment logically
pushed former rural producers permanently or temporarily to the city in pursuit of
urban opportunities. Certainly this interpretation applies for the western Betuwe in the
early modern period.Although no absolute population figures exist for the region prior
to the Black Death, in line with simultaneous developments elsewhere in western
Europe, it is likely that the western Betuwe experienced demographic growth in the
high middle ages and reached a population plateau towards the beginning of the
fourteenth century, perhaps ending with the ‘great death’ mentioned by chroniclers of
the period in reference to the plagues of 1316.111 Population declined through the
106 A more detailed explanation may be found in P. Priester, De economische ontwikkeling van de landbouw in
Groningen 18001910: een kwalitatieve en kwantitatieve analyse (Wageningen, 1991), pp. 11018; W. Formsma,
Beklemrecht en landbouw: een agronomisch-historische studie over het beklemrecht in Groningen, in vergelijking met
ontwikkelingen elders (Groningen, 1980).
107 W. Tijms, Groninger graanprijzen: de prijzen van agrarische producten tussen 1546 en 1990 (Wageningen, 2000).
108 On the effects of these floods, see T. Ufkes, ‘De Kerstvloed van 1717. Oorzaken en gevolgen van een
natuurramp’ (unpublished Univesity of Groningen Ph.D. thesis, 1984).
109 O. Knottnerus, ‘Yeoman and farmers in the Wadden Sea coastal marshes, c.15001900’, in Landholding and
Land Transfer in the North Sea Area (Late Middle Ages–19th Century), ed. B. van Bavel and P. Hoppenbrouwers
(Turnhout, 2004), pp. 14986,atpp.1801.
110 P. Priester, ‘De economische ontwikkeling van de landbouw in het Oldambt in de negentiende eeuw’, in
Elerie and Hoppenbrouwers, pp. 95104,atp.102. For the arable-pastoral ratio in 1661, see G.A., Ommelander
Archief, no. 1058.
111 With particular reference to the river area, see ‘Niederdeutsche Chroniken aus dem XV. Jahrhundert’, ed.
A. Meister, Annalen des Historischen Vereins für den Niederrhein, lxx (1901), 4364,atp.51. This was also the case
for nearby Xanthen along the Rhine (see Urkundenbuch des Stiftes Xanten, (vor590)–1359, i, ed. P. Weiler (Bonn,
1935), no. 462.
22 Land accumulation and population trends in the pre-industrial period
Copyright © 2014 Institute of Historical Research
fourteenth century, although figures from the Tielerwaard (an administrative district
within the western Betuwe) suggest that between 1382 and 1470 population recovered
by around 17 per cent.This recovery is curious given that the mid fifteenth century was
a time of well-documented plagues in the Dutch river area.112 It may be that this was
linked to the decline of serfdom and the manorial system and the proliferation of the
short-term lease giving more inhabitants access to their own land.Nonetheless, between
1470 and 1630/50, population once again tumbled to a lower level than in 1369,
unsurprisingly occurring at the same time as economic polarization in the region.This
demographic decline in the transition from the late middle ages to the early modern
period was mirrored in the nearby Bommelerwaard (see Table 3). Population did not
decline significantly and in fact was the same in 1630 as in 1470, and no different from
1369 levels. However, since the figures from 1369 represented a real population nadir
(given the disastrous impact of the Black Death from 1348 to 1350), the fact that
population was even the same in 1630 reveals strong stagnation at a low level over the
long term.The western Betuwe did not recover well from the fourteenth century crises.
These trends are supported by data on declining numbers of births and the increasing
age of marriage in the region. According to van Bavel, the low nuptiality in the region
was demonstrated most clearly in rural households which had little or no land (a
sizeable group by the sixteenth century), and had on average between one and a half to
two children fewer than families with land.113
In contrast, the increasing inequality in the distribution of land in the Oldambt
from the mid eighteenth century onwards occurred during a period of almost
relentless and frequently intense demographic growth and settlement expansion
(see Table 4). The seventeenth-century Oldambt experienced prolonged population
decline, resulting mainly from repeat bouts of plague and pestilence.114 However, from
a population nadir in the early eighteenth century, there was a real demographic revival
from (roughly) the seventeen-thirties onwards. It started slowly, as from 1735 to 1760
112 W. Blockmans, ‘The social and economic effect of the plague in the Low Countries’, Revue Belge de
philologie et d’histoire, lviii (1980), 83363.
113 B. van Bavel, ‘People and land: rural population developments and property structures in the Low
Countries, c.1300c.1600’, Continuity & Change, xvii (2002), 937,at p.24.
114 Although it was not as severely afflicted as other parts of Groningen (see P. Hoppenbrouwers,
‘Demographische Entwicklung und Besitzverhältnisse im Wold-Oldambt (Provinz Groningen) (ca. 16301730).
Die Quellen und ihre Probleme’, in Bevölkerungsgeschichte im Vergleich: Studien zu den Niederlanden und
Nordwestdeutschland, ed. E. Hinr ichs and H. van Zon (Aurich, 1988), pp. 926,atp.25).
Table 3. Population trends for regions in the Western Betuwe
Tielerwaard Bommelerwaard Neder-Betuwe
1369 5,835 5,800 6,200
1382/94 5,429 6,900 6,600
1470 6,385 Unknown 6,400
1630/50 5,485 6,200 6,400
1770 6,161 7,100 7,300
Sources: R. van Schaik, Belasting, bevolking en bezit in Gelre en Zutphen, 13501550 (Hilversum, 1987), pp. 2737;
P. Brusse, Overleven door ondernemen: de geschiedenis van de Over-Betuwe 16501850 (Wageningen, 1999), pp. 2832;
E. Hofstee, ‘Groei van de bevolking vanaf 1795’, in Het Gelders rivierengebied uit zijn isolement: een halve eeuw
plattelandsvernieuwing, ed. H. de Bruin (Tiel, 1988), pp. 4255.
Land accumulation and population trends in the pre-industrial period 23
Copyright © 2014 Institute of Historical Research
the population of the Oldambt increased by around 15 per cent.115 The greatest
demographic explosion came in the first half of the nineteenth century, however, as
the number of inhabitants almost doubled between 1795 and 1859.The last decades of
the nineteenth century also showed demographic growth, with the expansion of the
regional capital, Winschoten, into a small town.The Oldambt population in 1899 had
increased by a ratio of 2.78 from the figure in 1795, and furthermore, there appears to
have been a relentless upward demographic push all the way from 1730 to 1900.
Demographic growth in the Oldambt exceeded the general rate for the whole
province of Groningen.
Despite the critical conditions of impoverishment experienced by many of the rural
inhabitants of the Oldambt by the second half of the nineteenth century, very few of
the emigrants from the northern Netherlands to the Americas came from the Oldambt
– in fact, migration tended to be short distances between villages in search of work.116
While land consolidation and agricultural modernization led to high levels of labourer
emigration from Zeeland and northern Groningen, Oldambt labourers did not leave.117
Evert Hofstee has also demonstrated that by the late nineteenth century, the Oldambt
had one of the highest rates of fertility for a rural region in the whole of the
Netherlands.118 Indeed recent work has also empirically shown the unrestricted nature
of marriage practices in the province of Groningen during the nineteenth century.
Groningers married early in their twenties and almost ten years earlier than their
counterparts to the south in Drenthe, an area dominated by small farmers.119
115 O. Knottnerus, ‘Land kanaan aan de Noordzee: een vergeten hoofdstuk’, in Eler ie and Hoppenbrouwers,
pp. 2572,atp.44.
116 R. Paping, ‘Family strategies concerning migration and occupations of children in a market-orientated
agricultural economy’, Hist. of the Family,ix (2004), 15991,atp.159.
117 M. Wintle, ‘Push-factors in emigration: the case of the province of Zeeland in the 19th-century’,
Population Stud., xlvi (1992), 52337,atpp.5256; R. Swierenga,‘Exodus Netherlands, promised land America’,
Bijdragen en Mededelingen betreffende de Geschiedenis der Nederlanden, xcvii (1982), 51737,atp.522.
118 E. Hofstee, ‘De ontwikkeling van de huwelijksvruchtbaarheid in het Oldambt in de periode 18801950’,
in De wereld der mensen: sociaal-wetenschappelijke opstellen aangeboden aan Prof. Dr. J. J. Fahrenfort ter gelegenheid van
zijn afscheid als hoogleraar in de volkenkunde aan de Universiteit van Amsterdam, ed. J. Brummelkamp and others
(Groningen, 1955), pp. 295353.
119 E. Karel and R. Paping, ‘The rural succession myth: occupational careers and household formation of
peasants’ and farmers’ offspring around 1800’, Tijdschrift voor Sociale en Economische Geschiedenis,iv (2011), 4475;
E. Karel and R. Paping,‘Searching for a place to live: succession and child career strategies of peasant and far mer
households in rural Drenthe and Groningen in the first half of the 19th century’ (unpublished paper, Posthumus
Conference, University of Antwerp, 2011), pp. 1920.
Table 4. Population figures for the Oldambt, 1795–1899
1795 1830 1859 1869 1879 1899
Population 14,898 20,302 28,051 31,132 35,059 41,383
Population ratio 100 136 188 209 235 278
Population (Groningen
province)
114,555 157,504 207,688 225,336 253,256 299,602
Population ratio
(Groningen province)
100 138 181 197 221 262
Sources: Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek, ‘Volkstellingen 17951971<http://www.volkstellingen.nl/nl/>
[accessed 20 June 2013].
24 Land accumulation and population trends in the pre-industrial period
Copyright © 2014 Institute of Historical Research
So far it has been shown that the western Betuwe in the sixteenth century and the
Oldambt from roughly the mid eighteenth century experienced increasing levels of
inequality in the distribution of land caused by the phenomenon of land consolidation
by certain interest groups. However, while in the western Betuwe this occurred
alongside demographic decline or stagnation over the long term, the Oldambt
experienced intense long-term population expansion. Why did the two societies
show differing capacities to retain their rural populations? The answer, understandably,
is not monocausal. As argued above, pre-industrial rural populations were more likely
to have been preserved regardless of land consolidation and increasing inequalities
if the economy was flexible enough to allow other economic opportunities to be
available.
By the sixteenth century in the western Betuwe, a gap had grown between a local
elite of successful tenant farmers with large farms who had accumulated all the lease
land, and a mass of impoverished agriculturalists who had lost the means of production
and had become proletarians. The problem was, however, that the rural economy was
arranged in such a way as to ensure that there was not enough wage labour to go
round. The large tenant farms of the western Betuwe were commercialized and
oriented towards urban markets, but they followed very capital intensive and labour
extensive modes of exploitation.120 Very small amounts of surplus were lost in taxation
(with the exception of river tolls exacted by territorial lords),121 which meant that
more could be invested in the farms. Surplus was used to improve the hydraulics with
drainage mills, highly important in a sodden environment.The enclosure of land into
coherent farm units also reduced transportation and storage costs for products and
materials, and less time was wasted travelling between plots. Furthermore, large-scale
producers such as the abbey of Marienweerd acquired a number of strategically
placed stadshoven to store produce in the towns of Culemborg, Zaltbommel, Grave and
Cologne.122
The commercial orientation of these large farms went hand-in-hand with a wide
transition from arable to pastoral farming. Even those that continued with arable
cultivation did so with an emphasis on fodder crops and oats for the feeding of
animals.123 Accounts and tithe registrations show that in 1364, only a third of the
agricultural land in the Land van Culemborg (an administrative district in the western
Betuwe) was used as arable, and by 1450 this had declined to just under a fifth of total
120 Van Bavel, ‘Land, lease and agriculture’, pp. 359.
121 J. Weststrate, In het kielzog van moderne markten: handel en scheepvaart op de Rijn, Waal en Ijssel, ca. 1360
ca. 1560 (Hilversum, 2008), pp. 1067;De rekeningen van de landsheerlijke riviertollen in Gelderland, 1394/5, ed.
J. Westermann (Arnhem, 1939), pp. 4988. Other rights of the duke of Gelders are listed in R. van Schaïk,
‘Taxation, public finances and the state-making process in the late middle ages: the case of the duchy of
Guelders’, Jour. Medieval Hist., xix (1993), 25171,at p.263.
122 B. van Bavel,‘De stadshoven van de Norbertijner abdijen tijdens de late middeleeuwen en het begin van
de nieuwe tijd: een beknopte inleiding’, in De stadshoven: refuge, overslagplaats en stedelijke residentie.Verslagen van
de contractdag van de werkgroep Norbertijnse geschiedenis in Nederland, ed. S. van de Perre (Utrecht, 1995), pp. 926;
B. van Bavel, ‘Schakels tussen abdij en stad: de stadshoven van de norbertijner abdijen in de Nederlanden
(ca. 1250–ca. 1600)’, Analecta Praemonstratensia, lxxvi (2000), 13357. See, e.g., G.E.L.A., AMtB 2,0170,no.106.
123 P. Hoppenbrouwers, ‘Agricultural production and technology in the Netherlands, c.10001500’, in
Medieval Farming and Technology: the Impact of Agricultural Change in Northwest Europe, c.15001850, ed. G. Astill and
J. Langdon (Turnhout, 2002), pp. 99101.
Land accumulation and population trends in the pre-industrial period 25
Copyright © 2014 Institute of Historical Research
land.124 Similarly, in the Ambt of Beesd and Rhenoy (another administrative district),
48 per cent of the land was arable in 1364, but this declined to just over a third
by 1400.125 Conversion from arable to pastoral farming during the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries was most pronounced in the lower-lying areas away from
the Linge River, where heavy soils and poor drainage hampered ploughing.
Many sixteenth-century tenant farmers opted to move further towards extensive
agriculture; indeed high prices were being paid for meat and dairy produce in the
fifteen-hundreds. The western Betuwe became a prominent area for horse-breeding
and ox-fattening in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, while large farmers with
sufficient capital invested in orchards necessary for market-oriented fruit production.126
Farmers took advantage of the local markets for horses, cattle and oxen, which
developed in the nearby towns and villages of Beusichem, Culemborg, Nijmegen,Tiel
and Zaltbommel, from the second half of the fifteenth century onwards.127 Another
form of extensive agriculture which developed in the late middle ages was the
exploitation of duck decoys (to trap ducks),128 which could only be constructed
by large farmers with sufficient capital.129 In short, these realignments in the rural
economy meant that agriculturalists who had lost all independent access to land also
struggled to find work as wage labourers on the large farms. Work was available in
the Marienweerdse Veld, which was retained partly as demesne by the abbey of
Marienweerd into the sixteenth century, but this provided employment for just
twenty-five fixed-contract workers, twenty-five temporary workers for the harvest, and
twenty single-day workers for times outside the harvest.130 The lack of employment
was compounded by tenant farmers securing labour from migrant workers who
originated as much as 150 kilometres away in parts of Overijssel (eastern Netherlands),
and who were liable to accept much lower wages.
The case of the Oldambt was different. As urban investors financed the reclamation
of new polders, the large farmers that emerged in the region moved from a previously
124 Although some caution must be taken with using tithes to measure agricultural productivity and land
under cultivation (see G. Dejongh and E. Thoen, ‘Arable productivity in Flanders and the former ter ritory of
Belgium in a long-term perspective (from the middle ages to the end of the ancien régime)’, in Land Productivity
and Agro-systems in the North Sea Area (Middle Ages–20th Century): Elements for Comparison, ed. B. van Bavel and
E. Thoen (Turnhout, 1999), pp. 3064,atp.33; B. Dodds, ‘Estimating arable output using Durham prior y tithe
receipts, 13411450’, Econ. Hist. Rev., lvii (2004), 24585,at pp.2547.
125 B. van Bavel,‘A valuation of arable productivity in the central part of the Dutch river area, c.13601570’,
in van Bavel and Thoen, pp. 297310,at pp.3056.
126 Van Bavel, ‘Land, lease and agriculture’, pp. 356.
127 On markets in the Betuwe, see J. Benders, Item instituimus ibidem singulis annis nundinas: fairs in the
principality of Guelders, 12941543’, in Fiere e mercati nella integrazione delle economie Europee secc. XIII–XVIII,
ed. S. Cavaciocchi (Prato, 2000), pp. 64567,at pp.64951,6645; J. den Hoed, ‘Beschouwingen rond de
Culemborgse stadsrechtbrief van 1318’, Spiegel der Historie, iii (1968), 34653,atpp.34950. On the development
of specifically horse-fairs from the late 14th century onwards in the river area, see J. Dijkman, Shaping Medieval
Markets: the Organisation of Commodity Markets in Holland, c.12001450 (Leiden, 2011), pp. 601. On specifically
horse-markets in the Betuwe, see van Bavel, Goederenverwerving,pp.4501; F. van den Hombergh,‘Brugman en
de broodnijd: problemen rond de Culemborgse paardenmarkt’, De Drie Steden, viii (1987), 39.
128 B. van Bavel, ‘Eendenkooien in het Hollandse en Gelderse rivierengebied. Aanleg en vroegste
exploitatie’, Historisch-Geografisch Tijdschrift,xx(2002), 1620; M. van Tielfhof, ‘Eendenkooien in Rijnland in de
vroegmoderne tijd’, Tijdschrift voor Waterstaatsgeschiedenis, xiii (2004), 4759.
129 See G.E.L.A.,Waardenburg, no. 584; Nassause Domeinen, no. 148,fo.231r; G.E.L.A., ORA Deil, no. 1089,
fo. 141v. Many of these decoys were found in the lower-lying marshes such as the area of Beesd known as ‘Over
de Graaf ’, some belonging to hereditary leasers of the convent of Mary Magdalene at Wijk bij Duurstede
(see Regionaal Archief Rivierenland Tiel, Archief Dijkstoel Beesd, 15521838, Verpondingen over Beesd 1690,
no. 26).
130 Van Bavel, Marienweerd,pp.43642.
26 Land accumulation and population trends in the pre-industrial period
Copyright © 2014 Institute of Historical Research
mixed pattern of arable and grazing to a predominantly grain-growing economy. As
small farmers lost their herds through cattle plague and their land through floods or
accumulation by wealthier farmers, more and more land became turned over to arable
in the eighteenth century.131 Otto Knottnerus has shown this process most clearly,
demonstrating both the increase in arable land and the decline in the numbers of
cattle between the late seventeenth and early nineteenth century.132 By 1771, the cattle
population of the Oldambt was half what it had been in 1697, while arable extended
across almost 60 per cent of the total area – perhaps two to three times the figure in
1662.133 As a result, from the late eighteenth century, farmhouses changed in design,
with both living-quarters and barns under one roof, and the sheds lengthened to store
more grain produce.134
Thus the increase in population from the seventeen-thirties in the Oldambt can
partly be explained by the plentiful opportunity for work that still existed in the
region, in spite of the beginnings of land consolidation. Large farmers became rich
from the labour of others, but agricultural labourers shared in a collective improvement
of living standards.135 As more land was reclaimed in the polders, new opportunities
to work arose and led to the development of new ‘labourer villages’ clustered on
the edges of the Dollard.136 Work was not restricted to tilling the fields, though, as
agriculture on the polders necessitated large amounts of labour for digging dikes and
maintaining sluices.137 Maintenance work helped labourers out in the winter when the
availability of farm work was lower.138 Up to 1850, large farmers were employing more
live-in servants and workers on their farms to cope with greater workloads, but there
was also an increase in the number of fixed-contract workers and day labourers.139
Eighteenth-century reports suggest that labourers were known consistently to eat
hearty breakfasts of bread, ham and beer.140 The demand for work was so high on the
large farms during the early nineteenth century that many farmers also employed
131 R. van Schaik,‘Omvang en kwaliteit van het cultuurareaal in Groningerland tijdens de 16de en 17de eeuw’,
Historisch-Geografisch Tijdschrift,ii(1984), 919, table 1; J. Harten, ‘De ontwikkeling van de landbouw in
Groningen gedurende de achtiende en de negentiende eeuw’, Tijdschrift Koninklijk Nederlands Aardrijkskundig
Genootschap, lxxxiii (1966), 34657; J. van Poel,‘De landbouw na 1800’, in Historie van Groningen: stad en land, ed.
W. Formsma and others (Groningen, 1976), pp. 50730,atp.512;Heren en boeren: een studie over de Commissieen
van Landbouw (180151)(Wageningen, 1949), pp. 4957.
132 Knottnerus, ‘Land kanaän’, p. 59.
133 G.A., Gewestelijke Besturen, no. 574.
134 P. Havik, ‘De Oldambster boerderij’, in Rund um Eems und Dollart: historische erkundungen im grensgebiet der
Nordostniederlande und Nordwestdeutschlands, ed. O. Knottnerus and others (Groningen, 1992),pp. 290303,at p.291.
135 L. Meihuizen,‘Sociaal-economische geschiedenis van Groningerland’, in Formsma and others, pp. 33160;
B. Wander, Het Oldambtster boerenbedrijf van 18001920. Een voorlopige orientatie aan de hand van literatuur (Arnhem,
1977); O. Knottnerus,‘Oldambt: het Puukje van de geheele provincie’, in Stichting Historisch Boerderij-Onderzoek;
Jaarverslag 1995 (Arnhem, 1996), pp. 3555.
136 On labourer housing (in contrast to the grand farmhouses of the farmers), see J. de Boer, ‘Dorpen in
Groningen’, Noorderbreedte, xii (1988), 14551; E. Hofstee, Het Oldambt. Een sociografie,i: vormende krachten
(Groningen, 1937), p. 222; Schuurman, ‘Tussen “beschaving” en “verwildering”’, p. 117.
137 O. Knottnerus, ‘Het Oldambt in de achttiende eeuw – een inleiding’, in Het loeit in het Oldambt. Kroniek
van de boerenopstand van 1748, ed. H. Perton (Scheemda, 1998), pp. 937.
138 A point made in P. van Dam, ‘Digging for a dike: Holland’s labor market ca. 1510’, in Hoppenbrouwers
and van Zanden, pp. 2224.
139 G. Collenteur and R. Paping, ‘De arbeidsmarkt voor inwonend boerenpersoneel in het Groningse
kleigebied 18301920’, NEHA-Jaarboek voor Economische, Bedrijfs- en Techniekgeschiedenis,lx (1997), 96135,at
p. 101.
140 I. van den Bosch,‘Natuur- en geneeskundige verhandeling van de oorzaken, voorbehoeding en geneezing,
uit de natuurlijke gesteldheid van het vaderland voortvloeijende’, in Verhandelingen, uitgegeeven door de Hollandsche
Maatschappij der Weetenschappen te Haarlem (Haarlem, 1778), pp. 591610,atp.606.
Land accumulation and population trends in the pre-industrial period 27
Copyright © 2014 Institute of Historical Research
seasonal labourers taken on from the Veenkolonien, Eemsland, Reiderland and other
parts of the Westfalen.141
Wage labour on arable farms and land reclamation supported increasing populations
up to a point, but after 1850 this positive interpretation becomes less applicable. From
the mid nineteenth century, the availability of employment was so polarized between
the busy harvests and the quiet winters that barely a week of work was done in
December or January.142 Winter unemployment was particularly severe in the Oldambt
in contrast to other areas of Groningen, particularly in the late nineteenth century
when chemical fertilizers and mechanical technology reduced much of the need for
manual labour.143 This issue became more contentious as large farmers decided to
continue to employ ‘outsiders’, as revealed by a letter sent in 1846 by thirty-one
labourers from Drieborg to the king, requesting something to be done about foreign
workers ‘taking bread from their mouths’.144 As the Oldambt had become more heavily
populated over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, large farmers
benefited from an over-supply of labour, and real wages accordingly dropped.145 Wages
remained stagnant from 1750 through to 1850, but prices went up, so much so that by
the mid nineteenth century, labouring families had difficulty buying bread.146 In that
sense, the availability of wage labour supported a growing (almost landless) population
up to a point, but other factors can explain the continued demographic growth later
in the nineteenth century.
Another reason for the low capacity of the western Betuwe rural economy to retain
its inhabitants in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was its lack of employment
opportunities outside farming. No significant proto-industries developed in this area to
take on those who had lost their land – just 3per cent of the total workforce was
employed in this way.147 In nearby Holland, rural people compensated for worsening
agricultural conditions such as soil subsidence by occupying themselves in a number of
non-agricultural activities.148 The inhabitants of the western Betuwe, however, did not
141 J. Lucassen, Naar de kusten van de Noordzee: trekarbeid in Europees perspektief, 16001900 (Gouda, 1984), p. 274;
O. Knottnerus, ‘Wanderarbeiter auf der andere Seite der Grenze’, in Wanderarbeit jenseits der Grenze, ed.
P. Schoneville (Assen, 1993), pp. 1221. See also the Verslag van de commissie, benoemd door het departement
Winschoten der Maatschappij tot Nutvan ‘t Algemeen, betrekkelijk de arbeiders-quaestie (Winschoten, 1872), p. 18.
142 Paping, Voor een handvol stuivers,pp.1024.
143 R. Paping,‘Vaste en losse arbeiders en de werkloosheid op de Groninger klei 17601820’, NEHA-Jaarboek
voor Economische, Bedrijfs- en Techniekgeschiedenis, lvii (1994), pp. 1535; Hofstee, Het Oldambt,pp.21718.
144 P. Priester and H. de Raad, De iezeren kette van d’armoude. Aspecten van de sociale-economische geschiedenis van
Beerta, 180070 (Groningen, 1983), pp. 28,138.
145 Paping, Voor een handvol stuivers,p.344.
146 R. Paping,‘De nijverheid op het Groninger platteland 18001860. Bedrijfsstructuur en loonontwikkeling’,
Economisch- en Sociaal-Historisch Jaarboek,liv (1991), 80116,atpp.99,113; G. de Jager, ‘De Oldambster
landbouwer en zijn bedrijf voor 60 jaar en thans’, Groningen, Cultureel Maandblad,x(1927), pp. 703.
147 B. van Bavel,‘Proto-industrie tussen de Gelderse rivieren? Een eerste verkenning naar de niet-agrarische,
marktgerichte activiteiten op het platteland van het Gelderse rivierengebied, 13001600’, Bijdragen en
Mededelingen Vereniging Gelre, xciii (2002), 5578.
148 On soil subsidence, see D. de Boer, Graaf en grafiek: sociale en economische ontwikkelingen in het middeleeuwse
‘Noordholland’ tussen c.1345 en c.1415 (Leiden, 1978), p. 222; P. van Dam, ‘Sinking peat bogs: environmental change
in Holland, 13501550’, Environmental Hist.,vi (2001), 3245. On the non-agricultural opportunities in late
medieval Holland, see J. L. van Zanden, Arbeid tijdens het handelskapitalisme. Opkomst en neergang van de Hollandse
economie, 13501850 (Bergen, 1991), ch. 1; J. L. van Zanden, ‘A third road to capitalism? Proto-industrialisation and
the moderate nature of the late medieval crisis in Flanders and Holland, 13501550’, in Hoppenbrouwers and
van Zanden, pp. 85101; J. L. van Zanden,‘Taking the measure of the early modern economy: historical national
accounts for Holland in 1510/14’, European Rev. Econ. Hist.,vi(2002), 13163,atpp.1359; B. van Bavel, ‘Early
proto-industrialization in the Low Countries? The importance and nature of non-agr icultural activities on the
countryside in Flanders and Holland’, Revue Belge de philologie et d’histoire, lxxxi (2003), 110965.
28 Land accumulation and population trends in the pre-industrial period
Copyright © 2014 Institute of Historical Research
exhibit the same flexibility and did not have these options: 80 per cent of households
in the mid sixteenth century were in agricultural work.149 As well as an absence of
proto-industries in the western Betuwe, there was no sign of intensive production of
industrial crops such as flax or hops, which were produced on small peasant plots in
inland Flanders.150 Possibly the only significant work away from labouring on the farms
was instead wage labour needed for maintaining the dikes, unsurprising given the wet
environment and the evidence of frequent breaks.151
The Oldambt economy was much more flexible and allowed room for wage
labourers to compensate for their lack of land with other non-agricultural strategies.
First, even the most land-poor of labouring families were still able to retain small plots.
Oldambt labourers managed subsistence through a combination of dependent labour
and independent cultivation of potatoes.152 Indeed, the precarious reliance on this crop
by a high proportion of labourers meant that Groningen was almost the hardest hit
province in the Netherlands during the potato disease of the mid nineteenth century,
which even led to revolt in the city of Groningen.153 These small plots were generally
leased by the larger farmers from their own lands, often whole pieces of fenland on
which the labourers built themselves simple huts and small hovels.154 Thus, the
‘labour-pool’ villages operated a ‘dual economy’, whereby the inhabitants would act as
agricultural labourers from six in the morning to one or two in the afternoon in a
shortened day, and travel back to their own plots to work on them in the afternoon.
Labourers often held less than one hectare, and though this may seem an entirely
insubstantial amount of land, the intensive production of potatoes probably saved
many families from starvation (Oldambt labourers often ate potatoes for all meals of
the day).
Many agricultural labourers supported themselves in the tougher winter periods by
securing work in the Veenkolonien, as peat diggers. Some also offered their services as
transporters of goods and people along the waterways of the region. Labourers could
149 Van Bavel, ‘Rural wage labour’, p. 45.
150 B. van Bavel, ‘Landbouw, bosbouw en visser ij’, in Gelre, Geldern, Gelderland. Geschiedenis en cultuur van het
hertogdom Gelre, ed. J. Stinner and K.-H. Tekath (Geldern, 2001), pp. 2617; B. Slicher van Bath, ‘The rise of
intensive husbandry in the Low Countries’, in Britain and the Netherlands, ed. J. S. Bromley and E. H. Kossmann
(1960), pp. 13053,at pp.1367,1489; J. Bieleman, Geschiedenis van de landbouw in Nederland, 15501950
(Amsterdam, 1992), pp. 5676. On intensive peasant cultivation in inland Flanders, see E. Thoen, ‘A commercial
survival economy in evolution: the Flemish countryside and the transition to capitalism (middle ages–19th
century)’, in Hoppenbrouwers and van Zanden, pp. 10257; ‘The birth of “Flemish husbandry”: agr icultural
technology in medieval Flanders’, in Astill and Langdon, pp. 6988.
151 Van Bavel, Marienweerd,pp.3779,385,428-9. On dike break-throughs, see De Tielse kroniek: een geschiedenis
van de Lage Landen van de volksverhuizingen tot het midden van de vijftiende eeuw, met een vervolg over de jaren 155266,
ed. J. Kuys (Amsterdam, 1983), pp. 1647; H. van Heiningen, Dijken en dijkdoorbraken in het Nederlandse
rivierengebied (The Hague, 1978).
152 The importance of the potato to Groningen is discussed in R. Paping and V. Tassenaar, ‘The consequences
of the potato disease in the Netherlands, 184560: a regional approach’, in When the Potato Failed: Causes and
Effects of the ‘Last’ European Subsistence Crisis, ed. C. O’Grada, R. Paping and E. Vanhaute (Turnhout, 2007),
pp. 14984, esp. pp. 152,154. See also F. Terlouw,‘De aardappelziekte in Nederland in 1845 en volgende jaren’,
Economisch- en Sociaal-Historisch Jaarboek, xxxiv (1971), 263308; M. Bergman, ‘The potato blight in the
Netherlands and its social consequences, 18457’, International Rev. Social Hist., xii (1967), 390431.
153 For revolts, see D. Gout, ‘Het broodoproer in Groningen in 1847’, Groningse Volksalmanak (1976/7),
pp. 6384.
154 Honderd jaar Landbouwvereniging ‘Nieuwolda-Nieuw-Scheemda’ (18601960), ed. R. Georgius and L. de Smet
(2vols., Nieuwolda, 1960), i. 15;Tussen ’t Zieldaip en ’t Grootmoar: vier eeuwen leven en werken in Nieuw-Scheemda
en ’t Waar (Nieuw Scheemda, 1985), p. 24.
Land accumulation and population trends in the pre-industrial period 29
Copyright © 2014 Institute of Historical Research
secure work improving the footpaths by laying down and compacting gravel.155 In fact
non-agricultural opportunities soared in the nineteenth century, with an increasing
number of artisanal and industrial occupations. The occupational registers from 1807
suggest that around a fifth of the population were employed in a more permanent
industrial or craft capacity, while the conscription registers of 1813 indicate that
the proportion was more like a quarter.156 Overall in 1813, around 40 per cent
of the working population in the Oldambt was considered ‘non-agricultural’. The
industrial-service character of the economy was only strengthened by the later stages
of the nineteenth century, especially with the growth of Winschoten into a regional
trading centre with more urban functions. The province-wide statistics calculated in
1862 suggest this, showing the total number of those considered ‘farmers’ or
‘agricultural labourers’ to be just over half of the Oldambt population (see Table 5).
In fact the intensification and expansion of grain cultivation on the fertile polders
of the Oldambt also created new industrial opportunities. The left-over stalks from
the arable fields were used in new cardboard factories. The first such factory in
the Netherlands appeared in Hoogezand in 1869 (Hooites and Beukema), and by the
beginning of the twentieth century there were about twenty in or around the
Oldambt, including nine in the parish of Oude-Pekela, but also in Scheemda,
Winschoten, Sappemeer and Nieuweschans.157 The factory in Scheemda, known as De
Toekomst, employed over sixty local labourers in 1909.158 Some labourers also crossed
the border into Germany to work in factories.159 Women found limited opportunities
in the Oldambt by the second half of the nineteenth century, but some sought work
as seamstresses or factory workers.160 Other important factories were those making use
of surplus potatoes to produce starch, with significant ones in Foxhol (Eureka),
Muntendam, Zuidbroek (Motké) and Oude Pekela (Oranja), the last of which burnt
down in 1898.161 This situation can be contrasted with nineteenth-century Zeeland
155 Landhuiskundige almanak ten dienste van de land- en buitenman, ed. M. Teenstra (Groningen, 1859), p. 131.
156 G.A., Gewestelijke Besturen in Groningen, 17981814 (1815), 3, nos. 8556,16424,18989,1901.
157 W. Friedrich, 125 jaar de fabriek: karton in Nieuweschans (Nieuweschans, 1995); W. van Hoorn, ‘Reiderland’,
het verhaal van een Coöperatieve strokartonfabriek (Winschoten, 1968). For the Veenkolonien, see T. Broekhuis,
Voorheen de vooruitgang. Voormalige aardappelmeel- en strokartonfabrieken in de Veenkolonien (Amsterdam, 1986).
158 G.A., Coöperatieve strokartonfabriek ‘De Toekomst’, 18991971,388, nos. 160,166. See also the wage
books of the ‘Reiderland’ cardboard factory in G.A., Coöperatieve strokartonfabriek ‘Reiderland’, 191388,
2045,no.122; and see the numerous labourers employed in other factories, e.g. G.A., W.A. Scholten NV,
ca. 1840–ca. 1965,1100, nos. 56,106,110,171,176,190,199,203,206,208.
159 G.A., W.A. Scholten NV, ca. 1840–ca. 1965,1100, nos. 21516.
160 ‘We hadden geen keus’: interviews met landarbeidsters uit het Oldambt 192040, ed. A. Hibma, W. Hoekstra and
T. Uil (Groningen, 1987), pp. 1215;Verslagen betreffende den oeconomischen toestand der landarbeiders in Nederland,
i (Groningen, 1908), pp. 105,153.
161 Voerman, p. 49.
Table 5. Proportion of the Oldambt population in the agricultural sector, 1862 (%)
Population Agricultural
labourers
Farmers Agricultural
sector
Non-agricultural
sector
31,590 31 20 51 49
Sources: ‘Landbouwstatistiek van de provincie Groningen over het jaar 1862’, in Bijdragen tot de kennis van den
tegenwoordigen staat der provincie Groningen, v (Groningen, 1870).
30 Land accumulation and population trends in the pre-industrial period
Copyright © 2014 Institute of Historical Research
(south-west Netherlands): beyond farming it had almost nothing, and it is therefore
unsurprising that in conditions of land consolidation Zeeland lost large proportions of
its population.162
Another reason for the contraction of village communities in the western Betuwe
after land consolidation was the absence or loss of welfare systems on which the rural
poor could fall back. Common land never played a dominant role in the economy of
the river area during the middle ages (especially in comparison to the east, such as
Drenthe or Overijssel), but it was not completely absent.163 At the beginning of the
fourteenth century, around 2per cent of land was under common ownership in the
western parts of the river area, since a large proportion had already been parcelled out
into private ownership before documents started making explicit references to it.164
There were two types of common land in the western Betuwe: the first was land
unsuitable for arable cultivation in the low-lying marshes away from the Linge River,
often used for grazing; the second was communally operated arable complexes close to
the villages, particularly in the Land van Buren.165 In the villages of Buren, Beusichem
and Erichem, there was a combined eighty-five hectares distributed between them,
divided up into three arable fields, and this lasted well into the seventeenth century
when it was finally usurped by higher status landowners such as the count of Buren.166
The presence of commons in some areas of the Betuwe probably formalized
the crystallization of settlement in concentrated villages during the middle ages.
Inhabitants resided around the edges of centrally placed greens which had communal
functions; and in fact, a precondition of entry into the system was ownership of one
of the houses tied to old inheritance rights.167 The early disappearance of this system
in much of the river area, or at least the continual encroachment onto the commons
between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, probably facilitated the shrinkage of
the villages in the transition into the early modern period. Some local inhabitants
began to protest to magistrates at their exclusion from the commons; however, the
large landowners of the Betuwe had no interest in sustaining a peasant economy,
speeding its eventual decline.168 Essentially the previous safety-net of the commons
completely disintegrated.
The commons were never really a feature in the Oldambt, and certainly not by the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. However, in contrast to the early modern western
Betuwe, the poorest households of the Oldambt were aided in their struggle to survive
by the widespread provision of poor relief.169 During the eighteenth century this
support was provided by the parish institutions of the reformed church, although the
numbers of Oldambt people who received relief were decidedly limited.This had less
162 M. Wintle, ‘Modest growth and capital drain in an advanced economy: the case of Dutch agriculture in
the 19th century’, Agricultural Hist. Rev., xxxix (1991), 1729,at p.27.
163 The area of the Low Countries where common land was important is shown in P. Hoppenbrouwers, ‘The
use and management of commons in the Netherlands: an overview’, in The Management of Common Land in
North West Europe, c.15001850, ed. M. De Moor, L. Shaw-Taylor and P. Warde (Turnhout, 2002), pp. 88112.
164 Reference to small pieces of common land are still found in the western Betuwe, however, even as late
as the 17th century, e.g. G.E.L.A., Familie Pieck, 0480,no.46.
165 Van Bavel, Transitie,pp.2748.
166 A. Koch and A. Maris, ‘Meentgenootschappen in Land van Buren’, Bijdragen en Mededelingen Vereniging
Gelre, xlix (1949), 163204,atpp.1934.
167 See the map at Erichem in R.A.R., Oud Archief Buren, 0692,no.743. Some inhabitants got permission
to build on the commons (see no. 747).
168 R.A.R., Oud Archief Buren, 0692,no.746.
169 This argument is also made in Wintle, ‘Push-factors in emigration’, p. 528.
Land accumulation and population trends in the pre-industrial period 31
Copyright © 2014 Institute of Historical Research
to do with the workings of poor relief itself, and was more a function of the higher
living standards experienced by farmers and labourers alike.As mentioned already, work
was still plentiful then, wages were high, and more importantly real wages were high.
Poor relief in the eighteenth century did help the really destitute, however, and cash
payment and food parcels were reserved for widows or families who supported
‘burdens’ to the household.170 Through the course of the nineteenth century the
nature of this support changed quite a bit according to data from Richard Paping, as
more Oldambt inhabitants received welfare, though each gift was of a lower amount.
This was testament to the widening disparities in the region between rich and
poor, and the increasing numbers of agricultural labourers. Nevertheless, the constant
distribution of food through parish relief in the likes of Beerta, Finsterwolde,
Nieuwschans, Winschoten, Nieuwolda and Termunten, meant that many households
were saved from absolute poverty and starvation in the very worst years.171
As argued above, particular economic and institutional alignments in the rural
societies themselves meant that they had differing capacities to retain their populations,
which had been put under pressure by land consolidation. However, it must also be
recognized that both of these rural regions were located within different urban
networks – opportunities which ‘pulled’ rural inhabitants away in tandem with the
‘push’ factors. The western Betuwe was affected by the commercial development and
urbanization seen in nearby Holland in the transition from the late middle ages to the
early modern period – particularly given the western Betuwe’s inability to develop
its own set of non-agricultural opportunities. Holland was a magnet for those
impoverished rural dwellers of the area who had been divorced from the productive
process.The reclamation of the Vijfheerenlanden between the eleventh and thirteenth
centuries (separated from the western Betuwe by the Diefdijk), and the peat lands of
south Holland in general, attracted many new settlers from the river area. Peasant
colonizers were enticed by territorial lords such as the bishop of Utrecht and the
count of Holland who offered property and freedoms, possibly two great attractions
for heavily burdened serfs in the western Betuwe.172 More curious, however, was the
unusual population trend of the Holland peat lands, which (although probably affected
in the short-term by the Black Death) continued to rise during the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries, quite anomalous to what was going on in Europe during the
period.173 Population figures only started to level off towards the end of the sixteenth
century.174 The continuing rise in population in Holland between 1300 and 1550 may
have been linked to inward migration, and many of these migrants may have come
from the western Betuwe, particularly destitute wage labourers of the sixteenth
century.
170 E.g., in Midwolda numerous cash and food payments were made in the late 18th century to widows, while
one Hindrick Jurriens in the same parish received a large yearly payment for keeping his mother in-house (see
G.A., Archief Nederlands Hervormde Gemeente Midwolda, no. 5).
171 Paping, Voor een handvol stuivers,pp.28990.
172 H. van der Linden, De cope: bijdrage tot de rechtgeschiedenis van de openlegging der Hollands-Utrechtse laagvlakte
(Assen, 1956); H. van der Linden, ‘Het platteland in het Noordwesten met de nadruk op de occupatie circa
10001300’, Algemene Geschiedenis der Nederlanden,ii (1982), 4882, esp. pp. 738.
173 For population movements in the Holland peat lands, see van Bavel, ‘Population and land’; B. van Bavel
and J. L. van Zanden,‘The jump start of the Holland economy during the late-medieval crisis, c.1350c.1500’,
Econ. Hist. Rev., lvii (2004), 50324.
174 J. L. van Zanden, The Rise and Decline of Holland’s Economy: Merchant Capitalism and the Labour Market
(Manchester, 1993), pp. 3540.
32 Land accumulation and population trends in the pre-industrial period
Copyright © 2014 Institute of Historical Research
Despite the lack of proto-industry or alternative opportunities for employment in
the western Betuwe, migrants did not necessarily look for proto-industrial work in the
Holland countryside. Impoverished wage labourers turned towards the towns and
cities instead, which is logical given the early and strong urbanization experienced
in Holland.175 The duchy of Guelders became more economically and politically
connected to the west, loosening its traditional links with principalities in the German
Lower Rhine area, such as Cleves and Cologne.176 Dick de Boer has already noted that
the increasing population of Holland during the late middle ages and into the early
modern period can be attributed to the swelling of the towns, suggesting that these
people came from the surrounding countryside, particularly given the problems with
peat subsidence.177 In the words of Jan de Vries, ‘the fact that the urbanisation of this
era expressed itself more in the large number of cities rather than in their large size
speaks to the importance of the push force of rural crisis relative to the pull of
vigorous urban economies’.178
In contrast, the tendency of the Oldambt poor not to seek out urban opportunities
in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries on a massive scale is testament also to
its place within a different urban network. The lack of Oldambt participation in
emigration to the Americas in the second half of the nineteenth century has been
mentioned above, but it must also be emphasized that the city of Groningen failed to
be an attractive option during this period. Groningen did not absorb labour from the
countryside.179 Between 1800 and 1850 this is perhaps to be expected, given that
agriculture was still going through an intensifying and expansion process in the clay
areas, and work was still being created in the countryside (even if it was seasonal). It
is important to note, however, that the Netherlands in general during the nineteenth
century was going through a retarded or slower urbanizing process than other areas of
Europe.180 Indeed, it has long been remarked that the Netherlands retained a certain
agricultural character during the nineteenth century, strangely at odds with its early
commercialization of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.181 The Netherlands was
slow to latch on to urbanization connected with the industrial revolution of the late
eighteenth century. It is in this final context that we can understand the lack of drive
for Oldambt agricultural labourers to seek their fortune in the city of Groningen in
the eighteen-hundreds.
175 On the growth of the towns, see P. Lourens and J. Lucassen, Inwonertallen van Nederlandse steden
ca. 13001800 (Amsterdam, 1997), pp. 10023.
176 W. Alberts, ‘Gelderland van 154366’, in Geschiedenis van Gelderland, 14921795, ed. P. Meij and others
(Zutphen, 1975), pp. 7996.
177 De Boer, Graaf en grafiek,pp.21145.
178 J. de Vries and A. van der Woude, The First Modern Economy: Success, Failure and Perseverance of the Dutch
Economy, 15001815 (Cambridge, 1997), p. 19.
179 The same process has, for example, been plotted for Zeeland in P. Brusse, Gevallen stad. Stedelijke netwerken
en het platteland: Zeeland 17501850 (Wageningen, 2011).
180 See, e.g., J. de Vries, ‘Dutch economic growth in comparative-histor ical perspective, 15002000’, De
Economist, cxlviii (2000), 44367; P. Brusse and W. Mijnhardt, Towards a New Template for Dutch History:
De-urbanization and the Balance Between City and Countryside (Utrecht, 2011).
181 On the early Dutch modernization, see de Vr ies and van der Woude. On early Dutch urbanization, see
J. de Vries, European Urbanization (1984), p. 65. On the slow 19th-century industrialization, see J. Smits,
E. Horlings and J. L. van Zanden, ‘Sprekende cijfers! De historische nationale rekeningen van Nederland,
18071913’, NEHA- Jaarboek voor Economische, Bedrijfs- en Technieksgeschiedenis, lxii (1999), 51110; J. Mokyr,
‘Capital, labour, and the delay of the industr ial revolution in the Netherlands’, Economisch- en Sociaal-Historisch
Jaarboek, xxxviii (1975), 28099; J. L. van Zanden, De economische ontwikkeling van de Nederlandse landbouw in de
negentiende eeuw, 18001914 (Utrecht, 1985), pp. 2234.
Land accumulation and population trends in the pre-industrial period 33
Copyright © 2014 Institute of Historical Research
This article has attempted to analyse how rural societies in the pre-industrial period
were able to retain their inhabitants, even after land accumulation and consolidation in
the hands of powerful or wealthy interest groups. It was remarked in the introduction
that rural populations were often decimated by these trends towards the expropriation
and proletarianization of rural producers, and this is confirmed by the experience of
the western Betuwe in the early modern period. As inequality in the distribution of
land increased in the sixteenth century, the rural population declined and villages
contracted under the combined weight of a lack of opportunity for wage labour and
non-agricultural work, the collapse of the commons, and the pull of the blossoming
urban economies of Holland. However, rural decimation was not inevitable under
the pressure of land consolidation, as is shown by the case of the Oldambt in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Here, intense and long-term demographic growth
was concurrent with increasing disparities in the distribution of property.The Oldambt
was able to retain its rural population thanks to the (initially) plentiful wage labour
opportunities, later to be replaced by non-agricultural and industrial work.The poorest
households were able to eke out a meagre existence through poor provision, and
furthermore, the most impoverished and destitute did not necessarily seek out new
urban opportunities – understandable given the isolation of the region and the
contraction of Groningen’s economy in the nineteenth century.
It remains to be seen whether the principles of this thesis are valid for other
parts of the pre-industrial world, but research undertaken by the author suggests
that this may be the case. In a recent article it has been shown that, while the
late medieval Florentine contado (the countryside close to Florence) experienced a
demographic decline, with settlement contraction and farm abandonment, as a result
of the imposition of sharecropping, urban monopolies and restrictions on rural
proto-industries, and a lack of rural interest groups ready to stand up to dominant
urban elites, the Florentine distretto (the countryside more distant from Florence)
showed great resilience against urban predations by maintaining the commons,
widening economic portfolios, and differing social groups creating many layers of
jurisdiction over land which made it difficult for urban groups to penetrate.182 The
same type of comparative analysis has led to similar conclusions in late medieval and
early modern Holland and the Po Valley, where both regions by the sixteenth century
had experienced land consolidation caused by urban expropriation.183 In Holland, a
wide range of specialized and commercialized (non-agricultural) economic activities
and a flexible and unrestricted market for commodities and capital gave rural
communities the room to deal with environmental problems such as soil subsidence
and recover quickly from the Black Death.184 In contrast, in the Po Valley, the move
towards capital- and labour-extensive agriculture, encroachment into the commons,
an entirely restricted and manipulated set of proto-industrial activities, and markets
subject to domination by interest groups through monopoly gave rural communities
little chance to adapt to and deal with difficulties such as flooding, pestilence and failed
harvests, and led ultimately to the widespread migration of rural people to the cities.185
182 Curtis, ‘Florence and its hinterlands’.
183 B. van Bavel, ‘Markets for land, labor, and capital in northern Italy and the Low Countries, 12th to 17th
centuries’, Jour. Interdisciplinary Hist., xli (2011), 1353.
184 Also the thesis of Van Bavel and Van Zanden.
185 Curtis and Campopiano.
34 Land accumulation and population trends in the pre-industrial period
Copyright © 2014 Institute of Historical Research
In that sense we are beginning to see signs of certain societies being inherently better
set up to deal with problems (such as land consolidation and expropriation) than others
– in effect a framework for the resilience or vulnerability of rural populations is
beginning to emerge which will only be sharpened and refined through further
empirical testing.186
186 Curtis, ‘Pre-industrial societies’, ch. 2.
Land accumulation and population trends in the pre-industrial period 35
Copyright © 2014 Institute of Historical Research
... In large parts of the province, land was increasingly shifted out of the hands of local peasant farmers and consolidated more with elite landowners, often urban institutions and wealthy burghers from Groningen city (Hoppenbrouwers 1991, Curtis 2016a. In nearby Oldambt, only a third of the land was left in the hands of rural inhabitants by 1721 (Curtis 2014b), and in other parts of inland clay-soil areas it was as low as a quarter (Paping 1995). In the regions of Hunsingo and Fivelgo, the Gini coefficient for user-level property distribution moved from 0.59 (in both areas) in 1630 to 0.68 and 0.71, respectively, in 1721 (Curtis 2016a). ...
... The alternative solution should have been investment from the parties acquiring the property in the 17th century, that is the wealthy urban burghers and powerful institutions from the city of Groningen itself who, instead of directly offering labor assistance, should have provided the capital for waged labor assistance. These wealthy urban groups, however, were reluctant to invest in spite of their property acquisitions, and this can be explained by the historic tensions between the city and the socalled provincial administration, or Ommelanden (Sundberg 2015), and exacerbated further by rural regions asserting their autonomy (Curtis 2014b). Both the city and the provincial administrations selectively invoked past precedents and customs as a way of avoiding the onerous weight of the financial burden that water management now bore, and when each saw the other as the responsible party, they waited for each other to make the first or more decisive commitment (Sundberg 2015). ...
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