ABSTRACT
Introduction Around 1540, the economy of the coastal zone of Friesland (a province in the northern part of the Netherlands), of which Hennaarderadeel is a part, was thoroughly monetized, specialized and quite market-orientated. A few arable farmers produced and sold wheat, but purchased rye for their own consumption, while a much greater number of livestock farmers purchased horses in the spring, but sold them again in the autumn to save on precious hay – which was used to feed milk cows (Knibbe 2006: 194-202). In villages and towns, quite a number of cobblers, wagon makers, blacksmiths and the like made a living, and in 1505, commercial project developers from Holland diked and drained the large Bildt area, a 5,000 hectare mudflat outside the dikes. At a price. This area would soon be characterized by (for the time) large arable farms which exported their barley and wheat not just to nearby cities like Franeker and Leeuwarden, but also to the rapidly growing cities in Holland and notably to the booming centre of the grain trade, Amsterdam (Kuiken 2013). Comparable statements can be made about the thriving land market: people had clear legal title to the land and land was often sold and purchased, though there were strict ‘family first, neighbours second’ rules about who had the first right to buy. Such rules, of course, influenced the allocation of land and the number and kind of transactions, but this did not make the land market less of a market – every market is guided by ever-changing rules and habits which influence what happens. The point about a market is not that such – arbitrary – rules exist. The point is that, contrary to other human exchange systems, like gift exchange or gender-based systems of division of labour, prices are set before transactions are finalized and these rules clearly enabled this. An exceptionally large part of the available land was rented. Clearly, land was not just bought to use for farming, but also for patrimonial reasons and to use it as an economic ‘asset’. This resembled the situation in the clay soil area of coastal Flanders (Soens and Thoens 2009), but differed from the situation in many other parts of Europe, where households bought and sold land to adapt available ‘capital’ to the number of family members of working age (to name only a few studies, see Pfister 2007; Fertig 2009; vermoesen 2010; Ogilvie et al. 2012).
