BREWING ON WALCHEREN FROM THE MIDDLE AGES TO EARLY MODERN TIMES. A SURVEY R.W. Linger For brewing Zeeland was the exception to the pattern in the neighbouring provinces of the Low Countries. Brewing was one of the principal industries of Holland from the mid fourteenth century to the mid seventeenth century. It was a major contributor to employment, total output, exports and to the de velopment of an economy based on the import of raw materials and the ex port of finished products. Flanders and even more Brabant had thriving brew ing industries in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. It would be wrong to say that there was hardly any brewing in Zeeland but the industry never thrived there, was always defending itself against competitors from nearby and afar. Zeeland, despite the efforts of local brewers, relied on Hol land for most of its beer1 and that was true throughout almost the entire his tory of the province. Zeeland did have a small brewing industry and, what is more. Zeeland faced many of the same problems of production and distribu tion of beer that plagued other jurisdictions through the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Zeeland endured decline in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as well. The history of brewing in Zeeland illustrates both its simi larities with the general tendencies in economic and technical change in the period as well as the uniqueness of those islands located on the edge of the North Sea. Zeeland brewers enjoyed no advantage and possibly disadvantages in ac cess to the major raw materials of brewing. The principal grains, barley and oats, were produced locally but there was no large surplus and often a deficit. So any grain used to make beer either had to be imported or replaced by im ports to make bread for the human or animal population. Peat was the stan dard fuel for brewers and there was, compared to Holland and the eastern Netherlands, little still to be cut in Zeeland by the sixteenth century with sup plies. relative to elsewhere, falling over time. Water while plentiful was often brackish with sources of clean sweet water limited on the islands of the province. The greatest problem brewers faced throughout the Low Countries was consistent supplies of good water. The closer to the ocean and the lower the level of the land the more likely water would be brackish and so not use able to make good beer. Raw materials for brewing had to be imported from elsewhere and Zeeland's many waterways at least made that process an eas ier one. Still if so many of the necessities had to be brought in the sensible step was simply to bring in the finished product, the beer itself. I. J. de Vries and A. van der Woude, The first modern economy: success, failure and perseverance of the Dutch economy, 1500-IS15 (Cambridge 1997) 320. 1

Tijdschriftenbank Zeeland

Archief | 1999 | | pagina 11