Read The Burgher and the Whore: Prostitution in Early Modern Amsterdam Online
Authors: Lotte van de Pol
The Burgher and the Whore: Prostitution in Early Modern Amsterdam (23 page)
According to the accounts money was received ‘from a bawd’ or ‘for keeping a brothel’ about eight times a year.The sums rarely match the fines recorded in the Confession Books, so perhaps it often proved impossible to collect the money owed. In the
1730
s the amounts in- volved were between
100
and
300
guilders. By the
1760
s they had risen to
400
to
600
guilders and the upward trend continued: around
1790
the sums paid ranged from
600
to as much as
2
,
500
guilders. From the mid-eighteenth century onwards, music house proprietors and brothel-keepers were sometimes fined for mistreating their girls, or for violence that took place in their establishments, and these fines too steadily increased. The
12
,
000
guilders paid by ‘Henry the Kraut’ in
1790
, as a penalty for acts of violence, was one of the highest fines ever to appear in the bailiffs’ accounts.
10
Other sums are recorded as having been collected from bawds and brothel-keepers without any further explanation. Are these perhaps the ‘permits’ and ‘taxes’ that foreigners wrote about so frequently? A
R
ussian nobleman who visited Holland in
1697
–
8
as part of Peter the Great’s retinue, for example, wrote that one could visit the music houses ‘without the least fear, because those houses exist with the per- mission of the municipal authorities, and pay tax’.
11
Dutch writers never mention any such tax, while foreigners never write about the
fines and ‘compounding’ that certainly did provide the police with income from prostitution. It seems likely that foreign travel writers misinterpreted what they saw and heard, and passed on a garbled ver- sion to other foreigners. Presumably the Dutch were better informed. Nevertheless it is not entirely clear exactly what happened. After about
1710
permits certainly existed, but they were licences for musical per- formance.In
De ongelukkige levensbeschryving
a manageress of a music house explains the system.Three days a week, usually on Saturday, Sunday, and Monday evenings, musicians are permitted to play, and for this privilege a certain sum is paid to the police.‘On other nights we are not allowed to play music at all, or we may be fined twenty-five guilders by the bailiff.’
No prostitutes were allowed to be present on ‘music nights’.
12
In the interrogations in the Confession Books there is no mention of permits or payments,with the exception of two intriguing statements
dating from the first half of the eighteenth century. In
1737
Yda Faber, a notorious bawd, admits she runs a whorehouse, ‘but says she paid ninety-six guilders last fair to do so’.
13
There is no record of such a sum in the bailiffs’ accounts, although it is worth noting that the bailiff at the time, Jan Backer, was suspected of corruption.Yda may simply be referring to the custom of innkeepers and the like paying for a licence to take part in the fair.
14
In
1707
Evertje Jans, mistress of the music house De Spelonk (The Cavern), went even further. She shouted abuse at her neighbours and threatened them, at which one responded: ‘Don’t make such a racket or I’ll lay it all before the chief officer.’‘You may do so,’ Evertje answered.‘I paid the chief officer
160
guilders only a few weeks ago; he has to live from me and houses like mine.’
15
For this brazen remark she was sentenced to stand on the scaffold, served three years in the Spin House, and was banished from the city for a further three years, an exceptionally harsh punishment. We have no way of discovering the truth behind what she had said.
The characters of the bailiff and his men
The Amsterdam bailiff was a powerful man and by birth always a dis- tinguished gentleman. He belonged to the regent class, the oligarchy of rich families that governed Dutch cities, had usually studied law, and was likely to be a former or future alderman or burgomaster. He had an office in the town hall but could also operate from home and he could deal with minor cases himself, as illustrated by an anecdote doing the rounds in about
1660
. A certain Floris Tin, a notorious miser, had assaulted someone in a fit of rage. He thought it best to go
immediately to Bailiff Lambert
R
eynst to set things straight.The fine was six guilders. Floris counted out four guilders and bid the bailiff good day.
R
eynst:‘Hold fast, Floris old man, there should be a fine of six guilders here.’ Floris:‘Why, Mr Bailiff, isn’t a third always due to he
who reports the crime?’
16
Such direct contact became increasingly rare. Until about
1670
the bailiff was occasionally encountered ‘in the field’ and might even attend raids on whorehouses in person, but thereafter he was more likely to send his deputies to represent him; the distance between him and the general population had grown, reflecting a tendency for the elite to become more detached from the common folk.
The bailiff was appointed for three years; the deputy bailiffs were government officials, for whom it was a job for life. Among deputies the same surnames appear over the decades: Voerknegt, Engelbregt, and Bogaard, for example.They spent a long time in office and could hand on the job to family members. A deputy operated from his own house and his constables might simply sit in his kitchen with the maid (both domestic staff and officers were,after all,referred to as‘servants’).
17
In the eighteenth century the deputies also started to use certain inns as ‘police stations’, including Het Witte Wambuys (The White Jacket)
and De Wagen (The Wagon) in the
R
eguliersbreestraat, a street that also featured several brothels. In the late Middle Ages the bailiff ’s men
had belonged to the dishonourable segment of the population, in fact they had been brothel-keepers themselves.
18
After the Alteration of
1578
it was decreed that they ‘may maintain no whores nor other in- iquity in their houses any longer, but as servants of the judiciary must live lives of discipline and honour’.
19
We are left to wonder whether the bailiff ’s men suddenly became honourable burghers and how much time had to pass before respectable men were willing to become constables. Their low status remained unchanged. In the Confession Books they are usually referred to simply by their first names as ‘Con- stable Jan’ or ‘Constable Klaas’.
The authorities demanded impartiality and incorruptibility from all those they employed. In regent circles corruption was seen as scandal- ous and anyone guilty of it was regarded as ‘foul’.
20
At all levels of law enforcement, accepting money was strictly forbidden.The bailiff ’s in- structions stated emphatically that he must see to it that his subordi- nates did not profit in any way from ‘whores, or keepers of whores, or whoremasters’. His deputies had to swear a similar oath.
21
The constables were expressly forbidden to make unauthorized financial settlements with brothel-keepers or other such characters.
22
Night- watchmen had to promise not to take bribes.
23
For their part, the deputy bailiffs had to swear to control their men in this regard.
24
Corruption was regularly punished. All across the Dutch
R
epublic, civil servants of all ranks were tried for venality and abuse of power,
and when judicial functionaries stood trial it was likely to be for the misuse of the practice of compounding.
25
The most notorious case was that of Johan van Banchem, bailiff of The Hague, who after only a few years in office was suspended and tried in
1676
for extortion on a grand scale, mainly in the form of gross abuses of compounding for
adultery, aided and abetted by bawds and prostitutes. He was sentenced to death in
1680
but died in prison in
1694
, awaiting appeal.
26
Such trials tell us not only about prevailing norms but about what happened in practice; they demonstrate that abuse of office was indeed punished, but also that it took place.
There were various factors that stood in the way of an effective and scrupulous law-enforcement policy. First of all, the manpower available was small. In
1500
, when the population of Amsterdam stood at just over
8
,
000
, the police force consisted of the bailiff and his twelve serv- ants. By
1700
the population had increased twentyfold but the size of the force had little more than doubled, to about thirty men, so it was heavily dependent on the cooperation of the people, which was in some cases a formal requirement. Surgeons, for example, were obliged to report any injuries incurred in fights. Most people could choose either to help the police or to obstruct them, and some even manipu- lated the system for their own ends. Commonly accepted norms did not always coincide with those of the authorities. About theft there was no disagreement: the cry ‘stop thief!’ would see culprits caught and the less fortunate among them were subjected to the
maling
as a sum- mary punishment right there in the street. People were inclined to help tax-evaders and even beggars to escape the constables, but to- wards prostitutes they exhibited mainly indifference. As we have seen, whores were not subjected to the
maling
, but neither did passers-by come to their aid.
In
1713
one Piet, a fish-gutter at the fish market who lived in a dis- reputable alley in the city centre, fatally wounded a man in a fight. He fled, and neighbours of his, a certain Dirck and the prostitute Aaltje Wiebes, started a collection to pay his travel expenses. The brothel- keepers of the neighbourhood contributed a shilling each. Aaltje’s own bawd, however, believed the three guilders Aaltje had raised with her whip-round had been earned by prostitution and demanded her share. She and Aaltje came to blows. Aaltje shouted ‘murder’, whereupon the nightwatchmen came and took them off to the watch-house, so that this case came to be entered in the Confession Books; others must have gone unrecorded.
28
R
eporting a crime could be very rewarding. For the constables and deputy bailliffs the reward for bringing in criminals was such a lucra-
tive source of income that they paid ‘correspondents’ (informants who actively went in search of crimes punishable by a fine) out of their own pockets.
R
egulations and fixed rates governed how much such inform- ants were to be paid, but in reality they often received far more, and they were frequently given money up front as well. Many ‘correspond- ents’ were themselves criminals or at home in the criminal under- world, and aside from any financial reward they might have sentences
This system was of course wide open to abuse, even if no one matched the exploits of the legendary Jonathan Wild, ‘Thief-Taker General’ of London, who was hanged in
1725
.There were‘correspond- ents’ who put it about that, through their mediation, sentences could simply be bought off. In
1663
brothel-keeper Lijsbeth Harmens, ar- rested for violating her banishment, testified that she had returned to the city on the advice of Anne van Woerden and Hester Michiels,‘who had fooled her into believing she had been amnestied by the bailiff, for which she had paid the large sum of seventy-five guilders’. Anne and Hester were swindlers and thieves, but they were also informers.They had sold other ‘pardons’ for dozens of guilders apiece.
30
The following year there was a similar case, again involving women on both sides.
31
In
1738
the underworld figure Haagse Mie openly boasted about the
many prisoners she had freed from the holding cells through her good relations with the bailiff. She told the wife of a burgher arrested after a fight that she should come along to see her.‘Should you give me a stiver, then I could arrange that the person concerned be released from the cells, without any scandal, for I am highly regarded by our lord- ships.’ A few days later it turned out to be more a case of bribing the lower ranks: ‘I have already spent five guilders on the constable, and I must have twenty guilders by tomorrow night or I’ll not lift another finger.’
32
