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