lions with merchants of Bordeaux in 1412. In 1408 at La Rochelle there was
a chapel for people from the Low Countries and, without question, Zee-
landers were included. The basis for a continuing trade with France, a trade
for Middelburg largely in wine, was well laid by the early fifteenth century,
just at the point that wine consumption in Zeeland was presumably going
down6. By the mid fourteenth century, and in some cases because of local
conditions, the long term shift of preferences from wine to beer was still
making its way southward through the Low Countries. Over the course of the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries wine consumption declined in the Low
Countries. Though a number of factors played a role in the change, the rise in
beer consumption was one critical reason7 and that rise in beer consumption
was the result of the development by brewers in north German towns of
higher quality beer. Around 1200 Bremen and later Hamburg beer makers
found the right proportions and a better method for producing beer with
hops. The product was lighter, required less grain to make than traditional ale
and could last longer. The new type of beer came to dominate market after
market pushing the border between the region where beer was preferred to
wine slowly southward. It was that better hopped beer which was imported
and shipped along inland waterways to various Low Countries markets. The
change to hopped beer may have been less dramatic and slower in Zeeland,
however, than elsewhere in the Low Countries.
In the fourteenth century the counts of Holland pursued a policy of the
promotion of beer brewing. For example in 1351 Count William V prohibited
the sale of beer made outside five of the districts of Holland in his lands, with
the exception of Amsterdam8. Domestic brewers were it appears able by that
date to supply the domestic market with enough beer, including beer made
with hops, to satisfy demand. The production of hopped beer was relatively
new in the Low Countries, the process having been imported from north Ger
many9. The protectionist policies of the counts made possible the establish
ment of an alternate source of high quality beer for consumers in the Nether
lands and so Zeeland came to rely on Holland producers in the course of the
fourteenth century. The general policy of the counts in the fourteenth century
was to limit imports but never to a point where such restrictions would dam
age their income from taxes on beer. In 1420 Count John of Bavaria went
further when he repeated existing earlier purely protectionist legislation and
said that no beer could be sold anywhere in Holland or Zeeland that was not
brewed in either of those two counties10. By the early fifteenth century Zee-
land then was subjected to the same general protectionist policy as was the
county of Holland. While the counts might see the two provinces as a single
market for beer some towns and even county officials did have other ideas,
ones expressed sporadically in their own legislation.
6. Unger, "Economische ontwikkeling', 59, 70.
7. H. van der Wee, The growth of the Antwerp market and the European economy in the fifteenth
and sixteenth, centuries (The Hague 1963) vol. I 294.
8. P.H.J, van der Laan, Oorkondenboek van Amsterdam tot 1400 (Amsterdam 1975) nr. 129.
9. R.W. Unger, 'Technical change in the brewing industry in Germany, the Low Countries, and
England in the late Middle Ages', The Journal of European Economic History 21 (1992) 281-313.
10. Van Loenen, Haarlemse brouwindustrie, 61
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