The Burgher and the Whore: Prostitution in Early Modern Amsterdam (10 page)

The criterion of honour, of reputation, remained in full force. Es- tablished Amsterdammers were suspicious of ‘strangers of unknown

repute’.Take for example the reaction to a statement made in court in
1749
by Giertje
R
ijers, an Amsterdam seamstress arrested on charges of fornication with a merchant from Leipzig. She claimed the man had led her astray with promises of marriage—but what reason did she have, the bailiff asked, to ‘take the word of someone utterly unknown to her and moreover a stranger’?
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Outsiders were not given the ben- efit of the doubt, since honour was based on knowledge of a person’s
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background, his reputation, and that of his family. There were good reasons for caution in dealing with strangers. Agreements were mostly verbal in this period. It was impossible to know whether a vagrant, a traveller, a newcomer to the city, indeed anyone with an unknown background could be trusted, so he represented a security risk. In the absence of reliable population registers and documentary means of identification, a person’s identity was hard to confirm. This emphasis on reputation, and the social control that went with it, helped people to protect themselves and each other.

Criteria of honour

The concept of honour and shame exists the world over, but the exact meaning and significance of words like ‘honour’,‘disrepute’, and ‘dis- grace’ are elusive and differ according to period, culture, gender, and class. There are, however, several universal characteristics. First of all, honour and reputation are always defined by others, so both the de- fence of one’s honour and damage to another person’s are public mat- ters. Sexual conduct is always of the utmost importance, especially for women, whose good name depends largely on a reputation for chas- tity and sexual fidelity. In all societies the insult most commonly used against women is ‘whore’, and a distinction is invariably made be- tween male and female honour. Finally, honour is commonly ex- pressed in concrete form, such as the wearing of certain clothing and the right to take precedence, or to occupy a particular seat, at ceremonies.

Honour is bound up with the body.The head is the seat of honour and the covering and uncovering of the head were important signals of deference; the lower body, on the other hand, along with its func- tions, its organs and excretions, are places of shame. Hence the relevance of hats, hair, facial scars and bare bottoms. Shame literally

clings to a person and the disreputable are often physically shunned. In Dutch the word
vuil
(meaning filthy or foul) carried the connota- tions ‘dishonourable’ and ‘sexually tainted’. A common way to insult someone, thereby impugning his honour, was to compare him to a beast, especially a pig, an animal that grovels in the dirt, or a dog, a creature that openly displays its sexual desires and copulates in public. As honour depended to a great degree on proper sexual behaviour, whores, bawds, and brothel-keepers of either sex were dishonourable by definition. Anyone who became involved with such people was contaminated, sometimes literally so, since a visit to a prostitute in- volved a risk of venereal disease, especially the great pox (syphilis), commonly referred to as ‘the foul disease’. The
gildenbussen
, the mutual insurance funds held by the guilds, would not pay out in cases of dis- ease acquired ‘through intercourse with disreputable women’.
11
On

ships too, venereal diseases were excluded from free medical care.
12
Honour and credit went hand in hand, partly because honour was

closely related to trustworthiness in financial affairs. ‘Thief ’ was one of the worst insults and an accusation of theft would be taken ex- tremely seriously. Loss of reputation often meant a loss of credit and therefore exclusion from networks of lending and surety. It might even mean the loss of employment or clients, and therefore liveli- hood.
13
Bankruptcy was proof of financial unreliability and meant serious disgrace. In popular literature, women who become whores and men who become bankrupts are often implicitly equated. Stran- gers were routinely suspected of bankruptcy—might they not very likely have left their places of birth because they had lost their honour and, by the same token, why should they care about their reputation in unfamiliar surroundings?

Physical contact with the judicial apparatus, especially prison or the scaffold (generally a place of public humiliation rather than execution), meant the immediate loss of honour.When an offender was placed on the scaffold with a notice or symbol indicating his or her offence, pub- lic disgrace was the most important aspect of the punishment. In sev- eral cities including The Hague, though not in Amsterdam, a convicted prostitute might be exhibited in an iron cage, which was spun round so quickly that the unfortunate woman became nauseous and vomited, thereby fouling herself in public.
14
Imprisonment was public, which made it all the more dishonourable; people could pay a few stivers to visit a house of correction and watch the prisoners.

Honour lost in this way was extremely hard to restore. Marie Taats, arrested in a whorehouse for the third time in
1716
, defended herself with the argument that ‘she had served time in the Spin House and therefore honest people will not take her on [as a maid] and there is no other means for her to earn a living’.
15
Other prostitutes claimed they had tried working as maids but reverted to prostitution when their em- ployers found out they had spent time in prison and dismissed them.
16
Sometimes false names were given to the police as part of an attempt to avoid recognition as a recidivist, which would very likely entail a prison
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sentence. In
1731
a brothel-keeper called
R
eympje Theunis gave her name as Jannetje Jans so that ‘she did not have to face the shame of being

recorded in the bailiff ’s book’, let alone ‘the scandal of jail’.
17

‘Last honours’ were another extremely important aspect of public rec- ognition. A great deal of money was spent on funerals, and anyone who could possibly afford it would have family members buried inside the church rather than in the graveyard outside. A decent funeral was all about honour and status, requiring the correct number of mourners and the appropriate ceremony. Attendance at funerals was an important obli- gation for neighbours and fellow guild members, male and female. In
1696
proposals to introduce a tax on funerals and to change existing rules

for burials led to what became known as the Undertakers
R
iot (
Aanspre- kersoproer
).Those who could not afford the tax were afraid they would be

buried publicly as paupers, and all baulked at the prospect of no longer being able to choose their own undertakers and coffin bearers. People felt their right to an ‘honourable burial’ was at stake.
18
It was the worst Am- sterdam riot of the seventeenth century, with dozens of fatalities.

Female honour and male honour

A woman’s honour depended primarily on her sexual reputation. An ‘honest girl’ was a virgin; a ‘dishonest girl’ had lost her virginity, al- though marriage could ‘make an honest woman’ of her and if a woman went to bed with her fiancé it was a case of honour merely being deferred.
19
According to an older tradition that lived on among the common folk, a promise of marriage followed by sexual inter- course constituted a valid union.
20
An unmarried mother who had been persuaded to agree to sexual relations after promises of wedlock was demonstrating not her shame but her honour by publicly

taking her baby to the front door of the man who had fathered it and presenting the child to him as his own.
21
It was a way of stating that she had nothing to hide.

For men the main concern was professional honour.An honourable man kept his word, paid his bills, could not be bribed, and was loyal to his colleagues. Nevertheless, a man’s honour too was bound up with sexual behaviour. Going to the whores certainly did a man’s reputation no good, but adultery was a far worse offence. Not only could an adul- terer expect harsh punishment, he would be declared ‘dishonourable and perjurious’ and ‘inhabile’, in other words disqualified from public office. A married man with an established position in society who entered a brothel was therefore risking a great deal.
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An important aspect of male honour was defined by the sexual hierarchy itself: women and the female domain were held to be infe- rior to men and the male domain. In the many contemporary illustra- tions depicting a ‘battle for the breeches’, in which a man and a woman are shown fighting who is the boss, a man who loses out to his wife is the object of contempt. The popular penny print ‘Jan de Wasser’ ( Jan the Washerman) shows Jan performing women’s work while his wife Griet takes on male tasks, and the following text is printed under the image of Jan at the washtub:

Through this task at which you toil Your honourable name you soil.
22

Performing work or engaging in dealings regarded as feminine could disgrace a man, but a woman who did a man’s job was not dishon- oured by it. She was violating precepts that came from God, nature, and society, but she was also striving for something higher, which was perfectly laudable in itself.
23
Finally, in contrast to the notions of hon- our and reputation that prevailed in Mediterranean countries, in the

Dutch
R
epublic a woman’s honour was an independent quality that belonged to her. She was personally responsible for defending it.

Honour and disgrace in linguistic usage

Honour was a crucial concept, but it was bandied about to such an extent that it is not always easy to see where the boundaries lay. ‘Lead- ing a dishonest life’ was often synonymous with ‘being a prostitute’ but

not always. A dwelling or tavern known as ‘a house of ill repute’ usually accommodated prostitutes but occasionally other undesirables were meant, such as thieves.

Examples from the judicial records illustrate a wide range of appli- cations of the term. A daughter-in-law of elderly bawd Anna Jans promised before the court in
1655
that she would henceforth ‘dress her honourably’.
24
Anna was over
70
, so it is hard to imagine this was a matter of sexually titillating attire. Her clothes may have been too brightly coloured and too lavish for her age and station in life; clearly something drastic would have to be done to change her appearance before she could be made to look like an honourable member of soci- ety. Pieter Jans Karman confessed in court in
1685
that he had ‘led a dishonest life’ and promised ‘to live from now on as an honest man with his wife’. He was guilty of adultery.
25
The prostitute Lijsbeth Walna, caught with a man in
1694
, protested that she had ‘done noth- ing dishonourable there with that gentleman’,
26
and in the same year an old woman who owed money to a turf-carrier was told by him that, if she preferred, she could pay ‘in a very dishonest way’: he wanted her to flagellate him.
27
Caatje Harmens was found in a whorehouse in
1718
‘in a very dishonourable manner half undressed’,
28
while in
1724
a customer of another Anna Jans admitted that she had ‘lain ready to
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be used to her dishonour’.
29
Lijsje
R
oos, arrested in a whorehouse in

1725
, said that ‘she’d had a lover who’d dishonoured her’.
30

The contrast between honourable and dishonourable was seen as similar to that between clean and dirty, or between human and animal. Terms like ‘foul’ and ‘animal’ had sexual connotations. An ‘unclean bride’ was pregnant; the ‘foul disease’ was syphilis; a prostitute who claimed she was ‘clean’ meant she did not have any kind of venereal disease.The ‘foul trade’ was prostitution, and at the far end of the spec- trum from a ‘filthy stew-house’ was a ‘pure virgin’ who surely could not have anything to do with such a place.
31
The Dutch language does not distinguish between meat and flesh, and in the literature of the time a bawd might be portrayed as ‘a peddler of warm meat’.
32

The ‘theft of honour’

Slander, abuse, and insults were slurs on a person’s honour and reputa- tion and therefore a serious business. ‘It is the greatest thievery to

injure a person’s good name’ is the conclusion of Mattheus Tengnagel’s
Klucht van Frick in ’t veur-huys
(Farce of Frick in the Front-House), published in
1642
, which itself takes the form of an extended slanging match.You can guard against ordinary thieves, but against ‘thieves of honour’ there is no defence.
33

In abusive quarrels in both literary and archival sources, women were generally called whore, thief, beast, bitch, or sow; a man would be reviled as a villain, thief, or dog. To heighten the effect, references were often made to public punishment, to excrement, or to infections, including venereal disease. In the latter case the usual adjective is ‘poxy’. People no doubt swore as well, but the archives mention only ‘abominable blasphe- mies’; the clerk never wrote out the actual words for fear of calling down those very curses upon himself. People must have been less afraid of the devil, since he is mentioned frequently in documented profanities, as are thunder and lightning, which were associated with him.

Examples from the archives of terms of abuse targeted at women include Spin House whore, Spin House cattle, branded whore, Jews’ whore, poxy whore, bitch, beast of lightning, everyman’s whore, thun- derous whore, dung-whore, and street sow. Men were called villain, bloodhound, banished dog, poxy or rotten hound, thieving sailor,
R
asp House knave, cad, wife-bully, whore-hunter, and bankrupt. Seven- teenth-century ships’ surgeon Nicolaus de Graaff refers to women