De welvaart en sociale achtergrond van de Leuvense brouwers

(1600-1713)

Samenvatting

The Wealth and Social Background of the Leuven Brewers (1600-1713). This article studies the wealth and social background of the brewers in seventeenth century Leuven. It argues that, while the brewers as a group were very wealthy, they were not as homogenous as the existing literature generally portrays them. A crucial factor is the distinction between the two types of brewers that were part of the Leuven brewers’ guild: the brewers-suppliers and the brewers-tapsters. Based on a quantitative analysis of their income and houses, the article concludes that, in terms of wealth, the suppliers were consistently richer than their tapster colleagues. At the same time, there were significant individual differences within each of the two groups. Importantly, the brewers’ wealth grew parallel to the continuous expansion of the Leuven beer industry during the seventeenth century, which was a feat of its own considering the period of crisis and economical decline the city was going through at that time. While the brewers were predominantly part of the middle classes at the beginning of the seventeenth century, a majority of them, especially the brewer-suppliers, could consider themselves part of the upper class and the urban elite by the turn of the eighteenth century. Many of them managed to gain significant political influence and became fulltime politicians.

Attempts to link the differences in wealth to solely the brewers’ individual production figures did not yield any satisfactory results, suggesting that brewers extensively diversified their economic activities. In fact, only a handful of brewers specialised in the production of beer to the exclusion of all else. The other guild members made extensive use of multiple guild memberships to run shops that sold a diverse range of products in which beer was just a constituent part. This serves as further evidence to show that the brewers of Leuven should not be regarded as a homogenous group but rather as a social, professional, and diverse collection of entrepreneurs.