Other Evidence Concerning the Development of the Standard of Living
The decline of the real wage during the early modern period is confirmed by other evidence concerning the standard of living. A team of archaeologists led by Maat has in a number of studies documented the decline in the stature of men and women buried in the western part of the Netherlands.
The combined result of three studies of the average heights of men during the Middle Ages has shown that they were probably over 170 cm tall. A group of canons (n=23) was found to be 174 cm on average, whereas the inhabitants of a Delft infirmary (n=25) averaged ‘only' 170.5 cm; in the following period (between 1433 and 1652), however, a study of the cemetery of the same infirmary showed that average height had declined to 168.9 cm. In a number of studies related to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century males, average heights were found to be about 166 cm, a decrease of about 4 cm compared to the situation in the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries.15 During the first half of the nineteenth century, when the real wage remained at the low level it had settled to at the end of the eighteenth century, the average stature of conscripts also showed strong fluctuations consistent with the changes in the real wage (displaying troughs in the mid-1840s and mid-1850s). Only after about 1860, at the same time the heights of Dutch men started to rise, did real wages begin to increasesharply but it took until the beginning of the twentieth century before the stature that was probably normal in the Middle Ages was attained once again.16
The long-term correlation between real wages and stature strongly supports the conclusions about standards of living drawn from the study of real wages. Cross-sectional analysis points in the same direction. One of the striking results of the analysis of heights of conscripts in the Netherlands at the beginning of the nineteenth century is that there appears to be an inverse relationship between the level of economic development (in terms of urbanization ratio and income) and the biological standard of living.
The contrast especially between ‘backward’ Drenthe, which had the tallest recruits, and highly developed Holland and Zeeland, with the shortest recruits, is very striking (see Noordegraaf and van Zanden 1995: 419; Tassenaar 2000). This evidence is consistent with a study of the regional variation in the distribution of income in the same period, which documented huge differences between the west, where inequality was very high, and the rest, where the income distribution was much less skewed (and which showed that Drenthe had by far the lowest inequality, see Soltow and van Zanden 1998: 135-41).The decline in real wages and stature was probably related to changes in consumption patterns. The consumption of meat and fish probably declined in the long run, especially in the cities. In the city of Leiden, meat consumption per capita fell by more than 50% between the 1470s and 1801-4. Herring, which was a staple diet during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, became a luxury during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Part of the explanation is offered by the changes in relative prices, the prices of food products increased much more than those of industrial products, which may have induced consumers to switch towards the latter (see Table 7.2). As a result, the per capita consumption of industrial products may have increased substantially, in spite of the decline of real wages. A few studies into the long-term development of material wealth have tended to show such an increase.17 In a previous section it was argued that the quality of housing probably improved a lot between 1500 and 1800, although this does not necessarily mean that the per capita consumption of housing increased, because the population probably grew faster than the supply of housing space. Finally, there is much evidence that literacy rates of both men and women went up substantially between 1500 and 1800. This may have been the largest item of capital formation during this period and it must have resulted in major increases in the welfare of the population (Kuijpers 1997; see Reis, Chapter 8, this volume).
Demographic indicators of the development of the standard of living for the Netherlands have not been studied much. There is some evidence that the mean age of marriage rose substantially during the sixteenth century.18 This rise is consistent with the decline of the standard of living and fits into the Hajnal hypothesis that the two were intimately connected. A further, but less dramatic, rise in the mean age of marriage is documented for the period after about 1650 (de Vries 1985: 665).
Faber (1976) has formulated the hypothesis that during the seventeenth century subsistence crises were thanks to the booming economy, almost absent from the Netherlands whereas during the eighteenth century, as a result of economic stagnation, they returned. This hypothesis was tested by Noordegraaf and
van Zanden (1995), who used series on the number of deaths in three cities (Rotterdam, Amsterdam, and Alkmaar) to study the relationship between prices (of grains, and the cost-of-living index constructed by de Vries) and mortality Applying the method developed by Weir (1984), they found no effect of grain prices or the cost of living on fluctuations in the number of deaths in seventeenth-century Rotterdam, but significant effects were noticed in eighteenth-century Amsterdam and Rotterdam, which appears to confirm the Faber hypothesis. However, closer inspection of the series shows that until the 1670s the pattern was dominated by the cyclical occurrence of the plague.19 The variation in the number of deaths around the trend—which may be considered to be an indicator of the effects of exogenous shocks on the demographic system—did not increase after 1700, but remained at the same level (for Rotterdam, the standard deviation was about 0.20). Therefore, it is questionable whether this analysis of the changing relationship between grain prices and the number of deaths can be used to infer a decline in the standard of living in the eighteenth century. For the nineteenth century (in fact, 1811—70), Galloway (1988) has demonstrated a rather weak relationship between grain prices and the death rate; his analysis showed a much stronger influence of grain prices on birth rates and marriage rates.
7.