Tuani

Girl power: the European marriage
pattern and labour markets in the
North Sea region in the late medieval
and early modern period1
By TINE DE MOOR and JAN LUITEN VAN ZANDEN
How good to be a woman, how much better to be a man!
Maidens and wenches, remember the lessonyou’re about to hear
Don’t hurtle yourself into marriage far too soon.
The saying goes: ‘where is your spouse? Where’s your honour?’
But one who earns her board and clothes
Shouldn’t scurry to suffer a man’s rod . . .
Though wedlock I do not decry;
Unyoked is best! Happy the woman without a man.Poem by Anna Bijns (1493–1575) on the benefits of celibacy and late marriage2
T his article argues that the European Marriage Pattern (EMP) has played a
fundamental role in western Europe’s economic development. The EMP
emerged in north-western Europe in the late medieval period as a result of the
preaching of the Catholic Church promoting marriagebased on consensus, the
rise of labour markets, and specific institutions concerning property transfers
between generations that encouraged wage labour by women. It resulted in a
demographic regime embedded in a highly commercial environment, in which
households interacted frequently with labour, capital, and commodity markets.We
also discuss possible long-term consequences for human capitalformation and
institution building.
I
In 1505 Janne Heyndericx, aged 31, living in the Zeeland village of Kouwenkerke,
told a committee investigating the malpractices by the local magistrates the
following story:3 eight years earlier, she had promised to marry a young man,
Adriaen Jacopsz, and he had also promised to marryher. They slept together and
continued to do so without ever officially marrying as was required by the law of
the holy Church, postponing their wedding until a more mutually convenient time.
1
We would like to thank the participants of the Global Economic History (GEHN) workshop on ‘The rise,
organization and institutional framework of factor markets’ (Utrecht,23–6 June 2005), and in particular Peter
Boomgaard, Bruce Campbell, Marcus Cerman, Ken Pomeranz, and Maarten Prak, and the referees of this
journal, for their comments on the first draft of this article.
2
Wilson, Women writers, p. 382.
3
On the malpractices concerning the levying of arbitrary fines on people living together who had notbeen
officially married by the church, see Bange and Weiler, ‘De problematiek’, pp. 399–400.
© Economic History Society 2009. Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main
Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
ehr_483 1..33
2 TINE DE MOOR AND JAN LUITEN VAN ZANDEN
At that time she was still living with her mother and stepfather,who subsequently
refused to maintain her, so that she was forced to find employment elsewhere and
left to earn a wage. When she came to work in Kouwenkerke, she lived with
another young man by whom she had a child. Four or five years before, Adriaen
had tried to be released from his promise to marry her, although they were still in
regular contact and were sleeping together. She said shestill wanted to marry him,
as although they had not been married in the eyes of the Church, as far as she was
concerned they were indeed married before God. Moreover, she reported that it
was his fault that she had gone so far (that is, had had a child with another man),
because he had kept her waiting for so long.4
This story of Janne is strikingly ‘modern’ and when seen in a global...