It is impossible to make accurate comparisons between prices in the Golden Age of the Dutch Republic and those today. Figures can certainly be calculated, based on the comparative prices of gold or essential foodstuffs, but they do not take into account vital differences such as what constitutes a minimal standard of living (in many respects, people who today would be called poor live more comfortably than the richest Dutch in the seventeenth century) and certainly not what luxuries such as tulip bulbs were worth in the Golden Age.
The best comparisons probably come from looking at different salaries and earnings. The table that follows sets out some typical examples from the Dutch Republic in the first half of the seventeenth century. *
The basic unit of currency in the republic was the guilder. One guilder was made up of 20 stuivers.
20 stuivers = 1 guilder
|
½ stuiver |
Cost of a tankard of beer |
|
6½ stuivers |
Cost of a 12-pound loaf, 1620 |
|
8 stuivers |
Daily wage of an experienced Haarlem bleacher, 1601 (= about 110 guilders a year) |
|
18 stuivers |
Daily wage of an Amsterdam cloth-shearer, 1633 (= about 250 guilders a year) |
|
13 guilders |
Exchange price of one Dutch ton of herring, 1636 60 guilders Exchange price of 40 gallons of French brandy, 1636 |
|
250 guilders |
Annual earnings of a carpenter, 1630s |
|
750 guilders |
Clusius’s salary at the University of Leiden, 1592 |
|
1,500 guilders |
Typical earnings of a middle-ranking merchant, 1630s |
|
1,600 guilders |
Rembrandt’s fee for his greatest masterpiece, The Night Watch, 1642 |
|
3,000 guilders |
Typical earnings of a well-off merchant, 1630s |
|
5,200 guilders |
Highest reliably attested price paid for a tulip bulb, 1637 |
*Sources: Deursen, Plain Lives; Hunger, Charles d’Ecluse; Posthumus, Inquiry; Zumthor, Daily Life in Rembrandt’s Holland.
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