This volume originated in three sessions on ‘The Rise and Nature of Landless Rural Households in Europe, 16th–19th Century’, as part of the European Rural History (EURHO) Conference held in Leuven (Belgium), 11–14 September 2017. The realisation of this project has been supported by the FWO-funded Comparative Rural History Network (CORN). Very sadly, we have to note that during the publication process, we lost one of the contributors. Dieter Bruneel of Ghent University died prematurely in September 2019 at an extremely young age. However, we are proud that we can present one of his last works as chapter 5 of this volume.

In this chapter, I will first sketch out developments in the shares of landless and land-poor rural households in the Netherlands in the nineteenth century after briefly going into changes in the earlier centuries, building on available datasets in the literature. For this analysis, landless and land-poor households can be divided into three categories: (1) farm labourers with hardly any land; (2) very small peasants or cottagers who could not sustain themselves from their holdings; and (3) artisans and others wholly or partially specialised in non-agricultural work. Their importance differed distinctively by region, for instance between coastal and inland parts of the Netherlands.

In the rest of this chapter, I will concentrate on the final quarter of the eighteenth and on the nineteenth century, and on the first group outlined above, of landless unskilled labourers, especially in coastal Groningen and partly also in inland Drenthe, both situated in the north of the Netherlands. Questions that will be answered are: what were the survival strategies over the lifecycle of labouring families? How did their members’ employment opportunities vary according to the seasons in the nineteenth century? What was the social origin of the parents of labourers and what were their children's chances of escaping from the labouring class?

The development of landed and non-landed rural households in the Netherlands, 1600–1900

First, we will briefly sketch the development of the Dutch rural population from the sixteenth century to 1900, followed by a discussion of the development of the rural social structure until 1800. The main part of this section will deal with the rural social structure from about 1800 onwards, when statistical data on rural households becomes relatively more abundant for the Netherlands. The problem, however, is that different definitions must be used to distinguish the different social segments in society. We will look first at the number of households using at least one horse and try to combine them with census-data around 1909 and occupational data around 1807. The use by a rural household of a horse – for which some statistics are available – implies in general that this household has a reasonable amount of land at its disposal, making the possession of a horse necessary to help cultivate it.

Landless families have been an essential part of European rural society for a very long time. In most historical contexts, numerous landless people took part in local and regional labour markets and supported the workforce of farmers. Landless families usually lived in their own households, although single-parent families sometimes lived as lodgers in larger households. ‘Landlessness’ means that people had no or very little control over land. This common feature could take different forms, depending on regional, social and individual variations. Landless families often rented tiny houses, with very small pieces of land, mostly gardens, at best. Sometimes, they had to make do with less living space, some renting only small parts of houses, or single rooms, or even a small corner of the barn or the baking house. In those cases, the use of landed property was not always part of the rental agreement, hence families in the countryside sometimes faced a total lack of access to land. In other words: their control of land, either through property rights or formal arrangements like lease contracts, was negligible. This does not necessarily mean that there was no access to land at all – local peasants and farmers could allow for gleaning on harvested fields, for example, or livestock could be brought to commons even without formal access.

Our definition of landless households will be those families that had neither property rights on nor other formal control over cultivable land, apart from small gardens around the house. In this book, we will often also include near landless rural households, who had very limited access to land, though in no way enough to sustain a family. Both groups have in common that they needed substantial external sources of revenue for making a living.

In many European regions, population grew at least from the sixteenth or seventeenth century onwards, and this population growth mostly enlarged the share of landless or near landless households in the countryside. Social inequality in the countryside was subject to strong regional variation and determined the access of social groups to landed property. Inheritance practices played a central role here: in regions with impartible inheritance, the number of farms hardly increased. Consequently, many descendants of landowners experienced downward mobility and fell into the status of landless day labourers.

Before the twentieth century, throughout northern and western Europe a large part of the agricultural work was performed by live-in farm servants, whereas in eastern and Mediterranean Europe they were far less important. Two different models of domestic service can be discerned within the northwestern European economic-demographic system. In regions without a large landless labour force – for example, the interior provinces of the Netherlands – the system was mainly used to even out shortages and surpluses between family farms caused by (temporary) discrepancies between family size and available land. Social differences between servants and masters were relatively small. Servants often acquired a (small) farm of their own after marriage, just like their parents. In more capitalistic regions such as the Dutch coastal provinces (including Groningen) – with large social differences within the agricultural population – the situation was quite different. Many farms had more land than a farmer's family could cultivate without support, while within landless labourer households useful economic activities were lacking, stimulating the members of these families to work for the farmers, partly as live-in farm servants.

Past Dutch research concentrated mainly on young women doing live-in domestic work. Around 1900 the position of domestic servant became increasingly unpopular with young women. The supply of domestic servants decreased, because it was felt that it was humiliating to be a servant and the work offered few prospects. Young women preferred to work in a factory or in a shop, inasmuch as these positions offered more individual freedom (as factory workers) or a higher social status (as live-in shop assistants). While demand for domestic servants did not fall, domestic work was increasingly done by non-resident women. After World War One, the resulting shortage of live-in domestic servants was partly solved by an influx of German maids.

Although attracting less attention in the literature, the number of live-in farm servants was probably higher than that of domestic servants for most of the nineteenth century. Van Zanden estimated the number of female Dutch farm servants using tax and census data. According to his analyses there were 37,200 young women aged sixteen or older in 1810, 42,200 in 1850, 33,000 in 1880 and 28,500 in 1910 active as live-in farm servants.