When your working days were over: Louvain 1796
What did the elderly do before the birth of the welfare state? Did they spend their remaining years living in poverty? Could they rely on...
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For those looking to save...
‘For those looking to save: you are ridiculous! The moneybox should be squandered during festivities’. Thus the chorus of a song by the...
When did they stop working? Gold- and silversmiths in early-modern Frisia
An earlier contribution to this blog dealt with the retirement of surgeons in eighteenth-century Amsterdam: on average they stopped...
Stature in revolutionary-era Bois-le-Duc
Today, Dutch men are the tallest in the World at an average height of 1,83m, and women are ranked second at 1,69m (after the Latvian...
Sailors and stature
Stature of recruits of Amsterdam’s Kweekschool voor de Zeevaart An earlier contribution dealt with stature of people who requested a...
When did they stop working? Craft guilds and retirement in early-modern Amsterdam
Contrary to popular opinion, many people in the past reached old age. Adults in the early modern period could reasonably expect to...
Who were old in the Middle Ages?
In the Middle Ages, when did old age begin? a) 50 b) 55 c) 60 d) 65 Granted: this would already be a tough question to answer for the...
Preparing for old age: the portfolio of a sixteenth-century poor man
Late-medieval people looking to secure a comfortable old age, had to make sure they accumulated capital – just like today. Capital...
Saint Nicholas: patron saint of bankers
The Dutch know Saint Nicholas as the patron saint of children and - to a lesser extent - sailors. Furthermore a few readers may gave...
A Pre-Protestant Ethic?
This week Stuart Henderson of Queen's University Centre for Economic History published a nice piece on the NEP-HIS blog, in which he...
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