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 members of a confraternity of amateur poets – a so-called chamber of rhetoricians – of the town of Malines in present-day Belgium. These rhetoricians had entered the song for a contest - a meeting of fourteen chambers of rhetoricians in Antwerp in 1561. The songs and plays performed on this occasion were recorded in a volume published in 1562.
The text of the song is in late-medieval Dutch and often difficult to understand: the chorus probably ridicules the thrifty, pointing out their savings belonged to the 'guilds'. With the latter the rhetoricians probably expressed the idea that savings would eventually be squandered during festivities: social gatherings such as those that were frequently organized by the rhetoricians themselves, or by the many craft guilds and religious confraternities that characterized late-medieval city-life. And perhaps they even referred to so-called 'Shrove Tuesday guilds' that brought together men and women for heavy drinking and feasting during the final day of Carnival.
In the five verses of their song, the rhetoricians offer various reasons not to be thrifty. In the first verse they sang how savings cannot be taken with to the grave and in the end your savings will go to your heirs. Saved money also cannot take away any worries.
According to the second verse, the money the saver had painstakingly put aside, would eventually be squandered. The rhetoricians do not explain themselves: did they expect the miser to give in to binge drinking? Or did they speculate his heirs would spend his hard-earned money?
Fortunately misers hardly ever succeed in saving: their spending it during social gatherings at least yielded some things: excise taxes on wine and beer for the town government; business for inn-keepers; and various clever slogans the boozers came up with. The latter was of course important for the amateur poets of rhetoricians chambers!
Those about to smash their piggy bank would be most welcome to join in, the rhetoricians sang. After all, what better use for hard-earned money than buying a round of beer and making new friends? The final verse portrays the rhetoricians exactly like this: as merry and wel-mannered gentlemen, who meet for drinks and squander their savings. The final line even goes as far as to conclude that pouring coins from the piggy bank is the smart thing to do: vroe (wise).
All present had a good laugh: the visitors from Malines had turned their sin – gluttony - into a virtue! The carnivalesque reversal of well-known values was quite popular in sixteenth-century culture: the audience understood that saving was in fact the clever thing to do, and also a way to take away worries. However the various sophisms – drinking supports the tax collector, causes business to flourish, and spurs creativity, would have been enthousiastically welcomed by an audience busy drinking wine and beer. Finally, perhaps the singers were also aware of the irony of their performance: singing about their undoubtedly expensive hobby of travelling to foreign cities to engage in amateur poetry events.
Image of the song. Source: H. Borggrefe, T. Fusenig en B. Uppenkamp (eds.), Tussen stadspaleizen en luchtkastelen. Hans Vredeman en de Renaissance (Gent/Amsterdam 2002).