The Burgher and the Whore: Prostitution in Early Modern Amsterdam (7 page)

main port of call. Most of those arrested for prostitution in The Hague in the eighteenth century, for example, turned out also to have lived as prostitutes in Amsterdam.

Brothel-keepers too moved relatively frequently. Their changes of address were often involuntary, prompted by protests from neighbours or orders to ‘dislodge’ after a police raid.They might even be banished from the city.The most stable element seems to have been the location itself. When four ‘ragged whores’ were arrested in
1742
, neighbours testified that the room in which they lived and where they took the clients they picked up in the street had ‘always been known as a cham- ber of whores’.
28
Some premises were notorious for decades as ‘dis- reputable houses’ of various kinds and under various names. These were places where the landlord apparently made no objection, infor- mation that would be passed around within the appropriate circles. Possibly these addresses had come to be seen as tainted and were there- fore avoided by honest folk.

Music houses
‌
‌

In
1578
prostitution was forced underground and whorehouses had the best chance of survival if they remained small and relatively hidden. The famous music houses, on the other hand, date back only to the final quarter of the seventeenth century.Their origins lay in the music halls, respectable establishments where people could listen to music, dance, and have a few drinks. The most famous of these, De Meniste Bruiloft (The Mennonite Wedding), featured a large collection of mu- sical instruments as well as musical boxes, fountains, and mechanical water features. It was a major tourist attraction in the
1630
s and
1640
s.
29
Along with young people out to enjoy themselves, places like this at- tracted prostitutes looking for clients. Their presence drew male cus- tomers, which prompted landlords to make sure women were always available. Eventually the respectable music halls lost out to the compe- tition.This is the highly plausible scenario described in
Het Amsterdam- sch Hoerdom
.
30

The combination of music, dance, and sexual temptation was noth- ing new. Dancing was very popular among the lower orders as well as the rich, and even small villages had dance-halls and dancing schools. The
R
eformed Church was fiercely opposed to dancing.
31
In
1661
Pastor Petrus Wittewrongel was one of many preachers who fulmi- nated against ‘lecherous, flirtatious, improper dancing’ in which men and women ‘in all disreputable wantonness and iniquity, to the sound

of musical instruments or the singing of flippant songs, dance and leap to the rhythm and rules of the dance’. Those who abandoned them- selves to such activities were generally ‘godless people, dishonourable comedians, whore-minders, love-sick howlers, and epicurean liber- tines, with their twirls, capers, and goat- or billy-goat leaps’; dancing had the effect of ‘bellows, fanning the flames of whoredom’.
32
Such bellows were operated by the devil, as portrayed in many illustrations and frontispieces of books of the period,including that to
D’Openhertige Juffrouw
(see p. ii of this book).

In
1629
, in response to pressure from the
R
eformed Church, the Amsterdam authorities banned women from visiting dance halls and

dancing schools, since mixed dancing meant ‘a door was opened wide to all kinds of indecency’.
33
The authorities are unlikely to have been able to enforce the ban, however, since dance-halls were highly popular among young people out for a night on the town. Dancing was no less

important at the margins of society, as suggested by the description of a criminal in
1709
as ‘pockmarked, small of stature, a good dancer’, while another bore the nickname The Dancer.
3
4
Elkanah Watson, who visited a music house in
1784
, describes the kind of dancing that went on:

We crowded through a gang of smoking jack tars, boors, and vulgar citizens, to the other end of the room; where I was much diverted to see a strapping negro fellow dancing a jig with one of the spillhouse ladies, and an old man playing upon a violin. The dancing was curious enough—they seemed to dance, or rather to slide, heavily upon their heels, scaling about the room, without the least order or animation. Indeed they seemed to me like a couple of artificial machines set in motion. [see Appendix
1
]

It was felt to be but a small step from sensual stimulation by music and dancing to fornication, so women found in dance-halls, in contraven- tion of the
1629
statute, were often regarded as whores. In the
1650
s the police regularly arrested them.They would convict the proprietors too, and forbid them to keep ‘a whorehouse and dance-hall’, but to what extent this was a matter of professional prostitution is unclear. With the rise of the music houses the term ‘dance-hall’ disappeared, but such houses remained in existence, especially in poorer neigh- bourhoods. In
1717
, for example, a young Amsterdam pastry cook was stabbed to death one night in front of a music house called the Witte Arend (White Eagle) in a fight that had begun inside over a dance.
35
No prostitutes were ever arrested there, so it was probably a dance-hall rather than a brothel. Most downmarket of all were the
michelkitten
(
michelen
being a slang word for dancing,
kit
meaning dive), which were frequented by members of the criminal underworld. Here beer and brandy were served, not wine, and the music was provided by a single violinist, who played in exchange for tips and carried on until he dropped.
36

A music house—the term only really became current towards the end of the seventeenth century; until then English travellers tended to call them music halls or musicos—was a dance-hall, music hall, and whorehouse in one (Plates
3
and
4
). The main attraction was the overt presence of pretty women whom everyone knew to be whores. At first not even the police regarded these establishments as brothels; during raids they arrested the prostitutes but rarely the people in charge. It was acceptable to visit a music house, since one might be there purely as a spectator, and they were part of the sightseeing tour—a grand opportunity for upright citizens to

indulge their curiosity about the coarse life at the bottom of the heap, comparable to the fascination of watching prisoners at the
R
asp House and the Spin House (the houses of correction for men and women respectively).

Foreign travellers and members of the elite visited only the ‘better’ music houses, such as Het Hof van Holland on the Zeedijk.There they could see women dressed up as proper young ladies, most around
20
years old and often only recently taken on as prostitutes for the first time. It was important to exclude people of the common sort, so the proprietor took great care in the hiring of musicians, telling them never to play the ‘roguish’ dance tunes that were especially popular among the lowest of the low. The players were instructed to say they had no knowledge of such music. According to
Het Amsterdamsch Hoerdom
this was the simplest means of keeping ‘malicious and rowdy scum’ away: ‘Where ruffians may not dance, they will not come to spend their money.’
37
To refuse them entry might have been more provocative. In the years around
1680
in particular, there were often fights inside and outside music houses that started as quarrels over admission policy.

A prostitute’s ability to sing and dance increased her appeal and her market value. In
1682
Constantijn Huygens Jr makes mention in his diary of one Madame la Touche, an elegant Amsterdam brothel-keeper in whose house lived an Italian woman proficient in the ‘lascivious arts’ of singing, playing, and dancing.
38
Customers too, incidentally, not only danced but sang ‘loudly and from the chest’.The more expensive music houses usually provided an ensemble consisting of a violin, a harpsichord or dulcimer, and a double bass.Those frequented by sailors and apprentices, on the other hand, featured instruments loud enough to be heard above the stomping noise of the dances popular in such places. Sometimes organs were installed for this purpose, to the great dismay of respectable citizens who associated the instrument with church worship. In the eighteenth century there are also references to oboes, shawms, and trumpets, accompanied by the double bass (Plates
3
and
4
).

Music houses that operated as brothels were much written and talked about but never very numerous. Most sources, from the late seventeenth century to the early nineteenth, refer to between eighteen and twenty-five at any one time.
39
In the Confession Books for
1696
–
8
, for example, eighteen music houses can be identified by name, all of

them near the harbour.There were eight on the Zeedijk, including De
R
ijzende Zon (The
R
ising Sun), De Bocht van Guinee (The Bight of Guinea), De Posthoorn (The Post Horn), and the famous Hof van Holland (Court of Holland). The Geldersekade boasted three, and there were another seven in nearby streets, among them Het Pakhuis (The Warehouse), De Spaanse Zee (The Spanish Main), and Het Hof van Engeland (The Court of England).Their names were displayed on

signs hanging outside, or on stone plaques set into the facade. Some quickly disappeared; others were top addresses for many years. Het Hof van Holland saw
163
arrests between
1689
and
1722
, De Post- hoorn
171
between
1686
and
1720
, and De
R
ijzende Zon
179
between

1685
and
1723
.This last music house,The
R
ising Sun, was at the corner

of the Waterpoortsteeg and the Zeedijk and because its precise address

is known we can trace its history from
1677
to
1743
. Before
1685
it was a whorehouse without a name, from
1731
it appears in the archives as The Fountain and subsequently as The New Fountain. In
1743
a man and a woman were arrested as brothel-keepers at the same address, along with four whores, although this time the establishment is not named. Over the decades it was referred to as a whorehouse, a late- night tavern, a dancing school, and a music house.

There were music houses that are not mentioned by name in the Confession Books. One example is The Long Cellar, which catered to the English in particular and appears in many travelogues written by English visitors between
1687
and
1700
.
40
William Mountague calls it a ‘nasty common Bawdy-House’, where the wine and the women were ‘good for nothing’ (see Appendix
1
), but Thomas Penson, one of the few travel writers of the lower orders, held a different opinion. He had been taken there by an English captain who was staying in Am- sterdam on business and who visited it daily. ‘I found the women generally very loving to Englishmen,’ he writes. He clearly enjoyed himself, even accompanying one of the prostitutes to her lodgings, where they carried on drinking and singing. Frustratingly we do not know what songs they sang, or in what language, although he does make clear that the women spoke Dutch. He claims he did not have sex: ‘My curiosity led me to tread the serpent’s path, but I was not stung.’ His vivid account can be found in Appendix
1
.
41

R
espectable people could enter a music house without their honour being sullied, or so they claimed. One writes: ‘Here they only make

their rendezvous, but the execution is done elsewhere.’ Another: ‘No

manner of Lewdness is ever suffer’d to be transacted in them.’
42
These were purely the places where people met, negotiated, and came to an arrangement, writes Bernard de Mandeville in his
Fable of the Bees
(
1714
); no iniquitous behaviour of any kind was tolerated.
43
This was a dubious line of reasoning, as
Het Amsterdam Hoerdom
had made clear decades before: ‘It is true that the common room is not the place where the greatest improprieties are committed, but what happens elsewhere they know well enough, who have been ruined in these stews.’
44
It was usually possible to take a woman into a back or upper room of a music house, and there were often prostitutes living on the premises.‘A music house, where women are chambered for the service

of menfolk who come there,’ is how Kaatje van
R
hijn described to the court in The Hague in
1769
the Amsterdam establishment where, be-

fore becoming a prostitute, she had been employed as a maid.
45
Prostitutes needed fine apparel if they were to work in the more

famous music houses, and they usually hired garments or bought them on credit from their bawds, who would keep a close eye on their in- vestment. Many prostitutes were allowed to go to music houses only in the company of their bawds or a maid. Those without beautiful clothes were forced to stick to the simpler places, such as Het Grote Wijnvat (The Great Wine Cask), one of the taverns popular at the time in which people sat in huge barrels.There the prostitutes had to pay a few stivers just to be allowed in.
46

Few music houses could afford to clothe and accommodate many prostitutes on a permanent basis.While whorehouses were dependent on their ability to fetch whores as required, the music houses for their part relied on nearby bawdy-houses to supply them. In the evenings, emerging from the basements and one-room apartments of the nar- row alleys nearby, whores and their bawds would make their way to the music houses on the Zeedijk and the Geldersekade. Since the bawds provided the outfits worn by their whores, their presence (or that of their maids) was tolerated, even if they brought no direct profit to the business.