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 Stichting Archiefpublicaties

Eric Ketelaar

Archiving People.
A Social History
of Dutch Archives

ˆ
l Cover: Jurriaen Ovens, Regents of the Civic
Orphanage (Burgerweeshuis) in Amsterdam,
1663. Amsterdam Museum, on loan from
the Spirit Foundation, SB 4843. See Fig. 1.0.

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Stichting Archiefpublicaties
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ISBN 9789071251481
For comments and corrections see www.archivingpeople.nl
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2a kader

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PAGE CHAPTER ARCHIVING PEOPLE
Preface...................................................................................................
2a Table of Contents 7a

Prologue: Rembrandt’s Archives ............................................... 9a

Chapter 0
General Introduction: Reading the Archives ........................ 15a

Chapter 1
Archiving People .............................................................................. 22a
—
1.0 Introduction................................................................................... 23a
1.1 Roman Veterans ............................................................................ 24a
1.2 From Cradle to Grave ................................................................... 25b
1.2.1 Church and Civic Registers................................................................................... 25b
1.2.2 The Legible Citizen............................................................................................... 27b
1.2.3 Civic Registration.................................................................................................. 29b
1.2.4 Capturing People................................................................................................. 30b
1.2.4.1 Introduction........................................................................................... 30b
1.2.4.2 People Registers................................................................................... 31b
1.2.4.3 Paper Man.............................................................................................. 32b
1.2.4.4 ID-cards.................................................................................................. 33a
1.2.4.5 Safekeeping........................................................................................... 34b
1.2.5 Data Protection and Automation......................................................................... 34b
1.3 Burghers and Residents ................................................................ 35b
1.4 Sailors and Soldiers ....................................................................... 39b
1.4.1 Sailing with the VOC............................................................................................. 39b
1.4.2 Enlisting in the Army............................................................................................. 42a
1.5 Migrants ........................................................................................ 44a
1.5.1 Strangers............................................................................................................... 44a
1.5.2 The Migration Machine........................................................................................ 45b

| | 1.6 My Government, my File .............................................................. 47b

PAGE CHAPTER ARCHIVING PEOPLE

2b Table of Contents
1.7 Archiving Families ......................................................................... 48b
1.7.1 Office Genealogies............................................................................................... 48b
1.7.2 A Treasury of Monuments..................................................................................... 49b
1.7.3 Collecting Family Archives................................................................................... 53a
1.8 Conclusion ..................................................................................... 54b

Chapter 2
Archiving Churches .......................................................................... 57a
—
2.0 Introduction................................................................................... 58a
2.1 Giving to the Church ..................................................................... 58b
2.2 Chapters and Churches ................................................................. 60a
2.3 Archiving the Reformation ........................................................... 64a
2.3.1 Iconoclasm and Archives...................................................................................... 64a
2.3.2 Archiving the New Bible....................................................................................... 65a
2.3.3 Disciplinary Acta................................................................................................... 67b
2.3.4 Church Members and Charity.............................................................................. 69a
2.4 Collecting Church Archives........................................................... 70b
2.5 Conclusion ..................................................................................... 72a

Chapter 3
Archiving States ................................................................................ 74a
—
3.0 Introduction................................................................................... 75a
3.1 The Chancery of the Counts of Holland ....................................... 77a
3.2 States of the Land ......................................................................... 79a
3.3 States General of the Confederacy .............................................. 87a
 | | 3.4 Archiving a Unitary State.............................................................. 90a
PAGE CHAPTER ARCHIVING PEOPLE

3a Table of Contents
3.5 Archiving Central Government 1813-1991 .................................. 93a
3.6 State Archives ............................................................................... 96b
3.6.1 A National Archivarius.......................................................................................... 96b
3.6.2 Life into the Country’s Archives............................................................................ 98a
3.6.3 A Network of State Archives................................................................................. 99a
3.7 Conclusion ..................................................................................... 101a

Chapter 4
Archiving Cities ................................................................................. 103a
—
4.0 Introduction................................................................................... 104a
4.1 City Charters ................................................................................. 105b
4.2 City Registers ................................................................................ 107a
4.3 Jan van Hout, City Clerk ............................................................... 109b
4.4 Jan van Hout, Archivist ................................................................. 111a
4.5 Order ............................................................................................. 112b
4.6 Access ............................................................................................ 114b
4.7 The City’s Soul ............................................................................... 115b
4.8 City Archives with a capital A ....................................................... 117a
4.9 The Modern Paper City................................................................. 119b
4.9.1 French Influences.................................................................................................. 119b
4.9.2 Communities of Archive....................................................................................... 120a
4.9.3 Departmentalization and Commercialization..................................................... 121a
4.10 The Code........................................................................................ 121a
4.11 The Datapolis................................................................................. 122b
4.12 Conclusion ..................................................................................... 123a

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PAGE CHAPTER ARCHIVING PEOPLE

3b Table of Contents
Chapter 5
Archiving Polders and Commons .............................................. 125a
—
5.0 Introduction................................................................................... 126a
5.1 Visitation with the Dike Book ....................................................... 126b
5.2 Peat Dredging ............................................................................... 129a
5.3 Draining ......................................................................................... 130a
5.4 Caring for Water Board Archives ................................................. 132a
5.5 Draining as a State Enterprise ...................................................... 133a
5.6 Commons and Communities ......................................................... 135a
5.7 Conclusion ..................................................................................... 138a

Chapter 6
Archiving Property .......................................................................... 139a
—
6.0 Introduction .................................................................................. 140a
6.1 Transfer of Property...................................................................... 141a
6.1.1 Transfer of Property before 1811.......................................................................... 141a
6.1.2 Transfer of Property since 1811............................................................................. 145b
6.2 Property Management ................................................................. 147b
6.2.1 The Abbey’s Cartularies and Rentals................................................................... 147b
6.2.2 For Pious Uses....................................................................................................... 149b
6.2.3 Of Riches and Regents......................................................................................... 150b
6.2.4 Estate Inventories................................................................................................. 152b
6.2.5 Orphan Chambers................................................................................................ 154b
6.3 Insolvent estates ........................................................................... 156b
6.3.1 The Chamber of Desolate Estates....................................................................... 156b
6.3.2 From Paper to e-Justice Portal............................................................................. 160a
 | | 6.4 Holocaust Assets........................................................................... 161b
PAGE CHAPTER ARCHIVING PEOPLE

4a Table of Contents
6.5 Conclusion ..................................................................................... 163a

Chapter 7
Archiving Trade and Industry ...................................................... 165a
—
7.0 Introduction................................................................................... 166a
7.1 Business Letters ............................................................................ 167a
7.2 Partners in Trading and Shipping ................................................. 169b
7.3 Office Archives .............................................................................. 171a
7.3.1 The Merchant’s Comptoir..................................................................................... 171a
7.3.2 On Board............................................................................................................... 172b
7.3.3 The Office as a Memory Centre........................................................................... 174a
7.4 Mastering Time and Distance ....................................................... 174b
7.5 Trading and Shipping in the First World War ............................... 175b
7.6 Dutch Paper and Dutch Gin .......................................................... 177a
7.6.0 Land of the Windmills........................................................................................... 177a
7.6.1 Making Paper........................................................................................................ 177b
7.6.1.1 Starting a Papermill............................................................................... 177b
7.6.1.2 Getting up Steam.................................................................................. 179b
7.6.1.3 Rationing................................................................................................ 181a
7.6.1.4 Automation............................................................................................ 183a
7.6.2 Dutch Courage...................................................................................................... 183a
7.6.2.1 Malting, Roasting, and Distilling.......................................................... 183a
7.6.2.2 Taxation.................................................................................................. 184b
7.6.2.3 Associating............................................................................................ 185b
7.7 Collecting Trade and Industry Archives ....................................... 187a
7.8 What to Keep? .............................................................................. 188b
7.9 Conclusion ..................................................................................... 189a

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PAGE CHAPTER ARCHIVING PEOPLE

4b Table of Contents
Chapter 8
Archiving Monies .............................................................................. 190a
—
8.0 Introduction................................................................................... 191a
8.1 The Oldest Archival Document .................................................... 192a
8.2 Keeping the Books ........................................................................ 193a
8.2.1 Municipal Accounts.............................................................................................. 193a
8.2.2 Merchants’ Books................................................................................................. 195a
8.2.3 The Bookkeeping Mindset................................................................................... 197a
8.2.4 Accounting by the VOC........................................................................................ 197b
8.2.5 Double-Entry Bookkeeping by Government...................................................... 198b
8.2.6 Accountability Portrayed...................................................................................... 199b
8.2.7 Mechanizing and Computerizing the Books....................................................... 201a
8.3 Taxation ......................................................................................... 202b
8.3.1 Taxes, Excises, Duties, and Rates at all Levels of Government........................... 202b
8.3.2 The Calculating State........................................................................................... 206b
8.4 Banking .......................................................................................... 211b
8.4.1 Banks of Exchange................................................................................................ 211b
8.4.2 Merchant Bankers ................................................................................................ 212b
8.5 Conclusion ..................................................................................... 214a

Chapter 9
Archiving Litigation ......................................................................... 215a
—
9.0 Introduction................................................................................... 216a
9.1 ‘Administering Justice in the Name and on Behalf
of the High Government’.............................................................. 217a
9.2 Court Archives .............................................................................. 222b
 | | 9.3 The Court’s Memory ..................................................................... 223b
PAGE CHAPTER ARCHIVING PEOPLE

5a Table of Contents
9.4 Judicial Archives after 1811 .......................................................... 225b
9.5 Notaries ......................................................................................... 227b
9.6 Notarial Records ........................................................................... 229b
9.7 Less Paper: Sampling Judicial Records and
Digitizing the Judicial Process...................................................... 231b
9.8 Conclusion ..................................................................................... 233a

Chapter 10
Archiving the East Indies............................................................... 234a
—
10.0 Introduction................................................................................... 235a
10.1 Exploring for Trade ....................................................................... 236a
10.2 Making VOC Knowledge Available.............................................. 236b
10.3 Mediating Tasman’s Journals ....................................................... 237b
10.4 Pewter Records ............................................................................. 239b
10.5 The VOC Archives ......................................................................... 240a
10.6 A VOC Merchant’s Archive ........................................................... 245a
10.7 Colonial Affairs .............................................................................. 248b
10.8 Conclusion ..................................................................................... 251b

Chapter 11
Archiving Technologies .................................................................. 253a
—
11.0 Introduction................................................................................... 254a
11.1 Before 1800 ................................................................................... 254b
11.1.1 Making and Using................................................................................................. 254b
11.1.1.1 Material.................................................................................................. 254b

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PAGE CHAPTER ARCHIVING PEOPLE
11.1.1.2 Language and Script............................................................................. 256b
5b Table of Contents
11.1.1.3 Form....................................................................................................... 257b
11.1.2 Arranging.............................................................................................................. 260a
11.1.3 Preservin................................................................................................................ 261b
11.2 Since 1800 ..................................................................................... 264a
11.2.0 Introduction........................................................................................................... 264a
11.2.1 Making and Using................................................................................................. 265b
11.2.1.1 Material.................................................................................................. 265b
11.2.1.2 Script, Sound, and Images.................................................................... 267a
11.2.1.3 Form....................................................................................................... 268b
11.2.2 Arranging.............................................................................................................. 270a
11.2.3 Preserving.............................................................................................................. 271b
11.3 Conclusion ..................................................................................... 275b

Chapter 12
Archiving Professionals ................................................................. 277a
—
12.0 Introduction................................................................................... 278a
12.1 Archivers and Archivists ............................................................... 278b
12.2 Enters the Archivarius ................................................................... 279a
12.3 Scientific Archiving ....................................................................... 279b
12.4 The Association of Archivists in the Netherlands........................ 281a
12.5 The Archives Act of 1918 .............................................................. 283a
12.6 New Archives and New Professionals ......................................... 284a
12.7 Hercules at the Crossroads ........................................................... 285a
12.8 Conclusion ..................................................................................... 286a
 | | Chapter 13
PAGE CHAPTER ARCHIVING PEOPLE

6a Table of Contents

The Dutchness of Dutch Archives.............................................. 287a

—
13.0 Introduction................................................................................... 288a
13.1 Typically Dutch .............................................................................. 288a
13.2 Inspiration from Abroad ............................................................... 289a
13.3 Conditioning Factors .................................................................... 289b
13.4 Archiving in the Polder Model...................................................... 291a
13.5 VOC Shares ................................................................................... 292b
13.6 Draining the Polder ....................................................................... 294b
13.7 Trading and Rationing during the First World War ..................... 296a
13.8 Comparative Archival History ...................................................... 296b

Index ...................................................................................................... 298a

About the Author ............................................................................. 302a

| | This publication was made possible with financial support from

PAGE CHAPTER ARCHIVING PEOPLE

6b Table of Contents

NOT Fund (National Archives) .................................................... 176b

DocFactory .......................................................................................... 56b
.................................................................................................................. 276b

Picturae ................................................................................................ 73b

VHIC ....................................................................................................... 102b

Doxis....................................................................................................... 124b
.................................................................................................................. 252b

Memorix................................................................................................ 164b
 | |
PAGE CHAPTER ARCHIVING PEOPLE

7a Preface
Preface
A social history of archives, as presented in this book, treats the influence of societal
challenges, patterns, and norms on archiving practices, and vice versa: archiving that
conditioned or facilitated societal practices. Such a social history of archives is important
not only for the user of archives and the archivist but also for people who design archiving
systems and policies and who will have to understand the duality of the archive in society
(I use archive and archives mainly as synonyms). In order to understand the archive,
historians and other users of the archive must ‘comprehend the conceptual and cultural
milieu in which their archival sources are created, structured, processed, appraised,
discarded, and preserved’.1 Indeed, archiving (in the broad sense as used in this book) is not
limited to filing and preservation, but—as I will explain in the General Introduction—
implies recordkeeping from the very decision to use documents for a transaction. This
book, in exploring archiving practices in the past, tries to answer the question: what did
‘archiving people’ in the Netherlands do and why did they do it in various domains. These
domains are each covered in a particular chapter: archiving people, churches, states, cities,
polders and commons, property, trade and industry, monies, litigation, the East Indies,
technologies and the professionalization of the archival endeavour. Furthermore, I will try
to answer the question to what extent were these archiving practices typically Dutch?

This book does not cover the whole spectrum of archiving, but instead highlights people’s
dealings with basic types of records ‘that may be called constants in record creation’.2 These
were, according to the pioneer of archival history Ernst Posner, records facilitating control
over persons, records regarding real estate, financial and other accounting records,
1 Francis X. Blouin and William Rosenberg,
Processing the past. Contesting authority in history and
‘notarial’ records safeguarding private business transactions, the laws of the land, and
the archives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), records created and retained as evidence of past administrative action.
p. 210.
2 Ernst Posner, Archives in the ancient world
(Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972),
Even if we cannot speak of constants, there are some recurring features across time and
p. 3. space in various domains of people’s activities. However, research into the social history of

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PAGE CHAPTER ARCHIVING PEOPLE
archives is neither meant to restore a real or imagined continuity nor to demonstrate that
7b Preface
a past practice still exists in the present. As in Foucault’s genealogical method, I rather
want to ‘record the singularity of events outside of any monotonous finality (…) not in
order to trace the gradual curve of their evolution but to isolate the different scenes where
they engaged in different roles’.3 This genealogy is ‘patiently documentary. It operates in a
field of entangled and confused parchments, on documents that have been scratched over
and recopied many times.’4 It examines practices of archiving in the social context of
activities of communities, organizations, and individuals in the various domains that have
structured this book. In each chapter, I will present various practices of archiving through
time and from different parts of the Netherlands as exemplars, not as a comprehensive and
definitive history.

The book covers a time span from the Romans until today. The oldest archival documents
date from the 1st century (1.1 and 8.1). At the other end of the timeline, glimpses of the
21st century digital age appear in 1.2.2, 4.11, 6.4.2, 8.2.7, 8.3.2, 9.7, and in chapters 11 and
12. A few sections deal with archiving in the Middle Ages (2.1, 2.2, 3.1, 4.1, 4.2), while most
others cover archiving from the 17th century to the 20th century, although ‘cover’ is maybe
not the right word for the slices I have cut, depending on the availability of sources, ‘the
singularity of events’, and my own interests. The presentation in each chapter is not always
in strict chronological order.

In this book ‘Netherlands’ refers to the northern Netherlands before the outbreak of the
Dutch Revolt (1566-1572), to the Dutch Republic of the United Provinces, and from 1798
the unitary state which, in 1815, became the Kingdom of the Netherlands. I use ‘Holland’
3 Michel Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, only for the county of that name, which was one out of seven provinces that formed the
transl. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon, in
Language, counter-memory, practice. Selected essays
United Provinces. Historically, the Netherlands extended beyond the current European
and interviews by Michel Foucault, ed. Donald F. territory. However, of the archiving people in other continents I focus on the officials of the
Bouchard (Ithaka NY: Cornell University Press, 1977),
p. 139, repr. in The Foucault reader, ed. Paul Rabinow
United East India Company (Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie – VOC), bypassing the
(New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), p. 76. Dutch in the Americas and the Caribbean—not because they were less important but due
4 Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, p. 139. to restraints of time and the size of this book (1.4.1, 7.3.2, 8.2.4, and chapter 10).
 | |
PAGE CHAPTER ARCHIVING PEOPLE
Other areas which I have left unexplored include archiving in war (with the exception
8a Preface
of conscription, see 1.4.2), the navy, diplomacy, criminality, transport and traffic,
architecture, health care, agriculture, fishery, the arts, and education. From all industries
(chapter 7) I have chosen two: the ‘typically Dutch’ making of paper and distilling of
jenever.
5 Some examples in English: A financial history of The
Netherlands, ed. Marjolein ’t Hart, Joost Jonker and Jan My interest in archival history has led in the past 50 years to a number of publications,
Luiten van Zanden (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1997); Peter Burke, A social history of knowledge:
many of them containing material that I was able to use for this book. This (and of course
From Gutenberg to Diderot (Cambridge: Polity, the availability of sources) may explain why some issues have been dealt with more
2000); A.T. van Deursen, Plain lives in a golden age.
Popular culture, religion and society in seventeenth-
extensively or in a different mode than others.
century Holland, transl. Maarten Ultee (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1991); Dutch culture in
a European perspective, 5 vols (Assen/Basingstoke:
In the research for this book, I used the archival literature in conjunction with research in
Royal Van Gorcum/Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); the archives, both in the search room of various Dutch archival institutions and in
Jonathan Israel, The Dutch Republic: Its rise, greatness,
and fall 1477-1806 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995);
digitized archives on the Internet. My findings were contextualised by reading widely what
Joost Jonker and Keetie Sluyterman, At home on the historians, political scientists, sociologists, and others have written about aspects of Dutch
world markets: Dutch international trading companies
from the 16th century until the present (Montreal:
society.5 From that literature I gleaned the information I needed to understand archiving
McGill-Queen’s Press-MQUP, 2001); Simon Schama, people not only from within the archive, but also from the outside, taking different
The embarrassment of riches. An interpretation of
Dutch culture in the Golden Age (New York: Knopf,
viewpoints of creators, record subjects, users, and other ‘archivers’.
1987); The Cambridge companion to the Dutch Golden
Age, ed. Helmer J. Helmers and Geert H. Janssen
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018);
I have written this work in English, hoping that my book may be used in further
Jan de Vries and Ad van der Woude, The first modern comparative research by Dutch and foreign scholars. Translations from Dutch are mine
economy. Success, failure, and perseverance of the
Dutch economy, 1500–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge
unless indicated otherwise. For the translation and explanation of Dutch terms (in italics)
University Press, 1997). standard and specialized dictionaries have been used.6 Geographical names mentioned in
6 Archiefterminologie voor Nederland en Vlaanderen a historical or a contemporary context are given as they were written at the time,
(’s-Gravenhage, Stichting Archiefpublicaties, 2003);
Peter Beal, A dictionary of English manuscript
respectively as they are written now. Therefore, for example, both Batavia and Jakarta are
terminology 1450-2000 (Oxford: Oxford University mentioned, depending on the context.
Press, 2008); Dictionary of archival terminology,
second edition, ed. Peter Walne et al. (München:
Saur, 1988); Elsevier’s Lexicon of archive terminology I am indebted to the members of the board of Stichting Archiefpublicaties (S@P) for
(Amsterdam/London/New York: Elsevier, 1964);
Lexicon van Nederlandse archieftermen
their decision to publish this book and for their comments on the draft in an early stage.
(’s-Gravenhage: Stichting Archief Publikaties, 1983). Chairman Daan Hertogs guided the practical and financial aspects of the project.

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PAGE CHAPTER ARCHIVING PEOPLE
His predecessor Hildo van Engen was my sparring partner throughout the genesis of the
8b Preface
book, offering extremely valuable advice whenever I needed guidance and checking every
text meticulously.

Structure and contents of the book benefitted from the extensive comments from my
friends and colleagues Peter Horsman and Charles Jeurgens who read the entire
manuscript. Theo Thomassen’s critique led to improvements in several chapters.
The invaluable contributions by other archivists and scholars are acknowledged in the
footnotes. I have enjoyed the expertise of many professionals during my visits to search
rooms—physical and digital—of archives, libraries and other institutions of learning.

As always, my wife Els Ketelaar-de Vries Reilingh was my first reader and critic, and she did
nearly all the translation. The final copy-editing by Michael Karabinos enhanced the text
considerably. I am grateful to Marc Meeuwissen (Absoluut Designers) for transforming
my text into a magnificent e-book.
 | |
PAGE CHAPTER ARCHIVING PEOPLE

9a Prologue: Rembrandt’s Archives

Prologue: Rembrandt’s Archives
Archiving people traces people who are archiving themselves and other people, their
churches, states, cities, polders and commons, property, trade and industry, monies,
litigation, the East Indies, and technologies. Each of the following chapters deals with
archiving in one of these specific contexts. But, most, if not all, of these converge in the
day-to-day practices of individuals, families, communities, and institutions. Someone may
be trading, administering properties, accounting for monies, guarding the polder,
controlling the city, governing the state, caring for the church, being involved in litigation
and using technologies. These all lead to archiving, distinguishable but concurring,
mutually influencing, and sometimes overlapping. Therefore, to counter the
decomposition of archiving in the various chapters of this book, let us start by looking
at the way a person manages these various archiving practices comprehensively.

My protagonist is one of the greatest Dutchmen in history, the painter Rembrandt

(1606-1669). Since the middle of the 19th century archivists, art historians, and other
scholars have unearthed and published every scrap of paper concerning Rembrandt.
1 W.L. Strauss and M. van der Meulen, The Rembrandt
documents (New York: Abaris Books, 1979). See also
Even since the last comprehensive publication, The Rembrandt Documents (1979)1, new
S.A.C. Dudok van Heel, P. Schatborn, and E. Ornstein- documents have been discovered leading to the publication in 2006 of a volume New
Van Slooten. Dossier Rembrandt. Documenten,
tekeningen en prenten (Amsterdam: Museum het
Rembrandt Documents by Michiel Roscam Abbing.2 He also published The Treasures of
Rembrandthuis/Gemeentearchief, 1987). Rembrandt (2006), a handsomely illustrated book about Rembrandt, containing sleeves
2 Rembrandt 2006: II. New Rembrandt documents, ed. with fine facsimiles of some of these Rembrandt documents.3 The most recent find was
Michiel Roscam Abbing (Leiden: Foleor Publishers,
2006).
made in 2019 when the re-enrollment of Rembrandt at Leiden University in 1622 (two
3 Michiel Roscam Abbing, The treasures of Rembrandt
years after his matriculation) was discovered.4
(London: André Deutsch, 2006).
4 Jef Schaeps and Mart van Duijn, Rembrandt en de The on-line database RemDoc, The Rembrandt Documents Project provides access to 1667
Universiteit Leiden (Leiden: Leiden University Press,
2019).
documents (including 691 printed publications).5 Paradoxically, however, only very few of
5 http://remdoc.huygens.knaw.nl, this URL and the
these documents are by Rembrandt. Apart from a few autograph inscriptions on drawings
following accessed 4 Dec. 2018. and etchings and in alba amicorum, and the letter painted in Marten Looten’s portrait

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PAGE CHAPTER ARCHIVING PEOPLE
(1632)6, only seven original letters written by Rembrandt himself have been preserved,
9b Prologue: Rembrandt’s Archives
none addressed to Rembrandt. Numerous notarial deeds and other legal records exist
signed by Rembrandt. However, there is no such thing as Rembrandt’s archives,
consisting—as the definition goes—of documents created or received by Rembrandt in the
conduct of his affairs and preserved because of the enduring value contained in the
infor­­­­­mation or as evidence of the functions and responsibilities of their creator. Of course,
Rembrandt’s oeuvre, his paintings and engravings, are the primary evidence of what he
created. But they contain little or no information about Rembrandt’s business or his family
matters.

Still, on the basis of The Rembrandt Documents, we can try to remedy ‘the silence of the
archive’7 and reconstruct Rembrandt’s archives by piecing together the documents that
Rembrandt may have created or received in the conduct of his affairs. We may also try to
find out why Rembrandt’s records—as distinct from many records about Rembrandt—
have not survived. Did he destroy everything? Did Rembrandt have an archival
consciousness?

g
Archiving People (chapter 1) in Rembrandt’s case would have begun with the registration
of his baptism in Saint Peter’s Church in Leiden. Unfortunately, there is no record of his
baptism, since the baptismal registers of the church start in 1621. From other sources we
have to infer his birth date as 15 July 1606. One of these sources is the matriculation
register of Leiden University.8 Here we find the registration on 20 May 1620 of ‘Rembrandt
Hermansz of Leiden, student of literature, aged 14 (in the 14th), residing with his parents’.
This is literally the first time that Rembrandt appears in the archives. The second time is at
6 http://remdoc.huygens.knaw.nl/#/document/remdoc/ his re-enrollment at the University in February 1622 at the age of 15. It is not impossible for
e4398.
Rembrandt to have shown a certificate of his baptism on enrolling. He would certainly
7 David Thomas, Simon Fowler, and Valerie Johnson,
The silence of the archive (London: Facet, 2017).
have been required to have shown such a certificate when registering as a burgher
8 http://remdoc.huygens.knaw.nl/#/document/remdoc/
(poorter) of Amsterdam. Since only Amsterdam burghers could join the painters’ guild,
e4379. Rembrandt must have bought burghership, delivered the poorter oath and shown evidence
10a | |
PAGE CHAPTER ARCHIVING PEOPLE
Prologue: Rembrandt’s Archives
thereof (a poorterceel) to the guild. Unfortunately, the city’s register D of ‘bought poorters’
1620-1636 is lost, and there is no 17th-century registration of the members of St. Luke’s
painters’ guild. However, evidence of Rembrandt’s membership of the painters’ guild does
exist. Upon joining the guild, members received two tokens: a member’s medal and a funeral
token. The latter bearing Rembrandt’s name and the year 1634 has miraculously been
preserved.9 This token had to be shown at a guild member’s funeral which all members were
obliged to attend, with the tokens being evidence of their attendance.

Just as Rembrandt had to keep his funeral token, he would have had to keep other documents
used for archiving people, such as the certificate of his marriage to Saskia van Uylenburg
(registered in the marriage register of Sint Annaparochie in Friesland on 22 June 1634, old
style, which is 2 July 1634 in the Gregorian calendar introduced in Friesland in 1701),10 which
he will have needed when claiming Saskia’s inheritance after her death in 1642.

Fig. I Rembrandt’s funeral token. Museum

Het Rembrandthuis, Amsterdam.

Fig. II The marriage of Rembrandt and Saskia (22 June/7 July 1634), church book of
Sint Annaparochie. Tresoar, DTB, inv. nr. 120.

g
9 http://remdoc.huygens.knaw.nl/#/document/remdoc/
e4419.
In chapter 2 Archiving Churches I will show the importance of the proceedings of the church
10 http://remdoc.huygens.knaw.nl/#/document/remdoc/
council as a record of the maintenance of discipline in the Reformed church. Rembrandt
e4414. himself was not a member of the Reformed church, but his mistress Hendrickje Stoffels was.

10b | |
PAGE CHAPTER ARCHIVING PEOPLE
Prologue: Rembrandt’s Archives
She was accused of improper conduct and therefore summoned before the church
council.11 There she admitted that she lived with Rembrandt ‘like a whore’, for which she
was seriously berated, admonished to penitence and banned from the Lord’s Supper.

g
As with every burgher, Rembrandt was involved in Archiving States and Cities (chapters 3
and 4). For Rembrandt, the State was embodied in patrons like Johannes Wtenbogaert,
receiver general of taxes, Stadholder Prince Frederick Henry, and his secretary Sir
Constantijn Huygens. In 1665 Rembrandt’s son, Titus, had to address the sovereign, the
States of Holland, to apply for legal majority.

A few minutes’ walk from Rembrandt’s house was the City Hall on Dam square. This was
an archiving centre, not only because of the clerks working for the city magistrate and the
bench but also because the City Hall housed the Orphan Chamber (which Rembrandt
visited several times), as well as the Chamber of Insolvent Estates and the Bank of
Exchange (Wisselbank).12 When the Hall caught fire in the night of 6 and 7 July 1652, a
large crowd gathered not only to see the Hall burning down, but also to help save ‘the City’s
soul’, to quote the poet Vondel, meaning the city archives, the treasury, and the bank’s gold
and silver (see 4.7). The next morning Rembrandt drew the ruins of the City Hall.
11 http://remdoc.huygens.knaw.nl/#/document/remdoc/
The City Hall was at the centre of an informational space in which Rembrandt and his
e4657. See Fig. 2.6. contemporaries lived and worked. In one way or another, every burgher was involved in
12 The Orphan Chamber (Weeskamer) controlled archiving people, trade, governance, and money, and Rembrandt must have shared their
the management of the estates of minor orphans
(see 6.2.5). The Chamber of Insolvent Estates (Desolate
archival consciousness, though probably in the way he painted, with lossigheydt (looseness
Boedelkamer) was the equivalent to a bankruptcy or nonchalance).13
court (see 6.3.1). On the Bank of Exchange see 8.4.1.
13 Ernst van de Wetering, Rembrandt. The painter at
work (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press,
g
1997), pp. 162, 273. Rembrandt was not directly involved in Archiving the Polder (chapter 5). However, several
14 Han van Zwet, Lofwaerdighe dijckagies en misera­­­bele of his clients were investing their surplus in capital in the big reclamation projects in
polders. Een financiële analyse van landaanwinnings­
projecten in Hollands Noorderkwartier, 1597-1643
Noord-Holland at the time. Elias Trip owned 58 hectare in the Schermer polder (1635);
(Hilversum: Verloren, 2009). Rembrandt portrayed his daughter around 1639 and Elias’ brother in 1661.14 In 1643 the
 | |
PAGE CHAPTER ARCHIVING PEOPLE
Starnmeer was drained by a consortium of Amsterdam merchants including Willem van
11a Prologue: Rembrandt’s Archives
Ruytenburgh, one of the two protagonists of Rembrandt’s ‘The militia company of captain
Frans Banning Cocq and lieutenant Willem van Ruytenburgh’, also known as ‘The Night
Watch’ (1642).

g
Rembrandt was involved in Archiving Property (chapter 6) as well. He bought a plot of land
near Leiden in 1631 and sold it in 1640.15 He may have kept a copy of his mother’s last will as
evidence of the obligation of his brother Adriaen to recompense his siblings for their share in
the estate. He certainly would have had a copy of the notarial deed of the final settlement of his
mother’s estate.16

A copy of the last will of Rembrandt and Saskia (known to us from the notary’s archives17)
would have been kept among Rembrandt’s records. The bulk of the property records would
have consisted of the records about Rembrandt’s house on St. Antonies Breestraat, bought in
15 http://remdoc.huygens.knaw.nl/#/document/remdoc/
1639. A copy of the notarial deed of purchase must have been among Rembrandt’s records. In
e4391; http://remdoc.huygens.knaw.nl/#/document/ 1658, when the house was sold, an explicit reference was made to the old deeds (see 6.2.3).
remdoc/e4473.
There are some 20 more documents concerning Rembrandt’s house which are preserved in
16 http://remdoc.huygens.knaw.nl/#/document/remdoc/
e4487; http://remdoc.huygens.knaw.nl/#/document/
notarial and other archives. Several of these have to do with the fact that Rembrandt, when he
remdoc/e4412. bought the house, paid only a quarter of the price and remained indebted to the seller for
17 http://remdoc.huygens.knaw.nl/#/document/remdoc/ several years.
e4425;
18 http://remdoc.huygens.knaw.nl/#/document/remdoc/
e4428; http://remdoc.huygens.knaw.nl/#/document/
g
remdoc/e4429; http://remdoc.huygens.knaw.nl/#/ Archiving Trade and Industry (chapter 7) consisted, for Rembrandt, in recording the
document/remdoc/e4458; http://remdoc.huygens.knaw.
nl/#/document/remdoc/e4459; http://remdoc.huygens.
commissions for portraits and other paintings he obtained, and accounting for receipts and
knaw.nl/#/document/remdoc/e4460; expenses for his paintings. The only original letters preserved are the seven letters Rembrandt
http://remdoc.huygens.knaw.nl/#/document/remdoc/
e4461;
wrote to the Stadholder’s secretary, Sir Constantijn Huygens, about the commissions of
http://remdoc.huygens.knaw.nl/#/document/remdoc/ paintings by the Stadholder.18 One of these letters (now in the British Library) shows
e4462.
Rembrandt’s parsimony, for he used a piece of old paper which bears marks of having been
19 According to the Times’ report of the sale of the
Donnadieu collection of autographs in 1851: Times 2
folded around a copper plate before.19 All seven letters are now dispersed over five repositories
August 1851, p. 5. in Europe and the United States.

| |
PAGE CHAPTER ARCHIVING PEOPLE

11b Prologue: Rembrandt’s Archives

Fig. III. Letter from Rembrandt to Sir

Constantijn Huygens, 12 January 1639.
Koninklijke Verzamelingen, archief
Constantijn Huygens, inv. nr. G1-18.
 | |
PAGE CHAPTER ARCHIVING PEOPLE
These letters mainly discuss the price of the paintings delivered to the Stadholder. We
12a Prologue: Rembrandt’s Archives
know of more cases where the price of a painting by Rembrandt led to a dispute with a
customer. One concerned a portrait of Andries de Graeff of which arbitrators determined
in 1642 that the latter had to pay Rembrandt 500 guilders.20

In 1658 Rembrandt’s friend and patron Jan Six presented a claim (and Rembrandt a
counterclaim) based on two deeds. One by the painter agreeing to sell Six a portrait of
Saskia, and the second by Six, pertaining to two paintings, one of Simeon and the other of
‘The Sermon of John’.21 Six produced the former, whereas Rembrandt stated that he had
mislaid his deed—a rare glimpse into Rembrandt’s way of managing his records!

Several transactions were carried out only orally. An example from the Rembrandt
documents is the sale of Rubens’s painting ‘Hero and Leander’.22 Rembrandt bought it in
1637 and sold it some years later to art dealer Lodewijck van Ludick. In 1659 Lodewijck
testified to a notary as to having bought the painting ‘in about 1644, from Rembrant van
Rijn, without recalling the exact date’, for ‘the sum of about 530 guilders in cash’. It is
interesting to note that, apparently, Lodewijck van Ludick had neither a receipt nor
another record of the sale, but that he had to rely on his memory. Did Rembrandt also rely
on memory?
20 http://remdoc.huygens.knaw.nl/#/document/remdoc/
e12837.
We catch sight of the way Rembrandt jotted down some of his financial data on the back
21 http://remdoc.huygens.knaw.nl/#/document/remdoc/
e12788 .
of a painting or engraving, as he did on the back of the drawing ‘Susanna at the Bath’ where
22 http://remdoc.huygens.knaw.nl/#/document/remdoc/
he noted the sale of some of his pupils’ works:23
e4443; http://remdoc.huygens.knaw.nl/#/document/
remdoc/e12713.
[Sold] his standard bearer [for] 15 guilders
23 http://remdoc.huygens.knaw.nl/#/document/remdoc/
e13493.
Sold a ‘Flora’ 4. 6.-
24 http://remdoc.huygens.knaw.nl/#/document/remdoc/
Sold a work of Ferdinand [Bol] and another of his
e13493. Rembrandt scribbled a list of his prints, The ‘Abraham’ and ‘Flora’
apparently drawn up in connection with the forced
sale of his art in 1657-1658: http://remdoc.huygens.
Sold Leendert [van Beyeren’s/van der Cooghen’s] ‘Flora’ 5.-.- 24
knaw.nl/#/document/remdoc/e14738.

| |
PAGE CHAPTER ARCHIVING PEOPLE
Rembrandt would have kept some form of administration about his pupils. This is
12b Prologue: Rembrandt’s Archives
demonstrated by six receipts Rembrandt wrote in 1630 and 1631 for the instruction in the
art of painting he gave to Isaack de Jouderville.25 The receipts have been preserved in the
archives of the Orphan Chamber in Leiden. Rembrandt had many more pupils—40 to
50—but Isaack is the only one known from records written and signed by Rembrandt
25 http://remdoc.huygens.knaw.nl/#/document/remdoc/
himself.
e1654.
26 Paul Crenshaw, Rembrandt’s bankruptcy. The artist, The Anglo-Dutch war of 1652-1654 caused a decline in the economic situation of the
his patrons, and the art market in seventeenth-century
Netherlands (Cambridge: Cambridge University
country. Rembrandt was also affected, though other causes of his distress were lavish
Press, 2006); Machiel Bosman, Rembrandt’s plan. De spending on his collection of rare objects and works of art, and financial mismanagement.
ware geschiedenis van zijn faillissement (Amsterdam:
Athenaeum, 2019).
In 1655 he therefore organized an auction of paintings and valuables, but the proceeds
27 National Archives, Hoge Raad van Holland en Zeeland
were small. A year later he filed for cessio bonorum (cession of estate).26 This meant the
(3.03.02), inv. nr. 60, 8 August 1656, available on surrender of his estate as payment for all his debts and accepting full control by the
http://remdoc.huygens.knaw.nl/#/document/remdoc/
e4704; http://remdoc.huygens.knaw.nl/#/document/
Amsterdam Chamber of Insolvent Estates (Desolate Boedelkamer).
remdoc/e12732.
28 On 18 May 1656 Rembrandt had given power of The petition for cessio bonorum (see 11.1.1 and Fig. 11.5) was discovered as late as 1913
attorney to the Amsterdam procureur Arnout
Vingboons, http://remdoc.huygens.knaw.nl/#/
in the archives of the Supreme Council (Hoge Raad) at the National Archives, among the
document/remdoc/e4701. The petition for cessio thousands of comparable requests.27 The petition—most likely written by an Amsterdam
bonorum is not by the hand of Vingboons (see Amster­
dam City Archives, Dolhuis (342), inv. 926), but could
procureur (attorney dealing with court formalities), but signed by a solicitor at the
have been written by a clerk under his supervision. Supreme Council28—states as justification that Rembrandt’s insolvency is due ‘to losses
29 A.Th. van Deursen, ‘Rembrandt en zijn tijd. Het leven suffered in business, as well as damages and losses at sea’. This argument has puzzled many
van een Amsterdamse burgerman’, in Rembrandt.
De meester & zijn werkplaats, ed. Christopher Brown,
authors. Some of them suggest that this was just a standard formula, without particular
Jan Kelch, and Pieter van Thiel (Amsterdam/Zwolle: meaning.29 This suggestion must, however, be rejected. Reading hundreds of these
Rijksmuseum/Waanders, 1991), p. 45; see Crenshaw,
Rembrandt’s bankruptcy, p. 38.
petitions for cessio bonorum, one discovers that most of them use the standard formula
30 I used the second edition: W. van Alphen, Nieuw
taken from The Parrot, a famous legal formulary.30 The particular standard formula is that
verbeterde en vermeerderde papegay, ofte Formulier- the insolvency is due ‘to misfortune and damages suffered’. This formula may be
boeck van alderhande requestē, mandamenten,
conclusien &c, ghelijck die ghebruyckt ende
embellished and expanded, but only in a very few cases one does read something
gepractiseert werden voor de respectieve hoven van really specific for a particular applicant. Losses at sea are mentioned only three times
Iustitie in Hollandt .. (s Graven-Hage: Iohannes
Verhoeve, 1649). Later editions appeared in 1658,
in the fifty-odd petitions granted in 1656. This leads me to the conclusion that the
1668, 1682 and 1740. formula of Rembrandt’s petition was chosen intentionally, a conclusion I could not have
 | |
PAGE CHAPTER ARCHIVING PEOPLE
reached without going beyond the single document by browsing the Supreme Council’s
13a Prologue: Rembrandt’s Archives
archives.31

31 Strikingly, the exact formula of Rembrandt’s petition But why did Rembrandt use this argument? There is no evidence of Rembrandt being
was used one month earlier in the petition from a
Sephardic merchant in Amsterdam Aaron Mendes.
engaged in shipping or commercial activity other than selling and buying paintings and
One might think of Aaron and Rembrandt employing antiquities. If, as is sometimes suggested, ‘damages and losses at sea’ refers to the aftermath
the same procureur, who—since the handwriting
is different—may have used two clerks; National
of the Anglo-Dutch war, we would have found many more references among the
Archives, Hoge Raad van Holland en Zeeland petitions.32 Montias supposes that Rembrandt participated in shipping ventures of the
(3.03.02), inv. nr. 60, 4 June 1656. Rembrandt may
have known Aaron. This Aaron Mendes is probably
merchant and art dealer Marten van den Broeck.33 Dudok van Heel suggests that the
the merchant Aaron Mendes who had his banns read formula refers to Rembrandt losing works of arts shipped overseas.34 We will probably
on 16 August 1656 while living in Verversstraat, 200
meters from Rembrandt’s house.
never know.
32 In 1655 a few specific references are made to the
Anglo-Dutch war and a few references to losses at sea Rembrandt’s ‘insolvency generated a slew of documents’, as one of his biographers recently
generally.
wrote.35 Nearly all of them are in the archives of the Chamber of Insolvent Estates kept at
33 John M. Montias, Art at auction in 17th century
Amsterdam (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University
the Amsterdam City Archives. In Archiving Property (chapter 6), section 6.4 is devoted to
Press, 2002), pp. 180-87. the archiving of the Chamber.
34 S.A.C. Dudok van Heel, ‘Rembrandt van Rijn
(1606-1669). Een veranderend schildersportret’, in
Rembrandt. De meester & zijn werkplaats, ed.
g
Christopher Brown, Jan Kelch and Pieter van Thiel Archiving Monies (chapter 8) was essential, if only because Rembrandt lent money (for
(Amsterdam/Zwolle: Rijksmuseum/Waanders, 1991),
p. 60.
example to his employer Hendrick Uylenburch)36, participated in an investment plan
35 Gary Schwartz, Rembrandt’s universe. His art, his life,
(tontine)37 and borrowed money for which he generated IOU’s and promissory notes
his world (London: Thames & Hudson, 2006), p. 134. made up before the magistrate or a notary. Rembrandt would have kept the
See http://remdoc.huygens.knaw.nl/#/document/
remdoc/e4393.
correspondence with his creditors and some account to keep track of his loans and
36 http://remdoc.huygens.knaw.nl/#/document/remdoc/
payments. Rembrandt was, of course, subjected to taxation. In fact, the first government
e4393. record mentioning Rembrandt is the census for assessing the poll tax (hoofdgeld) in Leiden
37 http://remdoc.huygens.knaw.nl/#/document/remdoc/ in 1622, which lists Rembrandt, his siblings, and his parents.38 Rembrandt had to pay taxes
e4392.
on the inheritance of his father. The city of Leiden assessed the tax, but asked Amsterdam
38 http://remdoc.huygens.knaw.nl/#/document/remdoc/
e4381.
to enter the debt in its tax roll.39
39 http://remdoc.huygens.knaw.nl/#/document/remdoc/
e4554.

g
| |
PAGE CHAPTER ARCHIVING PEOPLE

13b Prologue: Rembrandt’s Archives

Rembrandt was a litigious man, and much of his archives must have been the result of his
litigation (chapter 9). For example, Rembrandt would have kept records of his case before
the Court of Friesland concerning the estate of his in-laws, and of his libel case against
Mayke and Albertus van Loo.40 More documents would have been kept by Rembrandt with
regard to his dispute with his mistress Geertje Dircx. When their affair ended in 1649,
Geertje sued Rembrandt either to marry her or to pay her an alimony.41 Her case before the
commissioners of matrimonial affairs was duly registered in the commissioners’ book of
quarrels (krakeel boek). Rembrandt was sentenced to pay Geertje 200 guilders annually. The
following year Rembrandt managed to have Geertje locked up in the women’s house of
correction in Gouda. That sordid affair, lasting at least seven years, was the origin of various
documents, many of which must have been in Rembrandt’s archives. Of the notarial deeds
naming Rembrandt, many were instruments for non-judicial settlement of a legal dispute,
others were wills, conveyances, or contracts.

g
On his way through Amsterdam Rembrandt would have often passed the East India House,
the seat of the United East India Company (VOC), which was only a short distance from his
home (chapter 10). Rembrandt profited from the goods brought in by the ships: among his
possessions were some Asian ceramics, an Indian gun and even the costumes for an Indian
man and woman. He will doubtlessly have had more Indian textiles. From India also came
the drawings of Mughal rulers and noblemen that inspired Rembrandt for his Mughal
paintings. And there was the elephant, a present for Prince Frederick Henry from the VOC,
that Rembrandt drew in 1637. A year after Rembrandt’s death his daughter Cornelia
married and departed with her husband to Batavia (Jakarta), where she died in 1684.

40 http://remdoc.huygens.knaw.nl/#/document/remdoc/ g
e4448; http://remdoc.huygens.knaw.nl/#/document/
remdoc/e13700.
We have already seen some of Rembrandt’s Archiving Technologies (chapter 11): paper,
41 http://remdoc.huygens.knaw.nl/#/document/remdoc/
pen, and ink (his inventory mentions a small marble ink stand). For his recordkeeping
e4578. Rembrandt may have used the same medium he used for his drawings: a reusable tablet
 | |
PAGE CHAPTER ARCHIVING PEOPLE
(tafelet), which was a booklet of erasable sheets on which one wrote with a metal stylus.42
14a Prologue: Rembrandt’s Archives
Ernst van de Wetering—the expert on Rembrandt’s art—has shown that Rembrandt used
these erasable supports for drawings, just as merchants and other people in his time used
these tafelettes for scribbling notes, drafting letters, or making calculations.43 In a Dutch
comedy of 1617 the protagonists talk about a contested sum of money44:

Ritsert Where is the specification?

Lecker I have it in my taf(e)let.
Ritsert Let me read it.
Lecker As soon as I come home, I will make a fair copy of it.
Ritsert I have other things to do, show it to me, why this shilly-shallying?
Lecker I do not have the tafelet in my pocket any more.

Rembrandt may have used tafelettes not only for his drawings but also for other ephemeral
uses like drafting accounts or letters.

42 Peter Stallybrass, Roger Chartier, J. Franklin Mowery

and Heather Wolfe, ‘Hamlet’s tables and the techno­
We do not know which technologies Rembrandt used for storing and retrieving his
logies of writing in Renaissance England’, Shakespeare records. As I will show in chapter 11, people in the 17th century usually stored their
Quarterly 55 (2004): 379-419; Roger Chartier,
Inscription and erasure (Philadelphia: University of
documents in boxes, chests, and cupboards. The extensive inventory of Rembrandt’s estate
Pennsylvania Press, 2007), pp. 1-12; Ann Blair and (25-26 July 1656) (see 6.2.4) does not mention any specific archival container, and lists ‘in
Peter Stallybrass, ‘Mediating information 1450-1800,’
in This is Enlightenment, ed. Clifford Siskin and
the small office’ only ten paintings by Rembrandt and a bedstead.45
William B. Warner (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2010), pp. 139-63.
g
43 Van de Wetering, Rembrandt. The painter at work,
pp. XI, 46-73.
Why have so very few of Rembrandt’s records survived (incidentally a question which can
44 P.C. Hooft, Gedichten. Vol. 2, ed. P. Leendertz and
be raised for many Dutch artists in the Golden Age)? There is no single answer. Let me first
F.A. Stoett (Amsterdam: P.N. van Kampen & Zoon, introduce the concept of ‘counter-archivalization’: the conscious or unconscious choice
1900), pp. 345-46.
not to record, not to put things on paper (see the General Introduction). Not every record
45 http://remdoc.huygens.knaw.nl/#/document/remdoc/
e12713.
is meant to exist much longer than the transaction it attests, as is the case today.
46 Van de Wetering, Rembrandt. The painter at work,
Rembrandt’s records may have shared the fate of many of his drawings which disappeared
p. 69. in what Ernst van de Wetering called ‘a black hole in art history’.46 Not only his tafelettes,

| |
PAGE CHAPTER ARCHIVING PEOPLE
but also records on other media may have been regarded as just transitory. Sometime after
14b Prologue: Rembrandt’s Archives
the loan was repaid, the sale done, or the commissioned portrait delivered, the receipt or
the invoice may have been thrown away, recycled, or given away. I mentioned the deed of
purchase of Rembrandt’s house which was kept as long as he owned the house, but
transferred when the house was sold to a new owner. Not every paper will be kept forever:
archival history is largely a history of destruction and neglect. ‘We know’, said Jacques
47 Jacques Derrida, ‘Archive fever. A seminar..,’ in Derrida, ‘that something in us, so to speak, something in the psychic apparatus, is driven to
Refiguring the archive, ed. Carolyn Hamilton et al.
(Dordrecht/Boston/London: Kluwer, 2002), p. 44. On
destroy the trace without any reminder. And that’s where the archive fever comes from.’47
the anarchiving destruction drive see Jacques Derrida,
Archive fever, transl. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago and
London: University of Chicago Press, 1996), pp. 10-12,
Archive fever may have led Rembrandt himself or his descendants to destroy the
19, 94. archives.48 Rembrandt’s financial records may have ended at the Chamber of Insolvent
48 Titia (1669-1715), the daughter of Titus, Rembrandt’s Estates. The Chamber’s commissioners were required to inventory and seize all registers
son, married François van Bijler (1666-1728). They had
no children. Rembrandt’s daughter Cornelia (1654-84)
and papers of the bankrupt.49 If this latter measure was indeed taken, it may explain the
married the painter Cornelis Suijthof, with whom she absence of any mention of records in the extensive inventory of Rembrandt’s estate.
had two sons, born in Batavia: Rembrandt Suijthof, b.
1673 and Hendric Suijthof, b. 1678. After the Suijthoffs
Sometimes the records of a bankrupt person remained at the Chamber; most were
had died, Rembrandt’s next of kin was his cousin destroyed at some stage.50 But it remains speculation: it is not certain whether or not
Cornelia, from whom all currently living posterity of
Rembrandt trace their descent. From the inventory
Rembrandt’s records were seized by the Chamber.
made after Rembrandt’s death http://remdoc.huygens.
knaw.nl/#/document/remdoc/e13471 were excluded
the contents of three rooms, among them were
What is certain is that only very few of the records created or received by Rembrandt
paintings and drawings. These rooms, which might dating either before or after his bankruptcy have been preserved. Recently Paul Crenshaw
have contained documents as well, were sealed by the
notary at the request of Rembrandt’s heirs.
wrote that ‘Rembrandt was not particularly organized or pristine in anything that he did.’51
49 Van Alphen, Papegay, p. 164. See also Van Deursen,
That may also apply to his recordkeeping. But nevertheless we may infer from the
‘Rembrandt en zijn tijd’, p. 49. contextual history of Rembrandt’s recordkeeping that he had an archival consciousness.
50 Amsterdam City Archives , Desolate Boedelkamer
(5072), inv. nr. 44 lists the contents of 26 chests
with papers of estates. Several seized records are
in the collection merchants’ books (5060). See
W.F.H. Oldewelt, Amsterdamsche archiefvondsten
(Amsterdam: De Bussy, 1942), pp. 57-66.
51 Crenshaw, Rembrandt’s bankruptcy, p. 74.
 | 0 |
PAGE CHAPTER ARCHIVING PEOPLE

15a

A SOCIAL HISTORY OF
DUTCH ARCHIVES General Introduction

Reading
the Archives
1

1 To a large extent this introduction builds upon three

of my papers:
• ‘Prolegomena to a social history of Dutch archives’,
—
in A usable collection. Essays in honour of Jaap
Kloosterman on collecting social history, ed. Aad
Blok, Jan Lucassen, and Huub Sanders (Amsterdam:
Amsterdam University Press, 2014), pp. 40-55,
https://web.archive.org/web/20190530101148/ On the 12th of June 1820 the burgomaster of Maastricht takes up
http://www.oapen.org/search?identifier=496214,
archived 31 May 2019;
pen and paper to write a warrant.Before him is Josephine Albert,
• ‘Foreword’, in Archives & information in the early who declares that the baby she has in her arms was delivered the
modern world, ed. Liesbeth Corens, Kate Peters, and
Alexandra Walsham (Oxford: Oxford University
night before by an unknown person to Lenculenstraat foundling
Press, 2018), pp. xv-xviii; hospital of which she is the matron. As dictated by the civil code,
• ‘A Dualidade do arquivar’, in Information and
memory, ed. Ricardo Pimenta, transl. Janaynne
the burgomaster describes the clothes of the two-month-old girl
Carvalho do Amaral (Rio de Janeiro: Instituto scrupulously. In the deed, he also includes the little poem, written
Brasileiro de Informação em Ciência e Tecnologia)
(forthcoming). on a small piece of paper that was attached to the foundling’s
Also, I included a paragraph from my ‘Looking clothes. He attaches this unsightly paper to the deed. In case the
through the record into the rose garden’, Arkhiyyon.
Reader in archives studies and documentation. Israel father or mother report themselves it may serve as evidence. The
Archives Association [Festschrift Paul Alsberg] 10-11
(1999): xxvii-xlii. In that essay, I used the concept
half of a playing card, the half of a coin, or other such tokens were
of the ‘archiver’ for the first time. also often used for this purpose. The poem is somewhat clumsy:

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Here I lie, very helpless

And Marianna is my name
My father does not want me
And my mother is dead
The only thing I can do is
pray to God for my daily bread.2

Fig. 0.1 Warrant concerning the foundling

Maria Dicht, 12 June 1820. Regional Historical
Centre Limburg, Burgerlijke stand Maastricht
(12.059), inv. nr. 23, akte 479.

2 Regional Historical Centre Limburg, Burgerlijke

stand Maastricht (12.059), inv. nr. 23, akte 479 and
Provinciaal Tehuis voor vondelingen (20.129A), inv. nr.
7398; J.H.J. Gulikers and M.K.J. Smeets, ‘Vondelingen
te Maastricht 1814-1823’, in Huldeblijk. Bundel
opstellen aangeboden aan de genealoog Jan J.M.H.
Verzijl bij gelegenheid van zijn zeventigste verjaardag
op 25 maart 1967 (Roermond: Stichting Instituut voor
Genealogie en Streekgeschiedenis, 1967), pp. 47-96;
Jacques Klöters, Voorwaarts leven, achterwaarts
begrijpen. Mijn journaal (Amsterdam: Singel
Uitgeverijen, 2016).
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The foundling has to be given a surname and, with an eye to the
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poem, Miss Albert proposes: Maria Anna Dicht (Dutch for poem).
If one now searches for this child, it becomes almost immediately
clear that the little girl was a daughter of 34-year-old Anna Catha­
­rina Simons and a gunner from the Maastricht garrison and that
she was named after her grandmother Maria Anna Woolhert.
The mother died on the 11th of June 1820 and on the same day the
widower Pieter Ketter abandons this child born out of wedlock.
A month later she was to die, as we can see from the foundling
hos­pi­­­
tal register and the death certificate drawn up by the
burgomaster.

Archivers and Archiving

The writer of the note left on Maria started a chain of ‘archivers’: the matron of the
foundling hospital, the burgomaster, and all those people who read, indexed, archived,
and preserved the record or exhibited it, or used it in their historical research and
published the case. And the foundling herself and her anonymous parents? Record
3 See my ‘Archives as spaces of memory’, Journal of the subjects are the people named in registers and other records. They do not merely leave
Society of Archivists 29 (2008): 14-15. See also Chris
Hurley, ‘Parallel provenance: (1) What if anything is
traces in their interaction with archiving systems: they are really co-creators because they
archival description?’, Archives and manuscripts 33 provide input in and interact with these systems.3
(2005): 110-45; Sue McKemmish, ‘Evidence of me
… in a digital world’, in I, digital. Personal collections
in the digital era, ed. Christopher A. Lee (Chicago: In all archives we encounter archiving people: the record subjects, authors, clerks,
Society of American Archivists, 2011), pp. 115-48;
Sue McKemmish and Michael Piggott, ‘Toward the
registrars, antiquarians, record managers, keepers, systematizers, genealogists, and other
archival multiverse. Challenging the binary opposition users, and, finally, archivists. Up to the 20th century they were predominantly men,
of the personal and corporate archive in modern
archival theory and practice’, Archivaria 76 (2013):
although we encounter here and there women as archiver; in the following chapters
111-44. matron Josephine Albert will be joined by other women.

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Archiving by people, archiving of people, and archiving for people. Each of the archiving
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people acts in his or her own turn in cultural practices of creation, classification, filing,
arrangement, appraisal, use and abuse, selection, and destruction of archives. Each
archiver participates in the recursive production and mediation of the archive (I use the
term ‘the archive’ both for the epistemological site and as a synonym for archives).
The mediation involves not only definition, selection, organization, interpretation,
representation, and presentation, but also concealment, displacement, and destruction.4

Within the archival profession, many distinguish between records (created and used in the
course of business and kept as long as that business requires) and archives (records to be
kept beyond their primary purpose). Many more, however, understand that this
distinction has little relevance, especially in the digital age. Recorded information can be
regarded as archival documents from the very beginning (in several languages the term
archival document includes what elsewhere is set apart as current records) as the sediment
of a specific activity or transaction. Archives are transactional and process-bound
information. Consequently, we do not consider the record or document merely on its own,
but within the context of the work process which created the document, and which gives
each record its specific meaning within that context.

Archiving in the broad sense as used in this book, starts with the decision to use docu­
4 Displaced archives, ed. James Lowry (London/New
ments for a transaction. This is followed by what archival scholar Peter Horsman calls
York: Routledge, 2017). documenting: making and using documents in a business process. According to Horsman,
5 Peter Horsman, Abuysen ende desordiën. documenting is followed by archiving: setting documents aside for possible future
Archiefvorming en archivering in Dordrecht 1200-1920
(’s-Gravenhage: Stichting archiefpublicaties, 2011),
reference.5 Unlike Horsman, I do not consider documenting as a phase separate from
pp. 230-31; Peter Horsman and Eric Ketelaar, ‘Archival archiving but as embedded in archiving. ‘Recordkeeping’ would be the Australian term,
history’, in Encyclopedia of archival science, ed.
Luciana Duranti and Patricia C. Franks (London etc.:
where ‘documentation of a transaction is archival from the time the record is created and
Rowman & Littlefield, 2015), pp. 53-58. the archival document retains evidential value for as long as it is in existence.’6
6 Sue McKemmish and Frank Upward, ‘The archival
document. A submission to the inquiry into Australia
as an information society’, Archives and manuscripts
Archiving includes creating and linking a document to a transaction and to the other
19 (1991): 19-20. documents of that transaction by some form of physical or virtual filing. The ‘archival
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bond’, or the interrelatedness between the records created and received in the course of a
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particular transaction, is an essential characteristic of archives. The poem attached to
foundling Maria’s body only makes sense in the context of the record written by the
burgomaster (unfortunately, the website of the Regional-historical Centre Limburg in
Maastricht presents the poem as a stand-alone document).7 Suppose that all attachments
to foundlings’ records would have been removed: they might have become collectable
items in a museum. Because the internal logic of such a collection is determined by the
world-view of the collector and not by the recordkeeping process, the original meaning of
the decontextualized attachments would be lost.

An archival document is recreated and transformed throughout the continuum of

recordkeeping, getting another meaning time and again.8 One document may exist in
various states or versions: the rough draft, the fair copy, the copy sent to the addressee, the
published version, and the final document once again taken from the file, annotated and
used in a subsequent transaction. Archive formation happens through interactions,
interventions, interrogations, and interpretations by creators, users, archivists; these are
activations which co-determine the archive’s meaning. The foundling’s record was created
by the burgomaster in a work process regulated by legal and social norms, as evidence to
be used in the future. But after some time, the primary evidential quality of a record fades
away or expires. Some records then get a new meaning as a historical source. Not one, but
various meanings.9 The foundling’s record got a new meaning when in the 1960s a
7 https://web.archive.org/web/20190530101234/
genealogist and an archivist discovered that in Maastricht between 1819 and 1822 many
https://www.rhcl.nl/nl/tentoonstellings-paginas/ babies were declared foundling only for the mother to benefit from financial support by the
schatkamer/, archived 31 May 2019.
government. This discovery changed the meaning of the record. This implies that the
8 Randolph Head, Making archives in early modern
Europe. Proof, information and political recordkeeping,
archive is not static, but that it is a dynamic process, even when it is seemingly frozen in
1400-1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, time. That process is managed by individuals, businesses, churches, and private and public
2019), p. 26 borrows the terms ‘de-semiosis’ and ‘re-
semiosis’ from the mediaevalist Thomas Hildbrand,
agencies in their social and cultural contexts. Through time these contexts are always being
who draws on the sociologist Niklaus Luhmann. constructed and thus ever changing.
9 Eric Ketelaar, ‘Tacit narratives. The meanings of
archives’, Archival science 1 (2001): 131-41; Eric
Ketelaar, ‘Cultivating archives’, Archival science 12
In every stage what is documented/archived and what is left out, and how the information
(2012): 19-33. is recorded, is influenced by seemingly innocent practices of classification, filing,

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registering, and, more importantly, by archivalization. In 1998 I proposed that term for the
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conscious or unconscious choice (determined by social and cultural factors) to consider
something worth documenting and archiving.10 These factors, in turn, are controlled by
different societal powers: institutions like the State, business (that also controls the
technologies of archiving), the Church, the press, but also by ideologies and socialized
norms based on, amongst others, class, gender, or race. The archive reflects realities as
perceived or constructed by the archivers. The foundling’s record declared that the parents
10 Eric Ketelaar, ‘Archivalisation and archiving’, Archives
of Maria were unknown, but from other archival sources we know that the warden at the
and manuscripts 27 (1999): 54-61. foundling hospital and the burgomaster knew exactly who the mother and father of the
11 Joseph Morsel, ‘Du texte aux archives. Le problème child were. The record was a true record, with a constructed (some may say: false) content.
de la source’, Bulletin du centre d’études médiévales
d’Auxerre, special issue nr. 2 (2008), https://web.
The reality we record, and the way in which we record, are determined by socio-cultural
archive.org/web/20190530101355/https://journals. factors. Each influences the other. The life and death of foundling Maria are not fully
openedition.org/cem/4132, archived 31 May 2019.
See Eric Ketelaar, ‘Archives, memories and identities’,
recoverable from the records because not everything was recorded: facts like who cared
in Archives and recordkeeping. Theory into practice, ed. for the baby after her mother’s death, what happened to her father, where was she during
Caroline Brown (London: Facet, 2014), pp. 131-70.
the month between her registration as a foundling and her death (she did not die at the
12 Judith Pollmann, Memory in early modern Europe,
1500-1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017),
hospital but in a house on Hoenderstraat).
ch. 1; Markus Friedrich, ‘Epilogue. Archives and
archiving across cultures—towards a matrix of
analysis’, in Manuscripts and archives. Comparative
Archiving is a social practice, entailing a social logic.11 That logic is conditioned by what
views on record-keeping, ed. Alessandro Bausi, Judith Pollmann calls the scripts available within a family, social group, or community;
Christian Brockmann, Michael Friedrich, and Sabine
Kienitz (Berlin/Boston: Walter de Gruyter, 2018),
these scripts are included in Markus Friedrich’s ‘archival ideologies’.12 Every community is
pp. 433-34. Friedrich adapted the term from ‘graphic a ‘community of memory’ embedded in its past and, consequently, cultivating specific
ideologies’ as identified by Matthew Hull: ‘sets of
conceptions about graphic artifacts held by their
genres (patterns of communication that conform to community norms13) through which
users, including about what material qualities of an that past is mediated. In that mediation records from the past are joined with records of
artefact are to count as signs, what sorts of agents
are (or should be) involved in them, and what the
the present, defining the community’s identity.
roles of human intentions and material causation are.’
Matthew S. Hull, Government of paper.
The materiality of bureaucracy in urban Pakistan
Moreover, the archiving by a community extends beyond its boundaries, involving
(Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: University of addressees, senders, and all other parties who are participating in the intertextual genre
California Press,2012), p. 14.
system. This concept was introduced by Charles Bazerman, who wrote that a genre system
13 Gillian Oliver and Wendy M. Duff, ‘Genre studies and
archives. Introduction to the special issue’, Archival
is a ‘complex web of interrelated genres, where each participant makes a recognizable act
science 12 (2012): 373. or move in some recognizable genre, which then may be followed by a certain range of
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appropriate generic responses by others’.14 Bazerman demonstrated the concept in an
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General Introduction: Reading
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analysis of the processes of applying for and granting a patent, which bear a striking
resemblance to various processes in Dutch archival history as well. Patents (octrooien)
for reclamation endeavours (see 5.3), or for establishing a mill (7.6) are genre systems in
which various participants, each within his or her own set of genres, are acting together.
Genres provide social codes of behaviour15 and can initiate actions: people know how to
respond to a particular genre. An application for a patent triggers a specific social action
involving different participants and genres, a petition for a writ of summons triggers a
sequence of genres created and used by lawyers, judges, and parties directly or indirectly
involved in the litigation (9.1). Conceptualizing recordkeeping systems as genre systems
brings ‘the social’ embedded in archiving to the foreground, emphasizes what Bazerman
calls the ‘multivocality’ of the text and highlights the enabling (and constraining) power
of archives and archiving.

Revisiting of archival concepts by postmodernist scholars (mainly, but not exclusively,

since Derrida’s Archive Fever) has led to a shift in archivistics from the actual archival
document to its functional process or context of creation; from the archive as a product to
archive as a process; from the physical artefact to the context in which that artefact is
created. This new perspective (or, maybe, paradigm) proved to be essential in coping with
digital-born and digitized archives. A document does not convey anything if we do not
know in what context it was written, sent, or received. In the world of paper, the context
can often be determined by the notes and stamps (registration codes) on a document, by
other documents from the same file, and by its place in the file. For digital archives to be
complete, the computer programme must ensure that the context data belonging to a
document are made at all and then saved. From these context data the connection must be
apparent between the different documents and between the documents and their use in
14 Charles Bazerman, ‘Systems of genres and the
enactment of social intentions’, in Genre and the new
the work process. If that connection is not clear we create information, but we do not form
rhetoric, ed. Aviva Freedman and Peter Medway records with an archival bond.
(London: Taylor & Francis, 1994), p. 97.
15 Fiorella Foscarini, ‘Diplomatics and genre theory
as complementary approaches’, Archival science 12
This contextual approach is a powerful tool for any user to find, to use, and to interpret his
(2012): 401. or her sources properly. But this presupposes that the user is enabled by the archivist to

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answer the question: how does the original purpose of the record affect what may be done
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General Introduction: Reading
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with it? One must look beyond the record to the record’s contextual history, to discover the
human being that acted as an archiver. It is looking for what Terry Cook named the
‘creative act or authoring intent or functional context behind the record’.16 One might call
that a post-modernist approach of the so-called objectivity or neutrality of the record. But
it is, in fact, the approach of traditional diplomatics, bringing one as close as possible to the
writer of the document, close to his or her norms and beliefs.

The trend in archivistics to look beyond the archive-as-product to the archive-as-process

coincided with the move in other disciplines from archives-as-sources to archives-as-
subject, a move which anthropologist Ann Stoler was the first to call ‘the archival turn’.17
She shifted her attention from archives as sites of knowledge retrieval to archives as sites of
knowledge production. Her move from extraction from the archive to an ethnography of
the archive has been followed in research of documentary practices by anthropologists,
psychologists, sociologists, and scholars of literary and media studies. They quite often
bemuse the professional archivist whenever they stretch the concept of the archive(s)
beyond what is customary in archival practice. However, the question is not ‘what is an
archive’, but: how does a particular individual or group at a particular time and place
perceive and understand an archive? Since an archival document can be in any medium,
form, or format, why might not landscapes, oral tradition, and rituals qualify as archives?
Some may, others may not. An archival document, in whatever form, is a persistent
representation of activities and transactions. That representation is accessible through its
‘contextual envelope’ constituted by the uniqueness of the processes and functions that
produced records and by the context of other documents created by the same activity over
16 Terry Cook, ‘What is past is prologue. A history of time.
archival ideas since 1898, and the future paradigm
shift’, Archivaria 43 (1997): 48.
17 Eric Ketelaar, ‘Archival turns and returns. Studies of
This contextuality implies that archivalization and archiving experience change in society,
the archive’, in Research in the archival multiverse, ed. but they also sustain changes in society. This is what I call the duality of the archive:
Anne J. Gilliland, Sue McKemmish, and Andrew J. Lau
(Clinton, Victoria: Monash University Press, 2016),
by archiving we are being archived. In other words, we construct the archive and are
pp. 228-68. constructed by the archive. As writer and curator Jorge Blasco Gallardo remarked:
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‘archiving is the way we relate to the world’. And he adds ‘By living we archive and we are
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General Introduction: Reading
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archived.’18 In my model of the archiving context19 (Fig. 0.2) this duality is represented by
arrows pointing to both ends. A mandate is an answer to societal challenges, while the
mandate may cause societal concerns; a work process influences archiving, but archiving
in turn influences work processes. As Peter Horsman found out in his study of archiving by
the city officers of Dordrecht, most phenomena in archiving were caused by changes in
documenting, and most changes in documenting were, in turn, caused by changes in work
processes. These could be the result of, for example, new tasks, or the transfer of tasks to
other bodies. These, in turn, were in many cases a reflection not just of changing
organizational insights, but mainly of changing societal notions. In Horsman’s research
these were notions of the relationships between citizen and government, and between
local and central government.

Societal
Challenges

Mandate
WHY
18 Jorge Blasco Gallardo, ‘Ceci n’est pas une archive’,
in Memorias y olvidos del archivo (Las Palmas de
Gran Canaria: Lampreave, 2010), pp. 11-19, https:// People Business
web.archive.org/web/20190530101501/https:// WHO WHAT
revistafakta.wordpress.com/2013/12/17/ceci-nest-
pas-une-archive-por-jorge-blasco-gallardo/, archived
Work
30 May 2019.
Processes
19 I added ‘Societal Challenges’ to the model presented HOW
by Hans Hofman, ‘The archive’, in Archives.
Recordkeeping in society, ed. Sue McKemmish,
Michael Piggott, Barbara Reed, and Frank Upward
(Charles Sturt University: Wagga-Wagga, 2005),
p. 138. Hofman’s model was based on the modelling by Archiving
Sue McKemmish et al., ‘Describing records in context
in the continuum. The Australian recordkeeping
metadata schema’, Archivaria 48 (1999): 12-13. Fig. 0.2 Model of the archiving context.

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Not all elements of the model are treated equally in this book. It is not a history of (the why,
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General Introduction: Reading
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who, and what of ) the Church, the State, the Cities, etc. Information on these elements is
provided in the book whenever that is deemed essential for understanding societal
challenges, archiving, and, in between, work processes. The focus is on archiving, both as a
reflection of the why, who, what, and how of human endeavour, and as a reflection of
societal challenges, patterns, and norms, and vice versa: archiving that conditions or
facilitates societal practices.

Using the term reflection should not lead us to assume that what we see as archived is (or
was) the real world. As Jorge Blasco Gallardo warns, archiving systems ‘have been
modelling ways of representing reality, looking at reality and, very often, have built and
designed reality itself ’.20 The archive reflects a reality as perceived or constructed by the
archivers. For example, judicial archives present the world as seen by each of the parties in
a lawsuit (see 9.4), financial records serve to make reality calculable, and government
records on people serve to make people legible as citizen and taxpayer (see 1.2.2, 8.3.2, and
8.5). When using archives, one has to know the why, who, what, and how in order to assess
which reality may be reflected in the archives.

Historicizing Archives
The renewed interest in the contexts in which archival documents are created has led to a
renewal of archival history. Of course, it has always been the task of the archivist to study
the history of the creator of the records as a requisite for arrangement (restoring the
20 Gallardo, ‘Ceci n’est pas une archive’. original order) and description of the archive. But with the emphasis on archivalization
21 Charles Jeurgens, ‘Historians and archivists. Two before archiving, we also want ‘to look beyond archive creation, as it were, and find out
disciplines working with the same papers’, Palimpsest
1.1 (June-November 2009): 47, https://web.archive.
how the recorded information came about’, as Charles Jeurgens, professor of archivistics at
org/web/20190530101755/https://www.academia. the University of Amsterdam, advocates.21 In historicizing archives, we mainly use the
edu/3201993/Historians_and_Archivists_Two_
Disciplines_Working_with_the_Same_Papers,
archives themselves. That is the ‘double bind’, entailing a new way of reading the socially
archived 30 May 2019. embedded archive as it was created by different agents (creators, users, archivists, and
22 Horsman and Ketelaar, ‘Archival history’. record subjects) in their interaction with institutions and technologies.22 Such an approach
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General Introduction: Reading
provides a view on the archive from the outside, probing society’s ‘archival consciousness’
the Archives
and its ‘archival ideologies’, in Brien Brothman’s words:

over the course of history, what kinds of purposes have animated individuals and
societies to keep and preserve documentation in its many forms, and what kinds of
social consequences have induced them to continue to do so, to stop doing so, or to
change how they do so?23

This challenges any researcher of the social history of archives, as Markus Friedrich so
23 Brien Brothman, ‘Perfect present, perfect gift. acutely writes, to practice
Finding a place for archival consciousness in social
theory,’ Archival science 10 (2010): 143. See also
Markus Friedrich, ‘The rise of archival consciousness
an approach to the history of archives that includes, but also transcends the well-
in provincial France. French feudal records and established research questions about institutional development, orders of know­
eighteenth-century seigneurial society’, Past & present
230, Suppl 11 (2016): 49-70; Markus Friedrich,
ledge and archival information-management by highlighting the additional ques­
‘Epilogue’. tions of how, why and through which agents archives and archive-related practices
24 Markus Friedrich, ‘Being an archivist in provincial became integrated within the everyday life of ordinary Europeans. A ‘social history
enlightened France. The case of Pierre Camille Le
Moine (1723–1800)’, European history quarterly 46
of archives’ would focus on how society at large became acquainted, familia­­­­rized,
(2016): 569. and, indeed, thoroughly impregnated with archival activities. It would highlight the
25 Friedrich, ‘Epilogue’, p. 426 uses the term counter- concepts and mentalities people relied on when conceiving their archives.24
archival practices, which he borrowed from Konrad
Hirschler, ‘From archive to archival practices.
When focusing on the interaction between ‘ordinary’ archiving people and institutions
Rethinking the preservation of Mamluk administrative and technologies (rather than putting the institutions and technologies centre stage), one
documents’, Journal of the American Oriental Society
136 (2016): 1-28. See also Michael Piggott, Archives
realizes that most of the certificates, licences, letters, and other documents people received
and societal provenance. Australian essays (Oxford: from institutions have only rarely been preserved, mainly because the owners did not think
Chandos, 2012), p. 3: ‘the silences of non-creation’, and
p. 188: the ‘infertile opposite’ of record creation.
them worth preserving or, perhaps, relied on the organizational memory of the institutions
26 Carolyn Steedman, ‘Something she called a fever.
they dealt with. These institutions, in turn, decided at various moments to destroy or keep
Michelet, Derrida, and Dust’, American historical their records. May one attribute this to ‘counter-archivalization’25 or ‘anti-archivalization’:
review 106 (2001): 1165; Carolyn Steedman, Dust
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001),
the economic, cultural, and political discouragement to capture and retain documents,
p. 18; Simon Fowler, ‘Enforced silences’, in David or societal forces towards destruction? Counter-archivalization is as much part of the
Thomas, Simon Fowler, and Valerie Johnson, The
silence of the archive (London: Facet, 2017), pp.
archival consciousness as constructive archivalization. Both are instrumental in
1-39. On ‘selective survival’ see also Arnold Esch, determining archival silences and what is kept and ends up in the archives, the outcome
‘Überlieferungs-Chance und Überlieferungs-Zufall
als methodisches Problem des Historikers’, Historische
being only the tiny flotsam of the great, slow-moving river of Everything, to use
Zeitschrift 240 (1985): 529–70. Carolyn Steedman’s words.26

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General Introduction: Reading
the Archives

Archival Histories
Archivists as scholars of recordkeeping are the very people to practice archival history
27 S. Muller, J.A. Feith, and R. Fruin, Manual for the and to fathom ‘the mechanisms of the old administration’, as the Dutch Manual for the
arrangement and description of archives. Translation
of the second edition by Arthur H. Leavitt, with new
arrangement and description of archives (1898) already stated.27 The usual practice for
introductions […] (Chicago: Society of American Dutch archival inventories is to provide in the introduction a ‘history of the archives’ with
archivists, 2003), section 61. Muller had used the
same words five years before, in the introduction of
a view to their proper use.28 An inventory aims to provide access, and this determines
S. Muller, Catalogus van het Archief. Eerste afdeeling the limited scope of the introduction. Therefore, the introduction only rarely presents
1122-1577 (Utrecht: Beijers, 1893), p. lxxxviii.
the archive as an object of historical study and within its societal context.
28 Eric Ketelaar, ‘Dimensies van archiefgeschiedenis,’
in Archiefambacht tussen geschiedenisbedrijf en
Since the 1980s the archival profession has been urged to broaden the scope of their
erfgoedwinkel. Een balans bij het afscheid van vijf archival histories. As early as 1980 American archival educator (and future Archivist of
rijksarchivarissen […], ed. Eddy Put and Chantal
Vancoppenolle (Brussel: Algemeen rijksarchief, 2013),
the United States) Frank Burke called for research into questions such as
pp. 227-41.
29 Frank G. Burke, ‘The future course of archival theory What is it within the nature of society that makes it create the records that it does?
in the United States’, American archivist 44 (1981): 42.
Is the impulse a purely practical one, or is there something in the human psyche that
30 Tom Nesmith, ‘Archives from the bottom up. Social
history and archival scholarship,’ Archivaria 14
dictates the keeping of a record, and what is the motivation for that act?29
(Summer 1982): 6-7; repr. in Canadian archival
studies and the rediscovery of provenance, ed. Tom
Nesmith (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1993),
In 1982 Tom Nesmith argued for an ‘archival scholarship grounded in the study of the
p. 161. See also Tom Nesmith, ‘Reopening archives. nature and purposes of archival records and institutions’, taking as a starting point the
Bringing new contextualities into archival theory and
practice’, Archivaria 60 (Fall 2005): 259-74.
history of society.30 His plea was repeated in 1992 by Barbara Craig who warned archivists
31 Barbara L. Craig, ‘Outward visions, inward glance.
that if they left archival history to others, their future would be at stake. She believed
Archives history and professional identity’, Archival archival history is essential for the professional identity of the archivist in the modern age
issues 17 (1992): 121.
because it is an aid in understanding ‘the contextual place of records in the world of affairs,
32 Selections of the presented papers were published in
Archivaria, Archival science, Libraries & the cultural
of thought, and of information. In short, we would benefit greatly from a historical
record, and in Engaging with records and archives.: sociology of the record and a diplomatic of the document.’31 At her invitation, the first
Histories and theories, ed. Fiorella Foscarini, et al.
(London, Facet Publishing, 2016).
International Conference on the History of Records and Archives (I-CHORA) met in
33 Barbara L. Craig, Philip B. Eppard, and Heather
2003.32 According to the hosts of the first I-CHORA, archival history is important because
Macneil, ‘Exploring perspectives and themes it ‘holds the promise of providing a better understanding of human experience and human
for histories of records and archives. The first
International Conference on the History of Records
needs.’33 Subsequent I-CHORA conferences were held in Amsterdam (2005 and 2015),
and Archives (I-CHORA)’, Archivaria 60 (2006): 7-8. Boston (2007), Perth (2008), London (2010), Austin (2012), and Melbourne (2018).
21a | 0 |
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ARCHIVING PEOPLE
General Introduction: Reading
I-CHORA attracted not only archivists but also historians and scholars in other
the Archives
disciplines. As explained before, in the past few decades many anthropologists, sociolo­
gists, scholars of cultural studies, and historians made the ‘archival turn’, considering not
only the archives as places of research or a theoretical concept but first and foremost as a
34 Randolph Head, ‘Preface. Historical research in
archive and knowledge cultures: an interdisciplinary
fascinating object of study in itself.34 As early as 1979 Michael Clanchy, in his masterly
wave’, Archival science 10 (2010): 191. book From memory to written record, made archival documents themselves the object of
35 M.T. Clanchy, From memory to written record. study, instead of viewing them merely as ‘quarries of information’.35 His approach was
England, 1066-1307, 3rd ed. (Chichester: Wiley-
Blackwell, 2013), p. 336. Earlier editions 1979 and
followed by researchers on orality and literacy, in particular pragmatic literacy, i.e. literacy
1993. and the culture of writing for pragmatic purposes.36 Their archival histories show the
36 Clanchy, From memory to written record, pp. 336-43 numerous ways with which ‘archival practice and archival knowledge shape subjects in
(Postscript by the author); R. Britnell, Pragmatic
literacy, east and west 1200-1330 (Woodbridge: The
history and subjects of history’.37 Two collections of conference papers published as special
Boydell Press, 1997); Marco Mostert, ‘De vroegste issues of Archival science, epitomize this kind of archival history by historians: ‘Toward a
geschiedenis van de schriftcultuur in Holland’, in
Datum et actum. Opstellen aangeboden aan Jaap
cultural history of archives’, ed. Ann Blair and Jennifer Mulligan (2007) and ‘Archival
Kruisheer (…), ed. D.P. Blok et al. (Amsterdam: knowledge cultures in Europe, 1400-1900’, ed. Randolph Head (2010). Most participants in
Meertens Instituut, 1998), pp. 315-30.
these conferences were historians, who are leading in the history of archives before the
37 Ann Blair and Jennifer Milligan, ‘Introduction’,
Archival science 7 (2007): 291.
modern era, as evidenced by books by Arndt Brendecke, Markus Friedrich, Ben Kafka,
38 A fine overview of the status of the research is given
Jacob Soll, Filippo de Vivo, and others.38 Together with Arndt Brendecke and Hilde de
by Alexandra Walsham, ‘The social history of the Weerdt, Randolph Head (whose comparative history of archives ‘Making Archives in
archive. Record-keeping in early modern Europe’, Past
& present, 230, suppl. 11 (2016): 9-48, https://web.
Early Modern Europe. Proof, Information and Political Recordkeeping, 1400-1700’ was
archive.org/web/20190530101943/https://academic. published recently) took the initiative to establish The global archivalities network, seeking
oup.com/past/article/230/suppl_11/9/2884268,
archived 30 May 2019, and by Alexandra Walsham,
to connect and recruit humanists in all disciplines interested in the comparative history of
Kate Peters, and Liesbeth Corens, ‘Introduction. archives.39 From 2012 to 2016 Filippo de Vivo conducted a large-scale collaborative
Archives and information in the early modern world’,
in Archives & information in the early modern world,
investigation into the comparative history of archives in late medieval and early modern
ed. Liesbeth Corens, Kate Peters, and Alexandra Italy, contextualizing the study of archives away from institutional history in a wider social
Walsham (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018),
pp. 1-25. See also Elizabeth Yale, ‘The history of
and cultural context. One of the outcomes of the project was a special issue of European
archives: the state of the discipline’, Book History 18 History Quarterly: ‘Archival transformations in early modern Europe’ (2016). In 2016 Past
(2015): 332-59. On the interdisciplinarity of archival
history see Filippo de Vivo, Andrea Guidi, and
and Present published an issue ‘The social history of the archive. Record-keeping in early
Alessandro Silvestri, ‘Introduzione a un percorso di modern Europe’, containing papers arising from a conference held at the British Academy
studio’, in Archivi e archivisti in Italia tra medioevo ed
età moderna’, ed. Filippo de Vivo, Andrea Guidi, and
in 2014. Other papers from the same conference were published in 2018 in the Proceedings
Alessandro Silvestri (Roma: Viella, 2015), pp. 9-39. of the British Academy ‘Archives and information in the early modern world’. A great deal

21b | 0 |
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ARCHIVING PEOPLE
General Introduction: Reading
of this scholarship addresses the history of knowledge, which partly overlaps the history of
the Archives
pragmatic literacy and the history of transactional archives.

In the Netherlands archival histories have been written mainly by archivists. They have
written extensive introductions to archive inventories, guides, and histories of archival
39 ‘Archivality is a comprehensive configurational term institutions, archival policies, and the archival profession.They have also contributed to
for characterizing the way different societies collect
documents that record information about dominion,
archival history with recent studies of the history of documenting and recordkeeping.40
possessions, and power.’: Head, Making archives, p. 37. Scholarship in diplomatics has yielded studies of chanceries which are relevant for archival
40 J.L. van der Gouw, ‘Munimenta en monumenta’, history.41 Since 1982 Dutch archivists and historians have published a series of studies of
Nederlands archievenblad 84 (1980): 497-514;
C.J. Zandvliet, Mapping for money. Maps, plans
genres of administrative records: broncommentaren (commentaries on sources).
and topographic paintings and their role in Dutch
overseas expansion during the 16th and 17th centuries
(Amsterdam: De Bataafsche Leeuw, 1998), 2nd
Archivalization and archiving are practices situated within social, cultural, political,
ed. 2002; Peter Horsman, Abuysen ende desordiën. technological, and other contexts. Through time these contexts are ever changing and ever
Archiefvorming en archivering in Dordrecht 1200-
1920 (’s-Gravenhage: Stichting archiefpublicaties,
being constructed, shaping, as Tom Nesmith argues,
2011); Theo Thomassen, Instrumenten van de macht.
De Staten-Generaal en hun archieven 1576-1796.
Onderzoeksgids (Den Haag: Huygens Instituut voor
the action of the people and institutions who made and maintained the records,
Nederlandse Geschiedenis, 2015), https://web. the functions the records perform, the capacities of information technologies to
archive.org/web/20170607054454/http://resources.
huygens.knaw.nl/retroboeken/instrumenten_
capture and preserve information at a given time, and the custodial history of the
macht/#page=0&accessor=toc&view=homePane, records.42
archived 7 June 2017.
41 E.C. Dijkhof, Het oorkondewezen van enige kloosters
en steden in Holland en Zeeland 1200-1325 (Leuven:
Historicizing practices of record formation and archiving is important for the user of
Peeters, 2003); J.F. Benders, Bestuursstructuur archives, the archivist, and the archival policy maker. We must understand the societies
en schriftcultuur: een analyse van de bestuurlijke
verschriftelijking in Deventer tot het eind van de
and the people who created and used the documents before we can really understand their
15de eeuw (Hilversum: Verloren, 2004); Geertrui value for research and other purposes. And vice versa: by exploring the social history of
van Synghel, ‘Actum in camera scriptorum
oppidi de Buscoducis’. De stedelijke secretarie van
archives we may get a better understanding of archiving people in the past, present, and
’s-Hertogenbosch tot ca. 1450 (Hilversum: Verloren, future.
2007).
42 Tom Nesmith, ‘Seeing archives. Postmodernism and
the changing intellectual place of archives,’ American
archivist 65 (2002): 35.
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PAGE CHAPTER ARCHIVING PEOPLE

A SOCIAL HISTORY OF
DUTCH ARCHIVES Chapter 1

Archiving People

—
1.0 Introduction 1.3 Burghers and Residents
1.1 Roman Veterans 1.4 Sailors and Soldiers
1.2 From Cradle to Grave 1.4.1 Sailing with the VOC
1.2.1 Church and Civic Registers 1.4.2 Enlisting in the Army
1.2.2 The Legible Citizen 1.5 Migrants
1.2.3 Civic Registration 1.5.1 Strangers
1.2.4 Capturing People 1.5.2 The Migration Machine
1.2.4.1 Introduction 1.6 My Government, my File
1.2.4.2 People Registers 1.7 Archiving Families
1.2.4.3 Paper Man 1.7.1 Office Genealogies
l Fig. 1.0 Jurriaen Ovens, Regents of the Civic
Orphanage (Burgerweeshuis) in Amsterdam, 1.2.4.4 ID-cards 1.7.2 A Treasury of Monuments
1663. Amsterdam Museum, on loan from 1.2.4.5 Safekeeping 1.7.3 Collecting Family Archives
the Spirit Foundation, SB 4843. 1.2.5 Data Protection and Automation 1.8 Conclusion
The Children’s Book is brought in for the
regents to record the admission of the boy to
the left and to render account to the other boy
who is leaving the orphanage.

ˇ
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Archiving People
1.0 Introduction
Archiving of the people, by the people, and for the people. In this chapter archiving of
people is treated (following the model of the archiving context, Fig. 0.2) as a business
(what) and a work process (how), involving people (who) as agents, leading to archiving.
Its history in what now constitutes the Netherlands begins with the oldest written traces
from Roman times. The second oldest record found on Dutch soil is a military diploma
for the son of the Batavian Gaverus dating from the year 98 CE (see 1.1). It is slightly more
recent than the wax tablet dating from 29 CE about a loan to which a Batavian soldier was
a witness (see 8.1).

Archiving people at a later date is treated from different angles in 1.2-1.7. The registration
of people from cradle to grave (1.2) began in the early Middle Ages by registering baptism
and marriage (1.2.1), both required by the Roman Catholic Church. These practices were
adapted and extended after the Reformation. Henceforth, civic government regulated the
registration and the validity of a marriage, while leaving the registration of baptism/birth
and funeral to the churches.

Government in premodern times had only a limited interest in archiving people and
concerned itself chiefly with people as taxpayers. This changed after the Batavian
Revolution (1795), which not only defined the ‘political citizen’ (staatsburger) at a national
level (the other person is not addressed as ‘sir’ anymore but as ‘citizen’) but also wanted to
make him or her legible for the State. In the model of the archiving context (Fig. 0.2) this
need for legibility is a societal challenge that has its effects on the other parts of the model
(why, what, who, how) and ultimately on the archiving. After the annexation of the
Netherlands by France (in stages between 1795 and 1810) this legibility is achieved
primarily by the introduction of civic registration (see 1.2.2 and 1.2.3). The French also
introduced compulsory military service. They could do so because they could depend on
perfect archiving practices (see 1.4).

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The next step in making the 19th-century citizen legible was the recording of data used
to construe the ‘average man’ (see 1.2.4). With the transition from the ‘Night Watch State’
to the welfare state, nature and scope of archiving people are extended. The citizen became
a ‘paper man’ who may be controlled and captured—often quite literally as the experiences
during the German occupation (1940-1945) have demonstrated. Up till now, these
experiences have dominated the public debate about the legal duty to identify oneself,
ID-cards, access to civic registration, and data protection (1.2.5).

Section 1.3 deals with the way cities archived their citizens before the 19th century.
The oldest citizens registers date from 1302. The oldest register of guild members in a
Dutch city is from 1249. These registers have been preserved in official archives. The
registered people received some form of certificate or licence. Once they had served their
purpose, these documents were not considered worthy of preservation. Thus, the decision
to throw away a document is as much part of archival politics as the decision to keep it.
This issue returns in section 1.4, which deals with the archiving of sailors and soldiers by
the United East India Company and by conscription in the 19th century. Both archiving
systems were information-rich genre systems consisting of regulated practices and
technologies. Those systems used to be paper-based, whereas, for example, today’s
‘migration machine’ (1.5) is largely dependent on computers, scanners, cameras and other
ICTs. However, the question is to what extent the record subject is involved in the
construction and disposition of ‘his’ or ‘her’ file (1.6).

People who archive their own documents and memorabilia often do this in the context of
their family. Family records are a combination of personal records, with the connection
between the different components being the relation of the family members. Section 1.7
traces the archival consciousness of Dutch families since the 16th century and the
adoption by the modern archival profession of the ‘archiveness’ of family archives which
was none too easy.
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1.1 Roman Veterans
The time from which no written traces have come down (the prehistory) ends with the
arrival of the Romans. Between 58 and 49 BCE, Julius Caesar captured the whole of Gaul
up to the river Rhine. A large part of the Netherlands of today—the area to the north of the
Roman border—remained ‘prehistoric’ until the Christianization in the 8th century.
The Romans came upon Batavians who lived in the east of the country and a people called
the Cananefates in the west. These people were incorporated into the Roman empire as
socii and the men were recruited for the Roman army. The Batavians served, for instance,
in the imperial guards, and in Britain. The commander of the garrison in Vindolanda near
Hadrian’s wall (where the 9th cohort of the Batavians was encamped) was a distinguished
Batavian.

At the Rhine border, near the Roman encampments, settlements arose where the original
inhabitants traded with the Romans. The sociologist Michael Mann distinguishes four
channels of Roman ideological power: the mosaic of villages, cities, tribes, and peoples
upon whom the Romans imposed their rule; the authoritative, official, political
communications channel of the empire; the army; and the trading networks of the empire.1
Along these four channels messages and controls passed, mostly in written form.

We may assume that the Governor of the Roman province of Germania Inferior
corresponded with Rome, as well as with the administrative centres of what now
constitutes the Netherlands: Ulpia Noviomagus Batavorum (Nijmegen) and Municipium
Aelium Cananefatum (Voorburg). The emphasis of this correspondence will have been on
military matters. These were noted down in commentarii, the official journals (sometimes
split up in series), kept and archived by commentarienses. The military commanders would
1 Michael Mann, The sources of social power, vol. I, keep drafts and incoming letters, as we know for instance from Vindolanda, and they had
A history of power from the beginning to A.D. 1760
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986),
records filed in the cohort archives (in tabulario cohortis). Unfortunately, hardly anything
pp. 310-13. of what was done in this country was kept.

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For the Batavians and the Cananefates archiving people mainly meant archiving Roman
military documents.2 The proof is the aforementioned military diploma for the son of the
Batavian Gavarus dating from the year 98, found in 1988 in Elst (Gelderland).

2 J.K. Haalebos, ‘Traian und die Hilfstruppen am

Niederrhein. Ein Militärdiplom des Jahres 98 n. Chr.
aus Elst in der Over-Betuwe (Niederlande)’, Saalburg
Jahrbuch 50 (2000): pp. 31-72; Tom Buijtendorp,
Het jaar 117. Sporen van Trajanus en Hadrianus in
Fig. 1.1 Military diploma for the son of the Batavian Gavarus, 98 CE.
de Lage Landen (Utrecht: Omniboek, 2017). Museum Het Valkhof, Nijmegen.
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The Cananefates and Batavians were free inhabitants, but they were not citizens of the
Roman empire. When a Cananefate or a Batavian had served in the Roman army for 25
years or longer, he would receive the citizenship and his marriage would be legalized, his
children thereby automatically becoming Roman citizens. A bronze plaque would have
been struck in Rome and fastened to the wall of Minerva’s temple. The veteran himself
would receive an authentic summary of his deeds in a bronze diploma, sealed by seven
witnesses. The word diploma is of Greek origin and means folded paper. The bronze
diploma was made of two connected tablets, on one of which the text was inscribed, on
the other the names of the witnesses. In Elst, only a fragment of the first tablet was found.
But this was sufficient for scholars to determine that it is the notice of dismissal made up
in 98, meant for a Batavian soldier, son of Gavarus, who had served with the horsemen of
Ala I Batavorum and to ascertain that his Batavian wife and two children were mentioned
in the document.

After 25 years of loyal service, the Batavian soldier returned to his native soil. He kept the
diploma as evidence of his military service and his Roman citizenship. He may have kept it
with other documents, such as the letters he wrote home during his long service. One of
the consequences of the contacts with the Romans was the spread of literacy. Not for
everyone, but there was a certain ’secondary literacy’, as veterans from the army could
function as readers, translators, and letter writers for family and other people from the
village. ‘At least one boy from almost every Batavian household was enlisted in the Roman
army’, says archaeologist Roymans. ‘There he got acquainted with writing. He had to
acquire this knowledge in one way or another to be able to perform his duties, to be
promoted and to maintain contact with home.’3

3 Quoted in Hans de Molenaar, ‘De indicatieve

betekenis van Romeinse “militaria” in de Betuwe’,
Graven tussen de rivieren 5/7 (January 2005): 7;
Ton Derks and Nico Roymans, ‘Seal-boxes and the
spread of Latin literacy in the Rhine delta’, Journal of
Roman archaeology - Supplementary series 48 (2002):
87-134.

25b kader

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PAGE CHAPTER ARCHIVING PEOPLE

1.2 From Cradle to Grave

Archiving People 4

1.2.1 Church and Civic Registers

Starting around 250 the north of the Roman Empire was afflicted with invasions by the
Franks and other Germanic groups. Shortly after 400, the Romans surrendered Germania.
What we call the Netherlands today was then inhabited by the Frisians (in the northwest
and along the coast) and by the Saxons in the east. The Frankish king Dagobert I captured
Utrecht from the Frisians. In 630 he had a small church built as a missionary station for the
Frisians who were gradually integrating into the Frankish Empire. The missionary bishop
Willibrord was appointed in Utrecht in 695. It was only in 753 that Utrecht became a
permanent bishopric (see 2.2). It was bounded in the east by the Bishopric of Münster and
the Saxon territory. When eventually in 804 Charlemagne conquered the Saxons, all Low
4 R.F. Vulsma, Geboekt van wieg tot graf. Burgerlijke
stand, bevolkingsregister en dtb, 3rd ed.
Countries were under Frankish control.
(’s-Gravenhage: Centraal Bureau voor Genealogie,
1983); J.G.J. van Booma, Onderzoek in protestantse
kerkelijke archieven in Nederland. Handleiding,
The oldest archives of the church of Utrecht regard goods and rights (see 2.1), including
tevens beknopte gegevens over de geschiedenis van de rights pertaining to people. An example is the ‘men of the Church’ in Dorestad, mentioned
kerkelijke instellingen, over het kerkelijk archiefrecht en
het kerkelijk archiefbeheer (’s-Gravenhage: Centraal
in a charter of Emperor Louis the Pious of 819, who were under the guardianship of the
Bureau voor Genealogie, 1994); Voorouders in beeld. Church. Christianization made people conversant with the religion ‘of the Book’ and with
Stamboom en familiegeschiedenis, ed. Rob van Drie
(Utrecht/Den Haag: Teleac-NOT/ Centraal Bureau
the biblical concept of recording people’s names in the heavenly Book of Life (Ps 139.16,
voor Genealogie, 1997); Valentin Groebner, Who Exodus 32, 30-34). The church rule (1215) to go to confession at least once a year at Easter
are you? Identification, deception, and surveillance
in early modern Europe (Brooklyn, NY: Zone Books,
led to the registration of the faithful whose confession was heard. Other registrations
2007); Henk Looijesteijn and Marco H.D. van followed: status animarum (register of the souls) and lists of communicants. In order to
Leeuwen, ‘Establishing and registering identity in
the Dutch Republic’, in Registration and recognition:
discourage clandestine marriages, bigamy, and concubinage the Roman Catholic Church
Documenting the person in world history, ed. Keith started archiving people’s marriages. In 1563 the Council of Trent decided that an
Breckenridge and Simon Szreter (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2012); Henk Boels, ‘ “De moeder aller
intended marriage had to be announced three times (banns) and that the priest had to
registraties”. Voorgeschiedenis en invoering van de make an entry of the blessing of the church in a book, mentioning the place, date, and the
burgerlijke stand in Nederland in 1811, gezien vanuit
Gronings perspectief ’, Pro memorie 15, no. 1 (2013):
names of husband, spouse, and those of the witnesses. Already at an earlier date, the parish
87-112. priest would take care of the registration of marriages, sometimes at the instruction of
26a | 1 |
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Archiving People
a bishop. The oldest marriage books preserved in the Netherlands are those of St. Mary’s
Church in Deventer (1542-1575), the Jacobi Church in Utrecht (1559), and of the churches
in Doesburg (1559) and Nederweert (1562). The Council of Trent also ordered registration
of baptisms, containing the names of godfather and godmother.
The baptismal register of the Old Church in Amsterdam begins in 1564, the one of St. John
in ’s-Hertogenbosch in 1565.

The registrations of marriage and baptism continued after the Reformation (see 2.3). In
1574 the Reformed Synod ruled that each church had to make a baptismal register and
registers of marriages and church members. The names of members that had died and for
whom a grave had been dug had to be registered as well. T h e Roman Catholic Church used
to have the authority to register marriages, but this changed and henceforth they were
registered by the civic authorities. In 1575 the magistrates of Leiden and Delft ordered that
for a marriage to be legal, the bride and groom had to have a licence of the registration of
the intended marriage. These rules were introduced in the whole province of Holland in
1580. In part they were a continuation of the old rules regarding the banns and the
registration of the marriage. From then on, the banns had to be published at the town hall.
The marriage was either celebrated in the church by a Reformed minister, or at the town
hall by the town magistrate.

Almost every province offered the choice between a church service and a civic one.
The provinces of Zeeland, Drenthe, and Groningen were the exceptions. Here the people
were only allowed to marry in the Reformed Church. In all the other provinces, the civic
government began to register both banns and marriages. In 1575 the Leiden magistrate
5 L. Hagoort, ‘Inleiding op de collectie doop-, trouw-
started a book of brides (bruytbouc) to register the banns published at the city hall. With a
en begraafboeken te Amsterdam’, Archiefinventaris note from the city hall, a reformed couple could then have their marriage announced and
Archief van de Burgerlijke stand; Doop-, trouw- en
begraafboeken van Amsterdam (Amsterdam:
confirmed in the church. People not belonging to the Reformed Church had to get married
Gemeentearchief, 2010): 1-15, https://web.archive. by a magistrate; for this category, a book of weddings (troubouc) was introduced in Leiden
org/web/20190531115455/https://archief.amsterdam/
inventarissen/overzicht/5001.nl.html, archived 31
in 1592. Likewise, at the Amsterdam City Hall, two betrothal registers were kept from
May 2019. 1581: one for the banns in the church and one for the banns from the steps of the city hall.5

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An extract from either of these was needed if the wedding was to take place in another
town. Marriages in the church were registered by a sexton (see Fig. II in the Prologue),
while a magistrate registered those in the town hall (for non-reformed people only).

Registers of births were not kept by the government; the local authorities did, however,
concern themselves with the registration of baptisms in the churches. This was because the
law correlated consequences to certain ages, an instance being the legal capacity to act on
attaining one’s majority. The Mennonites did not recognize infant baptism and therefore
the community kept no registers. This led to some problems: when a Mennonite wanted to
obtain citizenship, he had to show that his father was, in fact, his father. Therefore, the city
of Amsterdam decided in 1714 that the Mennonites also had to make a register of births.
The Portuguese and High German Jews in Amsterdam began to make birth registers in
1735 and 1739, respectively. As from 1785, the Amsterdam churches were required to
submit a copy of the baptismal or birth registers to the City Hall every six months. There
they were kept in the archives room (charterkamer).

Deaths were similarly not registered by the civic authorities. The churches, however, kept
burial books. They were kept up to date by gravediggers appointed by the town. In Holland
rates were imposed on marriage and burial from 1695, with the local secretary registering
these.

Basically, proof of birth or age could only be given if a register with an entry of baptism
could be shown. Yet other evidence was also occasionally accepted. Gerrid Langelaar went
to the Court of Utrecht in 1711 to get a declaration of majority (venia aetatis). As a proof of
his date of birth he handed over an extract from the notes in his own bible, made by his
father, stating that he was born on 28 March 1692. 6

Interested parties could obtain a copy from the registers of baptism, marriage, or burial.
6 W.S., ‘Familiebijbel als bewijsstuk’, Gens nostra 49
In Dutch there is an expression ‘zijn doopceel lichten’ (ceel = cedula), literally meaning
(1994): 430. ‘to bring out someone’s certificate of baptism’. The phrase has come to mean that you tell
 27a | 1 |
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Archiving People
all the ugly things you know about someone else. On several occasions official bodies could
ask for a doopceel. Thus, in Rotterdam in 1764 a doopceel and a copy from the marriage
book were used as proof to show that the name of the testator was spelt incorrectly in a
testament.7 Mistakes in registers could be corrected, as the following examples will show.

In 1761 Hendrik lmands and his wife Marijtge Verjuijst need a

copy from the marriage book in Saint Peter’s Church, Leiden, and
a copy of their banns from the register of banns kept up to date by
the magistrate of Leiden. To their astonishment they see that their
surnames have been totally misspelt (gantsch verkeerdelijk zijn
gesteld en geschreeven): they were registered as Hendrik Goeman
and Marijtge Torsue or Forsue. They turn to the city magistrate
and show proof, including a statement from the guild of peat
carriers. This said that between 1703 and 1721 no one of the name
of Hendrik Goeman had been registered in their books, but the
name ‘Hendrik lmands’ was indeed there. On 21 May 1751 the
magistrate then orders both the church register and the civic
register to be corrected. In 1705 Neeltge Jans has the name Hendrik
Laurensz, member of the Leiden civic guard, registered at the
baptism of her child Laurens. Hendrik, however, denies his
7 Rotterdam City Archives, Oud-archief van de stad
Rotterdam (1-01), inv. nr. 1273. paternity and takes the matter into court, because for him,
8 F.C.J. Ketelaar, ‘Verbetering van doop-, trouw- en ‘petitioner, being a married man, it is of the greatest importance
begraafboeken’, Gens nostra 25 (1970): 27-29, repr.
in Bij ons in de familie. Genealogische en heraldische that his name as the father of the aforementioned child would be
bloemlezing uit Gens nostra, 1945-1976, ed.
N.A. Hamers, M.J. van ’t Kruijs and R.F. Vulsma
stricken off the register’. The court then orders the church council
(Amsterdam: Nederlandse Genealogische Vereniging, to remove Hendrik’s name from the book.8
1979), pp. 15-17.

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Here we see that correct archiving of people by church authorities as well as civic
authorities is not only in the interest of the archive creator, but also in that of the archived
people themselves.

1.2.2 The Legible Citizen

Between 1795 and 1810 the Netherlands became part of France in different phases. This
had various consequences, one of which was the introduction of French law regarding
civic registration (burgerlijke stand). The purpose was to make the citizen ‘legible’ for the
State in his different capacities: as a subject, a draftee for military service, a taxpayer. The
link between civic registration and, for example, conscription caused crowds in various
places to retaliate against Napoleon’s plans in 1813 by storming the town hall and
destroying the registers that could be used for enlisting in the army.

The French civic registration comprised four registers: births, announcements of an

intended marriage, marriages, and deaths. Annual and decennial indexes made the
registers accessible. The registers were kept in duplicate: one copy was transferred to the
local court, together with all documents submitted by people and other annexes. The civic
registration was public: anyone could get an extract from the registers.

People were compelled to declare births and deaths to the burgomaster (maire) who also
officiated and registered the civic marriage. The old civic and church registers of baptisms,
marriages, and burials were confiscated by the State and had to be delivered at the mairie.
These so-called retroacta (preceding acts) of the civic registration came into the care of the
local registry office. In those municipalities where, later in the 19th century, a municipal
archivist was appointed (see 4.8) he mostly assumed custody of these retroacta.

Around 1900 the retroacta of the civic registration became a bone of contention between
state archivists and municipal archivists. After the foundation of the Association of
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Archivists in the Netherlands in 1891 (see 12.4), the state archivists set the tone for
decades: their position and professionalism were stronger than those of the municipal
archivists who were mostly volunteers. In 1910, only five of the 31 municipal archivists had
a decent salary. The state archivists were concerned about the quality of the care for the
retroacta in the several hundreds of municipalities without an archivist. Preservation and
access to these archives would be better ensured if they would be kept in the State Archives
(the same card was played in the struggle for the judicial archives from before 1811: see
9.4). State Archivist Fruin argued in 1903 that because of their confiscation in the French
period the retroacta of the civic registration had become State records, and therefore had
to be kept in State Archives. Fruin admitted that this would contradict the principle of
provenance as defended in the Dutch Manual by Muller, Feith, and Fruin himself (see
12.4). He believed that the necessity for improving the preservation of the retroacta by
taking them out of the municipalities without an archivist should prevail over archival
principles.

In 1919 the legislature compelled municipalities to transfer the old church registers of
baptisms, marriages, and burials and the civic registers of marriages to the State Archives.
However, a municipality could have these back as a deposit, provided it had a certificated
archivist and an appropriate repository at its disposal. It was not before 1995 that a new
Archives Act reversed the matter: the ownership of the deposited church registers was
handed over to the municipalities—not to the churches that had made the registers in the
first place. The civic registers of marriages were transferred to the municipalities at the
same time. As in the past, the conditions were that the municipality should have a
certificated archivist and a repository approved by the Provincial Executive. Currently,
around 70 (out of 355) municipalities do not comply with the first condition, and thus their
retroacta of the civic registration are still in the State Archives in the provincial capitals.

The old registers of baptisms, marriages, and burials were, and still are, an important
source for genealogical research. Family historians form the largest group of users of
archives. Between 1857 and 1886, 8.4 percent of researchers at the State Archives in

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The Hague (now the National Archives) did genealogical research.9 Their number
quadrupled after the new building opened in 1903. In the period 1907-1913 the average
percentage of genealogists was 17, with professional historians comprising 13 percent of
all researchers. Later, non-professional researchers and genealogists were in the majority
in the search room of the National Archives. In 2007, out of 19,725 total visits to the search
room of the National Archives, 29 percent came from genealogists, 19 by scholars, eight by
students or hobbyists, one by journalists, and 43 percent came for unspecified reasons.

As previously mentioned, the old church registers of baptisms, marriages, and burials,
and the civic registers of marriages had to be transferred to the State Archives after 1919.
However, many registers were never handed over by the churches and stayed in the
custody of the clergy. To make these registers accessible, Reverend F.S. Knipscheer of
Zaltbommel started indexing, beginning in his province of Gelderland in 1921. The central
government subsidized him, but for three years only. Knipscheer then founded a public
limited company for the indexing of church archives (N.V. tot het indiceeren van kerkelijke
archivalia). In 1932 the company was renamed Bureau for Historical Demography
(Bureau voor historische demografie), moved to The Hague, and became managed by
C.A. van Fenema. From 1934 the Bureau was situated in the National Archives. Around 20
people, among them some ‘unemployed intellectuals’, indexed the church registers which
the churches had lent to the National Archives for that purpose. After van Fenema’s death
in 1937, his brother (later succeeded by his cousin) managed the indexing work. In 1945
the Bureau merged with the newly founded Central Bureau of Genealogy. It was until the
1970s that rows of card catalogue drawers filled with ‘the Knipscheer indexes’ (mostly
pertaining to the Gelderland marriage registers) filled the hall of the Central Bureau. They
were destroyed in 2013, as meanwhile the digitized marriage registers had been made
accessible on the Internet. However, a sample of the collection has been preserved to show
what the paper indexes were like.

9 F.C.J. Ketelaar, ‘Het Rijksarchief op het breukvlak’,

Jaarboek 1998 Geschiedkundige Vereniging Die Haghe
In the 1970s the number of genealogists visiting archival institutions was growing, further
(1999): 140-61. necessitating measures such as the introduction of special search rooms for genealogists
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and self-service of microfilms and xerocopies of genealogical material (see 11.2.3). In 1980,
75 percent of the researchers visiting all State Archives came out of interest in family
history; in the municipal archives the average percentage was 51. Even in 2000 (the last
year covered by the Central Bureau of Statistics) 52 percent of all users of all archives
services were doing genealogical research (in the State Archives 67 percent, in the
municipal archives 51 percent). However, the greater part of genealogical research has
since moved to the Internet. A great number of archives services, together with the Central
Bureau of Genealogy, maintain the website ‘whowaswho’ (www.wiewaswie.nl/en/) which
now contains data from the civic registers of roughly 190 million people. The website was
visited by 1.2 million unique users in 2017: a rise of 34 percent from 2016. Because so many
genealogists now do their research online, it is no wonder that the Central Bureau of
Genealogy closed the reference desk in its search room alltogether in 2018; several other
archives are now opening their search room for a few days a week only.

Since the 1930s nearly all archives employed volunteers, students, and people in sheltered
employment to index the registers of baptisms, marriages, and deaths and other
genealogical sources. At the Amsterdam City Archives, more than one thousand registers
were indexed in approximately 15 years, resulting in millions of slips, including nearly one
and a half million pertaining to the registers of marriages 1576-1811. All were then
digitized, with the data entered into the national database wiewaswie.nl.

For the time being, digitization is the final phase in adapting the infrastructure of archives
services for genealogical research both qualitatively and quantitatively. The adaptation
happened through large-scale indexing projects, microfilming and xerocopying of
genealogical material, furnishing special search rooms for genealogists, introducing
self-service, and linking local indexes and digitized images through national databases and
portals on the Internet. This illustrates what Markus Friederich stated:

10 Markus Friedrich, ‘Genealogy as archive-driven

research enterprise in early modern Europe’, Osiris
genealogy is a striking example of how socially embedded projects of data gathering
32(1) (2017): 69. relied on, and in turn changed the structure, function, and meaning of, key
infrastructures of knowledge such as archives and libraries.10

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1.2.3 Civic Registration

Archiving People

After the departure of the French in 1813-1814 the civic registration, which they
introduced, was continued with some modifications. Local councils appointed a Registrar
of Civil Status (ambtenaar van de burgerlijke stand) who kept four registers with
certificates of birth, marriage (and divorce), death, and notice of marriage (and its
publication). The last one was split in 1879 into a register of notices of marriage and a
register of publications of these notices (banns); the latter was abolished in 1935, but the
publication of notices of marriage stayed in use until 1987. Until 1913 the banns were
proclaimed in front of the town hall, while later they were simply displayed there. Since
2015 the intention to be married may be declared via the Internet.

The bride and bridegroom had to submit many documents before the wedding ceremony.
These included their birth certificates (until circa 1850 mostly extracts of the
aforementioned retroacta), evidence of divorce of a previous marriage, or of the death of
the previous spouse. Couples under 30 also had to submit proof of the consent of the
parents (unless these were present at the wedding) or evidence of the death of their parents
(sometimes even of grandparents). The certificate of the banns and evidence that the
bridegroom had complied with the Act on the National Militia (see 1.4) had to be
submitted as well. Assembling these papers took time and money, which is also true for
their subsequent preservation. Nowadays these annexes to the marriage registers are a
goldmine for family historians.

In the register of birth certificates, foundlings were registered as well (see the General
Introduction). When, as was usual in the past, the foundling was accompanied by an
anonymous note or a token, this was kept as an annexe to the certificate.

All registers are in duplicate: one stays with the Registrar (and ultimately ends up in the
municipal archives), while an authentic copy originally went to the local court, though
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since 1994 the copy goes to the central repository of the Ministry of Justice. There the
copies are digitized if they are not yet in digital form. The paper copy is then destroyed.
Ultimately, the copies are transferred to the State Archives in the provincial capitals.

A great number of archives services have made the old registers accessible on the website
‘whowaswho’ (www.wiewaswie.nl/en/) (see 1.2.2). Formerly the only finding aids were the
annual and decennial indexes made by the Registrar.

Seemingly the certificates of the civic registration are static declarations of the fact of a
birth, a marriage, or a death. However, they may be ‘activated’ by new inscriptions. For
example, a divorce must be registered by adding a note to the marriage certificate, and a
change of surname or given name, adoption, or naturalization cause supplements and
changes in the birth certificate.

A stillborn child is inscribed in the register of deaths only, and it is therefore deemed to
have never existed. Many people find this dismal: a petition to Parliament in 2016 for
changing the law so that a stillborn child can be registered as a human being, received
82,000 signatures and the support of a parliamentary majority. The law was changed in
2019 to allow a stillborn child to be registered in the national digital Personal Records
Database (BRP). Archiving or not archiving a stillborn child is thus determined by legal,
and thus social, norms: the factors of archivalization (see the General Introduction) are
now different from those in the past when the Civil Code was introduced (1838) and
renovated (1970).

Shortly after the introduction of the civic registration, registers with pre-printed
certificates became available. The Registrar had to fill these in by hand; it was only in 1970
that (following experiments since 1955) the Registrar was allowed to type the certificates
on loose sheets which were bound later. The civic registration, which by nature is rather
conservative, lagged behind the recordkeeping in business and at municipalities, where
typewriters and loose-leaf systems were used ever since the first quarter of the 20th
century (see chapter 11). Meanwhile, innovation has quickened: electronic civic

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registration is now being introduced gradually, beginning with registration of a death
and the declaration of an intended marriage.

However, not only do technical developments influence civic registration, societal chal-
lenges (see Fig. 0.2) cause changes in archiving as well, as became clear with the registration
of stillborn children. Other examples are registered partnerships, introduced in 1997, that
have the same legal value as a marriage. Since 1998 the birth certificate of the first child
contains the choice of a surname (the father’s or the mother’s) for the new-born child and
his or her siblings. In 2001 marriage or a registered partnership for people of the same
gender was made possible. Already in 1985, it was allowed to change the gender as stated
in the birth certificate, but only if it was certain that the person involved was incapable of
procreating children or of giving birth to children. That condition was judged to be no
longer proportionate or acceptable in the 21st century and was therefore dropped in 2014.

1.2.4 Capturing People

1.2.4.1 Introduction
Archiving people by civic and church authorities was not only in the interest of the archive
creator but also in that of the people themselves. This became poignantly clear during the
German occupation of the Netherlands (1940-1945). Because the Nazi Nuremberg laws
declared everyone to be a full Jew who had four Jewish grandparents, a life could be saved
if a person could prove that one of the grandparents was non-Jewish. During the German
occupation, several archivists were involved in forging 17th and 18th-century registers of
baptisms and marriages. They faked a Reformed or Catholic baptism of a forebear of a Jew,
11 Eric Ketelaar, ‘Recordkeeping and societal power’,
or a marriage between a forefather of a Jew with a Christian, thereby saving the lives of
in Archives: Recordkeeping in society, ed. Sue their descendants. After the war, these forged registers were replaced by the originals,
McKemmish, Michael Piggott, Barbara Reed and
Frank Upward (Wagga-Wagga: Charles Sturt
which had been kept hidden—like the proverbial needle in a haystack—in the stacks,
University, 2005), p. 287. sometimes in the company of irreplaceable Jewish archives and Torah rolls.11
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Fig. 1.2 The Amsterdam population register after the attack by the Resistance on 27 March 1943.
Amsterdam City Archives, Gemeentepolitie (5225), inv. nr. 7230, Beeldbank ANWD00676000004.

Thus, the records became instruments of salvation. In the same period, however, records
were also used as instruments of deathly repression, provoking resistance. The population
register consisting of person cards (persoonskaarten—introduced just before the
Occupation) (see 1.2.4.3) became such an instrument of repression in the hands of the
Nazis, who used it for the deportation of Jews and the selection of men for forced labour in
Germany. To defuse that instrument, the Resistance attacked the Amsterdam population
register on 27 March 1943. The person cards stored in 600 filing cabinets were thrown on
big piles and set ablaze. Approximately 15 percent of the cards were burned either totally

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or partially and the remainder was severely damaged because the fire brigade purposely
used fire extinguishing water abundantly. It took more than nine months to reconstruct
the population register.12

The attack in Amsterdam and comparable actions in Apeldoorn, Kampen, and elsewhere
helped a (sometimes temporary) rescue of people whose person card had been burned. It
also became easier for civil servants to tamper with the reconstructed population register.
However, the Jewish population did not benefit from the attacks. The Resistance probably
did not realize that separate Jewish card indexes existed. The Nazis had ordered the Jewish
Council in Amsterdam to keep one of these indexes up to date. In May, June, and
September 1943 the remaining 11,000 Jews in Amsterdam were rounded up and deported.
Their ‘departure to Germany’ (but in fact mostly to Auschwitz or Sobibor) was
meticulously registered both in the card index at the Jewish Council, as well as in the
municipal registers. The deportation lists of the transit camps in Westerbork and Vught
served as the weekly input for the municipal registers.13 After the Liberation the
deportation lists and the card index of the Jewish Council would constitute the nucleus of
12 National Archives, Ministerie van Binnenlandse
Zaken, Directie Binnenlands Bestuur (2.04.87),
the archives of the Red Cross Information Bureau. This bureau was (and still is) not only
inv. nr. 6845. active in tracing displaced people but especially in uncovering the fate of Jews and other
13 More details in Annemieke van Bockxmeer, De oorlog Dutch people who were carried off and did not return, so that the date of their death can be
verzameld. Het ontstaan van de collectie van het NIOD
(Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij, 2014), pp. 239-87. See also
ascertained as precisely as possible. This ‘war archive’ is still maintained by the Red Cross,
Guus Luijters, Raymund Schütz and Marten Jongman, serving particularly as a historical source for survivors and relatives.
De deportaties uit Nederland 1940-1945. Portretten uit
de archieven (Amsterdam: Nieuw Amsterdam, 2017).
14 A.C. Meijer, ‘De negentiende-eeuwse “papieren
mensch”. Een onderzoek naar het Amsterdams
1.2.4.2 People Registers
bevolkingsregister als bron voor historici’, Nederlands
archievenblad 87 (1983): 371-95; ‘De gemeentelijke
In 1849 it was ordained that the data which had been collected for the census of that
bevolkingsregisters, 1850-1920’, ed. A. Knotter and year should be kept up to date by the municipalities beginning in 1850 in ‘people registers’
A. C. Meijer, in Broncommentaren, vol. 2 (Den Haag:
Instituut voor Nederlandse Geschiedenis, 1995); Nico
(volksregisters) or population registers.14 It concerned ‘such information concerning
Randeraad, ‘Negentiende-eeuwse bevolkingsregisters the population (…) as is deemed necessary and useful in a well-organized society’,
als statistische bron en middel tot sociale beheersing’,
Tijdschrift voor sociale geschiedenis 21, no. 3 (1995):
benefiting both government and other authorities as well as individual persons exerting
319-42. their rights as citizens. This concerned in particular the right to vote, inscribed in the 1848
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constitu­tion and pending regulation in the Franchise Act, Provincial Act, and the
Municipality Act. The other aim reflects the government’s hunger for information about
society and people, which had grown since the Batavian Revolution (1795) (see 3.4). It was
to increase even further during the 19th century with the effort to capture, as expressed by
the Belgian statistician Adolphe Quetelet, ‘the average man’ (l’homme moyen), not only
once, but in a lifetime at various stages and in various circumstances. As opposed to the
civic registration (which in principle contains snapshots of legal facts of birth, marriage,
and death only), the population register is a continuous record of the changes in a citizen’s
life. Following the example of the Belgian population register (established at the proposal
of Quetelet), every Dutch municipality kept track of 20 data on an individual: personal
data, the address, moving into and out of the municipality, religion, occupation, and other
data. On the same double-page of the register were recorded the personal data of family
members, servants, and other people residing at the same address.

The population register provided information for various ends: voting, military service,
taxation, care for the poor, and general statistics. Amsterdam even had to employ an extra
officer in 1870 in order to deal with all the requests for information from state agencies and
from municipal authorities. The population register, according to the Dutch historian Nico
Randeraad, developed into an abutment of the welfare state.

When people moved from one town to another, they needed a ticket issued by the former
municipality to show when registering in their new place of residence. Municipalities also
exchanged information about people changing places. After every decennial census,
new registers were made. This entailed much copying by hand and led to many errors.
The insertion of data and consultation of the hefty registers was both cumbersome and
difficult, even with the help of alphabetical indexes. The registers were set up by
neighbourhood, and then further divided by street and house number. Increasing
government activities resulted in an even greater frequency of updating and consultation
of the registers. Elsewhere within government and business, at the beginning of the 20th
century, bound registers were replaced by more efficient card indexes (see chapter 11) and

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the people register followed this trend. Some municipalities used a card index as early as
1880, and by 1921 most municipalities had introduced a population register in the form
of a system of ‘family cards’.

1.2.4.3 Paper Man

Registering the population was predominantly the task of municipalities. With the
increasing involvement of the central government, a more comprehensive, uniform, and
accurate registration was needed. A new population register was designed by Jacob Lentz,
who had been working at the population registry of The Hague from the age of 19. In 1929
he was transferred to the State Inspectorate of the Population Registers (Rijksinspectie van
de bevolkingsregisters) which had just been established. Lentz conceptualized the
population registers as a ‘centralized collection of paper people, representing natural
people and able to provide government with the information it desired regarding these
persons’. 15 Lentz’s concept became the system of ‘person cards’ (persoonskaarten) that was
introduced between 1936 and 1940, replacing the former ‘family cards’.
For each person a card was made comprising 35 compartments (vakken) for the various
data: surname and given name, date and place of birth of the person, his or her parents,
spouse, and children. Nationality, occupation, religion, passport number, firearms licence,
entitlement to a state pension, and royal decorations were registered as well. During the
German occupation, both the provision of an ID-card (persoonsbewijs) and that of a ration
card were recorded on the person card (see below).

The person cards were arranged alphabetically. A separate loose-leaf register showed who
were (or had been) living at a certain address. When a person moved to another town, the
person card was moved as well. After the death of a person, the card was sent to the
Central Bureau of Statistics and from there to the archives of the State Inspectorate of the
Population Registers (since 1949 the Central Bureau of Genealogy has been the custodian
15 J.L. Lentz, De bevolkingsboekhouding
of the cards of the deceased). When someone moved abroad, the card was sent to the
(’s-Hertogenbosch: VUGA, 1936), p. 2. State Inspectorate. During the Occupation the Inspectorate received the person cards of
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people who had been deported to a concentration camp or who had to do forced labour
in Germany.

On the back of the person card the cause of death was recorded. Between 1865 and 1927
the Registrar could only register a death if a death certificate existed, signed by a doctor. It
had to specify the cause of death, which was subsequently reported to the Central Bureau
of Statistics. Since doctors knew that the certificate would be read by registrars and others,
they were cautious to declare the cause of death because this might be embarrassing for
surviving relatives. In 1927 the system was changed. Henceforth, the doctor had to send in
two declarations: the A-form (carrying a succinct description of the cause of death) that
was submitted to the Registrar (who, as from 1938, entered the cause of death on the
person card), and the B-form (with a more extensive description of the cause of death) that
went to the Central Bureau of Statistics. This change meant that doctors could now
provide sensitive medical data, as the B-form was not read by the local registrar. This led to
a considerable increase of reported cases of death from syphilis, dementia paralytics,
carcinoma, and suicide, while deaths from benignant tumours and the secondary diseases
such as encephalitis and sepsis showed a decline. 16 This bears out Derrida’s assumption
that ‘the mutation in technology changes not simply the archiving process, but what is
archivable—that is, the content of what has to be archived is changed by the technology’
(see 11.3).17

1.2.4.4 ID-cards
Lentz was of the opinion that his system of people registration, though efficient, was not
16 Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star, Sorting perfect; he wanted a more comprehensive system in which the identity of every person
things out. Classification and its consequences
(Cambridge Mass./London: MIT Press, 1999), p. 141.
could be established irrefutably. 18 A departmental committee including Lentz
17 Jacques Derrida, Archive fever, trans. Eric Prenowitz
recommended the introduction of an identification card. In March 1940, Cabinet put the
(Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, advice aside, however, because ID-cards conflicted with Dutch traditions. Lentz was very
1996), p. 17.
disappointed, but a few months later, after the country had been occupied by Germany, he
18 L. de Jong, Het Koninkrijk der Nederlanden in de
Tweede Wereldoorlog 1939-1945, vol. 7, part 2
grasped the opportunity to design an ID card (persoonsbewijs) that would become the
(’s-Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976), pp. 703-14. basis for an identification system imposed by the Germans and introduced in 1941.

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Lentz’s design was based on the German Kennkarte, but it had a degree of perfection that
surprised the Germans. The ID-card was made of a special type of cardboard, it carried a
watermark, and was imprinted with a complicated background pattern. The ID-card
carried a photo, a fingerprint in duplicate, and the signature of the holder. The ID-cards for
Jews were imprinted twice with a large J. The population register 1938-1940 had already
been transformed into a Judenkartei. Any person with one or more Jewish grandparents
had already been required to declare his or her parentage. On the basis of that information,
the person cards of Jews were marked with a special tab.

From 1944 every ID-card had to carry a stamp affixed at the issuance of the ration card
(distributiestamkaart), which Lentz had also designed. The person card, the ID-card and
the ration card together formed a nearly watertight system of restlose Erfassung. This
German term means ‘total registering’, but it also has the connotation of all-embracing
seizure.

A copy of both the appended photo and the fingerprint were also fixed onto the receipt
that everyone had to sign. More than seven million receipts were kept by the State
Inspectorate of the Population Registers in The Hague, for the first time in history
constituting a national centralized population registry—the most important instrument of
surveillance and control by both the Dutch and German authorities.19 Strangely enough,
the existence of this central register was not known to the majority of the public and it was
not until December 1943 that the Dutch intelligence service in London received
information about the shadow archive of ID-cards (or rather: of the receipts) from a secret
agent who had been dropped in the Netherlands. On 11 April 1944 the RAF bombed the
villa Kleykamp in The Hague, where the central population register was kept. Fifty-nine
people died, and a great part of the ID-cards archive (estimations vary between 17 and 40
percent) was destroyed. Also destroyed were the registers of tens of thousands of skippers
and caravan dwellers. As one of the underground newsletters said, Lentz’s ‘house of cards’
has been blown away altogether. Lentz, who believed his life’s work destroyed, was a
19 De Jong, Het Koninkrijk, pp. 799-804. mental wreck and left his job within two months.
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The official historian of the Netherlands during the Second World War, L. de Jong,
concluded that the bombardment of Kleykamp had been of considerable importance for
those in hiding and for the people in the Resistance because it had facilitated the forging of
ID-cards and ration cards.

What was left of the shadow archive of ID-cards was brought to safety in Nijmegen, in
the east of the country. After the war the archive was deposited with the Central Bureau
of Genealogy.20 Occasionally the archive was used by public authorities; the fingerprints
were used to identify victims after the North Sea flood disaster of 1953, for example.
The sporadic use did not justify the costs of preserving 2,200 metres of shelving, however,
and therefore, with the approval of the General State Archivist, the Ministry of the Interior
decided in 1969 to destroy the collection. However, a sample of ten percent was taken and
transferred to the universities of Leiden and Groningen for research into dactylography.
These samples have vanished without leaving a trace.

Ever since the Occupation, the memory of the wartime identity card has been at the heart
of debates about introducing a requirement for identification and an ID-card. Not until
1994 was a restricted identification requirement introduced in order to combat football
vandalism, fraud, and money laundering. Ten years later the requirement was expanded.
Every person from the age of 14 had to be able to show either a passport, a municipal
ID-card, or a driver’s licence when requested by an authorized civil servant. Each of these
carries a photograph and the citizen service number. This number was introduced in 1988
as a registration number for tax authorities only. Later, other government agencies could
use it as well. This unique personal number is allocated to everyone registered in the
Personal Records Database (BRP). It is used in all contacts with government, health care,
and education. The National Office for Identity Data (Rijksdienst voor Identiteitsgegevens)
is responsible for the system of the citizen service number. Since 2009 fingerprints are
taken when a passport is applied for. These fingerprints are embedded in the passport only;
20 National Archives, Algemeen Rijksarchief: Vierde
as yet there is no central database, pending application of European Union regulations.
Afdeling, 1961-1969 (2.14.10), inv. nr. 63.

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1.2.4.5 Safekeeping
After the Liberation in 1945, the wartime ID-card was maintained for a while as proof of
identity, such as when voting, and to serve in the reconstruction of the population registers
that had been either destroyed or were useless because they contained forged cards. The
ration cards continued to be used until rationing was abolished in 1950. In 1951, at the
start of the Cold War, the government decided to make a copy of all person cards so that, if
in the event of an invasion of the country destruction of the person cards would be deemed
necessary, the shadow archive could serve to reconstruct the data once the occupation
would be over. 21 Eight hundred unemployed people were put to work throughout the
country to type copies of over ten million ‘archive cards’. These archive cards were copies
retained by municipalities of the cards of people who had moved to another municipality,
or who had died. This shadow archive was transported to Curaçao (Dutch Antilles).
Curaçao was also the destination for the copies of the civil registers of births, marriages,
and deaths. While the registers were returned to the Netherlands in 1975 (one month after
the Helsinki Declaration confirmed the end of the Cold War), the shadow archive of
person cards was disposed of in the 1960s by dumping it into the Caribbean Sea.

1.2.5 Data Protection and Automation

Certificates of the civic registration (burgerlijke stand) (see 1.2.3) are publicly accessible:
anyone may get an extract (uittreksel). Before the 1990s it was also possible to receive a
transcript (afschrift). Such a transcript could reveal a declaration of paternity or adoption.
Because the opinion about illegitimate and adopted children had changed over the years,
it was deemed inappropriate in 1987 to furnish a transcript of a birth certificate to anyone
21 https://web.archive.org/web/20161003230512/http://
but the person concerned and those who could justify an interest. This restriction was
ingmarbladertenschrijft.blogspot.com/2016/02/ expanded in 1994 to transcripts of any type of certificate from the civil registration.
schaduwarchieven-een-deel-van-akten.html, archived
31 May 2019; Bijlagen Handelingen Tweede Kamer,
1952-1953, nrs. 2896 and 2902.
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The certificates are public, but the public is not allowed to see them. Only when the
registers have been transferred to a State or municipal archive researchers are allowed to
browse the documents. Such transfer happens in different stages: after 100 years for the
registers of births, after 75 years for the registers of marriages and after 50 years for the
registers of deaths. The older civic registers have been digitized and made accessible on
the Internet www.wiewaswie.nl/en/.

The population register and the person cards were not open to the public for a long time;
they were considered to be administrative documents for government use. Nevertheless,
several institutions outside the public service were allowed to gather information from
these documents.22 Already in the 19th century, the churches could get access to update
the registration of their members in order to use the information for their parish work.
Therefore, the religion was stated on the person card. In the 1960s however, religion was
thought to be such a personal data that it should be beyond the cognizance of the
government.23 However, the churches resisted deleting religion, as did the Central Bureau
of Statistics. This changed drastically when it appeared that the mention of religion on the
person cards was abused for delivering so-called ‘non-Jew declarations’. These were
required from personnel of Dutch firms doing business with some Arab countries. In 1977
the Minister of the Interior forbade any provision—even to the record subject himself or
22 Gerdy Seegers and M.C.C. Wens, Persoonlijk gegeven.
Grepen uit de geschiedenis van bevolkingsregistratie
herself—of information concerning someone’s membership of a church or a religious
in Nederland (Amersfoort: Bekking, 1993); society. At the same time, the right of anyone to see his personal data as recorded on the
Hanno de Vries, Burgers te boek. Een institutioneel
onderzoek naar het beleidsterrein Basisadministratie
person card was introduced. Since 1982 people can request the deletion from the person
Persoonsgegevens en Reisdocumenten (BPR), 1945- card of any mention of religious belief or ideology. All these measures testify to changing
2003 (Den Haag: Algemeen Rijksarchief/PIVOT,
2006): http://web.archive.org/web/20181219170012/
mentalities in society.
http://docplayer.nl/10167128-Burgers-te-boek-een-
institutioneel-onderzoek-naar-het-beleidsterrein-
basisadministratie-persoonsgegevens-en-
In 1970 the government was caught off guard by a large-scale protest against the decennial
reisdocumenten-bpr-1945-2003.html, archived 19 census. Recollections of the Occupation, fear of computers, and the growing trend since
Dec. 2018.
the 1960s to oppose authority led to massive resistance, causing the failure of the census.
23 National Archives, Ministerie van Binnenlandse
Zaken, Directie Binnenlands Bestuur (2.04.97), inv.nrs.
No census has ever been held since. An indirect consequence was the first act on personal
6603, 6605. data protection (1989).

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Debates in the 1980s about privacy and automation caused the government to abandon
the project (started 20 years before) for the automated central registration of people.
However, the ‘paperless’ registration and processing of personal data continued to be
dreamt of. Finally, in 1984, the government proposed to establish a decentralized,
automated municipal population administration (geautomatiseerde gemeentelijke
bevolkingsadministratie—GBA). Ten years later the GBA came into force, replacing the
person card by a digital person’s file (persoonslijst). The files of deceased people are digitally
transferred to the Central Bureau of Genealogy (an autonomous foundation established in
the building of the National Archives); together with the paper person cards the digital files
constitute the National Register of the Deceased, from which the Central Bureau provides
extracts (annually 40,000 to 50,000).

In 2011 the government again opted for a central registration: the municipal GBA was to
be replaced by one central Personal Records Database (Basisregistratie Personen—BRP),
merging the GBA with the registrations of the Tax and Customs Administration and other
government agencies. This project was stopped in 2017. Eight years of policymaking,
design, and programming had not led to usable results, and completion was to take much
longer, to cost more, and to have fewer benefits than expected.

1.3 Burghers and Residents

24

24 Erika Kuijpers and Maarten Prak, ‘Burger, ingezetene,

vreemdeling: burgerschap in Amsterdam in de 17e en
18e eeuw’, in Burger, ed. Joost Kloek and Karin Tilmans From the Middle Ages, archiving citizens was a priority for cities. Good registration was
(Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2002), pp.
113-32; Looijestein and Van Leeuwen, ‘Establishing
necessary because citizens (poorters or burgers) had other rights and obligations than
and registering identity’; P.A.J. van den Berg, non-citizens (residents) and because the status of people played an important role in
’Inboorlingschap en ingezetenschap in de Republiek
der Verenigde Nederlanden, 1600-1795’, Tijdschrift
conflicts with or about people from other cities. Also, for fiscal and military reasons the
voor rechtsgeschiedenis 71 (2003): 125-53. magistrate had to know who were citizens and who were not. Finally, the fees for granting
25 J.F. Benders, Bestuursstructuur en schriftcultuur. citizenship had to be accounted for.25 This explains why new poorters were often registered
Een analyse van de bestuurlijke verschriftelijking in
Deventer tot het eind van de 15de eeuw (Hilversum:
in the town accounts. Over time, however, a separate citizens register (poorterboek of
Verloren, 2004), pp. 239-43. burgerboek) was made.
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Fig. 1.3 Citizens register (burgerboek) of 1478.

Regional Archives Zutphen, Oud-archief
Zutphen (0001), inv. nr. 841.

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The oldest citizens registers date from 1302 in Zierikzee (Zeeland) and Kampen on the
river IJssel. Kampen had received the franchise around 1228. Between 1302 and 1310 city
clerk Alexander Clericus built an administrative system, of which the citizens register was
but the first step. It was followed by recording the transfer of houses and plots (see 6.2).
From the neighbouring cities of Zwolle and Vollenhove lists of burgers have been
preserved since 1336 and 1339, respectively. Deventer, another city on the river IJssel,
started a citizens register as late as 1353. The oldest citizens register of Maastricht begins
in 1314.

Not all newcomers bothered to claim citizenship and be registered. It cost money
(50 guilders in Amsterdam from 1650) and involved duties, such as keeping guard and
cutting ice in the canals. These new people were resident (ingezetene) and therefore they
were only allowed to exercise occupations which were not regulated by the guilds.
The thousands of workmen who came to the Dutch cities from the 15th century were
not registered in the poorter books (see 1.5).

Once having been registered, and having paid the fee, the new citizen received a
poorterceel, a certificate (on parchment or paper) confirming his status (Fig. 1.4).

A poorterceel could also be given to someone who was born a poorter, or to persons who
had acquired citizenship by marrying the daughter or the widow of a poorter. If one lost
one’s poorterceel, one could request an extract from the citizens registers. On various
occasions one had to show a poorterceel, for example when applying for membership of a
guild (see below) or for admittance to the civic orphanage or a civic hospital which were
accessible only to citizens and their children.

Apart from the poorterceel a baptismal certificate (doopceel) (see 1.2.1) had to be shown
when placing an orphan in the Amsterdam Civic Orphanage (Burgerweeshuis), as evidence
that the orphan was not yet 12 years old. All this information was recorded in the so-called
Children’s Book. A painting of 1663 shows the members of the board of the Orphanage
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checking the documents (see Fig. 1.0).26 The painting still hangs in the former boardroom,
now part of the Amsterdam Museum.
At the table are six regents, behind them the bookkeeper who enters the room to hand
over the Children’s Book (still preserved in the Amsterdam City Archives). In the book the
names of the children admitted to the Civic Orphanage were noted down. The names of
the regents present at the placement of a child are in the Children’s Book along with the
names of the family members bringing the child. Mention is also made of brothers and
sisters of the orphan who were not in the orphanage due to their age.

26 The following is a summary of Eric Ketelaar,

‘Accountability portrayed. Documents on regents’
group portraits in the Dutch Golden Age’, Archival Fig. 1.4 Amsterdam Citizens certificate (poorterceel), 1771, submitted to gain citizenship of
science 14 (2014): 69-93. Rotterdam, 1778. Rotterdam City Archives, Oud-archief van de stad Rotterdam (1-01), inv. nrs.
933, 1005.

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In the painting we see that the regents also handle other documents. These may have
concerned the administration of the goods and chattels the children brought in, or the
property of the orphan’s parents; all these had to be registered and administered. If the
children received an inheritance while in the orphanage it was recorded in special
registers. Boys were boarded out to learn a trade; this was also registered, as were the
wages they earned. When an orphan enlisted on one of the ships of the United East India
Company (VOC) or the West India Company (WIC), notes were made of the conditions
and their pay, return, or death. Of course, the VOC and the WIC also registered these. The
orphans were also registered by the municipal Orphan Chamber (see 6.3). The orphanage
had to keep all records, safe and up to date, until the day the orphan was 18 and had to leave
and find a place in society. Then, the archives of the orphanage had to yield all the
information—often the original documents—relating to the estate to which the young
man or woman was entitled.

An orphanage was not the only one to register its residents. All charitable institutions
(almoners, relief boards, lepers’ homes, hospitals) kept some form of registration of their
inmates, clients, and patients. On a 1650 painting of the regents of the Amsterdam
Women’s House of Correction (Spinhuis), we see this illustrated: a huge ledger of inmates
is brought in.

Citizenship was a prerequisite to joining a guild, and guild membership was required to
exercise a great number of occupations. Each guild registered its brethren and sisters.
An early example is the guild roll of the merchants’ guild of Deventer, a rotulus of more
than six metres in which members were inscribed between 1249 and 1387. From 1418 to
1764 the list of members was kept in a codex (gildeboek). Guild members were also
archived in other registrations. For example, according to an ordinance of 1749, the
Amsterdam bakers’ guild had to keep various other registers apart for the main register:
registers of new masters and servants, annual fees, certificates of accomplished training
(leerbrieven), fines, sick or destitute brethren and sisters, and a journal of important affairs.
Of the whole administration of this guild nearly nothing has been preserved. This is in
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contrast with the archives of the Amsterdam brokers’ guild which includes the registration
of guild members from 1612-1854. These registers have been arranged alphabetically by
given name, as was usual in most registrations and finding aids. Of the Leiden guild of
felters (vollers), a pupils book of the period from 1507 to 1572 has been preserved. Most of
the guild books of the other guilds in Leiden are from the 17th and 18th centuries. Thus,
the archives of the painters’ guild contain the registration of assistants to the masters and
the results of the aptitude tests since 1625 (unfortunately the same year Rembrandt left
Leiden for Amsterdam).

Leerbrieven are found occasionally in the archives of a guild or in a family archive. This
certificate was important for the holder when he wanted to do the master’s test for his own
guild, or when he moved to another town and asked admission to a guild. Covenants to
train a young man for the tests (leercontracten) can be found in the archives of notaries and
orphanages. A surgeon’s diploma is pictured on portraits of the headmen of the
Amsterdam surgeons’ guild (1731 and 1732). The paintings refer to one of their most
important tasks: examining applicants and issuing these certificates. In 1630 the surgeons’
guild began a register of all examinations since 1599 and one of all pupils admitted since
1597; both were continued until 1798.

Professionals and practitioners were also registered in other administrations than that of
the guild. For example, every three months the innkeepers and tobacconists in Amsterdam
had to collect a licence from the regents of the Women’s House of Correction (Spinhuis) on
penalty of losing the right to sell beer, wine, or tobacco. For the licence (Spinhuis cedul)
they had to pay taxes. These constituted 30 to 40 percent of the income of the house.
Therefore, the licences earned a place in the portraits of the regents of the Women’s House
of Correction. According to the 18th-century accounts of the House of Correction,
600 to 1,000 licences were printed every quarter. In the archives, however, I found only
one of these licences, one out of the hundreds of thousands that were issued since the
beginning of the 16th century. From two scraps that had been used as memoranda and
were pinned to the pages of the minutes, I reconstructed another licence.

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Apparently, none of the publicans, innkeepers, and tobacconists who presented
themselves every three months at the Spinhuis to get their licence, considered it necessary
to keep this forever. Each licence referred to the page of the register held by the regents.
Only a few of these registers from between the 1740s and 1816 have been preserved.
Neither the publicans nor the Spinhuis regents considered the licences and the registers
worthy of preservation once they had served their primary purpose. The decision to throw
a document away is as much part of archival politics as is the decision to keep it.

Another example of documents that were used for a short time only to be discarded later
are the lepers’ attestations of being contaminated. Since 1413, Saint James’ Chapel in
Haarlem was the only place in Holland and Zeeland where leprosy patients were
examined. An attestation of being contaminated, a vuylbrief (vuyl = contaminated) with
the Saint James’ seal (Fig. 1.5), entitled the sufferer to be admitted to the leprosarium of
his town.

Lepers were only allowed in public when they carried a vuylbrief. As soon as they had
recovered and had received a schoonbrief (schoon = clean) as evidence, they burned all
their clothes together with the vuylbrief. Therefore, only very few of these attestations have
been preserved. As far as I know there are still only seven vuylbrieven dating from the
15th to the 17th century and very few schoonbrieven.
Even rarer are the licences for beggars. Beggars had to wear a badge. In Holland, starting in
1595, they were also required to have a written licence on them at all times. Tens of
thousands of these licences must have been issued, but I know of only three copies of such
a printed ‘pass’ (valid for three days between 8 a.m. and 4 p.m.), one in Amsterdam, and
two in Leiden. In Delft, beggar tokens were issued and a beggars’ book (bedelaerbouck) was
kept from 1597 until 1610. Of the Amsterdam register of issued beggar licences the
volumes A, B, and C have been lost; volume D 1597-1598 contains 1,742 entries of beggars,
with their name, provenance, and abode. This is usual—the licences issued by an authority
are destroyed, but the registration of the issued documents is kept in the archives of the
authority.
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Fig. 1.5 Certificate of leprosy (vuylbrief),

1645. The Hague City Archives, Leprooshuis
(0401-01), inv. nr. 241.

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1.4 Sailors and Soldiers
1.4.1 Sailing with the VOC
On 20 March 1602, the States General granted a charter to the United East India Company
(Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie or VOC).27 The VOC obtained the monopoly of all
navigation and trade to the east of the Cape of Good Hope and to the west of the Strait of
Magellan (see chapter 10). It was a huge business: in the 18th century on average nearly
27 Femme Gaastra, The Dutch East India Company.
Expansion and decline (Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 2003).
22,000 employees were working in the VOC trading area. Archiving these people was done
28 Frank Lequin. Het personeel van de Verenigde Oost-
by a sophisticated personnel administration which, although much was destroyed in the
Indische Compagnie in Azië in de achttiende eeuw, 19th century (see 3.6.1), still covers 245 metres of shelving (one-fifth of the total volume of
meer in het bijzonder in de vestiging Bengalen, 2nd
ed. (Alphen aan den Rijn: Canaletto/Repro-Holland,
the VOC archives in the Dutch National Archives).28
2005); De archieven van de Verenigde Oostindische
Compagnie. The archives of the Dutch East India
Company (1602-1795), ed. M.A.P. Meilink-Roelofsz,
R. Raben, and H. Spijkerman (’s-Gravenhage: Sdu
Uitgeverij Koninginnegracht, 1992), pp. 57-69:
On 25 October 1735, VOC ship Knappenhof (650 tons, built in
https://web.archive.org/web/20190531115715/ 1731) departs from the Dutch island Goeree for a journey to the
https://www.nationaalarchief.nl/sites/default/
files/afbeeldingen/toegangen/NL-HaNA_1.04.02_ Indies under the command of Arie van der Stolk.29 Among the 195
introduction-VOC.pdf (in English), and
https://web.archive.org/web/20190531115810/ people on board is Isaac Jijskoot, a sailor from Rotterdam. A few
https://www.nationaalarchief.nl/onderzoeken/
archief/1.04.02?activeTab=index&searchTerm=
weeks before, he signed on in the office of the Rotterdam Chamber
1.04.02 (in Dutch), both archived 31 May 2019. (one of the six VOC chambers) and received his ‘earnest-money’
29 This example was borrowed from Ton van Velzen,
‘Uitgevaren voor de Kamers; 700.000 mensen overzee’,
(handgeld) of two months’ wages. The bookkeeper records the
in Uitgevaren voor de Kamer Zeeland, ed. payment in the ship’s pay-ledger (scheepssoldijboek), in which all
Jan Parmentier (Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 2006), pp.
11-30; A.J.M. van Velzen, ‘VOC opvarenden, voorheen men on board the Knappenhof have an account.30 The debit (is
uitgevaren voor de Kamers: 700.000 mensen overzee’,
Genealogisch erfgoed magazine (2012): 4-7. schuldich) side shows the employee’s debts and the sums paid by
30 National Archives, VOC (1.04.02), inv. nr. 14180, folio the VOC to family members or proxies of the employee from his
117. Scan NL-HaNA_1.04.02_14180_0284.jpg:
http://hdl.handle.net/10648/33ea3374-7671-f63e- credit accrued during his appointment. After nearly nine months,
5e7f-5a2d612a1fd8, accessed 6 March 2019.
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Fig. 1.6 Account of Isaac Jijskoot in the pay-

ledger of the Knappenhof. National Archives,
VOC (1.04.02), inv. nr. 14180, folio 117.

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on 13 July 1736, the Knappenhof arrives in Batavia (Jakarta). Isaac
has by then earned 76 guilders and ten stuivers (a stuiver is 1/20 of
a guilder). This income is balanced with his expenses, resulting in
a deficit of 97 guilders and 14 stuivers. Isaac continues to work in
Asia, sailing on the ’t Huijs ten Donk and earning 47 guilders. He is
in hospital in Batavia for nearly a year. He departs for the Cape on
the Everswaart, arriving there in 1739 and he finally returns to
Holland in 1740.

The rule was for common sailors to work in Asia for five years. Every year on the 31st of
August, the wages a sailor had earned were registered at the pay office on the credit (moet
hebben) side of his account in the ship’s pay-ledger.

Each year the employee was given an extract from the ship’s pay-ledger containing the
balance of his account. At the end of his service, upon handing over all the pay-slips he had
accrued, he received the last statement with the final balance. At the pay office in the Dutch
Republic, he or his proxy or heirs were paid the amount stated on the account.

While the employee worked in Asia, dependents in the Netherlands had to be maintained.
Many VOC employees (some 30 percent at the beginning of the 18th century) signed
a month certificate (maandbrief or maandceel), an instruction to the VOC to pay two or
three months’ wages to wives, children, or parents annually. Isaac Jijskoot had entitled his
mother Trijntje Buijs. If the wife and children received poor relief, the maandbrief was
collected by the deacons or almoners. The annual payments were recorded on the
certificate and debited on the account in the ship’s pay-ledger.
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Another form of financial assistance for the family at home was to contract a loan with one
41a Archiving People
or more letters of debt (schuldbrieven). The bearer could collect the amount mentioned in
the debenture (for a common sailor normally 150 guilders, or the equivalent of 14 to 19
months wages) at the pay office of the VOC, but only if the debtor’s account showed a cre-
dit balance sufficient to pay both the monthly certificate and the letter of debt. Many sailors
provided their wives with money in this way. But the letters of debt were predomi­nant­ly
held by slaapbazen: innkeepers and crimps who recruited manpower for the Com­pany
with ‘wine, women, and singing’, while charging the men heavily for the cost of lodging and
the sailor’s kit. They could transfer the letter of debt to debt dealers (transport­kopers)—
many of them wives or widows of VOC men!—who were nicknamed soul buyers (ziel­-
kopers, with ziel, soul, being a pun on ceel, certificate). On the account of Isaac Jijskoot we
see a debenture of 150 guilders to innkeeper Jan Jansz. paid in four terms (ƒ 34-6, ƒ 50-14,
ƒ 21-6, and ƒ 43-14). The final credit balance was 75 guilders 16 stuivers and 8 pennies.

Before a ship sailed for Batavia, the crew was enrolled. At the Amsterdam Chamber two
bookkeepers wrote five muster-rolls: two for the administration in Amsterdam, and one to
be taken aboard together with two extra copies for Batavia. After the enrollment, the
personnel administration was in the hands of the pay office. All VOC employees on board
were registered in two identical ship’s pay-ledgers. The layout and maintenance of these
ledgers were regulated in an extensive instruction of 1647, with models in which
everything ‘for the instruction of the novices is presented clearly and as if pointed out with
the finger, word for word, just as these should be registered’ (tot onderwys der nieuwe­
lin­gen, van woord tot woord, gelyk die geboekt moeten werden, duydelyk voorgestelt, ende
als met den vinger aangewezen).31

Upon arrival in Batavia, one copy of the ship’s pay-ledger was then returned to the
Chamber in the Republic which had outfitted the ship. The other remained in the pay office
in Batavia. Most of the copies which were remitted to the Republic are now in the National
31 National Archives, Radermacher (1.10.69), inv. nrs.
Archives in The Hague: 2,991 volumes, mostly (93 percent) from the 18th century.
375, 382A.

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In these volumes, 655,000 men who sailed to Asia have been registered. Thirty percent
41b Archiving People
were soldiers, mostly non-Dutch Europeans. It is obvious that the employees had an
interest in the administration: many were married and had children who were dependent
on the money the VOC pay office paid out according to the administrative information.
Many VOC servants did not return (of the Dutch sailors and soldiers, 60.5 percent and
30.2 percent returned, respectively) and their inheritors had to rely on the administration.
All establishments of the VOC between Cape of Good Hope and Japan kept the general
pay office in Batavia informed of changes to be entered into the ship’s pay-ledgers.
Alterations in the current accounts of employees aboard the ships involved in the
intra-Asian trade, were passed on to Batavia and registered in what were known as sleepers
(slapers): the originals of the ship’s pay-ledgers. Testaments and estate inventories made
aboard ship or in Asia were also entered in the ledger.

The information supply depended on safe and timely transport to and from the Indies. In
October 1732 the Heren XVII (the board of the VOC) reminded the Governor-General
and the Council in Batavia urgently to dispatch the ship’s pay-ledgers on time. Duplicate
ledgers were sent aboard another ship as ships were lost frequently. For example, in 1781
Jacob Certon, a VOC merchant in China, sent his pay-slips home in two sets, the originals
on board of the Middelburg, and certified copies with the mail on board of the Pearl
(Paarl). Near the Cape, both ships were seized by the English. The skipper of the
Middelburg following the instructions set his ship on fire, the Pearl, however, was carried
off as a prize. All documents on board were submitted to the High Court of Admiralty in
London and ended up among the Prize Papers at the UK National Archives. There Creton’s
pay-slips, and those of his Chinese servant Tan Assoi, have been preserved.32 They are
32 http://www.gekaaptebrieven.nl/tekst/brief/4097
extremely rare examples of a document genre that was normally destroyed upon final
http://www.gekaaptebrieven.nl/tekst/brief/4099 and payment.
4071, 4073, 4075, 4079, 4085; https://www.huygens.
knaw.nl/dutch-prize-papers/?lang=en, accessed 7
April 2019. In spite of the loss of their payslips, Certon In 1746, a VOC ship went down with all mail, while the other ship carrying the duplicate
and Tan Assoi were paid by the VOC, having provided
security and with special authorization by a VOC
ledgers arrived in patria only a year later. The Heren XVII wrote in 1750 that the VOC
Director. administration had been:
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set back for a whole year, both in the payment of the month certificates that most
people in hardship are eagerly awaiting, as well as with regard to the transfers [of
money] which have not been paid because the books were missing, and we were also
hindered to pay the estates although the heirs showed proof that their relatives had
died in the Indies already a long time ago.33

Thus, the VOC directors showed the importance of good archiving, not only for the VOC
itself but also for personnel and their relatives.

1.4.2 Enlisting in the Army

34

33 Perry Moree, ‘”Met vriend die God geleide.” Het

Nederlands-Aziatische postvervoer ten tijde van
de Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie’ (Zutphen:
Walburg Pers, 1998), p. 55, note 83.
34 B. Koerhuis and W. van Mulken, De militie-registers
(’s-Gravenhage: Stichting Archiefpublicaties, 1986)
http://web.archive.org/web/20181220110931/http://
resources.huygens.knaw.nl/pdf/Broncommentaren/
voorlopig/Broncommentaren_V-029_044.pdf,
archived 20 Dec. 2018; Rob van Drie, ‘Opkomen
voor je nummer. Nationale militie in de negentiende
eeuw’, Genealogie. Tijdschrift voor familiegeschiedenis.
Kwartaalblad van het Centraal Bureau voor
Genealogie, 6, no 2 (2000): 36-41; private archives of
Adrianus J. Bemolt van Loghum Slaterus (1902-1992)
in the author’s custody.
Fig. 1.7 Ticket in the draw for military service, 1921, front and back. Collection of the author.

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It is 26 September 1921. With both hands, 19-year-old Adriaan holds a document that will
influence his whole life: a piece of paper, 8.5 by 10 centimetres, carrying a bold number 68.
It is the ticket Adriaan has just drawn in the lottery for military service. Like his comrades
he will make for the pub, all with their ticket pinned on their hat, some relieved to be
exempted, others, like Adriaan, with mixed feelings about the impact military service will
have on their lives and that of their family.

Being interested in history, Adriaan knows that the armies of the Republic formerly
consisted wholly of professional soldiers, although the constitution (Unie van Utrecht) of
1579 allowed for conscription. Conscription, as it existed during the French domination,
was continued after 1813 to supplement the regular army. Every year more than ten
thousand (after 1901 nearly twice this number) men were needed. By drawing lots it was
determined which boys were to be enlisted. Between 1815 and 1914 some three and a half
million boys took part in these lotteries. Military service and the annual lottery caused an
enormous intertextual paperwork involving not only various authorities but all young men
and (because of exemptions for sole sons and younger brothers) their relatives.
Registration also had effects outside the military sphere. Men were obliged to show a
military certificate at their wedding. The military service registers were checked against
the civic registers and the population register, while notarial and medical archives contain
acts concerning exemptions.

For Adriaan the ‘militia machine’ had started a month prior, with the summons from the
burgomaster to take part in the drawing. The machine was already working long before,
however, participating in an extensive genre system (see the General Introduction). Every
year the municipality made an enrolment register in which the parents of all boys who
were 18 years old by 1 January had to register their sons. Newspapers advertised the names
of those who had failed to register in time. The double sheets in the enrolment register
(inschrijvingsregister) carried 12 columns for name, date, place of birth, and other data.
Later, after the physical examination, more data such as height (accurate to a millimetre)
and other physical particulars (signalement) were recorded. This register had to be sent to
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the provincial capital to be checked by the Governor (Gouverneur/Commissaris des
Konings). Upon return, the municipality made an alphabetical list. This list was checked
again by the Governor and returned to the municipality that had to make it available for
public consultation.

For the drawing, numbered tickets (as many as there were registered men) were used.
In a session attended by all men who had been enrolled, these numbers were read aloud
and put in a bottle. In the alphabetical order of the list, each man drew a ticket. Whoever
got a number higher than the number of men needed for the military contingent of the
district, was safeguarded against military service (he ‘drew nil’), as opposed to the men
who drew a low number (‘a prize’). The latter were registered in the drawing register
(lotingsregister) (in duplicate), their physical particulars were checked, and they were
asked whether there would be any ground for exemption (being a sole son, having an older
brother who had served, being disabled, etc.). The 17 columns of the lotingsregister
contained nearly the same data as the enrolment register and the alphabetical list.

After the draw, the lotingsregisters were checked and signed by the militia commissioner
(an army officer who presided over the lottery) and two members of the local council.
The commissioner, having registered reasons for exemption and other objections, sent the
registers to the Governor, who forwarded one copy to the militia council (militieraad).
This council consisted of a member of the provincial assembly (Provinciale Staten),
a member of a local council, and a superior army officer. It held four sessions and made a
ruling on each of the men drafted into the army. After the third session, the register was
sent back to the Governor, who copied the new data into the second copy of the register
and sent the register back to the militia council to be used at the fourth and final session.
Thereafter the register was closed and returned to the Governor. Any appeal to the
Provincial Executive and its outcome would be registered, and the army unit into which
the draftee was to be enlisted was also noted in the register.

In 1861 the paperwork was somewhat simplified, but nevertheless it continued to be

extensive. Since then a large part of all the documents (especially from before the 1880s)

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has been destroyed, but the most essential registers are kept by State and municipal
archives. The registers of a number of municipalities are available on the Internet.

Adriaan kept the summons to the drawing and his number 68 ticket. His friend Jan—who
was exempted because he had two older brothers who had served in the army—kept the
certificate of exemption issued by the Governor. However, such documents are rarely kept
in private archives. Just as the government destroyed many registers of the militia genre
system because they had lost their administrative value, so, too, did most people—unlike
Adriaan and Jan—destroy the papers of the enlisting process.

As a soldier, Adriaan was the subject of an extensive and detailed personnel

administration, including the regimental entry books (stamboeken) which contained the
service record of each soldier. Beginning in 1904 the books were gradually replaced by
loose-leaf registers. Military service lasted five years, but already after one or one-and-a-
half year men could take leave (verlof). This was registered in Adriaan’s soldiers’ service
booklet (militaire zakboekje) which also contained his physical particulars, the account for
his uniform and other supplies, and his regimental and company registration number
(upon transfer to another company a new number was assigned). The passport with the
leave permit had to be shown to the burgomaster within 30 days.

The militia machine involved Adriaan anew when seventeen years later, on 29 August
1939, a general mobilization was proclaimed. More than 150,000 men on military leave
were called into service again—including the now 37-year-old Adriaan. He still had his
soldiers’ service booklet which mentioned the unit he was to report to in case of
mobilization (for some time Adriaan had used the booklet to record his household
expenses!). He now received a war booklet (oorlogszakboekje) containing pre-printed
forms for a testament and four postcards addressed to the Red Cross (partly filled in by the
regiment’s clerk) to report in case he were wounded, captured as a prisoner of war, or in
case of death. Adriaan survived and kept the booklet, together with the letters his wife
sent him while he was under arms.
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1.5 Migrants
Archiving People 35

1.5.1 Strangers
In premodern times everyone born outside the city or the province was a stranger. During
the 16th and 17th centuries, cities attracted many migrants. Half of the approximately 1.2
million migrants living in Dutch cities between 1600 and 1800 came from abroad: 150,000
refugees and 450,000 migrant workers. The universities enrolled many foreign students.
Amsterdam had thousands of visitors, temporary immigrants, and many others who lived
there permanently without being registered. This was part of a more or less conscious
policy of the city government that tried to make the city as attractive as possible to
migrants.

The object of registration of foreigners was to prevent them from becoming a burden on
civic or church poor relief services in the first place. Occasionally, when the pest raged, the
foreigner had to show an attestation of good health. Upon registration, a foreigner received
a certificate of admission, but sometimes not before he had lived in the city for some time
and had shown he could earn a living. Nearly all of these certificates have been destroyed,
as happened with so many certificates (see 1.3). Still, various city archives have kept the
admission registers. In Leiden, Haarlem, and The Hague the magistrate employed the
35 Herman Obdeijn and Marlou Schrover, Komen
en gaan. Immigratie en emigratie in Nederland
wardens of the various neighbourhoods (buurten) as controllers and registrars of
vanaf 1550 (Amsterdam: Bert Bakker, 2008); population movement in their districts. Around 1560, due to increasing social, political,
Gated communities? Regulating migration in early
modern cities, ed. Anne Winter and Bert de Munck
and economic hardship, Leiden was threatened to be flooded by destitute strangers and
(Burlington, VT: Routledge, 2012); Jan Lucassen, other vagabonds.36 Therefore, the magistrate ordained in 1564 that migrants had to show a
Immigranten in Holland 1600-1800. Een kwantitatieve
benadering (Amsterdam: Centrum voor de
certificate recording their state and behaviour and the last place of residence. The wardens
geschiedenis van migranten, 2002) ; Looijesteijn and of the neighbourhoods had to make a monthly report on newly arrived strangers. A few
Van Leeuwen, ‘Establishing and registering identity’.
years later the war situation had changed, industry was expanding, and the need for
36 Kees Walle. Buurthouden. De geschiedenis van
burengebruiken en buurtorganisaties in Leiden
workers from abroad was growing substantially. Therefore, restriction and registration of
(14e-19e eeuw) (Leiden: Ginkgo, 2005). strangers could be dispensed with. This is an example of changing social, economic, and

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political conditions leading to changing factors of archivalization (see the General
Introduction) and thereby to changes in registration and archiving.

The last quarter of the 17th century was a time of such changing conditions. The aftermath
of the war (1672) and the deteriorating economy brought huge numbers of war refugees,
beggars, and vagabonds into Dutch towns. Moreover, more poor German people came to
prospering Holland. In 1682 the States of Holland (followed in 1687 by the States of
Utrecht) ordained that a year after an immigrant had moved, he would no longer be
dependent on the poor relief in his former place of dwelling, but in the new one. To evade
the financial burden, public and church authorities began to require a warrant or surety
(acte van indemniteit, acte van cautie, ontlastbrief ) from the migrant: a certificate
declaring that he could resort to the place or parish he had come from or to his family at
all times (Fig. 1.8).37

When in 1741 Gijsbert de Bruijn moved with his family from the
village of Jaarsveld to Benschop, he possessed a warrant issued by
the local council of Jaarsveld. It was archived by Benschop council,
because they might need the document in case de Bruijn would
become impoverished. When Gijsbert departed for Lopik after
five years, he received a copy of the warrant. His son Jan moved to
Zegveld in 1757 and had to make do with an extract from the
warrant, made by the local council of Lopik. This extract is still in
the Zegveld municipal archives.38
37 Looijesteijn and Van Leeuwen, ‘Establishing and
registering identity’, pp. 230-231.
38 R.J.F van Drie, ‘Akten van indemniteit van Zegveld
1703-1811’, Heemtijdinghen. Orgaan van de Stichts-
Hollandse Vereniging 22, nr. 1 (1986): 48.
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Fig. 1.8 Warrant or surety (ontlastbrief) of

Joannes Vrindt, issued in The Hague in 1805,
and submitted to gain admission to Rotterdam,
1806. Rotterdam City Archives, Oud-archief
van de stad Rotterdam (1-01), inv. nrs. 1007,
1014.

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Starting in 1682 people migrating from Leiden were given a warrant. Incoming strangers
had to show their warrant at the city’s registry, and from 1737 the registry forwarded all
warrants every six months to the Poor Relief board (Huiszittenhuis). To improve access to
the warrant certificates, they were bound and provided with an alphabetical list. By 1785
the situation had changed. Leiden, following the example of Amsterdam, decided not to
issue (or demand) warrants any more. This would make it less attractive to move to
another town, because there one was not welcome without a warrant.

In 1709 the States of Holland enacted that French (Huguenot) religious refugees taking up
permanent residence in Holland were granted naturalization. The local magistrate had to
register these new subjects. The States of Zeeland (1710) and the States General (1715)
followed the example. Amsterdam, Leiden, and other cities have kept the registers of
naturalized refugees.

1.5.2 The Migration Machine

39

‘All foreigners who either have sufficient means of subsistence or can obtain these by
their industry, are admitted to the Netherlands.’ Thus reads article 1 of the Aliens Act
(Vreemdelingenwet), published on 10 September 1849. Later that month Eduard Hofmann,
a 24-year-old merchant from Germany, arrives in Amsterdam.40 As all foreigners must do,
he has to report to the police in order to get a passport. He hands over his German
39 Marlou Schrover, ed., Bronnen betreffende de passport, issued by the Justizamt in Lieberstein. It is returned to him on 1 October,
registratie van vreemdelingen in Nederland in de
negentiende en twintigste eeuw (Den Haag: Instituut
together with a Dutch pass. This is a declaration by the Amsterdam chief of police that
voor Nederlandse Geschiedenis, 2002), http://web. Hofmann has been admitted to the kingdom and may travel freely and may stay in the
archive.org/web/20181219165441/http://resources.
huygens.knaw.nl/pdf/Broncommentaren/voorlopig/
country. The pass, containing Hofmann’s physical particulars (signalement) and his
Broncommentaren_5_Compleet.pdf, archived 19 Dec. signature, contains a reference to the register of passes kept by the police. There the aim of
2018.
his stay (‘to trade’), his signalement, and the address of his lodging have been registered.
40 Amsterdam City Archives, Gemeentepolitie (5225),
inv. nr. 872, repr. Schrover, Bronnen betreffende de
The Amsterdam City Archives still preserve these pass registers 1849-1922 (105 volumes).
registratie van vreemdelingen, pp. 43-46. In 1923 the city adopted a new technology: a card index. In smaller towns the registration
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comprises a few volumes only, partly because the rule to issue a pass to those who had been
admitted into the country, had fallen into abeyance in many towns, and because foreigners
living in the Netherlands for some time were registered in the population register (see
1.2.4). When they were merchants or had another profession, they were also registered in
the patent registers (see 8.3).

Eduard Hofmann became an object of what political scientists Huub Dijstelbloem and
Albert Meijer have called the ‘migration machine’, comprising laws and policies, a large
amount of technology, and people such as civil servants, border police, and the migrants
themselves.41 Nowadays technology is predominantly ICT. In the past it involved a large
amount of paperwork: registers, card indexes, files, passports, certificates, and, since the
end of the 19th century, photographs and fingerprints as well. Hofmann gets to see only a
part of that machine during his visits to the police and when the documents based on the
registration are handed out to him.

On Hofmann’s arrival in Amsterdam, the Aliens Act of 1849 had just been enacted. The act
was only to be replaced by a new one in 1965. In the meantime, the migration machine
(and thus the archiving systems at national and local levels) had been frequently adapted to
changing societal challenges (see Fig. 0.2). For example, the First World War caused
heightened anxiety about deserters, revolutionaries, and refugees who might jeopardize
the neutrality of the Netherlands in the war. This led to tightening border control (1914)
and a new registration system: files of foreigners (1918). The obligatory passport (abolished
in 1862 by the Netherlands and many other countries) was reintroduced. When the
international situation stabilized, the migration machine was slightly adjusted; in 1922
compulsory reporting to the police and the complex system of two types of cards and
passes were abolished. In some smaller municipalities registration of foreigners even
vanished altogether. However, at the instigation of local ordinances, the police established
new registration systems. Larger constabularies set up separate departments of foreigners
41 Huub Dijstelbloem, Albert Meijer and Michiel Besters,
Migration and the new technological borders of Europe
or immigration police (vreemdelingenpolitie). They started to build files on various
(London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). categories of foreigners that were separate from the official registration. This is an example

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of professionalization and specialization as factors of archivalization (see the General
Introduction). It is also visible in the expansion of the registration, which comprises many
more data than in the systems before 1921. The number of items to be registered rose from
15 to 28.

Again and again, societal challenges led to adapting the migration machine. For example,
shortly after the Second World War, the registration included an assessment about the
membership in German organizations of the foreign resident or his or her spouse and
children. The foreigner also had to record (item by item and submitting written evidence)
on what grounds he or she believed ‘to be able to prove to be a true friend of the Dutch
people’.

Apart from the files kept by the local (later: regional) immigration police, the central
government held files on foreigners as well.42 There was no specific legal requirement to do
so, but the administration wanted to keep all correspondence regarding one person
together in a file. In the beginning, a new file was opened on each application for a visa, but
from 1948 all papers concerning one person were put together. With the growth of the
number of agencies and organizations dealing with foreigners, more documents from
various provenances were filed. This meant also that a file no longer contained mere
standard information, but might hold documents of a very diverse nature: notices from
legal departments; judgments; correspondence between government, guardians, and
solicitors; and all the supporting material, like country reports made by refugee
organizations; appeals by solicitors; letters from employers, family members, church
members, neighbours, and classmates; and denunciations from other asylum seekers. Files
became thicker (ten centimetres or more) if the case was problematic. What is judged to be
problematic is not the same at all times. Shortly after the Second World War, there was
much attention for pro-German people, later communists were seen as a threat which had
to be contained by extensive reporting.
42 Tyco Walaardt, Geruisloos inwilligen: argumentatie
en speelruimte in de Nederlandse asielprocedure,
1945-1994 (Hilversum: Verloren. 2012).
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A national aliens’ department (vreemdelingendienst) existed since 1918. The aliens’
departments in the 25 regional constabularies were merged with the national office when
the Aliens’ Act 1965 was revised in 1994; its current name is Immigration and
Naturalization Service (Immigratie- en Naturalisatiedienst, IND).

Since 1994 asylum seekers are cared for by the Central Agency for the Reception of
Asylum Seekers (Centraal Orgaan Opvang Asielzoekers, COA). Applications for asylum
are vetted by the IND. When the IND does not issue a residence permit, the asylum seeker
must leave the country, just as illegal immigrants. Since 2007 the Repatriation and
Departure Service (Dienst Terugkeer & Vertrek, DT&V) is in charge of the expulsion of
people from the country. DT&V, COA, and IND work together in what is called the aliens’
chain (vreemdelingenketen). Within the aliens’ chain, all information about a foreigner is
digitally shared and all partners make use of the same data; a foreigner is photographed
and fingerprinted only once, for example. Not yet fully digital is the exchange of
information with authorities outside the chain: courts, municipalities, education, health
care, and more. Lawyers and refugee organizations correspond with agencies in the aliens
chain. The file held in the aliens’ chain is accessible by the foreigner himself or herself and
to his or her caseworkers and attorneys. The record subject has the right to correct
inaccuracies.

The IND and its predecessors have created an enormous number of files. In 1955 the files
were cleansed for the first time; of the 500,000 files from 1939-1956, 55,000 files on
applications for a visa were destroyed. This was repeated in 1957. In 1978 there appeared to
be more than a million files; large quantities were selected and destroyed in the 1970s and
1980s, but not always according to transparent criteria. At the end of the 1990s, it was
proposed to preserve only those files which might show a deviation of standard policies.43
43 C.K. Berghuis, W. Hoffstädt and W.D. Küller,
According to the Archives Act, any draft appraisal schedule must be opened to public
De toelating van vreemdelingen. Een institutioneel inspection by citizens. Scholars protested against the destruction of historical source
onderzoek naar het beleidsterrein toelating van
vreemdelingen 1945-1993 (Den Haag: PIVOT, 1994);
material and migrants organizations resisted, because destruction would deprive
Staatscourant 2002, nr. 95. immigrants and their descendants of a major source for researching their past.

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Parliament also got involved in the debate. Under pressure of public opinion, the
government reconsidered the proposal. The National Archives formulated a special
criterion for appraisal of migrant files: they are important evidence of government actions
regarding the admission of foreigners and thereby of the start and development of Dutch
citizenship and the identity of foreigners and their descendants in relation to Dutch
society. All files from before 1990 have been kept; after 1990 only digital copies of the files
of people who legally stayed in the country were kept: asylum seekers and other migrants
who were naturalized or received a residence permit of indefinite duration. All other files
(including the files of people who were denied admission to the Netherlands) are
destroyed, except for a random sample.

1.6 My Government, My File

The government’s file, is it my file? Contacts between government and citizen are
increasingly digital. Nearly all correspondence between the taxpayer and the Tax
Administration is electronic (see 8.3). Using a DigiD (a username and a password) one can
log in on websites of national, provincial, and local government, as well as hospitals,
insurance companies, etc.

In 2017 13.5 million DigiDs were active. They gave access to 871 web services. The Tax
Administration was accessed 60 million times via DigiD, the Public Employment Service
(UWV) 54 million times. Since 2015 public authorities use an electronic messages box ‘My
Government’ (MijnOverheid) to communicate with citizens. In 2017 341 agencies sent 75
million messages, 85 percent of which were sent by the Tax Administration. All messages
are kept in the electronic mailbox until the citizen disposes of the mail. Via DigiD, a citizen
may check his or her own data kept in the five ‘basic’ registers or databases
(basisregistraties) pertaining to persons, the land registry, vehicles, the value of real estate,
and income. The public consulted these registers six million times in 2017.
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Stand 31-12-2017

Basisregistratie Basisregistratie Basisregistratie Kadaster Basisregistratie

Voertuigen Inkomen Topografie

Onroerende zaak

Appartements
recht

Perceel
Gekentekend Inkomen Zakelijk Recht Leiding Kleinschalig
Voertuig netwerk geo-object

Basisregistratie
Basisregistratie Grootschalige Topografie
WOZ Grootschalig
topografisch
object
WOZ waarde

Lijnelement
WOZ object

Belang Basisregistratie
Ondergrond
Ondergrond

Basisregistratie Personen Handelsregister Basisregistraties Adressen en Gebouwen

Niet natuurlijk Woonplaats Pand

persoon
Niet ingezetene Ingezetene
Adresseerbaar
object
Natuurlijk persoon Onderneming Openbare ruimte
maatschappelijke Verblijfsobject
activiteit
Standplaats

Vestiging Nummeraanduiding Ligplaats

Legenda
Basisregistratie niet beschikbaar Verbinding niet beschikbaar BR bevat geometrie
Fig. 1.9 The connections between the basic Basisregistratie beschikbaar Verbinding beschikbaar BR bevat nog geen geometrie
registers (basisregistraties)
https://www.digitaleoverheid.nl/overzicht-
van-alle-onderwerpen/basisregistraties-en-
afsprakenstelsels/inhoud-basisregistraties/
stelselplaat/.

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Public authorities are obliged to share data from any of these basisregistraties. They are
linked to the register of companies (handelsregister), and the basisregistraties for addresses
and buildings, via dozens of data pathways: a person with a certain income is linked to an
address, to a house with a certain value, to a vehicle, etc. Every change in one of the
registrations effects the total ‘image’ of the legible citizen who can be tracked through the
joint registrations when he or she moves to a new house, takes another job, or buys another
car.

1.7 Archiving Families

44

1.7.1 Office Genealogies

Because there were not many noble families in the Republic of the United Netherlands, the
archives of Dutch nobility are not on the scale of those of the English, French, and German
noble families. However, Dutch regents were interested in keeping and maintaining their
archives as well.

In 16th- and 17th-century Amsterdam ‘For a man or his family, the successfully achieved
social fiction of an unbroken line of a honourable, preferably patrilineal, descent was what
counted in establishing enduring claims to politico-economic privilege’, as Julia Adams
wrote.45 However, Amsterdam regents became interested in patrilineal descent only with
44 The following is for the greater part a summary of the aristocratization of the city patriciate in the 17th century. In the 16th and early 17th
Eric Ketelaar, ‘The genealogical gaze. Family identities
and family archives in the fourteenth to seventeenth
centuries, kinship (maagschap) was more important as the basis for political and social
centuries’, Libraries & the cultural record 44, no. status. There were strict rules to prevent a kinship in bodies governing the city that was too
1 (2009): 9-28. On family memory see also Judith
Pollmann, Memory in early modern Europe, 1500-
close. The regents kept a careful genealogical record of their own families and collected
1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), chapter pedigrees of other families with a view towards lucrative marriage deals. The Backer family
1.
collected genealogies of 320 Amsterdam families, while the Bicker archives contain lists of
45 Julia Adams, The familial state. Ruling families and
merchant capitalism in early modern Europe (Ithaca,
family members and the offices they held, stretching back to the 1400s and continuing to
N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2005), p. 94. 1772. Adams calls these records ‘office genealogies’.
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Writing family chronicles and genealogies became popular among Dutch regents,
beginning in the first half of the 17th century. An example is the volume with genealogical
memoranda written by Pierre de Beaufort (1595-1611), a French merchant who emigrated
to Zeeland. These were continued by his descendants until 1716 and have been preserved
in the family archives that also contain an office almanac for 1681 in which his son Pieter
noted down anniversaries and genealogical data of his ancestors. In those days, almanacs,
like Bibles, were used for noting down family chronicles. Christoffel Doll used an almanac
for the year 1623 to pen a chronicle ‘as a memorial for my children’. As early as 1579 Jan van
der Merct began a ‘Book of births of our children‘ (Geboortenboeck van onse kinderen) with
a reference to his father’s book, where his birth date had been inscribed. In 1626, when
Jan’s daughter Catharina married Daniel Hochepied she took the book with her, and it was
continued as a Hochepied family chronicle until 1708. The album amicorum that Nicolaas
Simonsz van Zwieten started in 1590 was used from 1621 to 1684 by his descendants to
chronicle the family history. The Stoop family of Dordrecht started a family chronicle in
1614 and continued it for almost a century. After his marriage in 1660, Dirk Heereman van
Suydtwyck began a ‘memorial’, including copies of records on the family’s estate and
genealogical notes; after his death in 1678 his widow continued the book until her death
in 1710.

As Luuc Kooijmans writes, merchants were preoccupied with risk and reputation and
continuity from one generation to the next.46 Therefore, Dutch regents wrote patrician
pedagogic memoirs for their descendants celebrating the lineage and transmitting
cautionary moral tales underlining the fragility of the family line. An example is the
46 Luuc Kooijmans, ‘Risk and reputation. On the Memorie of 150 pages written by regent Paulus Teding van Berkhout (1609-1672). For him,
mentality of merchants in the early modern period’,
in Entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship in early
the documents in the family archives were not only evidence of the administration of his
modern times. Merchants and industrialists within estate, but they also served the aristocratic pretensions and the protection of family
the orbit of the Dutch staple market, ed. C.M. Lesger
and L. Noordegraaf (Den Haag: Stichting Hollandse
honour. He was the first in his family to stipulate that the family archives and portraits
Historische Reeks, 1995), pp. 31-32. See on Teding should pass to the eldest son. In the 17th century it became customary to leave the family
van Berkhout also Jeroen Blaak, Literacy in everyday
life: reading and writing in early modern Dutch diaries
portraits, the family Bible, the pedigree, and the family chronicle to the eldest son.
(Leiden: Brill, 2009).

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In 1644 the antiquarian and genealogist Gerard Schaep cunningly managed to get hold of
the Schaep family archives, which were in the hands of the eldest, but Roman Catholic
branch of the family. Schaep exhorted his descendants to preserve the family archives
properly ‘in the service of our Race’. Schaep’s genealogical passion and aristocratic
ambitions were monumentalized in the family archives as well as in a gallery of family
portraits, some of them fabricated. Family portraits, memory tablets in churches, and the
family archives showed how ancient the family was. This was felt not only by patricians
emulating nobility but also by the old aristocracy that wanted to distinguish itself from
the homines novi by its ancient descent.

The Amsterdam regent Joan Huydecoper (1595-1661) was ennobled by both the Queen of
Sweden and King Louis XIV of France. In 1640 he bought the manor of Maarsseveen. His
part of the Huydecoper family archives consists of private letters, the two nobility patents,
wills, and his private account-book with annotations about the history of his family and his
city (on the Huydecopers see also 8.2.3).

1.7.2 A Treasury of Monuments

The urge to pass the social capital on to one’s descendants placed private records in a new
light, transfiguring the family archives into a patrimony to be preserved, expanded, and
transferred to future generations. As Psalm 119:111 reads: ‘Thy testimonies have I taken as
a heritage for ever: for they are the rejoicing of my heart.’

In the 18th century, souvenirs and memorials began to join the legal and administrative
records in Dutch family archives. This fact of monuments joining the muniments reflected
a change in values, appropriations, processes, and media which was apparent in society
at large, one where public archives regained their position as a treasury, not of monetary
valuables, but of historical monuments, valued by antiquarians, diplomatists, and
historians (see 4.8). Occasionally, interested outsiders got access to a family archive.
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For example, in 1777 Baron van Wassenaer provided documents from his family archives
to historians such as Bondam and Van Wijn (who was to become the first National
Archivist in 1802—see 3.6.1) and the historiographer of the province of Zeeland. Van Wijn
thanked the owner, expressing the wish that ‘in most families at the top people be found as
communicative as your Lordship. What would we then know of what is kept hidden
presently?’47

In the course of time, many family archives were lost due to carelessness, but also because
they were destroyed on purpose to prevent strangers from getting access to the family
history. Thus, the executors of pensionary Pieter Steyn sorted the family papers in his
archives according to his testament, packed them in chests, and deposited them in 1787
with the Orphan Chamber in Haarlem for a remuneration of 10,000 guilders. After 100
years all papers were to be destroyed. In 1887 the sealed chests were opened. Most of their
contents were appraised as state papers which were then sent to the National Archives.
However, all private papers were destroyed.48

Still, many family archives have been preserved, due to various factors. When several
generations have lived in one place the chance of survival of the records is greater than
with families who moved often. This is true not only with respect to families who lived in a
castle or stately home but also for families of merchants and bankers such as the Kingma
family (see 7.3.1). The biographer of the Kingma’s mentions a second factor. A family
47 National Archives, Familie Van Wassenaer van archive exerts a certain ‘coercion’: people are following images and models from their
Duvenvoorde (3.20.87), inv. nr. 1562.
family’s past, and thus the family archives become more important.49 Furthermore, a
48 W.E. de Boer-Meiboom, Inventaris van het archief van
Pieter Steyn, 1749-1772 (Den Haag: Nationaal Archief,
substantial family archive attracts even more archives: relatives deposit their archives with
1979). those of the main branch, women join their archival documents with their husband’s
49 Henk Nicolai, ‘De genealogie van het voorwerp: family archives.
Dierbare voorwerpen en familiecultuur bij de
Kingma’s te Makkum’, in Cultuur en maatschappij in
Nederland 1500-1800. Een historisch/anthropologisch In that way, the voluminous archives of Van Eysinga-Vegelin van Claerbergen (60 metres
perspectief, ed. Peter te Boekhorst, Peter Burke and
Willem Frijhoff (Meppel/Amsterdam/Heerlen: Boom/
of shelving) had been formed.50 In 1692 the Frisian nobleman Philip Ernst Vegelin van
Open universiteit, 1992), pp. 285-318. Claerbergen ordained in his testament that all his ‘notable papers, diplomas (bullen) and

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letters’ should be described in an inventory and kept conscientiously by the eldest son.
His son Hessel transferred the archives to Heremastate, his stately home in Joure where
Hessel’s son Philip Frederik assumed custodianship. After his death, his brother Johan took
over the archives. He bequeathed the archives to his grandson Frans Julius Johan van
Eysinga (1752-1828) and his cousin Pieter Benjamin Vegelin van Claerbergen (1734-1780).
The former inherited ‘all books, both printed and in manuscript, and further the collection
of those of my bound papers which do not concern specific goods and securities’. Pieter
received ‘all papers and documents of my ancestors concerning the genealogy or those
which only are of interest for the Vegelin family’. The part of the archives bequeathed to
Frans van Eysinga was transferred to Osingastate, a stately home in Langweer which he
had inherited from his grandfather and where the Van Eysinga archives came to be stored
as well. But the Eysinga House in Leeuwarden housed archives as well. In 1858 it was
discovered that the house contained the archives Van Eysinga-Vegelin van Claerbergen in
their entirety. The owner became jonkheer 51 Idzerd Frans van Eysinga, Frans’ youngest son
who had succeeded his three older brothers. Idzerd had already inherited the family
archives Humalda and Burmania which were kept in Burmania House in Leeuwarden.
The inventory made after Idzerd’s death (1870) described the archives as ‘a batch of
manuscripts’ to which little value was attached. Some years later the eldest son Frans
bought the shares in the archives of the other heirs for 500 guilders. In 1923 the entire
archives were transferred to the State Archives (presently named Tresoar) in Leeuwarden.
Several archivists worked to arrange and describe the archives, but it took until 2008
before the ‘definitive’ inventory (nearly 5,400 items) was published. The printed inventory
contains an archival genealogy: a table showing more than 50 family archives which have
been joined with the Van Eysinga archives in the course of five centuries (Fig. 1.10).

Another example of how the fate of a family archive is intertwined with the family’s
genealogy and linked to the places where the archive has been kept, is the archives of the
50 Barteld de Vries, Het familiearchief Van Eysinga -
Vegelin van Claerbergen (Leeuwarden: Tresoar, 2008).
Heshuysen family. They have been preserved because they were kept until 1958 in the attic
51 Jonkheer is a hereditary honorific title for the lowest
of the Rapenhofje, a local Amsterdam almshouse founded in 1648 by Pieter Raep and
rank within the nobility. managed by members of, among others, the families Raep, Bruyningh, and Heshuysen.
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51a Archiving People

Fig. 1.10 Table of the archives acquired by

the Van Esyinga family. From Barteld de Vries,
Het familiearchief Van Eysinga-Vegelin van
Claerbergen (Leeuwarden: Tresoar, 2008),
p. 28.

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In 1826 Catharina Hooft married Adolf Jan Heshuysen. She was the only surviving child of
Gerrit Hooft and Catharina Bruyningh. From her father she inherited the papers of his
parents and grandparents, and from unmarried uncles and aunts of the Bruyningh family
she inherited the Bruyningh family archives (including some papers of other families, Raep
among them). All these papers now constitute the family archives Heshuysen, kept in the
Amsterdam City Archives, where the administration of Rapenhofje and documents of
the firm Adolf Jan Heshuysen and Comp. are kept as well.

Both the Van Eysinga-Vegelin van Claerbergen archives and the Heshuysen family archives
are currently kept in public repositories (see 1.7.3). However, there are many owners who
keep their archives themselves, sometimes even employing a professional archivist. Three
examples are discussed below.

Since the 12th century, the Counts van den Bergh kept their archives in castle Bergh near
Arnhem. In the 18th century, the castle and the estate came to the house of Hohenzollern-
Sigmaringen. In 1912 the castle was bought by textile manufacturer and art collector
Jan Herman van Heek. Nowadays the castle and the archives are owned by the foundation
House Bergh. The Crown Prince of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen paid a visit to Bergh in
1830. He was appalled by the disorder of the archives and instructed the administrator to
have the archives put in order. By way of an advertisement in 1840, candidates for
arranging and inventorying the archives were sought. The young Reinier Tadema, a judge
in Zutphen (where he would become City Archivist in 1851), was hired. In just over a year
he managed to inventory the total of 139 metres of archives. They were kept in the archive
tower of the castle since 1842 (when the Registratur Ordnung for the stewards of the
Hohenzollerns was introduced). Both archives (the old one and the post-1842 one) have
been kept in the restored mint next to the castle since 1996. The archives of castle Bergh
(managed by the Regional Archives Achterhoek & Liemers) are being digitized.

As Hans Hofman, former archivist of House Bergh, argues, because the owners did not live
at the castle during the 18th and 19th centuries (and thus created their archives elsewhere),

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the archives are not predominantly a family archives: ‘The common element in defining
this archive is the estate and properties and their administration.’ 52

This holds true to a large extent for the archives at Twickel Castle in Delden as well.
The archives (250 metres) do not only comprise the archives of the families who owned the
castle since the 15th century, and those of several related families, but also the archives
created in the management of the vast estate (presently 6,500 hectares, the largest
privately-owned estate in the country). In the courtyard, a special repository was built to
house the archives. Since 1980 they are managed by a professional archivist who has put
all the inventories on the Internet.

According to the Dutch archival terminology, the Bergh and Twickel archives are ‘house
archives’ (huisarchieven): a combination of archives handed down by the people who have
lived in the same house or on the same estate. The term huisarchief is also used for the
archives of a House (dynasty) such as the House of Orange-Nassau. In 1825 King William I
founded the Royal House Archives (Koninklijk Huisarchief, KHA) in The Hague. Among
the archives deposited with the KHA were the private archives of William V, the last
Stadholder and father to King William I. He took them into exile in England in 1795.
The family archives which had been left behind in the Netherlands, were also deposited
with the KHA. From Germany, many documents concerning the Nassau estate also came
into the KHA. Management of the KHA was and is entrusted to court dignitaries; between
1982 and 2019 the director was a professional archivist (the current incumbent is an art
historian). Between 1895 and 1899 a purpose-built and (at the time) modern archives-
cum-library was established behind the Noordeinde Palace in The Hague. It was
thoroughly renovated between 1996 and 1998. The KHA contains the personal papers of
members of the Houses of Nassau and Orange-Nassau, the archives of royal estates and
former estates in the Netherlands and abroad, those of the Royal Household, and some
52 Hans Hofman, ‘The archive’, in Archives: Recordkeeping third-party archives. Upon request, the archives from before 1934 may be consulted for
in society, ed. Sue McKemmish, Michael Piggott,
Barbara Reed and Frank Upward (Wagga-Wagga:
academic research purposes.
Charles Sturt University, 2005), pp. 149-150.
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1.7.3 Collecting Family Archives

Archiving People 53

Archivists in the 19th century did not show much interest in family archives. Although
National Archivist Bakhuizen van den Brink (1854-1865) (see 3.6.2) acquired (through
purchase or donation) many private collections, he was only interested in public or
semi-public documents created and received by officials. In the case of the archives of
admiral Ver Huell, he considered a large portion of interest for biographers, but they
did not include the admiral’s political activities and ‘therefore I do not consider them as
belonging to the State Archives’.54 Ver Huell’s correspondence with his family and the
papers on his domestic life could be destroyed or returned to the family, according to
Bakhuizen van den Brink, ‘if there are family members who appreciate the details about
the renowned man’. And thus, the private papers were given to the admiral’s cousin and
biographer (in 1930 and 1932 these papers came to the National Archives).

Bakhuizen van den Brink’s ideas are echoed in the Dutch ‘Manual for the arrangement
and description of archives’ by Muller, Feith, and Fruin (1898) (see 12.4). Although Muller
had already recognized families as creators of archives in 1879 (see 4.9.2), he excluded
‘so-called family archives’ in 1893 and the latter opinion was codified in the 1898 Manual:
53 E.P. de Booy, ‘Documentatiecentra, private archieven
family archives are ‘a conglomerate of papers and documents’, they ‘do not form “a whole”
en het historisch motief ’, Nederlands archievenblad 78 (…) and lack the organic bond of an archive (…). The rules for ordinary archives, therefore,
(1974): 309-17; F.C.J. Ketelaar, ‘Openbaar en bijzonder
archiefwezen vroeger, nu en in de toekomst’, Jaarboek
cannot be applied to family archives.’ This did not prevent some State and municipal
van het Katholiek Documentatie Centrum 24 (1994): archivists from acquiring family archives. The State Archives in Friesland, for example,
48-56; Petra Links, ‘Privépapieren in bewaring’, in
Particuliere archieven. Fundamenten in beweging,
acquired many archives from the Frisian nobility: in 1900 the family archives Thoe
ed. Theo Vermeer, Petra Links and Justin Klein Schwartzenberg en Hohenlansberg (32 metres), the year after those of the Van Beijma
(’s-Gravenhage: Stichting Archiefpublicaties, 2013),
pp. 31-43.
thoe Kingma family (19 metres), followed by the archives of the families Van Harinxma
54 R. Fruin, De gestie van dr. R.C. Bakhuizen van den
thoe Slooten (10 metres), Van Sminia (16 metres) and a great number of smaller family
Brink als archivaris des rijks 1854-1865 hoofdzakelijk archives.
uit zijne ambtelijke correspondentie toegelicht
(’s-Gravenhage: Algemeene Landsdrukkerij, 1926),
p. 49.

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However, Muller stuck to the traditional conception:

Private archives ought not to be called proper archives; often they are collections of
papers of a much-varied nature, without a certain organization, partly even without
any connection; such things, in my opinion, are not really at home in a public
archival repository.55

Archivists of the younger generation wanted to consider family and other private archives
as archives, and they did not have any fundamental objections against taking private
archives into custody in public repositories. Fruin, however, had mixed feelings. In 1917
(after he had become National Archivist) he explained to the State archivists (among them
Muller) that, in general, a family archive is not at home in a public archival repository,
partly because access to such an archive is restricted on the whole. Family archives
containing official and semi-official documents and manorial records, however, should be
kept in a public repository. Since, according to Fruin (pace the Manual), a family archives
is an organic whole, these documents should not be separated from the rest, and thus the
whole archive should be transferred into public custody. Fruin, however, preferred to see
family archives acquired by a special privately managed repository.

Such a repository came about in 1925 when the pre-eminent association of genealogists
De Nederlandsche Leeuw founded a department of family archives, literally next door to
the National Archives in The Hague. Soon they kept almost 40 family archives, partly on
loan from the neighbour who transferred those family archives ‘which are of less interest
to general history’ (die voor de algemeene geschiedenis van minder belang zijn) to the
association. From 1929 onwards, central government paid a senior archivist at the
National Archives who worked part-time for De Nederlandsche Leeuw. The argument
was that the association, by caring for family archives, relieved the State Archives from an
important task. In 1984 De Nederlandsche Leeuw handed over the maintenance of the
55 S. Muller, ‘Toespraak van den voorzitter’, Nederlandsch
family archives to the Central Bureau of Genealogy (a private foundation established in
archievenblad 24 (1915-1916): 14. the building of the National Archives).
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Since 1917 it is commonly acknowledged by Dutch archivists that family archives are
indeed archives: a combination of personal archives in which the relation between the
components is determined by family relations. In such a family archives official
documents, (part of ) a business archive, or documents concerning a manor may be found
as well. ‘The conglomerate untangled’ is not accidentally the title of guidelines for
inventorying family archives, published in 1984.

In 1964 the Central Register of Family Archives (Centraal Register van familiearchieven)
was founded to register the whereabouts and contents of family archives, both those in
public repositories as well as those kept by private people, often at their home. Later its
task was expanded to associations, churches (see 2.4), and businesses. Therefore, in 1977,
the name was changed into Central Register of Private Archives (Centraal Register van
particuliere archieven, CRPA) as a department within the National Archives. The CRPA
did not only register, it gave advice to people regarding the management of their archives
and the choice of a repository that might be suitable for the depositing of their private
archives. Towards the end of the 20th century the CRPA declined and closed down—the
National Archives gave priority to public archives.

Yet in the 1970s government had formally accepted that several private archives belong

to those cultural assets whose preservation is in the interest of the community;

safeguarding that interest may be counted as a governmental responsibility if those
who are primarily responsible appear not to be able to bear this responsibility
sufficiently.56

However, no State subsidy was given for maintaining separate repositories of private
archives; governmental support would be given, as in the past, by taking private archives
56 Archiefraad. Verslag 1971 (’s-Gravenhage: into the custody of State and municipal archives. In 1985 the Minister of Culture reiterated
Staatsuitgeverij, 1972), p.52, see also Archiefraad.
Verslag 1972 (’s-Gravenhage: Staatsuitgeverij, 1973),
this policy, making it quite clear that he declined to subsidize archival care by private
p. 16. owners of archives (see 7.8).

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Nonetheless (or perhaps: consequently) special archives have spread beyond the public
domain. The repository of De Nederlandsche Leeuw has already been mentioned. The
Dutch Economic History Archives (1914) (see 7.7), which are older, occasionally accepted
family archives important to economic history. In 1935-1936 the International
Information Centre and Archives of the Women’s Movement and the International
Institute for Social History were founded. In 1969 the Catholic Documentation Centre was
opened and in 1971 the Historical Documentation Centre of Dutch Protestantism
followed. However, these special archives (with the exception of the last one), have no
specific task of collecting family archives. This contrasts with the Central Bureau of
Genealogy which keeps more than 600 family archives; that is to say: portions of family
archives that contain documents of importance for genealogical research.

1.8 Conclusion
According to the model of the archiving context (Fig. 0.2), this chapter treated the business
(what) of ‘archiving people’ by people (who) acting as agents involved in work processes
(how). Institutions like church, state, city, business, and the family generally do not register
people as an end, but as a means to know who their members, citizens, sailors, clients, and
relatives are, how they behave, what they need and what they contribute. At the same time,
such archiving draws boundaries between ‘us’ and ‘them’. Archiving ‘outsiders’ such as
migrants, vagabonds, and Jews is an instrument for surveillance, expulsion or worse. Thus,
archiving people may serve both benign purposes or result in entrapment. Creation, use,
and abuse of archives are subject to archivalization: the conscious or unconscious choice
(determined by social and cultural factors) to consider something worth documenting and
archiving. Examples of archivalization (and of societal challenges at the top of the model)
in this chapter include the decision to register a still-born child, the refusal to deliver
‘non-Jew certificates’, the urge to construct family archives, and the changing views on
privacy leading to changes in archiving.
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In medieval and early modern times archiving people was mostly confined to the
registering institution and only rarely shared with other entities (one of the exceptions
being the warrants for people moving to another place of residence). This was partly due to
the particularism that characterized government especially in the Republic of the United
Netherlands. From the 1800s, however, the central state strived to make the citizen ‘legible’
by the use of multiple registers and by linking various registers to the extent that ‘paper
man’ is archived in a networked ‘total’—at times even totalitarian—system.

Archiving people by institutions could be of use to people as well, however. The citizen
needed a citizen certificate, the VOC sailor his pay-slip, the tobacco seller his licence,
according to the rules imposed within his or her community. But there were also forms of
self-determined use of (and by) archiving people, for example in keeping diaries and
private archives. Such archiving was similar to ‘institutional’ archiving because it dealt
with continuity and evidence, but it differed because of a preoccupation with the memorial
function of archiving people. In both the administrative and the memorial modes,
archiving is a part (and an outcome) of a work process, but in the former the goal is
creating evidence, in the latter creating ‘touchstones’ of memory.57

Archiving is a social practice because it is socially performed. Such performances were

the meetings of boards and committees using documents to sustain and record their
decisions. Examples in this chapter are the board of the Amsterdam Civic Orphanage,
and the militieraad.

These practices can be illustrated with the archiving of migrants (1.5), an illustration which
in many respects is representative of archiving people in other domains as well. From the
end of the 16th century, an effort was made to curb the influx of war refugees and other
migrants who were a burden on the system and to regulate the financial support of the
poor by adapting the archiving and the technology in use (certificates, registers). The
57 Laura Millar, ‘Touchstones: considering the
relationship between memory and archives’,
systems that were implemented in the 19th century for archiving migrants were repeatedly
Archivaria 61 (2006): 105-26. adapted because of changes in technology (passports with a photograph, card indexes,

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loose-leaf registers, and automation) and the changing societal challenges caused by new
flows of migrants resulting from the World Wars and decolonization. These factors of
archivalization influence appraisal and destruction of archives: just before the beginning of
the 21st century, the increased compassion with asylum-seekers led to the adaptation of
the criteria for selecting the files of foreigners. The archiving interests of migrants and their
descendants are acknowledged. Increasingly the agency of the record subject as co-creator
of his or her record is legitimized. As I wrote some ten years ago:

This social and cultural phenomenon of co-creatorship entails a shift of the

traditional paradigm of the organic nature of records and the principle of
provenance. These records may be maintained on the organization’s server, as in
trust for the co-creators. More and more, government and business archives will
contain records of parallel provenance from two or more entities each residing in a
different context, even when they are involved in different kinds of action, for
example creation and control. This will also allow us to reconsider the boundaries
between public and private archives. Both are elements of a larger framework,
private archives complementing and supporting public archives and vice versa.58

58 Eric Ketelaar, ‘Archives as spaces of memory’, Journal of This co-creatorship by various agents happens in what we may call a genre system (see the
the Society of archivists 29 (2008): 14-15. See also Chris
Hurley, ‘Parallel provenance: (1) What if anything is
General Introduction) ‘where each participant makes a recognizable act or move in some
archival description?’, Archives and manuscripts 33 recognizable genre, which then may be followed by a certain range of appropriate generic
(2005): 110-45; Sue McKemmish, ‘Evidence of me
… in a digital world’, in I, digital. Personal collections
responses by others.’ 59
in the digital era, ed. Christopher A. Lee (Chicago:
Society of American Archivists, 2011), pp. 115–48;
Sue McKemmish and Michael Piggott, ‘Toward the
In the General Introduction, I introduced the concept of the duality of the archive. An
archival multiverse. Challenging the binary opposition example in this chapter is family archives embodying a ‘script’ to behave according to the
of the personal and corporate archive in modern
archival theory and practice’, Archivaria 76 (2013):
images and values transferred by the archives. This continuum of giving new meanings is
111–44. equally relevant for the changed and changing views of the archival profession on family
59 Charles Bazerman, ‘Systems of genres and the and other private archives. In every file one notices the fingerprints left behind by the
enactment of social intentions’, in Genre and the new
rhetoric, ed. Aviva Freedman and Peter Medway
record subjects and other ‘archivers’ through their interactions and interventions, thereby
(London: Taylor & Francis, 1994), p. 97. co-determining and re-determining the meaning of the file. This continues when these
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files are acknowledged and being used by migrants, their descendants, and society at large
as a historical (memorial) source. As in other circumstances ‘people without papers’ (les
sans-papiers) are rarely totally undocumented. As I demonstrated in this chapter (see also
the Prologue concerning the Rembrandt documents), people will leave traces in some
archiving system or other that may become a source of reconstructing a life. In this case
the archive is not used for its primary administrative purpose, but as a historical source. To
understand that source, it is necessary to understand the social practices by which the
archive was created and transferred through time.

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Contact
T +31 (0)70 82 00 371
E info@docfactory.nl
W www.docfactory.nl
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A SOCIAL HISTORY OF
DUTCH ARCHIVES Chapter 2

Archiving
Churches
—
2.0 Introduction
2.1 Giving to the Church
2.2 Chapters and Churches
2.3 Archiving the Reformation
2.3.1 Iconoclasm and Archives
2.3.2 Archiving the New Bible
2.3.3 Disciplinary Acta
2.3.4 Church Members and Charity
2.4 Collecting Church Archives
2.5 Conclusion

l Fig. 2.0 The oldest charter in the Netherlands

in the archives of the abbey of Thorn (Limburg):
King Otto I donates various rights to his vassal
Count Ansfried of Huy, 950. Regional historical
centre Limburg, Vrije rijksheerlijkheid Thorn
(01.187A), inv. nr. 1.

ˇ
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2.0 Introduction
Until recently, the Church was the centre of society—in the figurative sense and often also
literally. This was the case since Christianization, but also after the Reformation in the 16th
century. The Roman Catholic Church was a community of the book: in the first place the
Bible, but also the liturgical books, the books registering the faithful, and the books
recording the privileges and properties of the Church. The last three were interconnected:
the faithful would donate properties, the proceeds of which were meant to pay for saying a
mass on the anniversary of the benefactor. This would be recorded in the breviary used at
the liturgy. Other parchment and paper documents had a comparable memory function:
the charters, the accounts, the financial registers, etc.

The oldest administrative documents concern donations of properties to religious

institutions that archived them carefully—often by making a copy of them in a cartulary
(a register with transcripts of charters), or in a liber traditionum (a register making
mention of donations and/or containing transcripts). Such giving of property to the
Church is dealt with in 2.1.

A review could be written of archiving in every one of the Dutch religious institutions, but
I will limit myself in section 2.2 to the Bishop and chapters of Utrecht who created the first
archive within the present borders of the Netherlands.

The Dutch Revolt against the Spanish king began in 1566 with iconoclasts ransacking the
churches and their archives (2.3.1). The Revolt led to the foundation of the Republic of the
United Netherlands in 1588-1595. The States General of the Republic convened a
Reformed synod and ordered a new translation of the Bible. Both were archived, and these
archives became symbols of the balanced relationship between Church and State (2.3.2).
The Reformed Church created a new genre system (see the General Introduction) around
the acta of the church council (2.3.3). From archiving in the Reformed Church its
members benefited as did poor relief (2.3.4).

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Archiving Churches
According to Cees Dekker in his inaugural address as professor of archivistics at the
University of Amsterdam in 1981, the formation of church archives nearly always
happened spontaneously as a result from the administrative processes, with practical
rather than religious motives being important.1 Only in some of the smaller
denominations does one notice idealistic concerns which codetermine archiving,
especially when the community was still young. An example are the Mennonites, whose
refusal to acknowledge ecclesiastical authority and their faith in Christ’s return to Earth
did not stimulate them to record affairs in the here and now. According to Dekker, the
Moravian Church (Hernhutters) stood in sharp contrast to the Mennonites. They were a
‘group with clear-cut ideas, firmly led from a central point (…) infused with a business-like
mercantile spirit,’ and they ‘noted everything down (…) and exercised an extensive
archives management’.

Archiving the Church has had great impact in the Netherlands. This is true not only for
the churches themselves, but especially for society, both on people inside the Church and
outside. The societal impact of church archives led to their preservation becoming of
growing interest to public archival institutions since the late 19th century. For a long time,
however, both government and the churches preferred the churches managing their
archives. This changed in the 1980s, as will become clear in 2.4.

2.1 Giving to the Church

The Church was supported by emperors, kings, and nobility who donated land and rights,
often on the occasion of the founding of a church or a monastery. In this way, the donors
1 Cornelis Dekker, Kerkelijke archieven. Rede illustrated their power, gained influence in the Church, and secured their salvation.
uitgesproken bij de aanvaarding van het ambt van
buitengewoon hoogleraar in de archiefwetenschap
These properties had to be administered. In his capitulary Brevium exempla ad
alsmede de paleografie van de 14e tot en met de 17e describendas res ecclesiasticas et fiscales Charlemagne himself provided examples of how
eeuw aan de Universiteit van Amsterdam op 18 mei
1981 (s.l., 1981), repr. in Nederlands archievenblad 85
to administer: sic breviare debes—this is how you should record. In the inventory of the
(1981): 126-48. resources of a landed estate the religious treasures, bibles, and liturgical books had to be
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described first, then the homesteads, the properties held in usufruct, the holders of
benefices, and finally all estates with their livestock, garden plants, and fruit trees. The
basis for such an inventory were the charters whereby properties had been transferred.

Although these charters were kept carefully, much has been lost in the course of time and
is known only from later copies. Nevertheless, some original deeds of donation have been
preserved, among them the oldest original charter pertaining to Dutch territory: a gift in
864 by the King of West Francia to Saint Bavo’s monastery in Ghent (Belgium) which
included a marsh in Friesland. The document is kept at the State Archives in Ghent.
Incidentally, the oldest original charter in the National Archives of the Netherlands is
a papal bull (edict) of 5 November 1179 for the Benedictine abbey of Rijnsburg. One and a
half centuries older is a deed of 1025 whereby the German King Conrad II donates a part of
the county of Drenthe to the Bishop of Utrecht. Although only a fragment (a mere quarter)
of the charter has survived, it is the oldest document in the Utrecht Archives.2

Still older is a charter, dated 7 October 950, whereby King Otto I donates various rights to
his vassal Count Ansfried of Huy, including the market, the coinage, and the toll at
Kessenich (province of Limburg) (Fig. 2.0).3 Later, in 992, a cousin of Ansfried founded the
abbey in Thorn (Limburg), to which the formerly donated rights were transferred. The
deed of gift of 950 was kept in the archives of the abbey which are now in the possession of
the Limburg State Archives. This document dating from around the middle of the 10th
2 Perkament in stukken. Teruggevonden middeleeuwse
century is a forgery, or rather, a pseudo-original (schijnbaar origineel), because Otto never
handschriftfragmenten, ed. Bart Jaski, Marco Mostert, recorded his gift in a charter. The charter was made later and sealed with a faked royal seal,
and Kaj van Vliet (Hilversum: Verloren, 2018),
pp.151-57.
perhaps because the beneficiary did not want to rely on the witnesses at the oral donation
3 A.D.A. Monna, Zwerftocht met middeleeuwse heiligen
ceremony but felt the need for a deed in writing. It could also be that people were not so
(Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1988), pp. 107-9, 125-33; Marco much interested in the legal aspect of the charter, but rather saw it as a commemorative
Mostert, ‘Forgery and trust’, in Strategies of writing.
Studies on text and trust in the middle ages, ed. Petra
text, embodying a historical event.4 It is somewhat painful that this fabricated charter is
Schulte, Marco Mostert and Irene van Renswoude generally considered to be the oldest document in a Dutch public archival repository.
(Turnhout: Brepols, 2008), pp. 37-59.
We might prefer to bestow that title of honour to a document that is real in every respect,
4 Patrick J. Geary, Phantoms of remembrance. Memory
and oblivion at the end of the first millennium
such as the Roman wax tablet from the year 29 (see chapter 8.1), although it is preserved
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), ch. 3. in a museum, not in an archive.

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From the 9th century onward religious institutions in the Carolingian Empire started
creating cartularies: registers of integral copies of charters, deeds, and other records
relating to the foundation, the properties, and legal rights of the institution. According to
the medieval historian Patrick Geary, this often happened as part of an administrative
programme of estate management, but also to record the history of the ecclesiastical
properties for posterity. A third reason for cartularization was the desire to bring together
copies of select documents which could serve the pursuit of specific legal claims.5 We see
this happening in the Netherlands as well. When Bishop Hunger of Utrecht had to flee
from the Normans in 857, he took all the charters with him to the monastery of Sint-
Odiliënberg (Limburg). One of his successors, Bishop Radbod (or Radboud)—still in exile
but established in Deventer since circa 882—used these charters to make a cartulary: the
oldest cartulary in the Bishopric of Utrecht.6 We have knowledge of the cartulary from
copies only, the oldest dating from the 11th century. This copy was acquired by the English
antiquary Sir Robert Cotton in the 17th century. Together with the rest of his enormous
collection (containing, for example, a copy of the Magna Carta and the text of Beowulf) the
Utrecht cartulary came into the possession of the British Library. Around the middle of the
10th century, a few charters were copied in the cartulary in order to serve as confirmation
by the King of the donations made by his predecessors. In the 12th century, the cartulary
was copied once again in its entirety, whereby the texts were rearranged more or less in
chronological order. This copy is the Liber Donationum that was kept in the muniment
room of the cathedral (see Fig. 2.1) Currently the codex is in the Utrecht Archives.

Another copy of the Radbod cartulary served the monks of Egmond Abbey (province of
Noord-Holland) around 1100 as a basis for their own cartulary. For these monks the deeds
had no evidential or administrative value; they collected the copies in a codex with copies
of other charters, the annals of their own monastery, and some other chronicles.
5 Geary, Phantoms of remembrance, pp. 87-98. The Utrecht muniments had become Egmond monuments. This often happened.
6 P.A. Henderikx, ‘Het cartularium van Radbod’, in Patrick Geary gives various examples of 9th-century cartularies which have not been
Datum et actum. Opstellen aangeboden aan Jaap
Kruisheer…, ed. D.P. Blok et al. (Amsterdam: Meertens
established for an administrative or legal purpose, but rather to (re)collect ‘the traditions
Instituut, 1998), pp. 231-64. about the church (…), its relics, its lands, its dependents, and its patrons’. The border
60a kader

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between administrative and memorial functions was very flexible. For example, an
obituarium (or necrologium) was not only a record of the soul masses to be read daily, but
also of the prebends out of which the masses and the canons were to be paid.
Because the charters had no administrative value, their archiving (originals and copies in
7 Thomas N. Bisson, The crisis of the twelfth century. cartularies) was not aimed at exploitation. In the early Middle Ages, most ecclesiastical
Power, lordship, and the origins of European
government (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton
and secular authorities considered their patrimonies as fixed assets.7 Only gradually did
University Press, 2009), p. 328. they come to realize that archival documents could be used for a profitable exploitation of
8 R. Rau, Briefe des Bonifati­us [...] (Darmstadt: the domains. The archival genres that were developed for this new purpose, are the subject
Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1968), nr. 109;
C.J.C. Broer and M.W.J. de Bruijn, ‘Bonifatius en
of section 6.2.3.1.
de Utrechtse kerk’, in De kerk en de Nederlanden.
Archieven, instellingen, samenleving. Aangeboden aan
prof. dr. C. Dekker bij zijn afscheid als rijksarchivaris
en als hoogleraar in de archiefwetenschap…, ed. E.S.C.
Erkelens-Buttinger et al. (Hilversum: Verloren, 1997),
2.2 Chapters and Churches
pp. 43-65
9 Most information on the archives of the chapters
From the 7th century missionaries brought about the Christianization of a large part of
is drawn from S. Muller Fz., Catalogus van het what is now the Netherlands. In 695 Utrecht became the seat of the missionary Bishop
archief van het kapittel van St. Pieter (’s-Gravenhage:
Van Weelden en Mingelen, 1886); S. Muller Fz.,
Willibrord. After his death Boniface defended the position of Utrecht as a permanent
Catalogus van het archief der bisschoppen van Utrecht bishopric against the claims of the Bishopric of Cologne. He asked the support of Pope
(Utrecht: Breijer, 1906); K. Heeringa, Inventaris van
het archief van het kapittel van de Dom te Utrecht
Stephanus II to furnish him with copies from the papal archives (de scrinio aecclesiae
(Utrecht: Oosthoek, 1929); Bram van den Hoven van vestrae).8 In the 10th and 11th centuries Utrecht saw the establishment of five secular (i.e.
Genderen, ‘Registers en rekeningen: een voorbeeld
van middeleeuwse administratie en verschriftelijking’,
non-monastic) chapters (kapittels), each attached to a specific church: the Saint Martin’s
in De kerk en de Nederlanden, pp. 168-88. Cathedral chapter (Domkapittel), the chapter of Saint Saviour (Oudmunster), and Saint
On the chapters of Saint John and Saint Saviour:
E.N. Palmboom, Het kapittel van Sint Jan te
Peter’s, Saint John’s, and Saint Mary’s chapters. The bishop and each of the chapters
Utrecht. Een onderzoek naar verwerving, beheer en created archives.9 Their current volume ranges from 96 charters (Saint John) to 7,359
administratie van het oudste goederenbezit (elfde-
veertiende eeuw) (Hilversum: Verloren, 1995);
charters (Saint Saviour), and from 45 shelf metres (Saint Peter) to 170 metres
A.J. van den Hoven van Genderen, De heren van (Domkapittel). Of the more than 47,000 documents in the archives of the five chapters,
de kerk. De kanunniken van Oudmunster te Utrecht
en hun kerkgebouw in de late middeleeuwen (Zutphen:
almost 19,000 have been digitized as per 12 March 2019, resulting in 360,000 scans which
Walburg Pers, 1997). are available on the Internet.
On the archiving by the regular (i.e. monastic) chapter
of Saint Francis in Utrecht see Hildo van Engen,
De derde orde van Sint-Franciscus in het middeleeuwse In 2.1 I wrote how Bishop Hunger of Utrecht and his successors took their charters with
bisdom Utrecht. Een bijdrage tot de institutionele
geschiedenis van de Moderne Devotie (Hilversum:
them into exile. In 918 the bishop returned to Utrecht. Initially, his archives were kept in
Verloren, 2006), pp. 379-90. the cathedral, in the archives of Saint Martin’s chapter. But besides the repository in the

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cathedral, the bishop had other repositories at his disposal elsewhere in the bishopric.
From the end of the 14th century, the bishop established archival repositories in several of
his castles, and in the middle of the 15th century a central repository was founded in the
episcopal residence at Duurstede.

Initially, most attention was given to the charters and the accounts, but around the middle
of the 14th century the chancery started making registers. The four most important series
are the registra feodalium concerning the fiefs (lenen); the diversoria containing copies of
various outgoing documents, mostly of a political nature; the judicialia with judgments;
and the libri officiatorum et recessuum computationum in which appointments of officers
and the balance of their accounts were registered.
The bishop did not only represent spiritual power, he was also a sovereign lord (landsheer)
of large parts of the Netherlands: Nedersticht (the part of his lands around Utrecht) and
Oversticht, the region on the other side of the river IJssel, roughly encompassing the
current provinces of Overijssel, Drenthe, and Groningen.

When the bishop transferred his secular power to Charles V in 1528, all registers,
cartularies, accounts, ‘and other relevant writings, none excluded’ had to be transferred as
well. The ecclesiastical archives were not handed over. After the Old Catholic schism of
1723, the bishopric’s archives fell to the Old Catholic Church of Utrecht.

Those archives that had been claimed by the Stadholder of Holland on behalf of the
Emperor were for the greater part preserved in Holland and ended up in the National
Archives in The Hague. The episcopal archives that were kept in the land’s chest (landskist)
in Deventer and the one in Utrecht went into the municipal archives in these cities. When
at the end of the 19th century the renowned archivist Samuel Muller started to arrange the
bishopric’s archives, he managed to unite the archives kept in The Hague, Deventer, and
Utrecht. Muller also separated the archives of the Old Catholic Church from those of
Saint Martin’s chapter and did the same by separating from several other collections those
documents which he believed to belong to the bishopric’s archives. In his inventory (1906)
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PAGE CHAPTER ARCHIVING PEOPLE
the provenance of each item was recorded, however. Muller acknowledged that he had
61a Archiving Churches
reconstructed the bishopric’s archives and that some people would regard this with a wry
smile. He wrote ‘I admit that objections may be made, yet I feel no remorse about what I
have done.’

Fig. 2.1 The muniment room of the cathedral in Utrecht with Samuel Muller inventorying the
archives of Saint Martin’s cathedral chapter which were kept in the presses to the right, 1901.
Photo F. Reissig, Utrecht Archives, Prentverzameling, nr. 82951. See Fig. 11.10.

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Twenty years before, Muller had inventoried the archives of the chapter of Saint Peter.
61b Archiving Churches
The inventory, published in 1886, was judged by the Minister of the Interior to be a model
to be followed by the other State archivists.10 In the introduction Muller unfolded his ideas
on archival arrangement, ideas which would be codified in 1898 in the Manual by Muller,
Feith, and Fruin (see 12.4). Muller had introduced some of his conceptions previously in
his 1879 annual report as city archivist. There Muller introduced the notion (later adopted
in section 2 of the Manual) that an archive is ‘an organic whole’.

In the Middle Ages, the charters of Saint Peter’s chapter were well organized. They were
kept in a press (cupboard) with eight sections (marked A-H), each counting ten drawers
(marked I-X). Each drawer (or series of drawers) contained the documents concerning the
chapter’s lands in particular villages. The next lot consisted of five drawers with writings
concerning the tithes, four drawers with annuities (rentebrieven), six drawers mainly with
testaments, and finally four drawers with mixed documents (concernentia) about the
Utrecht Bishopric. Its continuation were six boxes or chests, three of which
(marked Prima, Secunda and Tertia cista) contained concernentia regarding the rights and
statutes of the five chapters. When the drawers of the big press were nearly filled, a smaller
press, the Parva archiva, was installed to keep less important documents in the same order
as in the main press. In the middle of the 16th century, the contents of all drawers and
boxes were described in an impressive inventory which can still be consulted.

In the archives of Saint Martin’s chapter, one encounters the results of 14th-century
archives management by the notary Henricus Boning. On the back of many charters
Boning wrote a reference to the page of one of the archive registers. Unfortunately, these
registers have not survived. Those dorsal annotations by Boning, however, point to the way
the archives were ordered and kept. Boning hesitated about allocations ‘concerning X’ and
‘file with X’ (pertinet ad and ponatur inter). He formed sections for the documents of the
10 W.E. Goelema, ‘De Handleiding: nieuwlichterij of bishop, the prelates, and other church officers, distinguishing these from the cathedral
codificatie ?’, in Respect voor de oude orde. Honderd
jaar Vereniging van archivarissen in Nederland, ed. P.
archives proper, which were divided in rubrics: privilegia, statuta, testamenta, communes
Brood (Hilversum: Verloren, 1991), pp. 61-72. literae. Boning distinguished between deeds of tenancy (tijdpacht) (temporales) and deeds
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of leasehold (erfpacht) (perpetuas) and assigned these to the competent administrative
units (kamers). The documents were geographically stored under the name of the parish
incorporating the land; the drawers or boxes for the various parishes were arranged in
alphabetical order. There also existed the section ‘useless’ (inutiles) containing documents
which will be of some use, but not at an early date. They might, however, have a real
historical value, and are therefore kept propter memoriam. And Boning explains, ‘the
documents are to serve memory, and as a good model indeed to be used when a similar
discord might happen (…) and they may be reserved for the future as information to be
used when a similar case may happen, but for now they are put among the useless [papers].’
(servetur ad memoriam, ut si quandoquidem similis discordia eveniret, bonum esset
exemplar, et alias non video ad quod valeat; reservetur pro tempore futuro, ut si similis
casus continget, quod haberetur pro informatione, sed pro nunc ponetur inter inutiles.)

Charters were often taken out to be presented as evidence in a court case, or other related
purposes. The series of registers recording the lending of charters of Saint Martin’s chapter
starts in 1519. In the archives of the chapter of Saint Mary a register of lending charters
from 1457 to 1464 has been preserved.

The canons of Saint Saviour reorganized their archives between 1348 and 1350. It took
them four days to transfer all charters to a large new cupboard securely anchored in the
vestry. The press was a new extraordinary piece of furniture: the bishop visited the chapter
to admire the new armarium. The charters were not only rearranged to correspond to the
shelves and boxes in the press, but they were also docketed (as the chapter of Saint John
had been doing already since around 1180): the name of the tenant, the area of the land,
and the term of the lease were inscribed on the back of each charter, plus a letter R
meaning that the charter had been registered. A new register of all properties was made,
largely in geographical order, replacing the old register kept since 1300. In the 1360s the
chapter started to inscribe the charters with a letter and number code, referring to their
place in the new armarium.

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Fig. 2.2a and b Deed of permission given by

Bishop Otto II of Lippe to build a church near
the river Gein, separated from the parish of
Eiteren (IJsselstein), 1217. Utrecht Archives,
Kapittel van Sint Marie (221), inv. nr. 830.
The document is a chirograph (see 7.3.2).
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Between 1425 and 1428 the secretary of the chapter of Saint Saviour made a new cartulary
(in three volumes), following the order of the shelves and boxes in the armarium. The
secretary made a selection: not all charters were copied, and many leasehold contracts
were summarized only. This different treatment may have been based on differences in
administrative needs. Original charters were often destroyed when they had lost
relevance, e.g. because the rent had been changed or terminated. Whenever the chapter
needed evidence, it could use its accounts and rent rolls. Thus, not all documents were
stored permanently and not all documents had to be copied fully, as the information was
recorded in other document genres. This, in turn, may be linked to new challenges in the
14th and 15th centuries, leading to new choices in archiving (archivalization—see the
General Introduction). According to Van den Hoven van Genderen these challenges
included the administration of more and bigger estates, as well as the transition from
quasi-perpetual leasehold to annual tenancy which caused regular changes of tenants and
rent which had to be recorded.

The Utrecht chapters were enormously powerful, partly due to their vast estates. The
chapter of Oudmunster, for example, owned at least 3,000 hectares of land, not including
seignorial rights, churches, houses, annuities, tithes, and other such assets. All those
properties were distributed in various funds and the income was earmarked—for example,
to pay stipends for the canons, maintenance of the church, masses to commemorate the
dead, and so forth. This necessitated an extensive administration of income and
expenditure, managed in each chapter by different administrative units (chambers) led by
a chamberlain (kameraar). Accounts of the chambers have been preserved: at the chapter
of Oudmunster since the 13th century, at the other chapters since the 14th century.

The chapters assembled together in the general chapter (kapittel-generaal) to decide on

spiritual as well as temporal matters. Apart from the Bishop or his deputy, the nobility, the
city of Utrecht, and four of the smaller cities often participated as well. That assembly of
the ‘three estates’ developed into the States of the Nedersticht (Utrecht). The chapters and
the city of Utrecht preponderated over the other delegates in the States. After the Refor­

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ma­tion, the Bishop lost his membership in the States, while the chapters, the nobility,
and the cities remained. Henceforth, nobility and cities together elected six to eight
representatives (geëligeerden) of the chapters to serve in the States. Later, the appointment
of the representatives of the chapters in the States passed into the hands of the Stadholder.

After the Reformation the chapters no longer had religious tasks, the churches having been
transferred to the public authorities. The chapters continued to be large landowners,
however. Just as before the Reformation, they had to pay prebends—now to about 140
canons, who had to be Protestant. Prominent families acquired these prebends. In 1746,
for example, Hendrik Swellengrebel, Governor of the United East India Company at the
Cape (with a fortune of one million guilders11), paid 6,000 guilders for a prebend at Saint
John’s for his son Johannes Willem.12 He would not only enjoy the income from the
prebend, but also fringe benefits from offices the chapter was entitled to assign, such as the
stewardship of a regional water board. Johannes’ brothers were given prebends at Saint
Mary’s and Saint Peter’s, and his five sons became canons too. Until 1854 there was always
a Swellengrebel member of one or two of the chapters.

A special type of archive at each chapter was the collection of relics.13 Willibrord was the
first to acquire relics for the bishopric, and later bishops and canons expanded the
collection. Thus, the cathedral owned the so-called hammer of Saint Martin from ca. 1000.
11 Kees Zandvliet, 500. De rijksten van de Republiek.
Rijkdom, geloof, macht & cultuur (Zutphen: Walburg
The object is now in a museum, just as, for example, a 14th century silver bust of the
Pers, 2018). canonized 9th-century bishop, Frederick, formerly owned by the Saint Saviour’s Church.
12 A. Hallema, ‘De Utrechtsche kapittels tijdens en na That church also owned a large part of the undergarment (albe) of Saint Odulphus, whom
de Hervorming’, Archief voor de geschiedenis van het
aartsbisdom Utrecht 56 (1932): 129-342.
Bishop Frederick had sent out as a missionary, and a bowl Odulphus is said to have drunk
13 The following is a summary of Anique C. de Kruijf,
from. The treasures were regularly inventoried. Many were also recorded in the ordinarius,
Stof zijt gij… Een deelinventarisatie van de the register with instructions for celebrating mass, decorating the altars, and taking relics
reliekenschat van de Oud-Katholieke Sint-
Gertrudiskathedraal te Utrecht (Utrecht: Clavis,
along in processions. After the Reformation, most relics were brought into safety. After
2008); Anique C. de Kruijf, Miraculeus bewaard. much (well-documented) wandering, most of the relics came in the care of Petrus Codde
Middeleeuwse Utrechtse relieken op reis. De schat van
de oud-katholieke Gertrudiskathedraal (Zutphen:
in the 17th century. He was a priest of the Roman Catholic Saint Gertrude’s Church in
Walburg Pers, 2011). Utrecht. Codde became one of the leaders of the Utrecht schism: from 1695 until his death
64a kader

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in 1710 he was Archbishop of Utrecht in the Old Catholic tradition. At present, the Old
Catholic Saint Gertrude’s Cathedral in Utrecht, dating from 1914, houses a treasure of
about 1,700 relics, among them many originating from the Utrecht chapters. These relics
are now kept in the base of the celebration altar and in three compartments in the main
altar. About 60 percent of the relics have a cedula, a piece of paper or parchment
identifying the relic. Besides relics, more than 70 textual documents, the majority
pertaining to these relics, are stored in the main altar.

After the annexation by France (1810), all properties of the chapters were confiscated by
the State. In 1826 the newly appointed custodian of the archives of the chapters, Gerrit
Dedel, received an instruction (drafted by the deputy National Archivist J.C. de Jonge) for
the inventorying of these archives, strictly prohibiting the mingling of the archives of one
chapter with those of another chapter.14 Dedel had to inventory the archives of each
chapter ‘on its own’. He was not allowed to distinguish between administrative and
historically important documents, because otherwise the ‘beautiful whole’ (schoon geheel)
of the chapters’ archives would get lost, as De Jonge wrote. This was what later would be
named respect des fonds—in France prescribed in a famous archival instruction of 1841.
However, neither in 1826 nor in 1841, was the respect for original order based on any
archival theory: it rather had a legal-administrative and pragmatic foundation.15

2.3 Archiving the Reformation

2.3.1 Iconoclasm and Archives
14 G.W.A. Panhuysen, ‘De herziening van de On 10 August 1566, the Iconoclasm (Beeldenstorm) began in Flanders and quickly
Handleiding. De Nederlandse oorsprong van het
“beginsel van herkomst”’, Nederlands archievenblad 62
expanded to the north. It was an expression of the resistance against the religious
(1957/1958): 28-49. persecution by the Spanish authorities. Churches and monasteries were purified of images
15 P.J. Horsman, F.C.J. Ketelaar and T.H.P.M. Thomassen, of saints and other signs of popery. The purged churches would henceforth be used for
Tekst en context van de Handleiding voor het ordenen
en beschrijven van archieven van 1898 (Hilversum:
worship by the Reformed Church. Not only statues, paintings, and sacral objects suffered:
Verloren, 1998), pp. LXXXVII-LXXXVIII. the anger of the iconoclasts was directed to the papist archives as well. In Leiden, the

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Iconoclasm began on 25 August 1566. With the help of ‘a few honest people’ the canons of
Saint Pancras tried to save their ‘letters and muniments kept in the ark and in locked or
open cupboards’ in the chapterhouse by bringing them somewhere else. Still, it was not
possible to bring everything into safety ‘due not only to all the dragging away, but also
to the limited time and the confusion’. The next day ‘some evildoers’ searched the boxes
and cupboards, destroyed the drawers and caused so much damage that the floor was
strewn with scraps of parchment and paper.16

The Iconoclasm was not only the signal for the revolt against the sovereign, the Spanish
King Philip II, but also for the battle with the Inquisition and the Roman Catholic
Church.17 Starting in 1572, one town after the other joined the Revolt and adopted
Calvinism, thereby reinforcing the reformed religion. The Reformed Church became the
public church of the Republic of the Seven United Netherlands. People could practice
another religion—but not in public—and only members of the Reformed Church (and of
the Walloon Church) could hold important government functions. The population of the
southern territories (today the provinces of Noord-Brabant and Limburg) remained
largely Catholic and elsewhere in the Republic there were a few Catholic enclaves.

The Reformed Church had the protection of a secular government: the States General,
the States of each of the provinces, the cities, and the seigniories. The properties of most
Roman Catholic churches and monasteries were confiscated, the buildings appropriated
for other purposes. The newly founded Leiden University (1575) occupied a former
16 J.C. Overvoorde, Archieven van de kerken (Théonville:
Leiden, 1915), pp. XLI-XLII.
nunnery, and the income from the estates of Egmond monastery and of a few other
17 A. T. van Deursen, Plain lives in a golden age. Popular
monasteries was allocated to the university. In 4.4 I will explain that the archives of the
culture, religion and society in seventeenth-century monasteries were confiscated as well, as they were essential to the administration of the
Holland, transl. by Maarten Ultee (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 62.
properties. However, many archives disappeared from sight: they were taken along by
18 Sandra Langereis, Geschiedenis als ambacht.
Catholics, found safety abroad, or were hidden, destroyed, sold as waste paper, or came to
Oudheidkunde in de Gouden Eeuw: Arnoldus any number of other endings. Many of the manuscripts were acquired by antiquaries who
Buchelius en Petrus Scriverius (Haarlem/Hilversum:
Historische Vereniging Holland/Verloren, 2001),
used them in their publications. As Sandra Langereis argues, the Reformation was thereby
p. 165. instrumental in bringing about public accessibility of many religious archives.18
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2.3.2 Archiving the New Bible

Archiving Churches

Fig. 2.3 Print by Theodoor Koning after a drawing by Daniël Kerkhoff, Monument for the
Reformed Church of the Netherlands since 1566 (Monument voor de Hervormde Kerk van
Nederland sinds 1566), 1780-1796. Rijksmuseum, RP-P-1904-1085.

A print from the 18th century ‘Monument for the Reformed Church of the Netherlands
since 1566’ (Monument voor de Hervormde Kerk van Nederland vanaf 1566) is a tribute to

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one of the first protestant preachers, Jan Arentsz, who in 1566 spread Calvinism with his
hedge sermons (hagepreken) all around the northern Netherlands.19 The print pictures
Jan Arentsz during his first sermons in Amsterdam, Hoorn, Leeuwarden, and Dordrecht.
The centrepiece of the print shows the examination of the Church’s synodal papers and
the documents for the New Bible.

At the request of the States General, a national synod assembled in Dordrecht in 1618-
1619 (Fig. 2.4). Its main purpose was to end the controversies between liberal and Calvinist
protestants over the Church’s creed. The synod determined both the church rules and the
tenets of Calvinism. In 1625 the acta and other documents of the synod were inventoried
and stored in a big chest with eight locks. One key was for the States General (kept by the
registrar), the others for the seven provinces. Every three years 22 clergymen, representing
the provincial Reformed synods and the Walloon synod gathered in The Hague to open the
chest and to check whether the records were in good condition. In a second chest in Leiden
the autographa of the Bible translation of 1635 were kept. These were the proofs with the
corrections made by the theologians who had worked on the translation while residing in
Leiden (partly at the expense of the city). The Bible, having been approved by the States
19 Print by Theodoor Koning after a drawing by
Daniël Kerkhoff and published by Gerbrand Roos,
General (hence the name: Statenbijbel), was printed in Leiden in 1637. Therefore, this
c. 1796, Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, http://hdl.handle. second chest with the autographa was kept at Leiden City Hall.
net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.407895, accessed 2
Dec. 2018.
20 J.P. van Dooren, Kisten en kasten. 350 jaar kerkelijke
How was the visitation of the records executed? The report of the 1692 visitation is a good
archiefdienst (Den Haag: Persbureau Ned. Herv. example.20 As was customary in the Republic, everything happened in a formal assembly:
Kerk/Boekencentrum, 1976); Theo Thomassen,
Onderzoeksgids. Instrumenten van de macht. De
the meeting of the clergy representing the provincial synods. After the opening and the
Staten-Generaal en hun archieven 1576-1796 reading of the acta of the last meeting, a committee to visit the meeting room of the States
(Den Haag: Huygens Instituut voor Nederlandse
Geschiedenis, 2015), pp. 269-70, https://web.
General was appointed. There the committee asked for permission to inspect the synodal
archive.org/web/20170607054454/http://resources. archives and requested the appointment of two delegates from the States General. Having
huygens.knaw.nl/retroboeken/instrumenten_
macht/#page=0&accessor=toc&view=homePane,
returned to the waiting room, the committee waited for the announcement that they may
archived 7 June 2017; A. Fris, Inventaris van de return at four o’clock to inspect the chest in the ceremonial Trêves chamber (the room
archieven behorend tot het ‘Oud Synodaal Archief ’
van de Nederlandse Hervormde Kerk, 1566-1816
where, in 1608, negotiations for a truce, trêves, with the Spanish had been held). In the
(Hilversum: Verloren, 1991), pp. XI-XVIII. chamber the ministers joined the two deputies from the States General.
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Fig. 2.4 François Schillemans, The Synod

of Dordrecht, 1618-1619. Rijksmuseum,
RP-P-OB-77.278.

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Fig. 2.5 Print by Theodoor Koning after a

drawing by Daniël Kerkhoff, Visitation of the
records of the Synod of Dordrecht. Monument
for the Reformed Church of the Netherlands
since 1566 (Monument voor de Hervormde
Kerk van Nederland sinds 1566), 1780-1796.
Rijksmuseum, RP-P-1904-1085, detail.
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PAGE CHAPTER ARCHIVING PEOPLE
To begin, all prayed to God that the documents may be in the same good condition as they
67a Archiving Churches
were three years before. Then the documents, bound in 17 volumes, were taken from the
chest piece by piece, examined closely, and then returned to the chest, which was then
locked with eight keys. After thanking the Almighty, the clergy thanked the gentlemen
from the States General who then announced that, in the meantime, the States General
had sent a letter to the magistrate of Leiden and that the committee may board the yacht of
the States General to sail to Leiden the next day at 7 a.m. Upon arrival in Leiden, the party
was ceremoniously welcomed by two burgomasters and the city clerk who accompanied
them to the City Hall. There they were awaited by two other burgomasters, the city’s legal
advisor (pensionaris), and the principal of the States’ theological seminary (Statencollege).
After the invocation of God’s name, the Leiden chest was then opened by the city clerk and
the principal, each with his own key. All 14 volumes of the autographa of the Bible were
laid on the table to be examined and subsequently put back in the chest.

After this ceremony, the deputies from the States treated the whole party to a meal, at
which the city honoured those at the table with eight pitchers of Rhine wine. Finally, all
returned to The Hague to continue the meeting that was adjourned the day before. The
two-days event was closed with a ‘brotherly meal’ and the signing of the acta.

This triennial visitation was, of course, a ritual, the records having become a fetish. Yet this
is an expression of the special place occupied by the archives of the Dordrecht synod and
the Bible translation. They even held a central place, as is shown in the allegorical print
with which this section opened.

In 1800 both chests were placed in the assembly chamber of the synod of Zuid-Holland in
Klooster Church in The Hague. The keys were transferred in 1816 to the general synod of
the Dutch Reformed Church, the successor of the Reformed Church. Since 2012 the chests
are kept in Museum Catharijneconvent in Utrecht and their contents in the Utrecht
Archives, where the central archives of the Reformed Church are kept as well.

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2.3.3 Disciplinary Acta
The Reformed Church attached great importance to the unity of doctrine, of management,
and of discipline.21 In order to implement and maintain church discipline, each parish
needed a church council (consistory) consisting of the minister and the elders. The
councils felt the need to note down ‘diligently and truthfully’ (neerstelick ende getrouwelick)
‘all acts and everything expedient to the administration of the church’.22 Both church books
and separate registers of acta were used for these minutes. Many were lost, but those from
Dordrecht and Naaldwijk beginning in 1572, the ones from Delft and Gorinchem from
1573, and those from Arnemuiden, Brielle, Delfshaven and Ridderkerk from 1574 still
exist. It often happened that the secretary also noted down in the church book what had
happened in the village, the town, or in the country, such as war, floods, and earthquakes.

Only those members of the church who were of blameless conduct could be admitted to
the Lord’s Supper. Sinners (like Rembrandt’s mistress Hendrickje Stoffels (or Jaghers)—see
the Prologue and Fig. 2.6) were summoned by the consistory to answer accusations of
unorthodoxy, but also those of drunkenness, gossip, quarrels, fights, and the like.
21 A. Th. van Deursen, Bavianen en slijkgeuzen. Kerk
en kerkvolk ten tijde van Maurits en Oldebarnevelt,
3rd ed. (Franeker: Van Wijnen, 1998), pp. 196-217;
When discipline had to be enforced, the first step usually was an interdiction to partake in
Van Deursen, Plain lives, pp. 267-71; Manon van der the Lord’s Supper. The sinner could only be reconciled with the congregation after a public
Heijden, Huwelijk in Holland. Stedelijke rechtspraak
en kerkelijke tucht, 1550-1700 (Amsterdam: Bakker,
admission of guilt. All details of the proceedings against sinners were written down in the
1998); Judith Pollmann, ‘Off the record. Problems acta, which thereby became narratives of deviance, contrition, and reconciliation.
in the quantification of Calvinist church discipline’,
The Sixteenth century journal, 33 (2002): 423-38;
Charles H. Parker, ‘Reformed Protestantism’, in The
Cambridge companion to the Dutch Golden Age, ed.
Helmer J. Helmers and Geert H. Janssen (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. 194-7.
22 Th. W. Jensma, Uw Rijk kome. Acta van de kerkeraad
van de Nederduits Gereformeerde gemeente te
Dordrecht 1573-1579 (Dordrecht: J.P. van den Tol,
1981).
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Fig. 2.6 Acta of the church council of the

Old Church in Amsterdam, 23 July 1654.
The second-last item reads in translation:
‘Hendrickie Jaghers appeared before the
assembly and has admitted that she lived with
Rembrandt the painter like a whore, for which
she has been seriously punished, admonished
to penitence and banned from the Lord’s
table (the celebration of the Lord’s Supper).’
Amsterdam City Archives, Hervormde
gemeente, Kerkenraad (376), inv. nr. 9, fol. 55.

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An example is the story of baker Pieter Joosten of Dordrecht. In

1575, he and his family strayed from the Church and Joosten had
not yet had his children baptized. For the next three years, the
church council tried hard to win Pieter back, but in December
1578 Pieter’s mother was excommunicated. This is an exceptional
measure, but it seems to have worked. Pieter appears before the
church council on 4 January 1579 and confesses that he has
recovered from doubt and the heresy of Anabaptism. He is longing
for reconciliation with the community. The church council thanks
God for his mercy and receives Pieter, on condition that he
reconciles himself with the parish. The council also admonishes
him to bring his children to be baptized as soon as possible. When
this is done, the reconciliation can be effected on 21 March 1579,
publicly in the church. In the intercessory prayer, Pieter’s errors are
named, and God is thanked for the return of the defector, without
mentioning Pieter’s name. Thus, 16 times in the course of three
years, Pieter Joosten was mentioned in the acta, which thereby
23 J.G.J. van Booma, Onderzoek in protestantse
kerkelijke archieven in Nederland: handleiding, concern both himself, his family, and the community.
tevens beknopte gegevens over de geschiedenis van de
kerkelijke instellingen, over het kerkelijk archiefrecht
en het kerkelijk archiefbeheer (Den Haag: Centraal
Bureau voor Genealogie, 1994); Voorouders in beeld.
Stamboom en familiegeschiedenis, ed. Rob van Drie
(Utrecht/Den Haag: Teleac-NOT/Centraal Bureau
Cases like this occupied the consistory for a long time, sometimes even for years. Accurate
voor Genealogie, 1997), pp. 110-1; Charles Parker, records were indispensable, and the need to keep track of all cases often led to making
‘Pilgrims’ progress. Narratives of penitence and
reconciliation in the Dutch Reformed Church’,
alphabetical indexes and other finding aids.23 The recording in the acta was, as any
Journal of early modern history 5 (2001): 230-1. recording, influenced by archivalization. The acta ‘were the product of conscious decisions
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of the consistory to enter or to omit particular items’, historian Judith Pollmann writes.24
Pollmann found that the Utrecht consistory tried to be discrete, not only by administering
much of its disciplinary measures outside the council chamber, but also by keeping ‘off the
record’ information that concerned members of Utrecht’s elite (but that was recorded in a
private diary). The acta were not accessible to members of the Church, and even
succeeding members of the church council were not supposed to know everything.

If church members were in a state of animosity they could not attend the Lord’s Supper
together. Therefore, the church council tried to settle disputes between church members.
In Amsterdam 22 percent of all cases submitted to the church council ended in a
settlement, in Deventer this was 29 percent and in Sluis 30 percent.25 The parties in the
dispute, the council, and the acta participated in a genre system.

2.3.4 Church Members and Charity

The acta formally established whether people were qualified to attend the Lord’s Supper
and were in good standing with the congregation. That, in turn, was a condition for
receiving a certificate in case of transfer to a church in another town. In such a certificate
(letter of security or indemnity) the church council declared that it would maintain the
departed member in case he or she was unexpectedly reduced to poverty or unable to earn
a living. People in need of such a certificate had to appear before the church council. The
letters, which had to serve as proof in case of poverty, were kept either by the town’s poor
relief board (see also 1.5.1) (see Fig. 1.8) or by the church poor relief board and registered in
24 Pollmann, ‘Off the record’, p. 429. transfer registers or in the church book. In 1775 it became the rule in Drenthe that no one
25 Benjamin J. Kaplan, Calvinists and libertines: could let a house, a farm, or a room to a person from another province who had not
confession and community in Utrecht 1578-
1620 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), pp. 36-37.
delivered a letter of indemnity to the local relief board.26 This was changed in 1818 when
26 H. Gras, Diaconiearchieven als bron. Een gids
the national Poor Law was introduced.
voor historisch onderzoek samengesteld op basis
van archivalia en inventarissen van de hervormde
gemeenten in Drenthe (Assen: Rijksarchief in Drenthe,
Apart from the acta, the parish archives contained correspondence, financial records and
1988). various registers, including registers of baptisms, marriages and burials (see 1.2.1). Other

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components of the church genre system are letters of indemnity (see above), registers of
church members (lidmaten), and records concerning poor relief.

In connection with the admission to the Lord’s Supper, the Reformed Church registered its
members in the church book or in a special members’ register. The Dordrecht minister was
instructed by the church council in 1576 to write down in alphabetical order the names of
all parishioners since the establishment of the church in 1572. In 1578 the synod ordained
that the Reformed churches must register all incoming and departing members.

Fig. 2.7 Register of members of the Reformed Church in Zutphen, 1609. Regional Archives
Zutphen, Kerkenraad Hervormde gemeente Zutphen (0063), inv. nr. 79.
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Before the Reformation, there were hospitals, houses for the poor, and other foundations
governed by wardens ‘of the Holy Spirit’ (heilige geestmeesters or armenmeesters) and
supervised by the civil authorities. They continued after the Reformation. In the Reformed
Church deacons (diakenen), elected by the church council (sometimes by the city
magistrate), were given the task of taking care of poor and sick people, widows, and
orphans. They administered the church properties and kept a record thereof. Already early
on, diaconal accounts were preserved in Goes (1577), Hasselt (1578), Loosduinen (1579),
Arnhem (1579), and The Hague (1583). The border between the diaconal and the civic care
of the poor (the latter taking many different institutional forms) is not easy to determine,
according to Van Deursen.27 Sometimes the two were strictly separated, as in Amsterdam,
sometimes the revenues flowed into one purse, as in Leiden.

In Delft, a Charity Board administering poor relief was founded in 1597. It was a joint
venture between the city and the poor relief board of the Reformed Church.28 Needy
people had to report to the Board and received a number and an assistance note
(bedienbriefje) pasted on a board in order to last longer. Twice a week the pauper (bedeelde)
reappeared at the Board to receive bread, money, clothing, and other necessities. Two
deacons and two of the city’s ‘masters of charity’ checked the assistance notes and
registered the provisions in their assistance book (bedienboek), one for the dispenses on
Wednesday, another for Saturday. These registers have been preserved (1616-1825), but of
the thousands of assistance notes, only a few have survived.

Of all church institutions the administration of the maintenance fund (kerkfabriek), was
least affected by the Reformation. The kerkfabriek continued to be managed by the local
magistrate or by churchwardens (kerkmeesters, or, following the Batavian Revolution:
church guardians, kerkvoogden) appointed either by the magistrate or elected by the
community. They were accountable to the civic authorities; their accounts, therefore, are
27 Van Deursen, Bavianen en slijkgeuzen, p. 106.
to be found in the town archives.
28 I. van der Vlis, Leven in armoede. Delftse bedeelden
in de zeventiende eeuw (Amsterdam: Prometheus/
Bakker, 2001).

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2.4 Collecting Church Archives
At the end of the 19th century, the deplorable state of many church archives urged State
Archivists to take an interest, and they assisted in particular with the inventorization of the
archives. It was only incidentally that church archives were deposited with State Archives.
The archives of the Reformed churches of Arnhem and Arnemuiden were deposited with
the State Archives in Gelderland and Zeeland (1882, 1898) with special permission from
the minister. Much depended on the efforts of the State Archivist and the readiness of the
church council in these cases. They were often concerned about public access to the
deposited archives. At the request of the conference of State Archivists, the Minister of the
Interior sent a circular letter in 1900 to all churches in which he insisted on the safekeeping
of their archives while stressing their importance for national history. The government did
not want to interfere with the management of the archives, but it was prepared to take
‘most kindly’ into consideration ‘all requests for assistance and help’. However, the Dutch
Reformed Church largely held the management of its archives in its own hands. The
Church appointed its own archivist in 1903 and issued regulations for church archives in
1919. The archivist was assisted by church members who were working at public
repositories but acted part-time as a consultant for classes and parishes. The other
Protestant churches had a similar organization.

In 1916 General State Archivist Fruin confirmed the point of view that the churches
themselves were responsible for their archives. Only if a church would neglect its archives

then the State has the moral obligation to care for these archives, if possible; he
has to open his repositories, but only when the Church itself fails in this task.
The archives of defunct Walloon churches are properly cared for at the Bibli­othèque
Wallonne. It would be foolish if the State or civic authorities would interfere.
29 R. Fruin, ‘Over de verzorging van private archieven’,
The State and the municipality only act in all these cases when the nearest interested
Nederlandsch archievenblad 25 (1916-1917): 24-29. party does not fulfil its duty.29
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Little could Fruin have foreseen that 55 years later the Bibliothèque Wallonne would seek
financial assistance from the State. It was this request for a subsidy in 1971 that led to a
fundamental advice to the government from the Archives Council. Their advice, adopted
by the government, has determined government policy about church archives and other
private archives up to the present day. The Archives Council argued that several private
archives belong

to those cultural assets whose preservation is in the interest of the community.

Caring for that interest may be reckoned to be the government’s task when those
who are primarily responsible appear not to be able to carry that responsibility
sufficiently.30

The Council felt that salvaging private archives should be done by opening public archival
repositories, not by subsidizing special institutions caring for private archives (like the
Bibliothèque Wallonne).

The Protestant Churches collaborated since the 1970s in a national commission to register
church archives. The aim was a system of registration of national, regional, and local
ecclesiastical archives—those managed by the Church as well as those kept in a public
repository. After much lobbying by the commission, in 1978 a new part-time staff
member of the Central Register of Private Archives (CRPA) (see 1.7.3) was tasked with
the registration of ecclesiastical archives. This was limited to Protestant churches and
institutions. The Roman Catholic Church, the Old Catholic Church, and the Jewish
communities stayed outside the registration. However, the first conference on church
archives, organized by CRPA in 1981, was attended by the archivist of the Roman
Catholic Bishopric of ’s-Hertogenbosch. At the conference, representatives of the
churches discussed the challenges for church archives with archivists and researchers:
record keeping, preservation, access. In 1985 the Protestant Churches signed a contract
with representatives of the State and local archives which was given the name of Church
30 Ar­chiefraad Verslag 1971 (’s-Gravenhage:
Staatsuitgeverij, 1972), pp. 52-5; Ar­chief­raad Verslag
Archives Decree (Kerkelijk Archiefbesluit). This agreement (revised in 1995) expresses
1972 (’s-Gravenhage: Staatsuitgeverij, 1973), p. 16. the principle that church archives when they are 25 years old, will be deposited in a

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public archival repository within the remit of the Archives Act. It contains the further
condition that public access is guaranteed, usually with a term of 30 years, occasionally
50 years or more. These principles are not only adhered to by the Protestant Churches
and the Salvation Army but followed as well by the Catholic Churches who were not
signatories to the agreement.
In choosing the public repository which will house the church archives, the rule is that
archives of parishes go to local public archives, while archives of provincial and regional
synods and classes (at district level) go to one of the State Archives. The pace of deposit
of church archives into public repositories was accelerated at the end of the 20th century
because so many churches began closing due to secularization and the merger of the three
biggest Protestant Churches in 2004.

The archives of the national authorities of the Mennonite Society are kept by the
Amsterdam City Archives, while those of the Protestant Church of the Netherlands
(a merger of the Evangelical-Lutheran Church, the Dutch Reformed Church, and the
Reformed Churches in the Netherlands—the latter a 19th century split from the Dutch
Reformed Church) are destined to go to the Utrecht Archives. The Utrecht Archives are
in fact the main centre of church archives, since they keep not only the archives of the
Protestant Church and its predecessors, but also the archives of the archbishoprics of the
Roman Catholic and Old Catholic Churches, the archives of the Moravian Church in the
Netherlands, and the archives of the Remonstrant Brotherhood.

Church-related archives are acquired not only by public archival institutions but also by
some ‘special archives’ which are outside the scope of the Archives Act. In the 1970s the
Catholic Documentation Centre and the Historical Documentation Centre for Dutch
Protestantism were established. Both are departments of university libraries, keeping
all sorts of documents concerning Catholic and Protestant life, respectively, in the
Netherlands since 1800, including archives of organizations and individuals that have
played an important role in Dutch society.
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Currently, all churches have ordinances and guidelines concerning records management.
In the Roman Catholic Church, these rules are based on the Codex Iuris Canonici which,
among other things, prescribes that every

diocesan bishop is to take care that the acts and documents of the archives of
cathedral, collegiate, parochial, and other churches in his territory are also diligently
preserved and that inventories or catalogues are made in duplicate, one of which is
to be preserved in the archive of the church and the other in the diocesan archive.31

2.5 Conclusion
This chapter sketched the development of archival processing, using case studies of
archiving by the Roman Catholic and Protestant Churches. Charters were registered and
copied in cartularies, for different reasons. The cartulary could serve as a ‘shadow archive’
which could be easily transported. Often the purpose of a cartulary changed from an
administrative or legal use into recording the history of the chapter or monastery. Such a
change from muniments to monuments reflected a change in the ‘business’ (what) and
work processes (how) (see Fig. 0.2). Likewise, individual charters could get a (new)
meaning as commemorative text, like the royal charter bearing the date of 7 October 950.
Even today that document has a symbolic significance as the oldest archival document in a
Dutch public archival repository. The line between documents with an administrative
function and those with a memorial function is not rigid and, moreover, may shift over
time. This is a general phenomenon, as I wrote in the General Introduction: an archival
document is recreated (and gets another meaning) throughout the continuum of
recordkeeping. Such a new meaning may be symbolic and ritualistic, as was the case with
the archives of the Synod of Dordrecht of 1618-1619 that decided on the tenets of
Calvinism and the translation of the Bible.

31 Codex Iuris Canonici, can. 491: https://web.archive.

org/web/20181018084440/http://jgray.org/codes/
The charters were often docketed with references on the back side, referring to the chests,
cic83eng.html, archived 18 Oct. 2018. boxes, and other containers where they were preserved. The arrangement of the charters

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was primarily according to form and function, with a secondary arrangement in
geographical order. In the 13th century, awareness grew slowly that the findability of a
charter would be best served if the order in the cartulary would mirror the order in the
chest. This was related to the changing view of the usefulness of the charters which could
be utilized for the exploitation of domains (see 6.2.3.1). The muniments were repurposed
into management tools. Their arrangement and description were adapted to fit the new
functionality. The use of documents for management was supported by new technologies,
for example, new genres of registers, as well as finding aids like geographical and
alphabetical tables. This repurposing and ensuing adaptation of systems are paradigmatic
for what occurred in other domains, as we will see in other chapters. For the Utrecht
chapters, new managerial challenges (caused, for example, by changes in leasehold) led to
changes in archiving.

The archives of the Utrecht chapters equally deserve attention because they have a special
place in the history of Dutch archivistics. The practice of arrangement of the chapters’
archives that was prescribed in 1826 would later be acknowledged as respect des fonds and
as a fundamental archival principle. The arrangement by Samuel Muller of the archives of
the chapter of Saint Peter was an exercise in archival methodology that would be codified
in the Dutch Manual in 1898.

‘Archiving the Church’ happened in a social context, it served the interests of the Church,
but also of its members. Genre systems (see the General Introduction) overlapped.
For example, the acta of the Reformed church councils (used as an account of the council’s
activities and legal proceedings) were also used as the basis for issuing a certificate to a
church member who moved to another town. Large bodies of poor people were dependent
on the extensive administration of the poor relief by the churches and the city. Much of
that administration (such as the poor relief registers) has been preserved in institutional
archives, not sharing the fate of the thousands of assistance notes and other documents
which were issued to the poor. This incongruity between institutional and private
archiving due to differing archival consciousness is a general phenomenon (see the
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Archiving Churches
General Introduction). Both institutional and private archiving are influenced by factors
of archivalization: what (and how) to record and what not; what (and how) to preserve
and what not.

Government kept at arm’s length from the church archives, except for the registers of
baptisms and marriages (see 1.2.1). Nevertheless, assistance with inventorization was
provided since the end of the 19th century. In some cases, a church archive was accepted as
a deposit into a State or municipal public repository, but generally, government kept aloof,
and the churches managed their archives by themselves. Only in the 1980s did registration
of archives of Protestant churches and institutions begin, followed by agreements about
depositing church archives in public repositories. Such agreements do not exist for other
categories of private archives. This preferential treatment of church archives is remarkable,
considering the diminishing or at least the changing importance of the church in society
and the separation of church and state.

73b kader

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74a

A SOCIAL HISTORY OF
DUTCH ARCHIVES Chapter 3

Archiving States

—
3.0 Introduction
3.1 The Chancery of the Counts
of Holland
3.2 States of the Land
3.3 States General of the
Confederacy
3.4 Archiving a Unitary State
3.5 Archiving Central
Government 1813-1991
3.6 State Archives
3.6.1 A National Archivarius
3.6.2 Life into the Country’s Archives
3.6.3 A Network of State Archives
l Fig. 3.0 Register of Philip the Good 3.7 Conclusion
(Remissorium Philippi), 1450. National
Archives, Graven van Holland (3.01.01),
inv. nr. 2149.
ˇ
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3.0 Introduction
In the Middle Ages, public governance in what is now the Netherlands was exercised by
sovereign vassals of the German Emperor, among them the Duke of Gelre (Gelderland),
the Count of Holland and Zeeland, and the Bishop of Utrecht, who as secular ruler
governed Utrecht, Overijssel, Drenthe, and Groningen. Other parts of the present
Netherlands belonged to the Duchies of Brabant and Limburg, the County of Flanders
(Vlaanderen) and the Prince-Bishopric of Liège (Luik). Friesland was in fact an
autonomous region until 1498 when the Duke of Saxony (Saksen) gained control.

Much has been written about the administration and archiving by these rulers, especially
the chancery and the charters of the counts of Holland and Zeeland. Therefore, I focus in
3.1 on the archiving by these counts. Their greed for power (just as that of other and later
rulers!) was accompanied by a ‘hunger for information’ that was appeased by increasing
textualization (verschriftelijking).

Several of the aforementioned states came into the hands of the Duke of Burgundy. In 1482
his possessions went to the Habsburgs. Between 1524 and 1543 Charles V (Duke of
Brabant, Count of Holland and Zeeland) acquired, among others, Friesland, Utrecht,
Overijssel, Groningen, Drenthe, and Gelre.

In 1568 the Dutch Revolt against Charles’ son Philip II broke out. Between 1588 and 1595
the Revolt led to the foundation of the Republic of the United Netherlands, consisting of
seven sovereign states, in the traditional order (of duchies and counties ): Gelre, Holland,
Zeeland, Utrecht, Friesland, Overijssel, Groningen, and the associated province of
Drenthe. The ‘Generality Lands’ (Generaliteitslanden) in the present provinces of Zeeland,
Noord-Brabant, Limburg, and Groningen were territories that were conquered later and
administered by the States General.

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0 20 40 60 80 100 km
Archiving States
0 10 20 30 40 50 60 miles

Dokkum Delfzijl
GR
VLIELAND Franeker O
Harlingen Leeuwarden Groningen I N
N

F RI E S L A N D G
E
TEXEL Sneek
N

Workum Bourtang
N O R T H
D RE N T H E
Staveren
Steenwijk
S E A Enkhuizen
Coevorden
Hoorn
Alkmaar
D

Beemster ZUIDER
Edam Kampen
A N

Zaan Zwolle
ZEE
Haarlem Amsterdam OVERIJSSEL
L L

Veluwe Deventer
Amersfoort
Leiden Zutphen
O

The Hague Utrecht G E L D E RL A N D

H

Rijswijk Gouda UTRECHT Groenlo

Delft Arnhem
Brill Rotterdam
R. Waal
Hellevoetsluis Nijmegen
Dordrecht
Zierikzee
ZEELAND Breda
‘s Hertogenbosch
Veere
GENERALITY
Middelburg Goes Bergen- LA
op-Zoom ND
S
R. R h
e

s
i

Antwerp e
eu
n

Bruges M
R.

Ghent
Fig. 3.1 Map of the Republic of the United
Cologne
Netherlands. With permission copied from
Maastricht
The Cambridge companion to the Dutch Brussels
Golden Age, ed. Helmer J. Helmers and Geert
H. Janssen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Tournai Liège
Press, 2018).
 | 3 |
PAGE CHAPTER ARCHIVING PEOPLE
The highest authority in each of the eight provinces was vested in the provincial assembly
76a Archiving States
or States of the Land (Staten van den Lande) (3.2). In addition, there were bodies of
Delegated States (Gedeputeerde Staten), provincial courts (see chapter 9), courts of audit,
and tax authorities (see chapter 8). They were assisted by a ‘civil service’ of officials who
admittedly looked after public affairs, but often by using private means. The distinction
between public and private archiving was not sharp. This is clear, for example, from the
archiving by the Stadholders. Before the Revolt the overlord in each territory was
represented by a governor (Stadholder, from the Dutch stadhouder) who in certain cases
had to confer with the States. Starting in 1572 the provincial States appointed the
Stadholder (an office held by members of the Orange-Nassau family, which became
hereditary in 1747). Within the Stadholder’s secretariat functioned a private secretariat
that dealt with the prince’s private matters. However, political papers were often marked
‘secret’ and archived by the private secretariat.

The Republic of the United Netherlands was a federal polity with limited powers for the
central authority. The sovereignty was vested with each of the provinces. In the provincial
States, the cities held the main power. They also tried to influence affairs of the
Confederacy (Generaliteit) such as foreign policy and military defence. The assembly of
the States General, where all provinces (except Drenthe) were represented, was dominated
by Holland, as the richest and most powerful province, paying circa 58 percent of the
Confederacy’s expenditure. The States General exercised sovereignty in the Generaliteits­
landen (Staats-Brabant, Staats-Vlaanderen, Westerwolde and parts of Limburg) that had
been acquired during the war. Equally, foreign territories taken by the United East India
Company (VOC) and the West India Company (WIC) were under the authority of the
States General.

The archives of the States General have recently been the subject of a thorough study by
Theo Thomassen. His book describes and analyses the archives of the States General
within the context of their creation, their original use, and their remediation after 1796 by
generations of archivists. It is a research guide, helping researchers in finding answers to

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PAGE CHAPTER ARCHIVING PEOPLE
questions concerning the composition, structure, and content of the archives of the States
76b Archiving States
General and the value and importance of these archives as a historical source. Thomassen
enriches his discussion on the archiving by the States General by placing it in the broader
context of archival theory. From what Thomassen has presented regarding the States
General and their archiving in more than 800 pages, I made a choice (3.3) which will,
I hope, inspire the reader to peruse Thomassen’s book by himself or herself.

The Batavian Revolution (1795) led to the creation of a unitary state in 1798, with
sovereignty transferred from the provinces to the central State. Apart from other factors,
the ‘information hunger’ of the new State led to bureaucratization and textualization on an
unprecedented scale, accompanied by new forms of archive creation and archive use (3.4).

In 1806 Napoleon granted the Netherlands a king—his brother Louis Napoleon. At the
cessation of the Kingdom, the greater part of the Netherlands was incorporated into
France in 1810; French legislation came into force in 1811. Previously, the present province
of Limburg, a few enclaves in Brabant and today’s Zeelandic Flanders had already been
joined with France (1794-1795). The island of Walcheren was annexed in 1809, and
Flushing (Vlissingen) had been incorporated the year before. The French left in 1813-1814
and the Netherlands once again became a kingdom, with William, Prince of Orange-
Nassau, as king. Between 1815 and 1830 present Belgium was a part of the Kingdom of the
Netherlands as well.

Many institutions, measures and procedures from the Batavian-French period were taken
over by the new Kingdom of the Netherlands, although slightly changed: public education,
the judiciary, postal services, the State tax administration, the State agency of waterways
and public works, the decimal system of weights and measures, and military service. Their
archiving systems were either continued or adapted. However, the once abominated
French specialization of administrative officers and the associated filing practices were
abolished. To prevent the return of the specialized bureaucracy, one of its tools (ordering
records par ordre de matières, or making subject files) was explicitly forbidden in 1823.
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However, as I describe in 3.5, in time the changing role of the State in a changing society
would lead to more modern archiving systems.

The late 19th-century emergence of a colonial state (Netherlands Indies, Surinam,

Netherlands Antilles) is not dealt with in this chapter, but later in 10.7.

In 3.6 I select the most important episodes of the history of the State Archives: from 1802
to the middle of the 19th century (3.6.1), the new vigour of the State Archives (Rijksarchief)
between 1851 and 1865 (3.6.2) and the development of a network of State Archives begun
in 1875 (3.6.3)—a development which only recently reached a new phase with the mergers
of the State Archives (with the exception of the National Archives) and municipal archives
between 1998 and 2006.

3.1 The Chancery of the Counts

of Holland 1

1 J.G. Kruisheer, ‘De registers van Pieter van Leiden.

Het papieren cartularium van de graven van Holland
(1299) en het begin van de systematische registratie
Governance by using the written word was barely known in the County of Holland before the
ter kanselarij (1316)’, Nederlands archievenblad 13th century. When the count had to deliver a charter, he made use of either the scriptorium
72 (1968): 27-110; J.G. Kruisheer, De oorkonden en
de kanselarij van de graven van Holland tot 1299
(writing centre) of Egmond Abbey or of the charter that had already been prepared by the
(’s-Gravenhage/Haarlem: Historische Vereniging addressee (destinataris). Only Count Dirk VII (1190-1203) had personnel at his disposal
voor Zuid-Holland, 1971); J.C. Kort, Het archief van
de graven van Holland, 889-1581 (’s-Gravenhage:
(among them his chaplain) who were able to make charters. Count William II (from 1247
Rijksarchief in Zuid-Holland, 1981); Eef Dijkhof, elected emperor of Germany) mainly used the royal chancery. Part of the count’s archives was
‘Bewaren of weggooien; afschrijven of verplaatsen.
Het papieren cartularium van de graven van Holland
transferred to Hainaut (Henegouwen) in 1299 at the order of John of Avesnes, Count of
en Zeeland en de politieke en ambtelijke zorg voor het Hainaut who had inherited Holland (and the claims on Zeeland). John also had a ‘shadow
grafelijke archief in 1299’, Bulletin de la Commission
royale d’histoire. Académie royale de Belgique 176.2
archive’ made, in the form of a cartulary (a register with transcripts of charters) that he could
(2010): 361-80; M.J. van Gent and M.-Ch. Le Bailly, take with him on his travels. To that end the archive (circa 350 charters and a few dozen
Gids voor de landsheerlijke archieven van Gelre,
Holland, Zeeland en het Sticht (Den Haag: Instituut
letters) was inventoried, and a selection of 163 charters was copied into the cartulary following
voor Nederlandse Geschiedenis, 2003). the order of the original documents. Each charter received a number and a short description

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(docket) on the back, both of which were copied into the cartulary. The table of contents
(ordinatio sive tabula litterarum sequentium per numerum) therefore provided access to both
the copies in the cartulary and the original charters (Fig. 3.2). The charters that had been
selected pertained to matters of actual importance. Among the non-current charters that
were destroyed were probably all documents concerning the relations with England and the
English king, whose daughter was married to John I.

The inventorization and cartularization in 1299 only concerned the documents received by
the count. The chancery did not normally keep a draft or a copy of the dispatched
documents. This changed in the 14th century, a time when the Count, apart from
attending to his patrimonial domains, had to involve himself and his officers diligently in
the rule of the county. The chancery then began to register copies of documents received
and sent. Probably they followed the example of the chancery of Hainaut which, as early as
in 1297, started to register the issued charters, albeit not very systematically. It is also
possible that the Holland chancery adopted the registration practice of the papal chancery
or the chanceries of the French and German kings.

In the abbey of Egmond registration of both incoming and outgoing charters was already
usual from the first quarter of the 13th century.2 The Holland chancery was innovative
in introducing geographical arrangement from 1316; different registers were created for
the various parts of the county, as well as for the foreign rulers with whom the count
interacted. This geographical arrangement would have corresponded with the order of the
archives implemented in 1299. The registers were made in duplicate: one series in which
the issued charters were copied day to day, and a series of duplicates. Some registers
branched off as the count’s activities expanded. Thus, separate registers concerning
Amstelland and Woerden were set up. New registers for Germany and England were
2 E.C. Dijkhof, Het oorkondenwezen van enige kloosters created as well. Thereby the number of registers rose from seven to 21 between 1304
en steden in Holland en Zeeland 1200-1325 (Leuven:
Peeters, 2003), pp. 393, 398.
and 1357. Through the Huygens Institute it is possible to access the electronic edition of
3 http://resources.huygens.knaw.nl/
22 registers dating between 1299 and 1345, covering more than 3,500 charters and
registershollandsegrafelijkheid, accessed 3 Dec. 2018. other texts.3
78a | 3 |
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Fig. 3.2 Table of contents of the cartulary of the

Counts of Holland, 1299. National Archives,
Graven van Holland (3.01. 01), inv. nr. 2144.

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The reorganization of the registers in 1316 had been put in place by Pieter van Leyden
and was continued from 1319 by his brother-in-law (and successor as head of chancery)
Gerard Alewijnsz. Because of the reorganization of the Holland muniment room, State
Archivist Bakhuizen van den Brink (see 3.6.2) praised Alewijnsz in 1854 as ‘the progenitor
of all Dutch archivists’. Alewijnsz started by marking the charters with a capital R as a sign
of the registration. The same method had been followed for a long time already at the papal
chancery and the chancery of the German king. Alewijnsz (bearing the title of memorialis
of the count, meaning something like historiographer) retired from the chancery after the
death of Count William IV in 1345, which unleashed a battle for power between his sister
Margaretha and her son William of Bavaria. As a precaution, Alewijnsz took a copy of the
registers with him. In 1350 the strife between the factions of supporters of Margaretha
and William broke out. It is likely that Margaretha arranged for the registers in the
chancery to be shipped to a safe place in Hainaut. They turned out to have vanished when
William acceded in 1351: a count without archives! Luckily, old Gerard Alewijnsz came to
his assistance and presented the Count with the copies he had been hiding. Alewijnsz
organized the chancery anew and transferred the office in 1354 to his successor Philip van
Leyden. Both Alewijnsz and Van Leyden were wealthy distinguished citizens of Leiden.
Philip is still renowned for his book (written for William V) De cura reipublicae et sorte
principantis (On the care for society and the duty of the ruler). The book refers at various
places to archiving under Gerard and Philip. Under Philip’s successor Dirk Foppenz
registration of charters became lax, notwithstanding his splendid title of custos et
conservator archivi et custodiae privilegiorum, registrorum et litterarum Comitatis
Hollandiae et Zelandiae.

From 1377 onwards documents of temporary importance were registered in special

registers, the so-called memorialen. Another series, that of feudal registers starts in 1417,
having been branched off the general registers in which the acts of fief had been copied
since 1316.
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Archives were formed not only in the chancery but also in the treasury and in the count’s
household, called the inn (herberg). The accounts that were preserved date from the
middle of the 14th century. Next to the treasurer there were various other accountable
officers who, just as the treasurer, submitted their account to the count’s council to be
audited (afhoren). This was replaced in 1446 under Philip the Good by control by a court of
audit (rekenkamer). The judicial functions of the council had already been transferred in
1428 to the Court of Holland and Zeeland that had just been established (see chapter 9).
This was part of Philip’s programme of professionalization. His wish for a more business-
like administration even found expression in the appearance of the accounts that no longer
showed decorated initials but plain letters. From 1428 the memorialen were kept by the
Court. The tasks of the clerks of the register were restricted predominantly to feudal
affairs, which later were entrusted to the Chamber of Fiefs and the Register (Leen- en
Registerkamer), which also controlled the domains (abolished in 1728).

Jacob Kort, who arranged and described the archives of the Counts of Holland (1981),
calculated how much of the original archives remains. Nearly all the registers (93 percent)
have been preserved, 48 percent of the charters and 31 percent of the accounts. This
calculation is largely based on old inventories and indexes made since the end of the 14th
century. Among these is the Remissorium Philippi made by the Count’s master of the
register (registermeester) Peter van Renesse van Beoostenzwene. It was presented to Philip
the Good in 1450. The codex consists of two parts: a systematic catalogue (repertorium) of
the registers, and an inventory of the original charters which were kept in 47 boxes or
drawers. The presentation of the book by Peter van Renesse van Beoostenzwene was
depicted in two of the images which decorate the Remissorium (Fig. 3.0).

3.2 States of the Land

In the Middle Ages, the regional estates (nobility, cities, and clergy) met for consultation—
among themselves and with the lord of the land. Gradually the States developed into an

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assembly of representatives of the estates. Archiving was restricted at first to the charters
and the financial administration. With the growth of affairs of the States the need for
accountability increased, leading to registration of the decisions (resoluties) beginning in
the 16th century. They are not a full record of the proceedings (minutes), but the decisions
only. Decisions were written in different stages, the records forming a genre system (see
the General Introduction). During the meeting a ‘rough draft’ (klad) was drawn up. After
the meeting a ‘first draft’ (concept) was made, but not yet approved. The adopted minute
(minuut) is the document as it was confirmed by the meeting. The ‘fair copy’ (net) is a
transcript of the minute intended to be kept by the board. Finally, extracts (uittreksels)
and transcripts or copies (afschriften) were often made.

The States and the States General operated a so-called resolutie system (resolutiestelsel) by
which the documents received and the fair copies of outgoing documents are arranged in
separate series of annexes to the decisions.4 The records are ordered according to the date
they were read in the assembly (lectum), tabled (exhibitum), or enacted (datum). When
one knows the date of the resolutie, one can find the annexes for that date. Next to the
series of fair copies of decisions there may be series of rough drafts, first drafts, minuten,
and transcripts (in manuscript or printed).

The term resolutie system was devised by 19th century archivists as a label for an ‘ideal’
recordkeeping system. In practice there was a gradual development of means to control
4 Peter J. Horsman, ‘A French legacy. The transition
loose papers by accommodating them in series made accessible by diverse finding aids.
from collegiate to bureaucratic record-keeping in a This development differed in the various provinces, notably because of differences in the
Dutch town, 1800-1900’, Archivaria 60 (2005): 125-44.
size of the archives; an increase of archives necessitates stricter rules for archiving and a
5 Ann Blair and Peter Stallybrass, ‘Mediating
information 1450-1800’, in This is Enlightenment,
more sophisticated apparatus of indexes and other finding aids (toegangen) (see 10.5 on
ed. Clifford Siskin and William B. Warner (Chicago: marginating resoluties).
University of Chicago Press, 2010), pp. 139-63;
Heather Wolfe and Peter Stallybrass, ‘The material
culture of record-keeping in early modern England’, in Because it was difficult—even with good indexes—to find all documents on a particular
Archives & information in the early modern world, ed.
Liesbeth Corens, Kate Peters and Alexandra Walsham
case or subject in the resolutie system, secretaries started to form files, or liassen—literally
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 179-208. by putting documents on a string (filium).5 In the past this was called in English ‘enfiling’,
80a | 3 |
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Archiving States
in Dutch practice liasseren (from French lier, binding together) or enfileren (also:
enfilaceren). A lias (file) is a series of papers strung together on a string (see Fig. 7.0 and
Fig. 8.0). Files could be stored in a cabinet with pigeonholes (loketkast) (see also chapter
11). Both files and pigeonholes were organized according to subject or class, and such
systems (rubriekenstelsels) could very well exist separately from a resolutie system.

For the archives management, the clerks (griffiers) of the provincial States (and of the
States General) had subordinate staff at their disposal. Some were paid by the clerk himself,
and therefore the registers and indexes the staff created were considered to be the private
property of the clerk (see 4.3). Demarcation between public and private records was also
hampered by the fact that the clerks often held their office at home. Consequently, the
archives of clerks such as those of the Fagel family6 (States General), and pensionaries
(raadpensionarissen, after the Stadholders the most influential officers of the States; in
Utrecht called secretarissen) such as Van Ledenberch and Van Hilten (Utrecht), Heinsius
(Holland), Van Citters (Zeeland), and others, contain much material from and about the
governments they served. Besides, defining what exactly constitutes the archives of the
States or the States General has been the work of ‘archivers’ throughout the centuries who
constructed an archive that is at best an approximation of what the original creators
regarded as the archives. This archival constructedness has been demonstrated
convincingly by Theo Thomassen in his treatment of the ups and downs of the archives
of the States General.

The manner of archiving by the States was closely connected with the States’ mandate,
business, and work processes (see Fig. 0.2). For example, the absence of an archive of
provincial States in Gelderland is related to what Jonathan Israel calls the entrenched
particularism of the three quarters forming the duchy that did not want to relinquish
6 Theo Thomassen, ‘”To put in order”; how the greffiers
Fagel documented themselves as men of politics, men
authority to the provincial States. In Friesland too, the quarters played a major role in
of religion and men of the world’, in Frozen in time. The the States which had consequences for decision-making and archiving. The fact that the
Fagel collection in the library of Trinity College Dublin,
ed. Timothy R. Jackson (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 2016),
States of Gelderland, and those of Overijssel, met alternately in the capitals of the
pp. 21-46. quarters also affected the work processes and the archiving.

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This is not the place for a complete treatment of the archiving by all eight States in the
Republic (in the traditional order, starting with Gelderland and ending with Drenthe).
Instead, I focus on what I consider to be a typically Dutch archiving practice (see chapter
13): the recording of collegiate decision-making (and, related to that, the treatment of
papers received and draft copies of outgoing documents and the findability of the records).
7 The following is for the greater part a summary of Other aspects of archiving are reviewed incidentally only.7
archive inventories, supplemented by some research
by the author and information provided by S. van
der Woude (Friesland), H. Nijkeuter (Drenthe) and From 1581 the supreme body in Gelderland was the provincial convention (Landdag)
P. Theeuwen (Gelderland): G.J. Mentink, ‘Bijdrage
tot de kennis van het formele besluitvormingsproces
representing the States of Gelre and Zutphen. The States were a joint assembly of the
in de vergaderingen van de staten van Gelderland governing bodies of the three quarters of the province, each having its own States of cities
1715-1794’, Verslag en bijdragen rijks archiefschool
1969-1970 (Utrecht 1971): 65-87; inventarissen van de
and nobility. The Landdag met twice a year, alternately in the city hall of one of the quarter
Gelderse kwartiersarchieven door K.W.J. Peeneman capitals: Nijmegen, Arnhem, and Zutphen. The meeting was attended by around 100
(2007), www.geldersarchief.nl, accessed 3 Dec. 2018;
W.E. Meiboom, Inventaris van het archief van de
people, but the affairs were managed by six deputies from each quarter. They sat at the
Staten van Holland en West-Friesland, 1572-1795 Landschap table, the other attendees mostly stood, keeping some distance from the table.
(Den Haag: Rijksarchief in Zuid-Holland, 1990);
K. Heeringa, Het archief van de Staten van Zeeland
The city clerk of the host capital acted as secretary. He kept a journal (notulen) recording
en hunne Gecommitteerde Raden (1574) 1578-1795 the progress of the meeting, the tabling of documents, and the decisions. Important
(1799) (’s-Gravenhage: Algemeene Landsdrukkerij,
1922); S. Muller Fz., Catalogus van het archief der
matters were nearly always ‘taken over’ (overgenomen) by the quarters for consultation,
Staten van Utrecht, 1375-1813 (Utrecht: Oosthoek, either during the Landdag meeting (each quarter retreating to a separate room), or upon
1915); S.P. de Jong, J.A. Schuur and P.M. Peucker,
Inventaris van de archieven van gewestelijke
their return home. The advice (opening) of the quarters was then tabled at the Landdag
bestuursinstellingen van Friesland (Ljouwert: Fryske meeting. The secretary wrote the report (reces) of the meeting, copies of which were sent
Akademy, 1998); A. Haga, ‘Uit de geschiedenis der
oude provinciale archieven in Overijssel’, Nederlands
to the two other quarters. The Landdag did not form its own archives. In principle, the
archievenblad 38 (1931): 156-71; G.J. ter Kuile and archives of each of the three States contain an identical series of documents (originals and
J.H. Wigger, Inventaris van de archieven van de Staten
van Overijssel, Ridderschap en Steden,
copies). The Landdag papers received by each of the three cities are not annexes to the
en van de op hen volgende colleges, 1580-1810, recessen (as elsewhere in a resolutie system), but annexes to the secretary’s journal. Records
www.historischcentrumoverijssel.nl, accessed 3 Dec.
2018; W.J. Formsma, Inventaris van de archieven der
from and about the Landdag have been preserved in the archives of the noblemen’s
Staten van Stad en Lande (’s-Gravenhage, Ministerie assemblies or knighthoods (ridderschappen) of the three quarters (there was no
van Onderwijs, Kunsten en Wetenschappen, 1958);
W.J. Formsma, Inventaris der Ommelander archieven
overarching provincial knighthood assembly).
(’s-Gravenhage, Ministerie van Onderwijs, Kunsten en
Wetenschappen, 1962); J.G.C. Joosting, De archieven
der elkander vóór 1814 opgevolgde gewestelijke
The Court of Gelre and Zutphen functioned as a general administrative body, apart from
besturen van Drenthe (Leiden: Brill, 1909); fulfilling judicial tasks (see 9.2). The Court had the authority to convene the Landdag,
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to set its agenda, to correspond on behalf of the States, and to implement the decisions of
the Landdag—all of which was the prerogative of the Delegated States in other provinces.
Therefore, one finds the extensive correspondence of the Landdag, and the petitions to the
States, in the archives of the Court. Originally the documents received were put on liassen,
but a great deal was bound later.

The States of each quarter assembled in the capital of the quarter. Their decisions can be
found in the recessen of the quarter, kept by the secretary of the capital city. Although the
quarter records were mostly kept separate from those of the city, they were mixed up quite
often. The municipal archivists of Nijmegen and Zutphen collaborated with the State
Archives in the 1950s and 1960s to make a definitive separation between the papers of the
city and those of the quarter. Their colleague at Arnhem, however, was of the opinion that
such a separation would be contrary to archival principles. Since the merger of State and
City Archives in 2002, the archives of the quarter Veluwe and those of Arnhem are kept in
the same repository, with the result that separation between the documents of the city and
the quarter documents is not a priority at all. The result, however, is that the inventory of
the archives of the Veluwe States contains over 750 references to the archives of the city of
Arnhem, since more than 40 percent of the quarter documents are there.

Around 1477 the charters of the States of Holland and West-Friesland (the official name;
in 1297 West-Friesland had become part of the county of Holland) were kept in the
muniment room of the city of Delft. The financial administration was archived at the
monastery of the Dominicans of The Hague, the meeting place of the States. At first a big
chest sufficed, but in 1560 a muniment room was built in the monastery to keep
documents of ‘perpetual interest’. The papers with a temporal value only stayed at the
secretariat in the care of the pensionary. Shortly thereafter The Hague, lacking a
fortification, was judged not to be safe enough and the muniment room was transferred to
the monastery of Saint Agatha in Delft, where William of Orange had resided since the
beginning of the Revolt. The iron door of the repository in The Hague was used in the new
muniment room. Over the years the Delft collection was forgotten, until 1771 when the
old archives room of the States was discovered during a renovation of the Prinsenhof

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(the former monastery of Saint Agatha). The documents were inventoried and transferred
to Delft City Hall. In 1827 the City offered the collection to the State Archivist, but it lasted
until 1852 before the records arrived at the State Archives (Rijksarchief). Here the most
important charters were stored in a special cabinet which had been made in the 18th
century to house significant charters of the States of Holland. Even today, the collection is
kept separately at the National Archives. While no longer in the cabinet, it is still kept
under the old name of ‘brown cabinet’ (bruine kastje).

The States of Holland consisted of delegates of the nobility and the 18 voting
(stemhebbende) cities. The series of their decisions (resoluties) starts in 1525. Apart from
the series of ordinary and secret resoluties, the archives contain separate series concerning
foreign affairs, the peace negotiations in Münster (Westphalia), the political relationship
between Holland and Zeeland, and other subjects. The papers received were first
transcribed in the resoluties and then stored on liassen in the loketkast. For the period
1653-1666 calendars (agenda’s) of the documents tabled at the States’ meetings have been
preserved. Among the papers received was (as in other States and cities) an abundance
of petitions (rekesten), for example petitions requesting an appointment to an office, a
declaration of majority (venia aetatis), or a patent (see 5.3 and 7.6.0). In many instances,
the original petition was edited and converted into a minute of the final decision. Many
petitions were returned to the petitioner carrying the States’ decision in the margin
(apostil or postil from Latin apostille, meaning note), in other cases the petitioners
received the decision in the form of an extract from the resoluties. The States kept draft
copies (minuten) and registers of decisions on petitions (appointementen).

In the third quarter of the 18th century, the pensionary’s clerk Johan Samuel Cassa made
indexes on the decisions—not only of contemporary decisions, but also of those from the
years 1525-1652. For this enormous work he was paid more than 7,000 guilders. Cassa
indexed the resoluties of the Delegated States 1621-1756 as well. As he wrote, he thereby
provided the States with a ‘compass’ to guide their governance. Later, in 1792, Cassa spent
five months inventorying the documents in the muniment room of Holland.
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Until the end of the 16th century, the States of Zeeland consisted of the nobles and
representatives of the cities. Since 1578 the States were composed of the Prince of Orange
as ‘first nobleman’ (eerste edele) and the cities of Middelburg, Zierikzee, Goes, Tholen,
Flushing (Vlissingen), and Veere. In 1578 an office (comptoir) of the States was established
in the former Norbertine Abbey of Our Lady in Middelburg, under the meeting room of
the newly created Delegated States. Three years later, 21 guilders were spent to buy a large
cupboard for storing the secret papers of the land. In 1664 a new room was furnished to
house the papers and other muniments. They were arranged by the new pensionary, Pieter
de Huybert. He had previously been secretary to the States, in which office he had been
succeeded by his cousin Justus. The secretary had to care for the archives and write the
minutes of the Delegated States, the pensionary did the same for the States, whose
meetings he chaired. Both cousins not only reorganized the archives, they also reorganized
the registry and ensured the copying of the older emissaries’ reports (verbalen). Regarding
the archives, the Delegated States ordained in 1664, among other things, that copies of
documents could be taken out (upon a receipt), but that the originals should be kept in the
loketkast, if possible, to minimize the risk of loss.

When the comptoir was furnished in 1578, pensionary Christoffel Roels started a register
in which he did not only record the decisions (resoluties) of the States and the Delegated
States, but also the various acts that were dealt with by the States, together with the
decisions taken. Shortly thereafter, he created a Collegiaalboek in which he wrote down
summaries of the matters dealt with during a meeting. Roels’ successors had to make a
rough draft of the decisions (notulen van de resolutiën) during the meeting, and to copy
these into quires which were later bound. Based on these drafts, the clerks wrote a fair copy
into the register which contained the agenda of the meeting and copies of the acts as well.
Two series of decisions therefore exist: drafts and fair copies. During De Huybert’s term
(1664-1687) printing of resoluties was introduced, beginning with those of 1672. The series
of fair copies runs up to and includes 1673; it is not clear whether De Huybert abolished
writing fair copies or if the fair copy was sent to the printer’s and got lost there.

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Fig. 3.3a Resoluties of the States of Zeeland,

16 March 1672, print version. Zeeuws Archief,
Staten van Zeeland (2), inv. nr. 3388.
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Fig. 3.3b Resoluties of the States of Zeeland, 16 March 1672, marginalia. Zeeuws Archief,
Staten van Zeeland (2), inv. nr. 371.

Next to the series of resoluties there is a series of documents received, as annexes to the
notulen (relatieven tot de notulen). In the 16th century these were probably filed on a string
or a spike. The outgoing letters were transcribed in the notulen. At the Statencomptoir
copies of the resoluties were written for all delegates and for the Audit Chamber. This
lasted until printing became the norm, first in a run of 26 copies, and after 1720 in runs of
46 to 51 copies.

In 1799 the new Batavian government ordered a total inventorization of the archives of
the former province of Zeeland to be made. Jacobus Cornelis te Water and Jacob Masson
were commissioned with the work. The former had been the pensionary’s clerk (1772-
1793), the latter was clerk-recorder (commies-notularis). They now bore the titles of
chartermeester and assistant to the chartermeester. Te Water and Masson were instructed
to check all cupboards, compartments, drawers, and writing desks in the clerk’s office
(griffie) and in all other offices and repositories, in the tower and in adjacent rooms.

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They had to take note ‘of all archives, charters, books, minutes, annexes, official letters,
memoranda, maps, and all other documents, in so far these may be deemed to be of any
substance’. After the inventorization everything had to be put

in an appropriate order and stored as much as possible (…) in cupboards,

pigeonholes and other places in such a manner that those [documents] which
are most often used (…) are kept near hand.

The documents stored in the secret cupboard had to be ‘cleansed’ of non-essential material
and the remainder be kept in safekeeping. Furthermore, the chests, compartments, writing
desks, and drawers had to be numbered. The numbers then had to be recorded in the
inventory together with an indication of the place of the documents ‘in order that
everything is easy to find and can be relocated to its proper place, in the proper order’.
Every month Te Water and Masson had to report in writing. Te Water and Masson
produced in three years (1799-1802) 14 inventories and other finding aids. Nevertheless,
their inventorization was not complete: in 1812 a mass of loose papers dating from before
1718 were discovered in the attic that Te Water and Masson had not seen.

In 1578 Utrecht chose the side with the Revolt. Previously, the States had encompassed
the clergy (the five chapters, see 2.1), the nobility, and the cities. This was continued,
although representatives of the (protestantized) chapters were elected by nobility and
cities from 1582. Each of the roughly 60 noblemen could act individually in the States.
The quarters which formed the province had a function in judicature, not in government.
In 1593 the Delegated States received their first instruction.
The clerk’s office (griffie) had a loketkast to store the greffier’s subject files (more than 200
of these files have been preserved). It seems that the files were created ad hoc for a specific
case and that only rarely documents were added to an existing file. This is in contrast to
the practice at the registries of Holland and the States General where the rubrics of the
loketkast (systematically arranged according to respecten, literally viewpoints) served to
store documents for a longer period.
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At first, clerks wrote the decisions on loose quires (which were bound later), but from 1588
the decisions were recorded in registers. There are various series: rough drafts
(incomplete), minuut decisions, and a duplicate series of fair copies. One contains the
original documents received (which were not, as in a pure resolutie system, kept as a series
separate from the decisions) and the decisions, the other is a duplicate which refers to the
first series by notes like fiat insertio (literally: let it be inserted). This system of referencing
was replaced in 1639 by transcribing the documents received in the copy register.

Then there are registers holding the secret resoluties (since 1670): a series of fair copies and
a series of draft copies (minuten). Alphabetical and systematic indexes provide access to
these resoluties. The clerks also made abridgements (compendieuse resoluties)
summarizing the most important decisions of each meeting. Quite a few copies of these
compendia have been preserved. The fair copies of outgoing letters were kept at separate
liassen, but since 1685 they were bound.

In a similar manner to Gelderland, quarters played an important role in the States of

Friesland. Aside from the quarters Oostergo, Westergo, and Zevenwouden a fourth
quarter was formed in 1578, comprising the 11 Frisian cities. However, the 82 delegates
from these four quarters seldom assembled in a plenary session, only to hear the reading of
the items on the agenda of the provincial convention (Landdag). After the reading, the
delegates would return to the chamber of their quarter in the hall of the Landschap.
The Landdag was prepared by the Mindergetal, an agenda-setting committee of eight
members, two from each quarter (mindergetal literally means lesser number, i.e. less than
the number of delegates in the plenary States). The members of the Mindergetal asked for
advice from their quarters and tabled the advice of the quarter at the Mindergetal,
The Mindergetal finally drafted the decisions of the States, which were sent to the quarters
for approval. The draft, having been approved, was handed to the secretary who wrote
the final version of the decision.

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Fig. 3.4 The States of Friesland, from the print Gouvernement des États
des Sept Provinces Unies by Henry Abraham Chatelain, 1721 (?).
Museum Van Gijn, Dordrecht.

As in Gelderland, the quarters were separate archive creators. In contrast with Gelderland,
however, the States (and the Delegated States) formed archives, including a series of
resoluties from 1580-1795. The Landdag papers have been preserved from 1683 onwards
and they may be considered to be the annexes to the resoluties. The Mindergetal formed
archives as well, though only a few have been preserved. Examples are the fair copies of the
resoluties sent to the four quarters for approval and the journals (1638-1795) containing
lists of the representatives, the agendas of the Landdag, and the resolutions taken by the
quarters on each point on the agenda. In the 18th century H.W. Baron van Plettenberg,
who was the provincial secretary from 1770 to 1780, made a systematic catalogue
(repertorium) of the journals.
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The resoluties of the States have only been preserved from the period 1580-1605, together
with the documents treated by the Landdag from 1683. Nearly all the documents received
by the Mindergetal and the quarters are missing. All things considered, the makers of the
inventory from 1998 conclude that archives management by the States of Friesland was
inadequate.

Fig. 3.5 The States of Overijssel, from the print Gouvernement des États
des Sept Provinces Unies by Henry Abraham Chatelain, 1721 (?).
Museum Van Gijn, Dordrecht.

The States of Overijssel consisted of the three big cities of Deventer, Kampen, and Zwolle
and the nobility from the three quarters of Vollenhove, Salland and Twenthe. Every
nobleman could appear in the States’ assembly in person, while the cities sent delegates.
The States met alternately in the three cities. Formation of archives, including registration

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of the decisions, started only with the secession from the Spanish in 1578. As was usual
elsewhere, both fair copies and drafts (minuten) were kept. In the 18th century the States
decided to have a copy made of the resoluties from 1578-1706. Somewhat later, the
province’s steward (rentmeester) D.E. van Voërst tot Averbergen made an alphabetical
index on the resoluties 1578-1777.

Copies of incoming documents were inserted in the resoluties; the originals kept on liassen
and in bundles. Before an assembly of the States, the three cities met and mostly agreed on
a common position. The record of these preliminary meetings can be found in the city
archives. Likewise, the nobility (Ridderschap) held preliminary meetings. In contrast with
Gelderland, the Ridderschap was an autonomous body with its own archives, and the
ridderschappen in the three quarters formed archives as well.

In 1593 the Delegated States took on a permanent character (the series of their resoluties
starts in that year), but like the States they assembled alternately in the three cities. The
archives travelled with the Delegated States, except for the chest with privileges that was
kept in Deventer. Later on, the Delegated States left the old archives in Deventer, Kampen,
and Zwolle, where they were often mixed with the city archives.

The States of Stad Groningen en Ommelanden (the official name from 1597, but in
practice referred to as Stad en Lande) drew its members from two entities: the city (stad)
of Groningen (represented in meetings by the full magistrate of 16 people) and the
‘Surrounding Lands’ (Ommelanden), represented by delegates (among them many
noblemen) from the 144 parishes (kerspelen). However, spokesmen on behalf of the two
entities were the two pensionaries (syndici) who based their speeches on what had been
discussed in preliminary meetings. Since 1558 the Ommelanden held their own
assemblies, they had their own governing bodies, their own treasury, and permanent
officers. The Ommelanden were divided into three quarters: Hunsingo, Fivelingo, and
Westerkwartier, with each quarter consisting of three sub-quarters. Any decision by the
States or the Ommelanden required a majority of six sub-quarters.
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Archiving by the States was limited at first. In the 16th century there was a common land’s
chest (landskist) containing mostly financial records jointly of Stad en Ommelanden.
Both the city and the Ommelanden had their own archives. After the province joined the
Confederacy in 1594 the joint archives appear to be kept by the syndicus Verrutius.
The archives were stored in two chests, one bought for this purpose, the other being the
former landskist.

The secretariat of the States was housed in the headquarters of the province since 1602.
At first the secretariat had one secretary only, but from 1648 City and Ommelanden each
appointed a secretary. According to his instruction, the secretary had to maintain an
inventory of the archives; however, only a few inventories from the 17th and 18th centuries
have been preserved. In 1770 people tried to bring the archives in order. An inventory of
all papers at the secretariat was made. Officials had often taken papers home and did not
return them. Delegated States therefore ordained that the day after the funeral of a
secretary or other provincial office-bearer, a committee had to visit the house of the
deceased to take away any provincial records (see also 9.3). Upon the death of a clerk,
the secretaries had to execute the confiscation of papers. Whether or not these rules
have been followed, is unknown.

Registration of the States’ decisions began in 1595. Apart from a series of fair copies,
volumes with rough drafts (mostly written during the meeting) and minuten from
1649-1689 and 1720-1741 have been preserved. Sometimes the documents received were
integrated into these bound volumes, but most petitions (rekesten) and other documents
received were put in separate series, as was the case with minuten of outgoing letters.

The region (Landschap) Drenthe was not an integral member of the Republic of the
United Netherlands, but nevertheless subject to a certain control (suzerainty) by the States
General. Drenthe paid the Confederacy for international and military protection. The
States of Drenthe consisted of the nobility (with one vote) and delegates of the freeholders
(eigenerfden) (two from each of the six districts or dingspelen), with jointly two votes.

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It was only from about 1600 that the resoluties of the States were registered. Before, the
secretary (landschrijver) (at the same time greffier of the provincial court) kept all papers
at home. In 1607 the States claimed the archives the former secretary Heimrich van
Rossum had kept at his house. However, Van Rossum refused to give them because he had
paid for the books and papers out of his own pocket. Only in 1609, after Van Rossum’s
death, did the States succeed in taking over ‘all papers (pampieren) which in any way bear
upon the Landschap’ from the heirs, in exchange for 200 guilders. Other claims by the
States on provincial archives kept in private hands, were equally successful.

In 1627 the States commissioned a committee to inventory the provincial archives. The
inventorization took three days. On the first day the committee inventoried a number of
liassen hanging in the office of the secretary, papers lying on four shelves, two benches and
a table, and the contents of a cabinet with nine compartments. The next day the committee
checked the records in the meeting chamber of the Delegated States which were kept in a
big chest, a coffer, and a small cabinet. The chest and the cabinet contained files (liassen),
protocols, bundles, packets, and diverse papers. The coffer contained mostly records
concerning the financial arrangement with the Confederacy. On the third day, five little
chests and boxes with privileges and other important (mainly financial) documents were
inventoried and stored in the newly manufactured land’s chest (landskist).

As usual, there are two series of decisions: minuten from 1620 (ending in 1772) and fair
copies from 1601 to 1794. Two registers exist from the period 1601-1618. To end a conflict
between nobility and freeholders, it was decided in 1619 to cross out all decisions made
between 1601 and 1603 and to make a new register which would omit any entry which
might offend the parties in the conflict. Incoming and minuten of outgoing documents
were put on a string (lias). There were files of all letters from a single authority, and files on
a particular subject such as church affairs, domains, and captains.
87a kader

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3.3 States General of the
Confederacy
As I explained in 3.0, most of what we know of the archiving by the States General—the
highest governing body of the Generaliteit, the confederacy of the Seven United Provinces
of the Netherlands—is based on the impressive study by Theo Thomassen, Instruments of
power. The States General and their archives 1576-1796.8 I have chosen a few aspects to be
treated here, on the basis of Thomassen’s work.

8 Th.H.P.M. Thomassen, Instrumenten van de macht. In 1464 Philip the Good convened representatives of all his territories to discuss his plan to
De Staten-Generaal en hun archieven 1576-1796
(PhD thesis University of Amsterdam, 2009)
launch a crusade. This meeting (in which delegates from, among others, Flanders, Hainaut,
http://hdl.handle.net/11245/1.319579; second Holland, and Zeeland took part) is considered to mark the beginning of the States General:
edition: Theo Thomassen, Instrumenten van de
macht. De Staten-Generaal en hun archieven 1576-
the assembly of representatives of sovereign territories. A turning point in the long
1796. Onderzoeksgids (Den Haag: Huygens Instituut development since 1464 came when in 1576 the representatives of the provinces rebelling
voor Nederlandse Geschiedenis, 2015), https://web.
archive.org/web/20170607054454/http://resources.
against Spain (among them Brabant, Flanders, Hainaut, Gelderland, Holland, Zeeland,
huygens.knaw.nl/retroboeken/instrumenten_ Utrecht, and the Groningen Ommelanden) assembled as States General, not as had been
macht/#page=0&accessor=toc&view=homePane,
archived 7 June 2017. For reference the page numbers
customary at the invitation by the lord of the land, but on their own authority. In 1576,
of the second edition are used. See also Theo archiving by the States General begins. At first hesitantly, with the clerks taking the records
Thomassen, ‘The history of the archives of the States-
General and its consequences for their cataloguing
in boxes from one meeting place to another. Archiving became permanent in 1585 when
and editing’, in Unlocking government archives of the States General and their registry settled in the Binnenhof in The Hague.9 Keeping the
the early modern period. Papers presented at the
workshop held at the Institute of Netherlands History,
archive’s inventory was the task of the agent who was also head of the household services
The Hague, 17-18 November 1994, ed. A.J. Veenendaal and master of ceremonies. He also cared for the physical maintenance of the documents at
and J. Roelevink (The Hague: Institute of
Netherlands History, 1995), pp. 84-93.
the clerk’s (greffier’s) office. Later, keeping the archives was delegated to the bailiff
9 Thomassen, De instrumenten, p. 736.
(deurwaarder) attached to the clerk’s office. The agent, the bailiff, and the greffier had a
10 Thomassen, De instrumenten, p. 713; Th.H.F. van
copy of the inventory each.10
Riemsdijk, De griffie van hare hoog mogenden. Bijdrage
tot de kennis van het archief van de Staten-Generaal
der Vereenigde Nederlanden (’s-Gravenhage: Nijhoff,
The assembly of the States General comprised delegates of the States of the provinces.
1885), pp. 38-9. Each province had one vote, but the vote of the most powerful province, Holland, was in

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most cases decisive. The States General met, took decisions, and governed. Thomassen
groups their functions into five categories.11 In the first place, the States General had to
maintain the Confederacy, preserve the rights and freedoms of the Confederates, keep up
the unity in the Confederacy, and appoint high functionaries of the Confederacy and
military officers. The second category comprises the functions related to religion, foreign
affairs, warfare, the control of the financial resources, and maintaining the national
currency. The third category comprises the functions focusing on exercising the
sovereignty of captured territories. This concerned the Generality Lands, areas in the
south captured from the Spanish, conquered cities in Europe, and the conquered
territories in Asia and the Americas. The fourth category comprised activities proceeding
from incidental decisions by the Confederates to make a particular matter communal.
This particularly concerned the care of economic affairs and water management. The fifth
category comprised what Thomassen calls derivative functions: conferring offices, issuing
and maintaining generally binding regulations, and taking decisions in matters concerning
private people.

At first much of the work of the States General was carried out orally, but as the amount
of work grew, managing affairs in writing became more usual. Written textuality served
transparency as well, and it was to some extent a guarantee against political manipulation.
In 1646 it was reconfirmed that requests and propositions had to be submitted in writing.
These documents were read aloud by the greffier during the meeting.12

The archives of the States General are seen as the paragon of an archive arranged according
to the resolutie system (see 3.2). Thomassen has defined the assembly of the States General
as a ‘decision taking machine’. Until the last meeting on 1 March 1796, the States General
had archived half a million decisions (resoluties) and a multiplicity of drafts, fair copies,
and transcripts chronologically arranged in more than 5,000 volumes, binders, and
11 Thomassen, De instrumenten, pp. 220-21. bundles. A large amount of that production can be found in numerous other archives in
12 Thomassen, De instrumenten, p. 461. the form of copies and extracts.13
13 Thomassen, De instrumenten, p. 475.
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At first the clerks wrote multiple copies of the decisions for the benefit of the provinces,
the Council of State, the cities, the Republic’s emissaries abroad, and other authorities and
people—all participants in one or more of the genre systems (see the General
Introduction) of the States General. Beginning in 1669 documents which needed to be
copied more than four times were printed—a measure ‘unprecedented in any country and
never to our knowledge followed elsewhere’, as Pettegree and Der Weduwen write.14
The printed resoluties were a selection especially for the foreign service, but as more
people were receiving them, the selection got broader. From 1703 onward all resoluties
were printed and indexed. The number of subscriptions to the printed resoluties increased
gradually; in 1728 there were 111 subscriptions. However, because the printed resoluties
were often not ready for months after the meeting, and because the provinces needed to
know what had been resolved as soon as possible, handwritten copies of the resoluties
continued to be important.

Often the text of a document received was inserted in the fair copy of the resoluties. The
original documents received stayed with the resoluties, which otherwise would not be
complete and therefore have less probative value. The letters that were not inserted and the
drafts (minuten) of outgoing documents were put on a lias by the agent. In the registry of
the States General, a lias was closed regularly and stored in a cupboard.15 The oldest of the
circa 20 series of liassen was the lias ‘lopende’ ( ‘running’, meaning active). Out of these
liassen files were branched off over time, for example a lias for documents on the currency,
another for the admiralties. In 1621 a lias was created concerning the foundation of the
VOC, two years later the WIC got a separate lias.16 The use of liassen continued until the
14 Thomassen, De instrumenten, pp. 599-602; Andrew
middle of the 17th century. In 1646, ‘when the chaos at the registry more than ever
Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen, The bookshop hampered the States General’s grip on the political process’,17 it was decided that the letters
of the world. Making and trading books in the Dutch
Golden Age (Newhaven/London: Yale University
received and sent were not only to be filed on a lias, but also transcribed into letter books.
Press, 2019) p. 196. However, the petitions and applications (rekesten) continued to be filed only, presently
15 Thomassen, De instrumenten, p. 649. forming 551 bundles from the years 1600-1796. Before, a petition had been returned to the
16 Thomassen, De instrumenten, p. 653. petitioner with the decision annotated (apostil) (see 3.2), but from the 17th century
17 Thomassen, De instrumenten, p. 659. onward the decision was communicated to the petitioner in the form of an extract from
18 Thomassen, De instrumenten, p. 658. the resoluties; the original petitions stayed with the States General.18

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When a new registry was finished in 1655-1656, agent Cornelis de Heijde made an
inventory of the archives. This inventory is quite efficient because it does not follow (as so
often happened) the sequence of the rooms and cupboards where the archives were kept
(still, De Heijde annotated the location of the documents). Instead it was systematically
arranged according to the nature of the series of registers, liassen, and bundles.19 De Heijde
continued to work on the (re)arrangement of the archives (especially of the series of
resoluties). He made a new inventory in 1677 when the archives were relocated following
the order of the original inventory. This inventory kept up to date until 1729, served until
1962 (!) as the finding aid of the Loketkas (see below).

Indexes were essential for the findability of resoluties and the connected documents.
The system of indexes grew gradually. In the 16th century, the greffier made his resoluties
accessible by noting short summaries or keywords in the margin of the register.20
Around 1600 the agent started to arrange the greffier’s marginalia systematically in an
index. After the death of agent De Heijde in 1678, indexing the regular (ordinaris) register
was delegated to the bailiff attached to the greffier’s office, and indexing the secret register
to the clerk of the ciphers. The greffier was responsible for the accessibility of the registers
of resolutions. This was in his own interest as well because he had to ensure an efficient
decision-making process in which precedents played a major role. For this purpose, the
index to the register, composed after year’s end, was insufficient. Therefore, in the final
quarter of the 17th century, the greffier started to endorse the drafts (minuten) by
annotating the substance of the resolutie on the back. These endorsements were copied
into an index, which he kept on a daily basis. In the 18th century, the greffier also
composed general indexes covering a couple of years.21 As was usual elsewhere (see 3.2 and
4.3), the indexes were made at the greffier’s own expense and therefore they belonged to
19 Van Riemsdijk, De griffie, pp. 128-29; Thomassen,
his private collection of manuscripts.
De instrumenten, pp. 448-49.
20 Thomassen, De instrumenten, p. 611. Apart from the resoluties, indexes, liassen, and the series of letters received and sent, there
21 Thomassen, De instrumenten, pp. 611-12. were records stored separately in the Loketkas, a large cupboard with pigeonholes (see also
22 Thomassen, De instrumenten, p. 703. 4.5 and chapter 11) in use since 1605.22 There existed also a Secrete Kas since 1621 to store
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bonds, treaties, ratifications, secret documents, and other important papers. The Secrete
Kas, containing 88 pigeonholes (loketten), has been preserved: the upper part stands in the
National Archives; the lower part was transferred to the Rijksmuseum in 1950. The latter
has a separate locker made in 1648 to house the red velvet box containing the ratification
of the Peace of Münster (Westphalia) by the Spanish king. This is still considered to be the
‘birth certificate’ of the Republic. Later, the great seal of the Confederacy was kept in the
same locker.23

Fig. 3.6 Lower part of the Secrete Kas of the States General. Rijksmuseum, BK-16464.

23 Thomassen, De instrumenten, p. 737.

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A large proportion of the archives of the States General consists of verbalen. A verbaal
(derived from Latin verbale, record) was a report, particularly the account of an envoy or
commissioner, presented in a meeting of his principals and then filed as an annexe to the
decision of discharge. Verbalen were submitted by emissaries, by representatives of the
States General serving with the army in the field or sent on a mission outside The Hague.
The verbaal contained the report with annexes, including the documents received and
fair copies of letters sent, all together as it were the mission’s archive.24

Thomassen concludes:

The archives of the States General are both representations and instruments of
power, not only of political power, the power to manage and control developments
in society, but also of memory power, the power to determine how society is
memorized. Order is a central instrument of power, not only because order is a
prerequisite for control and monitoring, but also because order is the most
characteristic expression of a culture.25

He warns that these instruments of power were not static but changed, not only during the
time the States General were active (1576-1796), but also later, at different points in time:

In the course of four centuries, the archives of the States General have constantly
been adapted to changing ideas and needs. They do not merely represent the
activities, power relations and attitudes of the records creators, but also those of
keepers and users of more recent times. Clerks and archivists have frequently
rearranged them, removing some documents and adding others.26

Thus, what we consider as the archives of the States General is largely a construct by
24 Thomassen, De instrumenten, pp. 679-80. ‘archivers’ who, as I wrote in the General Introduction, participated in the production and
25 Thomassen, De instrumenten, p. 763. mediation of the archive.
26 Thomassen, De instrumenten, p. 761.
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3.4 Archiving a Unitary State

Archiving States 27

Kafka has written somewhere that every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only
the slime of a new bureaucracy.28 This certainly applies to the Batavian Revolution of 1795.
In 1798 the constitution of the Batavian Republic created ministries (agentschappen) in
The Hague. They counted 175 civil servants, and already in 1805, their number had
doubled. At a national level the years after 1805 were ‘a bureaucratic heyday’, according to
27 The following is a summary of F.C.J. Ketelaar,
Simon Schama: ‘Memoranda, reports, dossiers and laws, both enacted and projected,
‘ “Door eenheid tot orde en vastheid”. Vernieuwing spewed from the bureaux in the Binnenhof and on the Plein with unremitting regularity.’29
van de overheidsadministratie in de Bataafse tijd’,
Nehalennia. Bulletin van de werkgroep Historie
The number of civil servants tripled during the reign of King Louis Napoleon. Their
en archeologie van het Koninklijk Zeeuwsch activities led to an enormous archive production.
genootschap der wetenschappen en de Zeeuwsche
Vereeniging voor dialectonderzoek, 109 (1996):
39-47. I also used H. Boels, Binnenlandse Zaken.
Ontstaan en ontwikkeling van een departement in
de Bataafse tijd 1795-1806. Een reconstructie (Den
Provincial government as a percentage of Provincial
Haag: Sdu Uitgeverij Koninginnegracht, 1993). 1795-1813 government before 1795
For sections 3.4 and 3.5 I used F.J.M. Otten, Gids
voor de archieven van de ministeries en de hoge
(metres)
colleges van staat, 1813-1940 (Den Haag: Instituut
voor Nederlandse Geschiedenis, 2004); A.E.M.
Ribberink, ‘Verbaal van het verhandelde’, Nederlands
Friesland 175 52
archievenblad 68 (1964): 64-70; A.E.M. Ribberink, Zeeland 105 24
Registratuur en rijksadministratie in de 19e eeuw
(’s-Gravenhage: Algemeen Rijksarchief, 1968);
Groningen 120 (1798-1814) 60 (before 1798)
H.A.J. van Schie, Registratuur van de Nederlandse Overijssel 71 (1811-1813) 20 (before 1810)
overheidsadministratie in de negentiende eeuw
(’s-Gravenhage: Rijksarchiefschool, 1992). See also
Horsman, ‘A French legacy’: 135-36. I thank Henny
van Schie for his comments on a draft of sections 3.4,
Table 3.1 Size of provincial government’s archives in four provinces, 1795-1813,
3.5 and 3.6. in metres of shelving and as a percentage of provincial government’s archives before 1795.
28 C.H. Church, Revolution and red tape. The French
ministerial bureaucracy 1770-1850 (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1981), p. VII.
One could regard these statistics as an indication of the low rate of survival of archives
29 S. Schama, Patriots and liberators. Revolution in the
Netherlands 1780-1813 (New York: HarperCollins,
before 1795 compared to the later period. However, there certainly is a relation between
1977), p. 541. archive production and the extensive textualization (verschriftelijking) of government.

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An important factor for the textualization was that for the first time in history, public
opinion and political influencing could be directed to a national parliament. The right of
petition was the first civil right regulated by the new parliament, and it was used on a large
scale. Citizens, civic bodies, and action groups sent petitions and appeared before
Parliament. The executive (created in 1798) was flooded with letters and petitions as well.
Under the former regime the provincial States, the courts, and the States General had dealt
with numerous petitions, but the impression is that from 1798 the new relationship
between government and citizens led to new and more correspondence.
The Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen (1795) created a new right: the right to
demand of every civil servant a rendering of accounts. This entailed documenting not only
of decision-making at the highest political level but also of activities in administrative
processes performed by individual officials at lower levels.
As in other times of crisis and reform, the Batavian Revolution led to disruptions of the
normal pattern and thereby to an increased archive production. The defence, for example,
entailed a bureaucracy which was more extensive than in a time of peace.
The textualization was partly the result of shifting tasks. Taxation, for example, was largely
transferred from the local and provincial levels to the State (see 8.3).

Even so, the most important factor for the textualization was the ‘hunger for information’
of the new authorities. They felt, as Jeurgens and Klep argue, a pressing and persistent need
for information regarding society.30 The formation of the unitary state and the later
centralization entailed that the top needed information which only the base could provide.
Central government had totally different ambitions and responsibilities compared to the
federal and provincial authorities in the past. Up until 1795 nearly everything fell under the
authority of provincial government, the involvement at national level being limited to
foreign affairs, army and navy, and the governance of the Confederacy territories (see 3.3).
After the Batavian Revolution it was necessary to develop national policies and national
legislation and to structure nationwide control of the latter. This was new, but just as new
30 Ch. Jeurgens and P.M.M. Klep, Informatieprocessen
van de Bataafs-Franse overheid 1795-1813 (Den Haag:
was the use of information as a basis for these policies, legislation, and implementation.
Instituut voor Nederlandse Geschiedenis, 1995), p. 11.
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Likewise new was that the information was collected and used on a national scale for
regional and local comparison. Relatively new was the use of pre-printed tables and
questionnaires meant to gather the information in a standardized format.

Information gathering was done by inspectors travelling the country or even abroad, and
by writing. The introduction and perfection of the written survey as a means of
information gathering in the Batavian-French period stimulated an increase in archiving,
as becomes clear when one checks the database created by the Institute of Dutch History.31

Archiving in the Batavian period reached back to the practices before 1795. The backbone
of the archiving system of the national Executive Administration (Uitvoerend Bewind)
were the decisions (resoluties) taken during a meeting and stored in chronological order.
Documents received and sent were mentioned in the decisions and formed into separate
series. Indexes gave access to the decisions and the supporting documents.

The ministries used a verbaal system. In the days of the States General (see 3.3) a verbaal
was the account of an envoy or commissioner, presented in a meeting of his principals.
The ministers (agenten) of the Batavian Republic kept a daily account (verbaal) of their
decisions taken on the letters and reports received. These accounts were arranged
chronologically, and the incoming documents and drafts of outgoing letters were filed and
registered according to the order of the verbalen.

Steven Dassevael, clerk at the State secretariat from 1798 until 1815, developed the verbaal
system: to each verbaal were joined the documents received, the verbalen of one day were
aggregated into a daily folder (chemise), and these folders were arranged according to the
date of the decision. The most important difference between this verbaal system and the
31 https://web.archive.org/web/20190522180842/http://
resolutie system of the States General (and most of the provincial States) was the storage of
resources.huygens.knaw.nl/bataafsfransebronnen, the incoming documents. In the resolutie system this was done in separate series and in the
archived 22 May 2019 ; K.J.P.F.M. Jeurgens, ‘Dutch
sources from the Batavian-French period’, in Unlocking
verbaal system in one series or folded into the double sheet of each decision. In Dassevael’s
government archives, pp. 94-104. system a range of annual indexes and other finding aids gave access to the files. The index

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arranged the decisions mostly under a subject heading (hoofd) and mentioned for each
decision all necessary data and numbers. All papers to be stored in the archives first passed
the index maker.

It was only in 1806 that the Netherlands was ruled by a king, Louis Napoleon. The country
soon got acquainted with his French-inspired administration. This was characterized by a
distribution of the work of civil servants by portfolios, entailing decentralization of
archiving. Such specialization and decentralization would have been unthinkable in the
Republic of the United Netherlands, but they fitted the changed system of political and
official accountability. Following the French, the job title of archivist came into use. T
he
ministries and the provincial administrations were split into divisions (sometimes divided
into bureaus), each with clearly defined tasks and a supervisor. Specialization and task
distribution replaced an administration in one hand (the secretary’s or greffier’s). Each
division or bureau kept its own archives, arranged according to the verbaal system or a
subject files system.

Between 1794 and 1810 the Netherlands was incorporated into France (see 3.0). In the
French one-man administration by prefects, under-prefects, and maires, the decision
(arrêté) took centre stage.32 The arrêté was inserted in the daily report (proces-verbaal),
comparable to the aforementioned verbaal. The fair copy (expeditie) was merely an extract
from the proces-verbaal and was copied into a correspondence register (registre de
correspondance). Each division and each bureau kept its own indicateur: a diary (agenda)
referring to the current place and status of the documents, making it possible to control
the document flow and thereby the workflow (see 4.9.1). The divisions and bureaus
32 P. Scherft, De archieven der prefectuur van het
departement der Monden van de Schelde (…)
maintained control of their own archives, which were arranged largely according to the
(Rijswijk: Ministerie van Cultuur, Recreatie supervisor’s personal understanding (thus, not regulated centrally), and more or less
en Maatschappelijk Werk, 1968); W.H. Stein,
Französisches Verwaltungsschriftgut in Deutschland.
systematically per subject. The indicateur referred to the pigeonholes in the cupboard or
Die Departementalverwaltungen in der Zeit the cardboard-backed folders (cartons) in the division or bureau that kept the documents
der Französischen Revolution und des Empire
(Marburg: Archivschule Marburg Institut für
received (the outgoing documents were to be found in the arrêtés and the registre de
Archivwissenschaft, 1996). correspondence).
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Fig. 3.7 Indicateur, 1810. Zeeuws Archief, Prefectuur (5), inv. nr. 8.

Ideally, the indicateur supports the control of the document flow and the workflow, as one
prefect wrote ‘in this general register one sees in a glance the process and the movement of
33 ‘….dans ce répertoire general on apperçoit d’un coup all matters’.33
d’oeil la marche et le mouvement de toutes les affaires’,
Prefect of the Departement du Zuyderzée to the maire
of Amsterdam, 28 May 1811, quoted by J.H. van den In practice, however, there were deviations. For example, the prefects of the departments
Hoek Ostende, ‘De invoering en de ontwikkeling
van het indicateurstelsel in Amsterdam’, Nederlands
of the Mouths of the IJssel (Overijssel) and the Upper IJssel (Gelderland) continued the
archievenblad 68 (1994): 57. Dutch verbaal system, which they had known previously when they had been regional

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commissioners (landdrosten) in the Kingdom of Holland. Elsewhere, Dutchmen managing
an administration often adopted the former Dutch system (Audit Chamber, Finance,
Water Management), whereas a French or a Belgian civil servant would introduce the
French system (Interior, Navy, prefectures Mouths of the Scheldt and Mouths of the
Meuse).

Fig. 3.8 Registre de correspondance, 1810. Zeeuws Archief, Prefectuur (5), inv. nr. 16.
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3.5 Archiving Central Government
1813-1991
The first Dutch introduction of archivistics (1955) written by archival educator Jaap van
der Gouw states ‘How the Dutch administration made use of the possibilities handed
down of old and those introduced in the French period, is shown at its best by the archives
of the State secretariat formed under King William I.’34 A first draft of a decision submitted
to the King is written on a folded double sheet of paper serving as a folder for the
documents that have led to the decision. This file is called a verbaal. When the King signs
the first draft it becomes the final draft (minuut); an authenticated copy is dispatched as
fair copy (expeditie). All royal decrees and other decisions are arranged by date; the
decisions of a single day receive a consecutive number.

A subject index on the chronologically arranged verbalen is made. An alphabetical list

(klapper) refers to the headings and the proper nouns in the index. At the State secretariat
the documents received were put in the folder of the royal decision. In other administra­
tions, the verbaal system comprised a chronological series of decisions next to a series of
documents received, arranged in chronological order as well. On each of the documents
(which at their reception were chronologically registered in a listing or agenda) the date
and number of the decision are written.

The archiving system prescribed by Royal Decree of 4 September 1823 for all ministries
(and later for provincial governments as well) consisted of one series of verbalen only: the
documents received were kept with the verbaal in one folder. The decree explicitly forbade
the French way of ordering documents according to subject, or to split the archives of a
ministry into archives per division and bureau. In each ministry, the archivist and his staff
34 J.L. van der Gouw, Inleiding tot de archivistiek
had to keep the general index in the manner as practised by the States General of the
(Zwolle: Tjeenk Willink, 1955), p. 43. former Republic (see 3.3).

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Finding a document in the verbaal system entails a number of steps. Suppose one wants to
find information in the archives of the Ministry of Justice on the expulsion of a group of
gypsies (zigeuners) in 1870 (see Figs. 3.9a-d).35

Like most ministries, the Ministry of Justice kept two verbaal series: the ordinary and the
secret verbaal. Checking the secret verbaal, one starts with the alphabetical list (a) which
under zigeuners refers to the index heading ‘administration of police—varia’. Under that
heading one finds in the index (b) a reference to the decision of 28 July 1870 Nr. 30. That
document (minute) will be found in the chronological series of verbalen (c) and it contains
the preceding documents that started the decision-making process. The minute carries a
reference to these received documents which were tabled (exhibitum) on 25 July 1870 Nrs.
13-25 (d). The agenda (d) refers to the decision of 30 July 1870 Nr. 30, while the agenda of
30 July refers at number 30 back to 25 July Nrs. 13-25. Normally the minute (c) would show
the various amendments and annotations made by civil servants while the minute was
moving through the bureaucratic hierarchy.

The verbaal system was an intertextual genre system (see the General Introduction)
involving civil servants, ministers, petitioners, senders, addressees, and other parties. Each
participant would make ‘a recognizable act or move in some recognizable genre, which
then may be followed by a certain range of appropriate generic responses by others’.36
35 The example comes from J.A.M.Y. Bos-Rops,
M. Bruggeman, and F.C.J. Ketelaar, Archiefwijzer.
The verbaal system was an excellent tool for an administration focusing on taking
Handleiding voor het gebruik van archieven in decisions in specific cases (see 10.7).37 Information retrieval concentrated on the date and
Nederland (Bussum: Coutinho, 2005), pp. 80-81.
number of the decision. Pulling a particular document from the chronological series, or all
36 Charles Bazerman, ‘Systems of genres and the
enactment of social intentions’, in Genre and the new
documents on different but related decisions taken on different dates, was possible with
rhetoric, ed. Aviva Freedman and Peter Medway the help of the annual indexes and other finding aids. On the other hand, for an
(London: Taylor & Francis, 1994), p. 97.
administration managing objects and policies over time, it was very cumbersome to
37 This paragraph is for the greater part a summary
of Eric Ketelaar, ‘Recordkeeping systems and office
extract the documents pertaining to, for example, a bridge or a canal, and to return them,
technology in Dutch public administration, 1823- after consultation, to their chronological place time and again.
1950’, Jahrbuch für europäische Verwaltungsgeschichte/
Yearbook of European administrative history 9 (1997):
213-22.
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Fig. 3.9 The verbaal system: alphabetical list

(a), index (b), minute (c), agenda (d). National
Archives, Ministerie van Justitie (1876-1914)
(2.09.05), inv. nrs. 6457 (exh. 30 July Nr. 30),
6590, 6599, 6609. (c)

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Archiving States

(b)

(a)

(d)
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Notwithstanding the interdiction to arrange documents according to subject, this
cumbersome practice led civil servants to create subject files with all the relevant
documents for a longer period. This was done from 1829 at the Department of Public
Works and Water Management. At the Ministry of Justice, 15 percent of the archives were
kept as subject files, apart from the verbaal between 1813 and 1876. Special series of files
were maintained separately, for example the files on each Act of Parliament tabled by the
Minister of Justice; and files on each courthouse, prison, or other building for which the
ministry was responsible; files on each association granted legal personality. Similar ways
of creating files instead of integrating documents into the verbaal series were gradually
developed at other ministries. In some ministries they split the central chronological series
into different sub­series, either for each division of the ministry (as the Ministry of the
Interior had been doing since 1823, clearly contravening the Royal Decree of that year!) or
for a broad subject specified in a classification table. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs was
the first to do this (1863), followed by the State Real Estate Department within the Ministry
of Finance in 1868.

During the 19th century, when the liberal ‘Night Watch State’ was gradually transforming
into an actively steering government, the role of government changed from deciding about
individual cases to steering development and preparing, implementing, and monitoring
policies. These activities could no longer be supported adequately by the verbaal system.
Therefore, the newly created Department for Commerce and Industry soon established a
subject classification (1898), as did the Ministry for Agriculture in 1905, bringing the
number of ministries diverging from the 1823 rules to four (out of nine).

Around the same time, municipalities began to change from chronological archiving to the
subject files system propagated by Johan Zaalberg and his Records Management Bureau
(Registratuurbureau) (see 4.10 and 12.6). In 1922 the Association of Dutch Municipalities
(Vereeniging van Nederlandsche Gemeenten,VNG) took over the Registratuurbureau. In
ten years the VNG managed to raise the number of contracts with municipalities from 52
to 312. In all these municipalities the traditional chronological series of documents were
succeeded by subject files arranged according to the Universal Decimal Code (UDC)

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classification. At the outbreak of the Second World War the VNG filing system was used in
657 (out of 1,054) municipalities. Remarkably, the records management movement in local
government and business did not affect the ministries and central State agencies at all.

Immediately after the Liberation, in August 1945 the Cabinet decided to reorganize all
ministries. Part of the reorganization concerned a more efficient records management.
Abram Mey coordinated the overall reorganization and chaired an interdepartmental
committee on records management. Mey was an accountant who had worked at the Board
of Post, Telephony, and Telegraphy in the field of office management, information
processing, and, generally, promotion of efficiency. In the second committee meeting,
Lieutenant Colonel S.D. Duyverman from the Navy Ministry proposed to follow the VNG
filing system. Petrus Noordenbos, director of the Registratuurbureau, was invited to join
the committee. Some ministries (notably Agriculture, Social Affairs and some
departments of the Interior) had already engaged Noordenbos to introduce the VNG
subject files system. That system was prescribed in 1946 in general guidelines, but was
shipwrecked, however, as a result of resistance in most ministries. Even the Ministry of
Finance—that had taken the initiative for the efficiency drive—did not change its
traditional verbaal system.

A year later the matter of filing ministerial records again received attention. This time the
initiative came from the Ministry of the Interior. Louis Beel was Minister for the Interior,
as well as Prime Minister. The story goes that before the war, when Beel was working at the
town clerk’s office in Eindhoven, he had learned to appreciate the VNG system and he
wanted to use it (especially its document tracking component) to prevent civil servants
from withholding sensitive documents. The official reason given by Beel was that the
non-uniform application of the 1823 verbaal system had to be addressed. To draft a new
decree, replacing the regulations of 1823, a new committee was set up in 1947. Like its
chairman, Mey, most members had been on the first committee, including Duyverman
and Noordenbos. This time a representative of the General State Archives, Sijbrand
Fockema Andreae, also took part. Of the ten members, four were efficiency specialists,
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while the others were experienced archivists and records managers. Following the
committee’s recommendations, a Royal Decree of 2 October 1950 (replacing the decree of
1823) prescribed the use of subject files and filing plans based on the UDC to all ministries
and central State agencies. The decree also imposed document process control and
tracking, regular destruction of records according to a retention schedule, the making of
security copies, inspection of records management by the State Archivists, and transfer of
archives after 40 years to the State Archives. This fixed term for transfer to the State
Archives was new: the Archives Act of 1918 had only regulated that a Royal Decree was
needed for any transfer of State archives created since 1813. Therefore (and because of lack
of space), the State Archives hardly managed ‘young’ archives (i.e. archives after 1850) until
well into the 1960s. The successive Archive Acts of 1962 and 1995 fixed the compulsory
transfer period on 50 and then 20 years, respectively.

The regulations of 1950 were brought up to date in 1980 by a Royal Decree on registries of
State agencies. The decree was rather conservative and did not allow much freedom to deal
with new challenges, such as informatization of the office and decentralization and
privatization of government policies and practices.38 In 1995 the decree was revoked.
Public authorities wrestled with automation of both work processes and the supporting
operational processes, including records management. In 1991 the Court of Audit
established that control by central government of its archiving of machine-readable
records was insufficient (see 11.2.1). Since then it has become clear that modern
information society offers new opportunities to government and society but, at the same
time, also creates new demands related to decision making and accountability. Proper
archiving is a major instrument to meet these demands (see 8.3.2).

Nowadays, ICT enables new modes of collaborative work, greater flexibility, interactivity,
and control in organizations. In e-business and e-government records are more and more
likely to be created in a network with different partners contributing to the record. I have
38 W.E. Goelema and A.J.M. den Teuling, ‘Twintig treated aspects of these ICT developments elsewhere: see 1.2.5 (Data Protection and
jaar registratuur. Twee impressies’, in Voor burger en
bestuur. Twintig jaar Nederlands archiefwezen 1968-
Automation), 1.5.2 (The Migration Machine), 6.3.2 (From Paper to e-Justice Portal),
1988, ed. P. Brood (Hilversum: Verloren, 1988), p. 123. 8.3.2 (The Calculating State), and 11.2.1 (Archiving Technologies).

96b kader

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3.6 State Archives

Archiving States 39

3.6.1 A National Archivarius

In 1798, in the wake of the Batavian Revolution, the seven united provinces, along with
Drenthe, Staats-Brabant, Staats-Vlaanderen, and parts of Limburg were reconstituted into
a unitary republic. The Republic needed a real national history, stressed Henricus van
Royen, a member of the new parliament, in 1800. Therefore, unhampered access to all
historical material was necessary. In the past, Van Royen said, ‘all charters and countless
first-rate documents’ were considered to be the jealously guarded property of different
institutions that concealed them from others, and were ‘proud of a useless, hidden, and
dusty stock.’ But now that stock had become ‘the property of the entire nation’, and,
Van Royen claimed, ‘would it not be the highest time to use it for the benefit of the
nation?’40 He proposed that all authentic charters and documents, kept by the different
general, provincial, and regional executives and administrations, be brought together.
An institution that could compare with the National Library (1798) and the National Art
Museum (1800) should be established ‘for the benefit of the Batavian people in general’
and ‘the lovers of our patriotic history’ in particular, who would want to make ‘an
39 This paragraph is a summary of Eric Ketelaar, appropriate use’ of all the old archives.
‘Muniments and monuments. The dawn of archives as
cultural patrimony’, Archival science 7 (2007): 343-57.
See also T.H.P.M.Thomassen, ‘De nationale collecties Netherlanders ‘went in search of what bound them, what they had in common, in past and
en het amalgaam der charters: het ontstaan van
het Nederlandse archiefwezen’, in Het archiefwezen
present’.41 The ‘imaginary fatherland’ was founded in the patrimony of the young nation,
in Europa omstreeks 1800 (Brussel: Algemeen including the archives. However, bringing the provincial archives together, as Van Royen
Rijksarchief, 1998), pp. 57-74.
had proposed, encountered resistance. Just as many people opposed the amalgamation of
40 National Archives, Algemeen rijksarchief (2.14.03),
inv. nr. 1; W.J. Formsma and F.C.J. Ketelaar, Gids voor
the provincial finances, they were also apprehensive of centralizing the archives.
de Nederlandse archieven. 4th ed. (Weesp: Fibula-Van Van Royen’s proposal was therefore only partially implemented. The task of the first
Dishoeck, 1985), pp. 32-3.
Archivarius (archivist) of the Batavian Republic (1802), Hendrik van Wijn, was restricted;
41 F. Grijzenhout and N.C.F. van Sas, Denkbeeldig
vaderland. Kunst en politiek in de Bataafs-Franse tijd
he had to inspect the material condition of the archives up to 1648 (the Peace of
1795-1813 (Den Haag: Sdu uitgevers, 1995), p. 6. Westphalia) and to select and catalogue those documents that were the most important
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for the study of public law, history, and literature. Van Wijn was explicitly forbidden to
mix the archives of the former provinces or even to move them to another place. His
instruction did not say anything about ‘appropriate use’ of the archives by ‘lovers of our
patriotic history’ mentioned by Van Royen. On the contrary, Van Wijn had to take an
oath of secrecy.42

There was therefore no question of centralization in a National Archives nor of access to

archives by the public. Numerous institutions continued to keep their archives due to their
administrative value, and not as material for historical research. This was the case, for
example, with the archives of the Council of the Nassau Demesne (Nassause Domeinraad);
upon confiscation of the domains by the State in 1798 the archives were transferred to
the Ministry of Finance. There, all documents of no importance or those found to be
illegible (!), were destroyed and what was kept, was used for the management of the
domains. A comparable fate befell the archives of the United East India Company (VOC).
In 1795 the VOC was brought under control of the new colonial administration that
selected the documents of economic and financial importance to be stored separately.
They were used for current business, included paying salaries and pensions to former VOC
personnel and their heirs. Some 15,000 volumes of VOC archives (including nearly all
Fig. 3.10 Hendrik van Wijn. Medal of the 17th-century pay-ledgers) were judged to be of no importance any longer and were
Royal Association of Archivists in the destroyed. Eventually State Archivist Bakhuizen van den Brink (see 3.6.2) achieved the
Netherlands, 1987. Collection of the author.
transfer of the VOC archives—or rather what was left—to the Rijksarchief in 1856.

Although 1802 did not bring the proposed National Archives, but only a National
Archivist, the appointment of Van Wijn in that year is considered to be the birth of the
Rijksarchief in The Hague (rebaptized Nationaal Archief at its bicentenary). Indeed, in
42 National Archives, Algemeen rijksarchief (2.14.03),
hindsight Van Wijn’s appointment can be seen as the start of the development of Archives
inv. nr. 1. (with a capital A): Archives as an institution that is separate (but also detached) from the
43 B. Woelderink, ‘De geschiedenis van het archiefwezen records creating administration and that manages archival documents for research by
in Nederland in hoofdlijnen’, in Verslag en bijdragen
rijks archiefschool 1972-1973/1973-1974 (Utrecht,
other people than the staff of the records creating agency.43 Van Wijn was not only
Rijks archiefschool, 1975), pp. 61-90. archivist of the Batavian Republic, he was also appointed keeper of the archives of the

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department Holland, as the former province was now called. Ever since 1802 the national
State archives were managed jointly with the archives of the province of Holland
(Zuid-Holland since the split of Holland into two provinces in 1840). Other departments
(Gelderland 1802, Utrecht 1803), the cities of Leeuwarden (1802) and Utrecht (1803),
and other towns (see 4.8) followed Holland’s example by putting their historical archives
in the hands of ‘specialists’, which, at the time, meant historians (see 12.2).

After the annexation by France, French archival legislation—including the regulations on

the appraisal (triage) of records—was put into force, but only in one part of the present
Netherlands, specifically in a part of Limburg that had been incorporated into France in
1795 (see 11.1.3). In Maastricht the archives of the department Lower Meuse were
established. In 1812 Napoleon ordered the foundation of a colossal repository in Paris for
the archives of the entire Empire. It was ordained that ‘the treasure of archives under
Monsieur van Win [Wijn] will be reunited with the Archives of the Empire’. French
functionaries started to select the State archives to be sent to Paris, but the packers and
movers stayed away. The fall of Napoleon ended the dream of the imperial archive.

In 1814 Van Wijn was restored to his function with the title of ’s Lands Archivarius. The
scope of his work was enlarged (and he was given a deputy, jonkheer Johannes Cornelis de
Jonge) because the King decided that all State archives from before 1795 had to be brought
together at the Binnenhof in The Hague. This was an important extension (from 1648 to
1795) of Van Wijn’s responsibilities that became even larger in 1829 when the limit of 1795
was brought forward to 1813. The King’s decision was especially important because
centralization of the State archives was intended as a means of proper arrangement and
preservation. However, there was hardly any question of the public using State archives for
research. There was virtually no staff. Van Wijn’s successor De Jonge had to work at home
because at the Archives there was neither an office nor a search room (just one unheated
cubicle with a table whereupon just one register could be consulted), and there were no
finding aids. The only person who knew the way around the archives was De Jonge’s
assistant De Zwaan.
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Since the annexation by France, the French law of 7 messidor an II (25 June 1794) was in
force in the southern Netherlands (Limburg and present-day Belgium). This law entitled
any citizen seeking legal evidence, access to the government’s archives. The principle of
public access to archives was recognized in the Netherlands only since 1829, when a
ministerial regulation authorized ‘the gentlemen archivists (…) entrusted with the care
for State, provincial or local archives’ to allow access to ‘all trusted persons of their
acquaintance who desire to conduct historical investigations in the general interest’.
The new regulation led to the opening up of Archives, for example in Utrecht, where the
provincial Archives were open to researchers for two hours a week. The institutionali­
zation of Archives (with a capital A) was concluded by this regulation but, just as in France,
it would take some decades before one could speak of a truly public archival system. As the
famous State Archivist Reinier Bakhuizen van den Brink wrote upon his nomination in
1854: ‘The century of secrecy has to be concluded with my appointment.’44

3.6.2 Life into the Country’s Archives

45

Upon the success of the movement for constitutional reform he had led, the liberal
statesman Thorbecke became Prime Minister in 1849. Among his many projects for
renewal of State and society was a reorganization of the archival system (archiefwezen).
44 ‘De Bakhuizen-correspondentie van Prosper Cuypers
Thorbecke was dissatisfied with the narrow-minded lack of openness at the Rijksarchief in
van Velthoven’, ed. F.F.X. Cerutti and F.A. Brekelmans, The Hague. He felt that the Rijksarchief should play a leading role in the country’s archival
Nederlands archievenblad 79 (1975): 57.
system, in a close relationship with the provincial and municipal Archives (see 12.3).
45 This paragraph is a summary of Eric Ketelaar,
‘In het archiefwezen meerder leven. De nationale
Thorbecke regarded Reinier Cornelis Bakhuizen van den Brink (a historian with ample
archiefpolitiek van Bakhuizen van den Brink 1851- experience in archival research in Vienna and Brussels) as a man who could implement
1865’, in Een vorstelijk archivaris. Opstellen voor
Bernard Woelderink (Zwolle: Waanders, 2003),
what the minister had in mind: ‘I want to bring more life into the Archives of our fatherland
pp. 190-96. (…) and to have it radiating from the Rijksarchief.’ 46 And Bakhuizen himself was convinced
46 Letter from the Minister of the Interior to Bakhuizen ‘Once I arrive at the Archives, I must have the liberty to start a revolution there.’47
van den Brink, 23 June 1851, University Library
Leiden, BPL 1930.
47 Letter from Bakhuizen van den Brink to J. Bake, 21
In 1851 the 41-year-old Bakhuizen was appointed at the Rijksarchief as assistant to State
February 1851, University Library Leiden, BPL 1892. Archivist De Jonge. Bakhuizen started on 1 July and after three weeks he submitted an

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extensive report to De Jonge, who forwarded the report to the minister. ‘Our archival
system has to be created’, Bakhuizen argued, and he formulated three conditions: public
access (openbaarheid), consultability (toegankelijkheid), and management in accordance
with the needs of scholarly research.48 This programme could be implemented as soon as
Bakhuizen was appointed State Archivist in 1854, after the death of De Jonge. Public access
and consultability were regulated in a Royal Decree of 26 June 1856 and in new regulations
for the Rijksarchief. Both were progress since the regulation of 1829 (see 3.6.1); now every
inhabitant and even every foreigner—acquainted with the archivist or not—would have
access to the archives, except people ‘whose admission might be denied for substantial
reasons’. At the Rijksarchief researchers no longer had to rely on human memory to find
documents; Bakhuizen and his staff developed various finding aids, among these a
comprehensive survey of the holdings and their history.

Apart from attaining public access and consultability, Bakhuizen worked hard to
concentrate all ministerial archives up to 1814 in the Rijksarchief. Furthermore, he sought
unity in the country’s archival system and further improved the management of the
provincial archives. In the past, some provincial archivists had been awarded an annual
subsidy. The first was the archivist of Gelderland in 1826. Bakhuizen used the instrument
of a subsidy to make provincial archives more dependent on the Rijksarchief. He also
endeavoured adoption by provincial government of the liberal principles of the 1856
decree. Depositing State archives with provincial and municipal repositories was another
means Bakhuizen used to strengthen the unity of the archival system.

On 15 July 1865 Bakhuizen van den Brink died. ‘He woke up the archival system’, his friend
Carel Vosmaer wrote. And indeed, Bakhuizen van den Brink laid the foundation of a
48 Access to archives, in Dutch archival terminology, national archival policy based on public access, consultability, and unity. Building on that
covers two concepts: the availability of archival
documents for consultation as a result of legal
foundation was the challenge for another generation.
authorization (openbaarheid) and the consultability
(toegankelijkheid): the intellectual control of archives
by arrangement and description in such a way that a
user can effectively consult the archives. See also 10.7.
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PAGE CHAPTER ARCHIVING PEOPLE

3.6.3 A Network of State Archives

Archiving States

That challenge, in combination with institutionalization and professionalization, was met

by jonkheer Victor de Stuers, who in 1875 became the powerful head of the Department
for Arts and Sciences within the Ministry of the Interior. De Stuers did not only aim for a
vigorous government policy regarding museums, monuments, arts, and science, but also
‘effective measures to improve the dismal situation of our archives system (archiefwezen)
in general’.49 One of the issues De Stuers wanted to remedy was the control by provincial
government of the provincial archives from before 1798. These archives, De Stuers argued,
had devolved to the unitary State and the State should take control. Therefore, the State
should establish State repositories, managed by a State archivist, in every province (except
Zuid-Holland where, as mentioned before, since 1802 both the national archives and those
of Holland had been kept in the Rijksarchief). Gelderland and Utrecht were the first two
provinces where the provincial archivist was succeeded by a State Archivist (Van
Riemsdijk in 1877 and Muller in 1879, respectively). The last province was Zeeland where,
in 1890, Ermerins was appointed State Archivist (in 1894 he was succeeded by Fruin).
Their instruction given by the Minister of the Interior ensured uniformity in methods and
practices (see 12.4). Between 1879 and 1901 purpose-built State repositories were built in
Gelderland, Noord-Brabant, Groningen, and Drenthe; in other provinces monumental
buildings (such as a church, a city gate, or a wing of the Middelburg Abbey) were changed
49 F.J. Duparc, Een eeuw strijd voor Nederlands cultureel into archival repositories. The state-of-the-art Rijksarchief in The Hague, which opened to
erfgoed. Ter herdenking van een eeuw rijksbeleid ten
aanzien van musea, oudheidkundig bodemonderzoek
the public in 1903 (see Fig. 11.18), was the crown of De Stuers’ building programme.50
en archieven 1875-1975 (’s-Gravenhage,
Staatsuitgeverij, 1975), pp. 401, 409-12.
Building and furnishing the Rijksarchief cost 650,000 guilders, the equivalent of more than
50 This paragraph is a summary of F.C.J. Ketelaar,
‘Het Rijksarchief op het breukvlak’, in Jaarboek 1998
eight million euro today.51 The operational budgets were adapted to meet the requirements
Geschiedkundige Vereniging Die Haghe (’s-Gravenhage and possibilities of the new building. The annual material budget of 7,175 guilders in 1895
1999), pp. 140-161.
was raised ten years later to 25,000 guilders. The personnel budget of 17,050 guilders in
51 In 1979 the General State Archives moved to the
present building which in today’s money would cost
1895 doubled in ten years. The number of researchers quadrupled to an annual average
29 million euros (30 million guilders in 1979). between 1907 and 1913 of 206.

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In the 19th century, nearly all researchers came from the upper middle class, whereas
between 1907 and 1916 their share was 50 percent. Interestingly, the occasional farmer,
labourer, woodworker, or lithographer did not come for genealogical research (which
made up 17 percent of the researchers; a doubling since the end of the 19th century), but
as a citizen seeking legal evidence to be used, for example, in an inheritance case or to
prove a right of way.

Fig. 3.11 Search room of the General State Archives (algemeen rijksarchief)
in The Hague, 1922. The Hague City Archives, Beeldbank, nr. 5.07046.
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At the instigation of De Stuers the State Archives in the 11 provincial capitals were
institutionally centralized. Following the example of Belgium, the State Archivist in
The Hague became General State Archivist (algemeen rijksarchivaris), having some
control over the State Archivists. In the late 1960s, the State Archives Service
(rijksarchiefdienst) was reorganized into a more hierarchically structured agency with
the General State Archivist as its head. This reorganization was begun by algemeen
rijksarchivaris Jaap van der Gouw (1966-1968) and was forcefully continued by his
successors Ton Ribberink (1968-1988) and Eric Ketelaar (1989-1997).52 When Ribberink
took office as keeper of the General State Archives and head of the State Archives Service,
these agencies, according to an investigation by the Archives Council, were not able to
implement the Archives Act that had come into force in 1968 because of a deficient
organization, lack of personnel, and unsuitable buildings.

During his time in office, Ribberink achieved an enormous reversal, with dedication and
patience, sometimes by attacking the bureaucracy, and at other times by flattering,
lobbying, and even engaging the press. The organization was streamlined: in each State
Archives, departments were set up for inventorization, public services, and management.
A central directorate handled personnel affairs, finance, automation, and the development
of methods and standards for the whole organization. The assembly of State Archivists was
to play an important role in the general coordination and policy making. Over the course
of 20 years, staff increased from 135 to 288. New State repositories were built in
Leeuwarden, Zwolle, Haarlem, Assen (partly newly built), and ’s-Hertogenbosch. With
52 This paragraph is a summary of Eric Ketelaar,
great perseverance, Ribberink attained new premises for the General State Archives
‘In memoriam A.E.M. Ribberink’, (algemeen rijksarchief) in The Hague (1979). These new buildings were urgently needed:
Informatieprofessional (March 2013): 37. See also
E.D. Eijken, ‘De rijksarchiefdienst, 1968-1988’, in
between 1968 and 1988 total holdings increased from 84 kilometres to nearly 160
Voor burger en bestuur. Twintig jaar Nederlands kilometres and the number of researchers grew (in the General State Archives from 8,000
archiefwezen 1968-1988, ed. P. Brood (Hilversum:
Verloren, 1988), pp. 20-47.
to 27,000 annually). This was partly the result of promotional campaigns advertising
53 National Archives, Centrale directie rijksarchiefdienst
Archives as the ‘supermarkets of history’.53
(2.14.18), inv. nrs. 1710, 1717.

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Archiving States

Fig. 3.12 Cover of the annual report of the State

Archives Service, showing the State Archives
in the provincial capitals, 1988. In 1992 a State
Archives in the province of Flevoland was
established.
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Archiving States
Under algemeen rijksarchivaris Maarten van Boven (1997-2007) the name Algemeen
Rijksarchief was changed to Nationaal Archief. T h e State Archives (with the exception of
the National Archives) merged with the municipal archives (sometimes with other
memory institutions as well) in the provincial capital, forming a regional historical centre
(regionaal historisch centrum).54 These regional historical centres are public bodies, with
an executive board whose members are appointed by the Minister of Education, Culture,
and Science and the municipality; they both provide the budget. The National Archives
continue to be a state agency under the Ministry of Education, Culture, and Science. The
digital long-term preservation repository function (e-depot) at the National Archives is
also utilized by the regional historical centres, thus joining the components of the former
State Archives Service, not in a hierarchical structure, but in a professional and technical
network, as is befitting the current network society.

3.7 Conclusion
Changes in recordkeeping are often the result of external political developments. An
example is the succession by the Count of Hainaut in the counties of Holland and Zeeland
in 1299 which led to the selection, arrangement, and cartularization of charters received by
the counts of Holland and Zeeland. The table of contents of the cartulary provided access
to the copies in the cartulary as well as to the original charters. The count’s chancery was
relatively early with this concordance between the physical arrangement of charters and
their intellectual arrangement in a cartulary; elsewhere this became usual only in the
course of the 13th century. The use of paper to make this cartulary was quite new.
However, after a while the chancery reverted to parchment (see 11.1.1).

54 In Friesland the merger of the State Archives with

the Provincial Library and the Frisian Literary
The inventorization and cartularization in 1299 only concerned the documents received
Museum into an institution called Tresoar, does not by the count. It was not until the 14th century (which is rather late in the European
include the Leeuwarden City Archives. The regional
historical centre of Noord-Brabant (BHIC) does not
context) that the count’s chancery embarked on making registers of outgoing charters.
include the ‘s-Hertogenbosch City Archives. Nevertheless, the geographical arrangement of the registers in Holland was quite

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innovative for its time. Furthermore, the registers were made in duplicate and the registers
branch off as the count’s activities expand.

Arrangement of loose documents, cartularization, transcribing incoming and outgoing

documents, and the use of new technologies (including paper and intellectual tools to
enhance findability of documents)—all these archiving practices at the count’s chancery
are encountered elsewhere, in different institutions and at different times. This will
become clear when we consider these practices as aggregation processes. Bringing parts
together into a coherent whole is the major challenge for any recordkeeping system (see
also 11.1.2).

Such aggregation was, in premodern and modern times, the main goal of each of the
recordkeeping systems: the so-called resolutie system (16th-19th centuries), the verbaal
system (19th-20th centuries), and the subject or case files system (20th century). The first
system is typically Dutch, the second is Dutch but was highly influenced by the French, and
the third was a German system adapted for use by Dutch municipal and other public
bodies (see also chapter 13).

It is obvious that the different social, political, and technological contexts brought
adaptations and changes with them. For example, the ambulatory assemblies in
Gelderland and Overijssel did not create a single archive, but left archiving to the regional
capitals. The transition of the ‘Night Watch State’ into an actively steering government
caused the replacement of the verbaal system (ideal for supporting decisions in discrete
cases) by a system of subject files which could serve mid-term and long-term policies in a
better way. This chapter contains more examples of the way in which societal challenges
influence mandate, business, and work processes and thereby impact on archiving (see Fig.
0.2): the formation of the unitary state (from 1795-1798 onwards) going hand in hand with
new challenges to government, the French influence on archiving, the drive for more
efficiency after the Second World War, and the impact of automation and privatization—
they are all factors of archivalization (see the General Introduction).
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While aggregation of parts into a whole may be the primary goal of a recordkeeping
system, the accessibility or findability of the parts is crucial. Indexes, tables, marginal
notes, inventories, and other finding aids provide intellectual control and access. Physical
control and access are served by forming series and files (liassen) and ordering documents
using pigeonholes (loketkast), boxes, and other containers. Both finding aids and physical
arrangement are updated when competencies and tasks are extended and when work
processes involving documents are changed, such as the formation at the States General of
new liassen for the VOC and the WIC. Index terms are adapted, often because of changing
societal circumstances (archivalization) in which certain terms are no longer regarded as
appropriate (see 4.10).

In premodern times, making finding aids was often considered to be a private affair of the
chancery personnel. Therefore, the indexes ended up in private archives, together with
other documents which were conceived to be private. Later generations would judge many
of these to be public archives, but that supposes a clear distinction between public and
private which in premodern times was not always feasible. Still, there are many examples
of the State recovering public archives from private hands.

The final section of this chapter (3.6) is an account of the main stages in the history of the
Dutch State Archives (rijksarchieven). A recurring issue is the quest for public access
(openbaarheid) of government archives, first regulated in 1829, extended in 1856,
inscribed in the Archives Act 1918, and further expanded in the 1960s by shortening the
transfer period to 50 years and in the 1990s to 20 years. Another recurrent concern is the
structure of the ‘archival system’ (archiefwezen) and particularly the organization of a
network of State Archives. The evolvement from the days of De Stuers (1870s) to the
recent merger of State Archives with municipal archives did not only entail the adaptation
of structures but also meant further professionalization (see chapter 12).

102b kader

Out of appreciation for professor Ketelaar’s important

contribution to the development of archival science.

Uit sympathie voor het belangrijke werk waarmee

professor Ketelaar heeft bijgedragen aan de ontwikkeling
van de archiefwetenschap.

www.vhic.nl
103a | 4 |
PAGE CHAPTER ARCHIVING PEOPLE

A SOCIAL HISTORY OF
DUTCH ARCHIVES Chapter 4

Archiving Cities

—
4.0 Introduction 4.10 The Code
4.1 City Charters 4.11 The Datapolis
4.2 City Registers 4.12 Conclusion
4.3 Jan van Hout, City Clerk
4.4 Jan van Hout, Archivist
4.5 Order
4.6 Access
4.7 The City’s Soul
4.8 City Archives with a
capital A
4.9 The Modern Paper City
4.9.1 French Influences
4.9.2 Communities of Archives
4.9.3 Departmentalization and
l Fig. 4.0 Portrait of the Deventer magistrate and
its four secretaries by Gerard Ter Borch (1617- Commercialization
1681), 1667. Deventer City Hall.

ˇ
104a | 4 |
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Archiving Cities
4.0 Introduction
Around the year 1300, cities in the northern Netherlands were comparatively small:
Dordrecht had a population of 5,000, Utrecht 5,500, and Groningen and Maastricht each
4,000. Remarkable is not so much the size of the cities’ populations, but the level of
urbanization of a relatively small country. By 1600, more than one in four Dutchmen lived
in a town of over 10,000 people, and a century later the ratio had risen to one in three.
Politically, Dutch cities were the building blocks of public governance of the provinces and
at a national level. Originally, the States of the provinces were a body consulted by the lord
of the land: the count or the duke (see 3.2). The States of Holland, for example, consisted of
the nobility and of the delegates of the six most important cities. After the abjuration of
the lord of the land Philip II (1581), the provincial States assumed sovereignty. In Holland
the cities (their number was raised to 18) participated in the provincial government; the
1 J.C. Streng, ‘Stemme in Staat’. De bestuurlijke elite
in de stadsrepubliek Zwolle 1579-1795 (Hilversum:
role of the nobility was restricted to one vote in the States. In other provinces both nobility
Verloren, 1997), p. 89. and cities took part in governing the province. According to Streng, the cities were
2 E.C. Dijkhof, Het oorkondewezen van enige kloosters city-republics ‘standing outside and above the States, but at the same time exercising
en steden in Holland en Zeeland 1200-1325 (Leuven:
Peeters, 2003); J.F. Benders, Bestuursstructuur
co-governance’.1 People were first and foremost burgher (poorter) of a city (or inhabitant of
en schriftcultuur. Een analyse van de bestuurlijke a village); second came the allegiance to one’s province and then to the Republic of the
verschriftelijking in Deventer tot het eind van de
15de eeuw (Hilversum: Verloren, 2004); Geertrui
United Netherlands. Since the 16th century burger became the preferred term for a citizen
van Synghel, ‘Actum in camera scriptorum of a town or a city. In this chapter I use citizen, burgher, and poorter as synonyms.
oppidi de Buscoducis’. De stedelijke secretarie van
’s-Hertogenbosch tot ca. 1450 (Hilversum: Verloren,
2007); Johanna A. Kossmann-Putto, Kamper Considering the important role of the cities in the Middle Ages and in premodern times,
schepenacten, 1316-1354 (Zwolle: Tijl, 1955);
M.H.M. Spierings, Het schepenprotocol van
it is no wonder that archiving the city has attracted much interest from Dutch historians.2
’s-Hertogenbosch, 1367-1400 (Tilburg: Stichting Much of their research since the mid-1990s was stimulated by the interest in pragmatic
Zuidelijk Historisch Contact, 1984); Ernst Pitz,
Schrift- und Aktenwesen der städtischen Verwaltung
literacy, i.e. literacy and the culture of writing for pragmatic purposes. Often their research
im Spätmittelalter: Köln, Nürnberg, Lübeck: has its roots in diplomatics. The diplomatist Eef Dijkhof based his study of pragmatic
Beitrag zur vergleichenden Städteforschung und zur
spätmittelalterlichen Aktenkunde (Köln: Paul Neubner,
literacy mainly on the charters of Middelburg, Dordrecht, Delft, and Haarlem between
1959). See also Randolph C. Head, Making archives in 1200 and 1325. Two examples with respect to individual cities are Jeroen Benders’ study
early modern Europe. Proof, information and political
recordkeeping, 1400-1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge
of the administrative structure and the use of writing in Deventer up to the end of the
University Press, 2019). 15th century, and Geertrui van Synghel’s diplomatic and palaeographical study of the city

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secretariat of ’s-Hertogenbosch before 1450. This research acknowledges the work of
predecessors like Jo Kossmann-Putto (the city registers of Kampen 1316-1354), Mechelien
Spierings (the aldermen’s roll of ’s-Hertogenbosch 1367-1400) and Ernst Pitz’s Schrift- und
Aktenwesen der städtischen Verwaltung im Spätmittelalter from 1959.

We possess the results of research on archiving of a few cities over a longer period. Rudi
van Maanen and René Kunst inventoried the city archives of Leiden (1574-1929) and
Leeuwarden (1426-1811), respectively; both dealt extensively with the history of archiving.
Peter Horsman researched the Dordrecht city archives 1200-1920, with special attention
to the contextual influences conditioning the behaviour of the recordkeeping system.3
Changing societal notions of the relationships between citizen and government, and
between local and central government, influence changes in governance, work processes,
and archiving. Unearthing these contextual changes and their effect on archiving was
central in my research and defined the choice of aspects of municipal archiving in different
times and at different places to be treated.

In the first place, I focus on the textualization (verschriftelijking; today datafication) of

municipal governance and management. I look at changes as well as continuity, refraining
(as I wrote in the Preface), however, from trying to restore a real or imagined continuity of
archiving practices. This restraint guides the treatment of the second main question as
well: how did administrators and citizens use the city’s archiving and how did such use
influence the creation and findability of the archives?

Especially in the Middle Ages, but even long thereafter, the city charters (4.1) were the
object of special care by the city council. The city privilege (franchise, or stadsrecht)
3 Peter Horsman, Abuysen ende desordiën. established or confirmed the town as a juridical and economic entity, and specified the
Archiefvorming en archivering in Dordrecht 1200-1920
(’s-Gravenhage: Stichting archiefpublicaties, 2011);
relationship between the city, its burghers, and the sovereign.
Peter Horsman and Eric Ketelaar, ‘Archival History’, in
Encyclopedia of archival science, ed. Luciana Duranti
and Patricia C. Franks (London etc.: Rowman &
According to Peter Horsman, one of the dominant aspects of local archiving until well into
Littlefield, 2015), pp. 53-58. the 19th century is the formation of series of registers beginning in the 14th century (4.2).
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I demonstrate this by taking Jan van Hout as an example. He became city clerk of Leiden in
1564 and he not only thoroughly redesigned the municipal administration (4.3), but also
reorganized archival management (4.4). There have been other innovative town clerks like
Van Hout, but this Leiden clerk was truly exceptional.

In Leiden, as elsewhere, the preservation, arrangement, and findability of loose papers was
a major challenge (4.5). One can measure the quality of a recordkeeping system by looking
at the ways this challenge was met.

The communal archives were of service to government and citizen, but how was access
provided? Section 4.6 deals with this aspect as a prelude to 4.7, which deals with the use of
city archives for historical research and the symbolic importance of the archives for the
citizen. In the 19th century City Archives (with a capital A) were created as separate
institutions, caring not only for the records creating administration, but also for research
by people other than the staff of the records creating agency (4.8).

The Batavian Revolution (1795) and the first national constitution (1798) created ‘the
Batavian People’ consisting of citizens (burgers) loyal to the Batavian Republic. Towns and
villages were constituted as components of the Republic and named municipalities
(gemeenten). The municipal authorities had to meet the ‘information hunger’ of the new
central government (see also 3.4). To some extent, archiving systems were influenced by
French practices that endured after the liberation from the French in 1813-1814 (4.9.1).
Decades before the Dutch Manual (1898) codified archival theory, methodology, and
practice, archivists discussed the issue of provenance: is an archive created by a
community or by its agencies? (4.9.2). Societal challenges led to new tasks and new
organizational forms by the end of the 19th century (4.9.3) and, in accordance with the
model of the archiving context (Fig. 0.2), to new archiving practices (4.10). More recent
societal changes entail viewing archiving the city more and more as datafication of the city:
the city and urban life captured and driven by data. This is leading to the development of
the ‘datapolis’ (4.11).

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Aspects of archiving cities are treated in other chapters as well, notably in Archiving
People (chapter 1), Archiving Property (chapter 6), Archiving Trade and Industry (chapter
7), and Archiving Monies (chapter 8).

4.1 City Charters

Each city considered its founding charter (stadsrecht) to be one of its most precious
docu­ments. In the northern Netherlands the Emperor granted city rights to Utrecht in
1122. The Duke of Brabant granted ’s-Hertogenbosch its franchise sometime between
1183 and 1204. Maastricht may have been given city rights by the Emperor and the Bishop
of Liège (Luik) before 1204. Dordrecht was the first city in Holland to receive a charter
from the Count of Holland (1220); Haarlem, Delft, and Leiden followed in 1245, 1246 and
1266. Brielle received stadsrecht in 1330 and a more elaborated charter in 1343, of which
the city had a safety copy made in the form of a vidimus4 by the Abbot of Middelburg as
early as 1344. Anyone who wanted to base a claim on the city charter had to consult the
safety copy, not the original.

Other privileges followed: the right to hold markets, exemption of tolls, staple rights, and
more. These letters of patent were kept with special care in an archives’ chest which often
(as in Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Leiden, Nijmegen, ’s-Hertogenbosch, Bergen op Zoom, and
Haarlem; see 11.1.3) was kept in the church—the most important stone building providing
also sacred protection. The documents in the chest were often put in boxes (see Fig. 11.8).
In Groningen, for example, the chest contained 54 boxes, each box containing documents
on a particular subject.5 The chest had several keys and could therefore be opened only
4 Or inspeximus: a charter in which is declared that
with the assistance of the whole council. This would not have happened frequently since
the author has examined an earlier charter, the text the most important charters had been transcribed in a book of privileges (or ordinances).
of which is quoted or summarized.
Keeping the charters in the chest and the distribution of the keys were both largely
5 A.T. Schuitema Meijer, E. van Dijk, W.K. van der
Veen, Historie van het archief der stad Groningen
symbolic practices.
(Groningen: Gemeentearchief, 1977), p. 21.
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In Dordrecht the keys to the charters were mentioned for the first time in 1383. At the
beginning of the 15th century, the guilds received the keys so that the chest could only be
opened with the cooperation of the guilds, who represented the community. The
ceremony of opening the city chest (later a cupboard with six keys, standing behind bars
locked with another six keys—one key for each of the most important guilds) was a
memorable event, extensively recorded in 1649 and 1770.

Fig. 4.1a City chest of Dordrecht. Photo: Fig. 4.1b City chest of Dordrecht opened.
Erfgoedhuis Zuid-Holland (Ad van der Zee). Photo: Regional Archives Dordrecht (Sander van Bladel).

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In 1649 the guilds demanded the chest be opened in order to check the guilds’ privilege of
1367, the exact text of which had been a major cause of their insurrection that had been
quelled by soldiers. The chest was opened again in 1770, at the request of the legal historian
P.H. van de Wall, who wanted to consult the originals for his publication of the privileges.
On that occasion the documents were aired and cleaned (some appeared to be writhed)
and checked with the published inventory that had been made in 1649.

Documents were symbols of power themselves. In Zwolle, after a revolt of the guilds in
1416, the rebelling guilds were punished not only by beheading their masters, but also by
the burning of their privileges. In the 1492 rebellion in Haarlem against taxes, the rebels
vented their fury on the tax records and other documents of the tax collectors. In the city
hall documents were torn to pieces, and the seals removed. The city charters embodied the
privileges granted to the city and its citizens. The punishment inflicted in 1492 by
Archduke Maximilian on Haarlem in response to the city’s role in the rebellion was the
forfeiture of most of the city’s privileges, with the original charters being confiscated.
Two councillors of the Court of Holland made a list of more than 100 of Haarlem’s most
precious documents, selected the privileges which were to be cancelled, and took the
documents to The Hague. Several years later the city started a lawsuit at the Great Council
of Mechelen (from the 15th century until the Revolt this served as the supreme court for
Holland and Zeeland) to get the documents back, but the claim was rejected in 1505
(the judgment is written on a sheet of one and a half metres!).6 Later the greater part of the
6 Noord-Hollands Archief, Stadsbestuur Haarlem
documents was returned to the city archives of Haarlem; yet a few documents mentioned
(1573), inv. nr. 73; Henk van Nierop, Treason in the in the 1492 inventory are still in the archives of the Counts of Holland, now in the National
Northern Quarter. War, terror, and the rule of law in
the Dutch Revolt (Princeton: Princeton University
Archives.
Press, 2009), p. 25; J. Scheurkogel, ‘Het Kaas- en
broodspel’, Bijdragen en mededelingen betreffende
de geschiedenis der Nederlanden 94, no. 2 (1979):
Documents were symbols, as was made clear in 1570 when the Duke of Alba, representing
189-211; Florence W.J. Koorn, Inventaris van het the King of Spain, confiscated the privileges of Utrecht in retaliation for the city’s leniency
stadsarchief van Haarlem 1245-1572 (Haarlem:
Archiefdienst voor Kennemerland, 2002), annexe 2.
towards the iconoclasts.7 The Duke refused to be satisfied with copies, so after much
7 S. Muller, Catalogus van het archief der gemeente
resistance the city had to surrender the original archival documents. It took three years
Utrecht, vol. 1 (Utrecht: Beijers, 1880), pp. xxvii-xxix. before the documents were returned to the city.
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The symbolic meaning of the city’s charters was often enhanced by keeping them in a
secret place. In 1579 the city council of Alkmaar commissioned three of its members to
store the city’s charters in a secret place and to keep that place secret.8 In many Dutch
cities the repository was referred to as ‘the secret’ (het secreet).

4.2 City Registers

In the first half of the 14th century textualization (verschriftelijking, which had slowly
started in the 13th century) prevails in many cities. A city secretariat exists in Dordrecht,
Haarlem, and Delft from the last quarter of the 13th century. According to Dijkhof, the
main cause of creating a secretariat is the citizens’ demand to have their legal acts be
certified by the city magistrate. In Middelburg, most of the administration is carried out in
writing since the 13th century; part of the textualization is the recording of citizens’ legal
acts in a city register. At the end of the 13th and the beginning of the 14th century the
authenticity of the magistrate’s charters pertaining to the transfer of immovable property,
testaments, etc., was ensured by storing them in the city chest in Arnhem and Kampen.
It was replaced subsequently by recording the acts in the city register, from which special
transfer registers were branched off later (see 6.2).

There were also other reasons to create and maintain registers. For example, in Deventer
specialization of tasks among the aldermen (schepenen) led to new registrations. The
people of Deventer also wanted insight into the city’s finances, which led to compiling
several partial administrations in a central bookkeeping: the city’s account (rekenboek) (see
8.2.1). Also, political factors played a role: the increasing frequency of conflicts in Gelre
and the Oversticht in the 1350s forced Deventer to begin registering the oorveden (pledges
of peace from the losing party in a feud). At the same time (first half of the 14th century), an
ordinance book (keurboek) is made in Kampen as well as one in Deventer. It is likely that
8 Regional Archives Alkmaar, Stadsarchief Alkmaar
the keurboek was open to the public, or at least that people could demand extracts from it.
1254-1815, inv. nr. 39, fol. 145. Later (in connection with the reinforcement of the influence of the meente, a body

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representing the burghers) the ordinances and by-laws (or part thereof ) were annually
recited aloud in public in Deventer, Kampen, Zutphen, Arnhem, and elsewhere.9

The Deventer ordinance book was referred to as stadboek (liber civitatis, city register), but
this term was used for other registers as well. In other towns, the town register is an
undifferentiated register of various matters, from which special registers are branched off
later. An early example is the Liber Vetus in Kampen, started around 1310 and continued in
1318 with a register that was no longer undifferentiated but sorted by headings. A special
citizens register existed in Kampen as early as 1302; in Deventer a city book for registering
citizens was started in 1353 (see 1.3), and a special register of judgments (clageboeck) in
1423. The latter was created, according to the ordinance, for the aldermen to sentence
similarly in similar cases.

In the Dordrecht stadboek, the city government recorded various acts, arranged under
headings such as ‘various letters’, ‘guild matters’, and ‘banishments’, since 1383. Beginning
in 1403, however, only banishments and other decisions are recorded that are promulgated
in front of the City Hall after ringing a bell; hence the name toll book (klepboek; in nearby
Gorinchem this was known as the bell book, kloksboek). The other matters are recorded in
a new stadboek, from which the register of acts (aktenboek) and the aldermen’s protocol
are branched off (bifurcation) around the middle of the 16th century. Peter Horsman has
thoroughly studied the registration and archiving in Dordrecht (see Fig. 4.3). Dordrecht
notably started a citizens register as late as 1659, after having recorded applications for
citizenship in the registers of petitions for a long time. We know however that, at least in
1450, a citizens register existed (see 1.3).

Dordrecht is equally late registering the (drafts of ) deeds of transfer and mortgage of
immovable property (see 6.2). The aldermen’s (schepenen) register begins in 1543 and is
split between 1593 and 1595 into six special registers for transfers, mortgages, and related
9 Benders, Bestuursstructuur, p. 120; L.A.J.W. Sloet,
‘Het kondichboek der stad Zutphen, Nederlandsche
documents.
Jaarboeken 7 (1845): 423-580.
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hoofdstuk 5 / der stede register

De procedure is aan de hand van de overgeleverde registers en de ordonnantie te

reconstrueren en daarmee de samenhang tussen de registers.

Curatoren moesten bij de aanvaarding van de functie borg stellen (geregistreerd

in de eerder genoemde cautieboeken). Bij uitbetaling moesten ook de crediteuren
borg stellen, omdat de beslissing van schepen-commissarissen in de regel bij pro-
visie was. Voor deze borgstellingen bestond een afzonderlijke register.93 In geval
dat een of meer van de crediteuren voorrang eisten en daarvoor een proces aan-
spanden, kon de finale afwikkeling zeker enkele jaren op zich laten wachten.
De administratie van de desolate boedels vormt een betrekkelijk afzonderlijk
geheel, goeddeels los van de andere registers, behoudens de initiëring van de pro-
cedure en in geval van conflicten die niet in der minne geschikt konden worden.

5.9 Bifurcatie- en relatieschema

In het voorgaande
Fig. 4.2isCity
eenregister
variëteit aan registers
(stadboek) de revue
of Dordrecht, 1383.gepasseerd, waarbij
Dordrecht City voor
Archives,
zover mogelijkStadsarchieven
de reden van ontstaan
1200-1572 (1),ofinv.
discontinuïteit
nr. 4. en de onderlinge relaties
werden beschreven. Onderstaand schema geeft een samenvattend overzicht van
de registers die uit het stadboek zijn voortgekomen. De rollen, die een afzonderlij-
ke ontstaansgeschiedenis hebben, zijn daarin niet opgenomen; evenmin de regis-
ters van de administratie van de desolatie boedels. Ook de resoluties van het
108b | 4 |
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gerecht zijn omwille van de overzichtelijkheid niet in het schema verwerkt.

Stadboek (1383)

Klepboek (1438-1811) Stadtboek (1403-15??)

Actenboek (1557-1738) Schepenprotocol (1543-1592) Cessionant Boek (1555-1806)

Transporten Constitutie- Certificatie- Decreet- en Procuratie-

Cautieboek
en Hypotheken boek boek preferentieboek boek
(1595-1706)
(1593-1811 (1593-1794) (1593-1644) (1593-1619) (1593-1810)

Register
Rekestboek Attestatieboek
Nominaties
(1649-1811) (1668-1811)
(1739-1811)

Registers Opsluiting Borgtochten

Burgerboek Interrogatoriënboek Borgtochtboek
Krankzinnigen enz Consignatiekas
(1659-1799) (1695-1810) ((1707)1711-1810)
(1734-1811) (1707-1811)

Figuur 5.1: Bifurcatie van het stadboek

90 ORA, invnrs 1006-1007. Van den Brandeler,

Fig. 4.3 Bifurcation Inventarisin
of the stadboek 2.2 VII nr 22 (blz
Dordrecht, 23)Peter
from geeft abusievelijk
Horsman. als titel
Secreet- en Preferentie-bouck
Abuysen ende (foutieve lezingArchiefvorming
desordiën. van titel op voorplat). Deze foute in
en archivering lezing is in de huidige
Dordrecht 1200-1920
inventaris overgenomen.
(’s-Gravenhage: Stichting archiefpublicaties, 2011), p. 133.
91 ORA, invnr 18.
92 ORA 1003-1005, in de inventaris weinig accuraat beschreven als Registers houdende aantekening van het
recht van voorrang, alsmede de rekeningen en verantwoording van de insolvente boedels. Bewaard gebleven zijn
de delen tussen 1730 en 1811.
93 ORA, invnrs 1501-1503.
133
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Increasing volume and differentiation of government tasks made new and more demands
on governance, work processes, and archiving, particularly in the registration of, and
access to, the evidence of rights and duties of government and citizen. In Groningen
(12,500 inhabitants in 1560, 16,600 in 1606), upon his appointment in 1553, city clerk
Egbert Alting begins by opening various registers, among them a register (protocol) of
outgoing letters, a register of ordinances, and a register of judgments. Until the end of the
14th century and the beginning of the 15th century, the Leiden administration, just as that
in Dordrecht, did not require much registration in the city register, apart from a few
specialized registers such as those of ordinances (keurboek, ca. 1360), burghers
(poorterboek, 1364), and atonements (zoenboek, 1370)—recording precisely those tasks
and competences that characterized a city, namely the regulation and adjudication of
burghers. Furthermore, documents were kept in the city chest (stede scrien). Specialization
and differentiation continue. The general city register atrophies, while the amount of new
registers increases. All those registers form an extensive intertextual genre system (see the
General Introduction) in which one event (for example the admittance of a new burgher) is
echoed in various registers. The findability of the registers is enhanced using new
technologies such as foliation, tabs (klavieren, markers fixed to the fore-edge of a codex),
and alphabetical tables—all, as Randolph Head argues, ‘little tools of knowledge’
developed by scholastic erudition and introduced into chanceries.10

The Leiden registers that existed around the middle of the 15th century served the city
administration in managing affairs for another century. But after the middle of the 16th
century registration expanded again, quantitatively and qualitatively, with one of the
reasons being the increase of the population and the economy: in 1400 Leiden had 5,000
inhabitants, in 1581 12,000, and in 1600 25,000. Here Jan van Hout, city clerk since 1564,
introduced registry management and records management, a prototype of the reforms at
the end of the 16th century which have determined the image of the municipal
administration during the ancien régime.

10 Head, Making archives, p. 60.

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4.3 Jan van Hout, City Clerk

Archiving Cities 11

In 1596 Leiden’s Gerecht (sheriff, burgomasters, and aldermen) orders clerk Jan van Hout
to specify his duties for which, according to his contract, he cannot request payment above
his salary, and, on the other hand, the extra activities for which he may be paid. Van Hout
begins his remonstrance with summarizing his career since he came into the city’s
employment as a scrivener (klerk) in 1562. From 1564 he has been the city clerk, with an
interruption from 1569 to 1573 when Van Hout, as a supporter of William of Orange, was
in exile abroad. Van Hout explains that recording in the books existing at the time of his
appointment is covered by his salary. However, for the registration (registratuer: the oldest
mention of this term in the Netherlands) in the books started by Van Hout, the city must
pay him extra. Van Hout enumerates all 39 series kept at the secretariat. Of these, 25 were
created while he was city clerk. In some cases, it sufficed to start registering what formerly
were only loose documents. For example, the register of witness statements replaced the
filing on a string (lias, see 3.3) as was the practice before 1581. In the same way the register
of appointments of city officials (Dienstboek) was formed; they were kept as loose papers,
but Van Hout started registering them. In the first volume he transcribed some
appointments made previously.

Other new series were established when administrative efficiency demanded to split a
special register from a general series. Thus, in 1590, the conditions of public auctions of
11 F.C.J. Ketelaar, ‘Jan van Hout’s “Registratuer”’,
immovable property (until then registered in the book of presentations, inbrengboek,
Nederlands archievenblad 84 (1980): 400-12; jointly with the private sales) were recorded in a separate register (see also 6.6.1). In 1574
R.C.J. van Maanen, Inventaris van het Stadsarchief
van Leiden (1253) 1574-1816 (1897) (Leiden:
Van Hout began the ‘Journal of all matters of the new burgomasters, the aldermen, and the
Gemeentearchief, 1986), pp. xxx-xxxix; Rudi van city council’. In 1577 he separated the council’s resolutions, and in 1587 he began with two
Maanen, Jan van Hout als stadssecretaris (2009),
https://web.archive.org/web/20190531122055/
series: the Burgomasters’ Journal and the Justice (Gerecht’s) Journal. In each, as he wrote,
https://oudleiden.nl/images/janvanhout/publicaties/ was ‘registered everything that happens in the meeting and is concluded [there]’. It is likely
sym2_maanen.pdf, archived 31 May 2019; Karel
Bostoen, Jan van Houts nalatenschap: bronnen
that Van Hout adapted this form for a journal from the practice in the Reformed Church
(Leiden: Ginkgo, 2013). where the church council kept extensive acta (minutes) (see 2.3.3). Van Hout’s journals
110a | 4 |
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also bear a resemblance to the resoluties kept since 1525 by the States of Holland (see 3.2).
Randolph Head argues that Van Hout’s ‘two central journals, recording the business
process of the most important urban authorities, reframed the operation of the entire
system’; incoming documents and the decisions taken were linked in the record of a
meeting, rather than filed according to subject matter. 12 This is, according to Head, one key
shift that defines a registry (German: Registratur). In fact, Jan van Hout calls his system
registratuer in de boucken as if to emphasize the importance of the codex as archiving tool.

Fig. 4.4 Enumeration of the series of registers kept by Jan van Hout, 1596, detail.
12 Head, Making archives, p. 255. Erfgoed Leiden, Stadsarchief van Leiden (0501A), inv. nr. 1051.

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New societal challenges (see Fig. 0.2) necessitated the creation of new registrations, what
one might call originative registrations. An example is the Reformation, which led to new
tasks for civic authorities with respect to marriages (see 1.2.1). In 1575 the magistrate
began a book of brides (Bruytbouc) to register the banns of Reformed people and those
belonging to other churches. With a note from the City Hall, the Reformed couples could
then have their marriage announced and confirmed in the church. People belonging to a
non-Reformed church had to get married by the magistrate; for them, a book of weddings
(Echtboeck) was introduced in 1592.

The marriage registers and the other registers created by Van Hout served the interests
of the city as well as those of the citizens. Very special was the Register Vetus, the register
of mortgages set up by Van Hout at his own expense in 1585. In this register the data of
parcels to be transferred were registered and verified. Citizens could check the register for
details about a parcel, the owner, and the adjacencies (see 6.1.1).

Van Hout’s career ended with his death in 1609. At that time, 61 series were kept at the City
Hall, nearly three times more than when he began. The importance of Van Hout’s record-
making is evident when one realizes that of the 44 series he initiated, at least 31 were
continued until or even beyond the French occupation (1810-1813).

In listing the series, each with a short explanation, Van Hout’s remonstrance follows the
‘Ordinance and instruction of the order or regularity which from now on will be
maintained at the secretariat or writing room of this city Leiden and concerning the pay
that will be required and paid there in these matters’ (Ordonnantie ende onderrichtinge
van de ordre ofte geregeltheyt die van nu voortsaen ter secretarye of schrijfcamere dezer
stadt Leyden zal werden onderhouden ende van tloon dat aldaer daervoren zal werden
afgeeyscht ende betaelt). It was printed at the City Hall in 1592 on the printing press which
Van Hout had bought for the city. This booklet of 50 pages contained a detailed justified
instruction for the clerks at the secretariat, pointing out which registers must be furnished
with alphabetical tables ‘to be relieved of the difficult unpleasantness of much searching’
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(om ‘van moeyelicke quellagie van veel souckens verlost te werden’). Van Hout’s colleague
and acquaintance in Dordrecht copied a few ideas from the Leiden instruction. At least six
series, started in Dordrecht in 1593, seem to have been inspired by the Leiden example.

Two books are not mentioned in the remonstrance: the waterboek of 1583-1589 and the
stratenboek 1588-1597, containing detailed maps of the width of canals and parcels, both
made on the initiative of Jan van Hout. The maps formed the basis for assessing the
contribution each homeowner had to pay for the maintenance of the lining (shoring) of the
canals and the pavement of the streets.13 Both codices, together with the Register Vetus,
visualized and archived the city.
Jan van Hout was not only city clerk, but also a notary (see next section), secretary to the
board of the Leiden University (founded in 1575), and secretary of the bailiwick
(baljuwschap) of Rijnland, the regional court. In the last capacity he ensured the building
(1580-1582) of an office with an archival repository in order to end the keeping of archives
at home, which was a ‘great inconvenience’ for the Rijnland judges and litigants. The
university’s ‘second memory’ was the Journal (Dachbouck), in which Jan van Hout noted
down everything that happened at the university. We read, for example, that in March
1595 the burgomasters and governors decided to have pulpita made for the 365 folio books
in the university library and that—at the suggestion of Jan van Hout—these were to be
fastened to the pulpits with chains. Anticipating an increase in the number of books,
they had 407 brass chains made at a cost of 183 guilders. Among the first gifts presented to
the new university library was the Opera Omnia by Philip van Leyden (see 3.1). The
inscription in the book tells us that it was donated by Jan van Hout.

4.4 Jan van Hout, Archivist

13 P.J.M. de Baar, ‘Jan van Hout en zijn Stratenboek en ‘The first archivist of Leiden’—a title of honour Jan van Hout justly deserves. In 2009—at
Grachtenboek’, in Ups en Downer. Bundel artikelen bij
het afscheid van mr. W. Downer als gemeentearchivaris
the commemoration of Van Hout’s death four centuries prior—archivist Rudi van Maanen
van Leiden (s.l., 1985), pp. 5-18. stated

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The far-reaching differentiation, but also the physical growth of the archives, caused
Van Hout to think about the findability. Around 1590 he began numbering all series
and files, both old and new ones, and marking them with a number. These numbers
correspond with the keywords in an alphabetically arranged register. To prevent
search problems, some archival documents have been put under more than one
keyword. Some documents and files carry the same number, however. Essentially
this comes down to subject indexing. The index served both the static and the
dynamic archives.14

We can recognize something of the system of categorizing knowledge using loci (topics
or commonplaces—Erasmus called them pigeonholes) that had been developed by the
philosopher (and secretarius of the city of Groningen between 1480 and 1484) Rudolph
Agricola.15

As elsewhere, the privileges and the other important charters were kept separately from
the rest of the archives, in the secreet in the City Hall. When the burgomasters entered the
secreet in 1577 they established that many documents were dampened and liable to be lost
altogether. Jan van Hout had the documents cleaned and dried with warm towels;
subsequently they were put in chronological order, inventoried, and stored in drawers.

After the Reformation, the estates of the churches and monasteries in and around Leiden
were confiscated and put at the disposal of the city and the university (see 2.3.1). The
archives were seized as well, as they were essential for managing the estates. Jan van Hout
put the charters of the monasteries in the city’s secreet and made an inventory (of 400
folios) of the archives. He also began to inventory the archives of the chapter of Saint
Pancras’ Church, but he was not able to finish the work. After his death, four drawers with
charters of the chapter were found at his home. They were returned to the charter
14 Van Maanen, Jan van Hout als stadssecretaris.
cupboard in City Hall.
15 Peter Burke, A social history of knowledge. From
Gutenberg to Diderot (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press,
2000), p. 95.
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Fig. 4.5 Alphabetical index of the series and

files at the Leiden city registry, made by Jan van
Hout, 1590 and continued until around 1607.
Erfgoed Leiden, Stadsarchief van Leiden (0501),
inv. nr. 1.

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Besides his work as clerk and secretary, Van Hout kept a scrivener’s office where all sorts of
writing were done for the city and other customers. Moreover, Van Hout acted as notary,
agent, and mediator. Describing his papers in his testament, Van Hout distinguished four
categories: documents of and for the city, notarial archives, documents pertaining to his
family and his estate, and, finally, documents concerning third parties. This distinction
proved not to be sharp enough when it came to inventorying the estate. The extensive
inventory of all registers and papers lists 283 items, many comprising several documents.
The heirs transferred roughly 100 items in the city documents category to the city. The
notarial archives comprised a dozen documents, including liassen of draft-acts and the
protocol from 1583 to 1609 of 206 pages. According to the testament, this archive was
handed over to the youngest of the Leiden notaries. The third category (Van Hout’s private
archives) were kept in a big cupboard with more than 30 numbered pigeonholes
containing hundreds of documents (described in the inventory as 92 items). On top of the
cupboard were three maps, 16 genealogical tables, and five bundles with documents about
church properties. Part of these were indeed private archives, but many papers were
considered to belong to one of the other categories. Therefore, the city government judged
it best not to leave part of the third and fourth categories in private hands, but to take them
in public custody at City Hall. Those needing copies were to have them made by the city
clerk. However, the documents in these categories had been bequeathed to the city greffier
Joost van Swanenburch and from him on his brother Isaac, the deputy city clerk. In 1622
the latter transferred the archives to the city, which rewarded Isaac with a gift of 150
guilders.

4.5 Order
As we have seen, the privileges were regarded as the most important documents among
the town archives. They were therefore treated with special care. The series of bound
registers (codices) were kept separately at the secretariat. In addition, there was a bulk of
loose papers, kept in boxes, bags, baskets, chests, cupboards, and as liassen (see 3.3).
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At first the clerk and his staff would have had them close at hand. After some time, they
were either destroyed or removed to attics and cellars. The need to improve the
accessibility and findability by creating order in this mass was discussed sporadically by the
city council.

This is shown in the example of Groningen.16 After the city government had repeatedly
expressed the wish for inventorization of the archives, a committee was finally entrusted in
1674 with the ordering of the documents kept at the secretariat, the audit chamber, and
elsewhere. The contents of the city chest and another old chest were transferred to three
new chests, each containing 15 drawers. It was decided not to maintain the old order of the
documents, but to make a new arrangement. In March 1677 the work was done, and the
keys of the chests and the inventory were handed over to the burgomasters. On comparing
the old order in the city chest and the new one, the changes over one and a half centuries
become apparent: formerly, the first drawer contained the ‘privileges and freedoms
granted by emperors, kings, lords, and republics’; now this category had been moved down
in the classification. Groningen no longer handled its own foreign affairs or concluded
treaties with foreign powers, as these now belonged to the prerogatives of the Republic of
the United Provinces.

In 1693, Rotterdam appointed an archives committee of three council members that

reported in 1697 on the ‘appropriate order to find, consult, and use the charters and papers
and the like’.17 This triggered the city council to decide on a drastic improvement of
archives management, but it took until 1704 before pensionary Isaac van Hoornbeek was
instructed to reorganize the papers. He focused on the charters and other important
documents and considered an alphabetical order (as for books). Finally, he chose an
16 Schuitema Meijer, Historie, pp. 82-86.
arrangement according to the subject of governance to replace the former order according
17 H.C. Hazewinkel, Honderd jaar gemeentelijke
archiefzorg MDCCCLVII-MCMLVII (Rotterdam:
to form (contracts, judgments, etc.). The documents and the pigeonholes where they were
Gemeentearchief, 1957); H. ten Boom and stored received a number. The inventories (one for each subject) refer to these numbers.
B. Woelderink, Inventaris van het oud archief van
de stad Rotterdam, 1340-1813, 3 vols. (Rotterdam:
The inventories were published in one volume.
Gemeentelijke Archiefdienst, 1976).

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Fig. 4.6a and b Inventory of the loketkast of

Rotterdam, 1704. Rotterdam City Archives,
Oud-archief stad Rotterdam (1-01), inv. nr. 703.
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Around the middle of the 18th century a shadow archive was made of the most important
documents stored in a cabinet with pigeonholes (loketkast). Upon completion of this
gigantic shadow archive (33 volumes) its maker, former city clerk Jacob van Belle, was
presented with a silver tobacco box with a golden lid and a laudatory inscription ‘for
indefatigable labour rendered in collecting the public archives, brought to a fortunate end’
(ob indeffessum in conferendis publicis archivis laborem praestitum, et feliciter
exantlatum).

By 1765 the disorder in the loketkast had again grown to such an extent that a new
campaign to create order was necessary. The pensionary and the two city clerks had to
arrange the documents anew, select and ‘extinguish the useless’ (het onnutte te
extingueren), and store the remains in such a way that the documents would easily be
found. A year later, an inventory of the loose papers and the series was finished. An update
of the 1704 inventory of the charters was then published, followed by a list of all the series
(1776); of the 41 series on the list, 33 have been preserved—eight (totalling more than
300 volumes) got lost or were cleared out.

In Amsterdam, Jean René Gericot, ‘charter clerk’ at the City Hall since 1739, completed the
inventorization of the books and papers in the rooms above the treasury in 1771. This
inventory of 308 pages is known as the ‘tearing up book’ (verscheurboek) because Gericot
indicated whether each document should be retained or destroyed.18

Inventories like these also exist elsewhere. They were often made on the occasion of
ordering or reordering the archives, but in most cases inventories were restricted to those
documents which were important for defending the rights and privileges of the city.
They mainly consist of the parchment charters and ‘the canonized papers’, to use the term
18 L. van Nierop, ‘Verscheuren. Een bijdrage tot de
geschiedenis van het Amsterdamsche archief ’,
recently introduced by René Kunst in his inventory of the Leeuwarden city archives.19
Jaarboek van het genootschap Amstelodamum 22 Around 1597 the Leeuwarden charters and papers were described in a register after the
(1925): 13-21.
administration moved to a new City Hall. The old city chest was then replaced by a large
19 René Kunst, Inventaris van het archief van de stad
Leeuwarden 1426-1811 (Leeuwarden: Historisch
cabinet which did not have the usual pigeonholes but drawers. The cabinet is still in the
Centrum Leeuwarden, 2012). Leeuwarden City Archives along with its successor, a much larger cabinet made in 1842.

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In other cities the loketkast was often systematically organized by headings (rubrieken).
These were mostly geographical headings, but in Leeuwarden the documents were
numbered at random, registered and put into the drawers. In 1729 the drawers were
inspected, and a new list of the most important papers was made. That list was updated in
1794 by council member Gerard Voorda, who in 1803 became the first Dutch city
Archivarius (see 4.8).

In 1654 the city council of Utrecht discussed the expediency of commissioning someone
‘who could examine the city’s archives once or several times a year, and who, for a better
preservation of the city’s charters and old papers, would bring order, both by reforming the
catalogue or register, and by renewing the presses and drawers for keeping the records’.20
This catalogue still exists in the Utrecht Archives. It was based on earlier inventorizations,
the oldest possibly made by the city clerk in 1478. The archival interest of the Utrecht
municipality was short-lived. When council member Cornelis Booth, a well-known
antiquarian, died in 1678, there is no further mention of the city archives in the council
minutes for over a century.

4.6 Access
The city archives served government and citizens. The city privileges were mostly kept
secret, but copies were available in books of privileges. These were often in private hands.
One could purchase an extract from various registers, as Jan van Hout’s ordinance (see
4.3) shows. In 1.2 we saw that extracts from registers of births, marriages, and deaths were
provided. Everywhere the registers of transfer of immovable property were publicly
20 Utrecht Archives, archief van het Gemeentearchief,
inv. nrs. 330-333; S. Muller, Catalogus van het Archief.
accessible (see 6.2). Public access occasionally led to disorder at the secretariat. In Delft, for
Eerste afdeeling 1122-1577 (Utrecht: Beijers, 1893), example, the magistrate frequently had to prohibit people from going behind the partition
pp. XXIX-XXXI; Tentoonstelling Utrechtse archieven
(Utrecht: Centraal Museum, 1953), p. 9.
into the clerk’s office to look for and read the registers by themselves.21
21 Delft City Archives, Stadsarchief 1246-1913, inv. nr.
69, fol. 46.
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Fig. 4.7 Regulation on the Delft city registry,

1573. Delft City Archives, Stadsbestuur, inv.
nr. 69.

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The secretariat was not the only municipal office to keep registers. For example, the
archives of the Amsterdam Chamber of Desolate Estates were accessible to creditors and
liquidators (see 6.4). The guilds kept registers and delivered extracts to members and
non-members. In 1687 someone required an extract from the weigh book from the master
of the weigh house in Leiden. This was permitted, but only with the consent of the
magistrate.22 At the Great Council of Mechelen (the supreme court) extracts from city
registers, the register of the Audit Office in The Hague, and notarial registers were
frequently used as evidence in court cases. However, in order to obtain an extract or copy,
one had to prove a justified interest. The archives of the Orphan Chamber (see 6.3.5) were
kept secret because it was decided that the value of an orphan’s assets should not become
public knowledge. Nevertheless, interested parties could get information and extracts,
although the deficient order of the archives often made this difficult. In 1611, the Leiden
Orphan Chamber moved to a new room at the City Hall, and at the same time the archives
were ordered and a few finding aids were created ‘to give anyone at all times, whenever
necessary and on request only, proper satisfaction which formerly, due to the lack of order,
could not happen’.23 (‘omme des noot en verzocht zynde, t’allen tijden eenen yder goet geryff
te mogen doen, ’t welck voor desen, mits gebreecke van ordre, niet en heeft connen
geschieden’). Secretary Paulus Stock, who had done the job of improving the findability of
the archives, was rewarded with 300 pounds (or 1,800 guilders).

4.7 The City’s Soul

24

In the archives repository (in chartophylacio) of the city of Groningen, the Dutch history
22 Erfgoed Leiden, Stadsarchief 1574-1816, inv. nr. 89, fol.
writer Ubbo Emmius (1547-1625) spent days, even weeks, in research. Emmius was
108-108verso. surprised to ascertain that the city was a curator and guardian of the memorials of Frisian
23 Erfgoed Leiden, Stadsarchief 1574-1816, inv. nr. 51, history. Groningen City Hall, he wrote, could be regarded as the common archives of the
198verso-199verso.
whole of the Frisian territory stretching from the river Ems in the East to the Lauwers in
24 The following is a summary of Eric Ketelaar,
‘Muniments and monuments. The dawn of archives as
the West. Emmius checked the reliability of chronicles by comparing them with ‘what I
cultural patrimony’, Archival science 7 (2007): 343-57. found in the state records, reliable monumenta of what happened’. In the same spirit,
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Arnold Buchelius (1565-1641) worked in Utrecht. In 1632, Buchelius sent his fellow
antiquarian Miraeus several reproductions of charters to be used for practising
diplomatics and palaeography, the tools for discriminating true and false monumenta.
Both Emmius and Buchelius—and they were not the only ones—used the term
monumenta for archival documents with historical value. The critical method of using
original source material, which these Dutch antiquarians were developing, was to a large
extent based on their familiarity with municipal recordkeeping.

Notwithstanding the praise of Ubbo Emmius for the Groningen city government and its
records, the urban memory was not a memory meant for history writing, but first and
foremost a memory for the defence of the city’s interests. Due to the defence of these
interests, Emmius was refused access to the archives of Leeuwarden in 1612 because ‘he
was regarded as an adversary of Friesland’s honour, which he had attacked in his writings’.25
And while Emmius was searching in the Groningen archives, he was being watched
constantly by one of the burgomasters and a member of the city council. His colleague in
Guelders, Joannes Pontanus, was given access to the municipal archives of Nijmegen in
1627 only on condition that he would preserve the city’s splendour and reputation, as far as
truth would allow. Like other cities, Nijmegen guarded its charters and privileges because
they were the basis for its precedence among the cities of Guelders.

City archives primarily served an administrative purpose. The administrative value of

records could well last for several decades, the archives serving as the institutional
memory. However, we find indications of the notion that city archives might be preserved
and transferred through time for reasons other than administrative purposes: as civic
symbols and touchstones of collective memory. When, for example, Dirck van Bleyswijck
in his history of Delft (1667), chronicles the burning of the City Hall in 1618, he laments
that, notwithstanding the efforts of many burghers to save the ‘city’s books, papers, and
25 A.J. Rinzema, ‘Ubbo Emmius als historicus’, in Ubbo muniments, paintings too, and everything which was to be kept’, the fire had destroyed so
Emmius. Een Oostfries geleerde in Groningen, ed.
W.J. Kuppers (Groningen/Leer: REGIO PRojekt/
much ‘from which we might have got some enlightenment, which we now have been
Schuster, 1994), p. 56. deprived of ’. Some years before, in 1652, the City Hall of Amsterdam had burned down.

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In verse the poet Joost van den Vondel admired the citizens who tried to save the archives:

The most loyal people dash forward and hurry and save
the Letters, Books, Money, Treasury, and Bank’s hoard
and preserve in that emergency the entire City’s soul. 26

De trouwste schieten toe: en reppen zich en redden

De Brieven, Boeken, Gelt, Tresoor en Bankenschadt
En bergen in dien noodt de ziel der gantsche Stadt.

Especially in the 18th century, people start to value ‘the genuine memorials’ which, besides
books by trustworthy writers, constitute the source for the historian, to paraphrase one of
26 https://web.archive.org/web/20190531122201/
https://onsamsterdam.nl/hier-gebeurde-het-dam-6-
the most famous 18th-century Dutch historians, Jan Wagenaar. His portrait, painted
juli-1652, archived 31 May 2019. around 1760-1761, shows Wagenaar—who worked as a clerk in Amsterdam City Hall—
27 Anthony Grafton, The footnote. A curious history surrounded by documents from the city archives. Using the ‘authentic documents’ is part
(London: Faber and Faber, 1997), p. 221.
of the new standard for precision which in those days, in Anthony Grafton’s words,
28 J. Roelevink, ‘Bewezen met authenticque stukken.
Juridisch-oudheidkundige drijfveren tot het uitgeven
‘gradually infected historical exposition (…). Historians (…) cherished a newer desire for
van teksten op het terrein van de vaderlandse critical discussion of the sources’.27 In the Netherlands, legal and antiquarian arguments
geschiedenis in de achttiende eeuw’, in Bron en
publikatie, ed. K. Kooijmans et al. (’s-Gravenhage:
mainly stimulated governments and private people to search for historical documents and
Bureau der Rijkscommissie voor Vaderlandse to publish them.28 Still, city governments continued to be very cautious in admitting
Geschiedenis, 1985), pp. 78-99.
strangers to the archives.
29 J.J. Woltjer, ‘Dutch privileges, real and imaginary’, in
Some political mythologies, ed. J.S. Bromley and
In times of crisis, as in 1672 and in 1747-1748, civic movements claim public access to and
E.H. Kossmann (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1975), pp. 19-35; publication of real or imagined privileges which might give them some influence over the
J.A.F. de Jongste, Onrust aan het Spaarne. Haarlem
in de jaren 1747-1751 (Den Haag 1984), p. 232;
city’s authorities (see 8.3.1).29 In the introduction to his edition of Van Mieris’ ‘Description
J. Roelevink, ‘Perkamenten blindgangers? Patriotten, of the city of Leiden’ (1771), Daniel van Alphen, city clerk of Leiden, praises the city
prinsgezinden en de archieven van hun overheden’,
in De droom van de revolutie. Nieuwe benaderingen
governors who granted Van Mieris access to ‘the charters, privileges, and other archives of
van het patriottisme, ed. H. Bots en W.W. Mijnhardt this city, which, being the citizenry’s own property, have been entrusted to the government
(Amsterdam: Bataafsche Leeuw, 1988), pp. 76-77.
for loyal and careful custody’.30 But the publication of archival documents was one thing,
30 Frans van Mieris, Beschryving der stad Leyden [...],
vol. 2 (Leyden: Honkoop and Van Hoogeveen, 1771),
access to the archives themselves remained the prerogative of city officials.
preface.
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4.8 City Archives with a capital A

Archiving Cities 31

In the 18th century, awareness of the value of archives, not as muniments only, but as
monuments to be used for historical research, was growing. After the Batavian Revolution
(1795), the seven united provinces were reconstituted into a unitary republic. The new
republic needed a real national history, as one of the members of the new parliament,
Henricus van Royen, emphasized. As explained in 3.6.1, his proposal led to the appoint­
ment of the first archivarius (archivist) of the Batavian Republic, Hendrik van Wijn, in
1802. It took some time before cities followed the example of central and provincial
governments to appoint an archivist (see 3.6.1). Leeuwarden was the first, with the
appointment of Gerard Voorda as unpaid archivarius in 1802.32 After his death (1805)
it took some time before bookseller and historian Wopke Eekhoff became archivarius of
Leeuwarden in 1838. At that date the Leeuwarden City Archives were the first local
Archives (with a capital A): an institution, independent (and detached!) from the records
creating administration, managing archival documents with a view to research by people
other than the staff of the records creating agency.

The regulations of 1829 (see 3.6.1) had proclaimed a right of access to State, provincial, and
local archives as an incentive for research in and editing of the sources of the Fatherland’s
(vaderlandse) history. The aim was clear: ‘fostering patriotism, encouraging civic virtues
and maintenance of the National Character’ (aankweeking van vaderlandsliefde,
31 The first part of this section is a summary of
bevordering van burgerdeugd en instandhouding van het Nationaal Karakter). These are
Eric Ketelaar, ‘Archieven. Munimenta en monumenta’, the words of the Royal Decree of 23 December 1826, by which King William I announced a
in Erfgoed. De geschiedenis van een begrip, ed.
Frans Grijzenhout (Amsterdam: Amsterdam
competition for a plan of Dutch history. At the same time the King instructed the Minister
University Press, 2007), pp. 85-107. of the Interior to issue orders to the governors in the provinces ‘to forthwith cause ordering
32 Geart de Vries, ‘The topicality of Wopke Eekhoff and arranging all provincial and municipal archives and those of all corporations and
(1809-1880): an interpretation of the tasks of the first
salaried town archivist of the Netherlands’, in Values in
furthermore to cause the making of accurate lists or registers thereof ’.
transition. Perspectives on the past, present and future From the reactions to the governors’ orders it becomes clear that many local councils and
of the archival profession, ed. Hildo van Engen
(The Hague: Stichting Archiefpublicaties, 2017),
managers of institutions were hardly aware of the value of their archives for history
pp. 47-59. writing, let alone their value as cultural heritage. The city of Rotterdam answered the

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governor, ‘the archives of our city only contain such pieces and documents which nothing
can contribute to the general history of the Fatherland’.33 The city of Kampen replied ‘our
city is not in the possession of any archives of much interest’. Still, here and there the
governors’ summons led to (resumed) summary inventorization of city archives, for
example in Deventer and Zwolle.

The example of Leeuwarden was followed by appointing a municipal archivist in

’s-Hertogenbosch (1841), Kampen (1842), Amsterdam (1848), Zutphen (1850), Leiden
(1855), and Rotterdam (1857).

In 1885 there were some 30 city archivists, most of them part-time (see also 12.3). They
were generally housed at the town hall, where the archives were kept. The first two
purpose-built municipal archival repositories were those in Leiden (1893) and Rotterdam
(1899).

Following the separation of justice and government in 1811 (see 4.9.1), the borderline
between ‘old archive’ and ‘new archive’ became fixed in most municipalities on the first of
January 1812 (in some cases 1816 because of totally new regulations enacted in that year).
In towns where a municipal archivist was appointed later, he was entrusted with the
management of the ‘old archive’, while the ‘new archive’ was in the care of the town clerk, to
whom the archivist was subordinated. This separation between old and new archives has
had long-lasting effects on theory, methodology, and practice of Dutch archivists who
Fig. 4.8 Broadsheet calling Rotterdam citizens generally did not care about ‘the living archives’ (see 12.6) and therefore were not involved
and institutions to contribute archival in records management (see 4.10). This would change only after the Second World War,
documents to the newly established City
Archives, 1858. From: H.C. Hazewinkel, as we will see.
Honderd jaar gemeentelijke archiefzorg
MDCCCLVII-MCMLVII (Rotterdam: Of the 31 municipal archivists, only five had a decent salary in 1910 (plus three State
Gemeentearchief, 1957), p. 43.
archivists who doubled as city archivists, and four city archivists who also managed a
museum or a library). Most of the others were part-time archivists, combining the office
33 Hazewinkel, Honderd jaar, p. 37. with other work, for example as teacher. The Archives Act of 1918 (see 12.5) placed the
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municipal archivist on an equal footing with the town clerk, both being appointed by the
municipal council (since 2006 by the burgomaster and aldermen).

From the 1930s municipal archives developed a distinctive profile.34 In contrast to the
State Archives that stuck to their classic legal mission as described in the Archives Act up
to the 1970s, many municipal archives took up the challenge of developing into a centre of
local history for the community. They made use of public and private archives, the city
library, and collections of prints and drawings—often collected by the city and by private
people since the 18th century. Local archives went beyond mere management of their
holdings. They often worked to document the present by the means of photography, oral
history (the Rotterdam City Archives established a sound archive in 1961), and other
means. From the 1960s local archives began to provide educational and community
services through intensive relations with schools and civic associations, organizing
exhibitions, courses of palaeography, and research into local history.
The number of municipal archives grew steadily after the Second World War. In 1955 the
first regional archives (streekarchivariaat) was founded in Noord-Brabant: a partnership
of several municipalities sharing an archivist. At first, the archivist perambulated his
district, later regional archives with a centrally located common repository, search room,
and other facilities became the standard. By 1990 there were 27 regional archives serving
227 municipalities. Other forms of sharing archives staff and facilities were also introduced
in municipalities and even by the water boards (regional water authorities).

By 1990, 38 municipal archives existed. Together with the 27 regional archives, this
34 R.A.D. Renting, ‘De Vereniging van archivarissen in ensured professional archives management in 47 percent of all municipalities. This
Nederland en de ontwikkeling van het gemeentelijk
archiefwezen’, in Respect voor de oude orde. Honderd
percentage increased as a result of the establishment of new municipal archives and new
jaar Vereniging van archivarissen in Nederland, ed. partnerships, but also of mergers of municipalities. In 1993 51 percent of the
Paul Brood (Stichting archiefpublikaties/Verloren:
Hilversum, 1991), pp. 27-60; R.A.D. Renting,
municipalities were served by professional archivists, in 2014 75 percent, and in 2018 81.5
‘Gemeentearchieven 1968-1988’, in Voor burger en percent. See the current map of all archives in the Netherlands.
bestuur. Twintig jaar Nederlands archiefwezen 1968-
1988, ed. P. Brood (Stichting archiefpublikaties/
Verloren: Hilversum 1988), pp. 48-76.

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LEGENDA
State Archives
Municipal Archives 1968
Municipal Archives established 1968-1982
Regional Archives 1968
Regional Archives established 1968-1982

Fig. 4.9 Map of public archival services in

the Netherlands, 1982. From Discussienota
archiefbeleid (’s-Gravenhage etc.: Commissie
Nota archiefbeleid, 1982).
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The expansion of the local archives system and the increase of the holdings was
accompanied by a strong increase in the number of researchers. In the 1970s an estimated
40 percent of all visits to search rooms (out of roughly 185,000 visits) was paid to State
Archives, 25 percent to the city archives of Amsterdam, The Hague, Rotterdam, and
Utrecht, and 35 percent to the other town archives. The latter figure rose to 51 percent in
1985, while the other shares dropped to 34 percent (State Archives) and 15 percent (the
four largest city archives). In 1990 all local archives received 249,000 visits to their search
rooms and all State Archives 122,000; five years later these numbers had risen to 295,000
and 128,000. More recently, visits to the search rooms are declining because of the
expan­­ding digitization of holdings. In 2018 the Amsterdam City Archives produced more
than six million scans (15 terabytes), the equivalent of 1,200 metres of shelving. In
Rotter­dam, the number of visits to the search room of the City Archives declined in the
decade between 2007 and 2017 by 27 percent, whereas the number of visits to the website
doubled.

As I mentioned, the ‘living’ archive remained an unknown territory for many archivists
(see 12.6). They believed that management of the ‘dynamic’ archive had to be left to the
administration of the archive producing entity. Regular transfer to the town archives of
records dating after 1813 was not prescribed; control (inspection) of the care for these
recent archives was the duty of the Provincial Executive (Gedeputeerde Staten) and its
provincial archives inspector (see Fig. 11.20). That office was generally held by the State
archivist in the province. According to the Archives Act of 1918, the State archivists had to
be involved in appraisal and destruction of local records. From 1950 the State archivists
also had to inspect the records management by State agencies (see 3.5). Similarly, archivists
of municipalities and water boards inspected the way records were managed by municipal
and water board offices beginning in 1968. A few municipalities had already regulated
inspection of records management by local ordinance, for example Amsterdam in 1954
and Rotterdam in 1960.

In the 1970s the State archivists and their local colleagues revisited (see 1.2, 9.4, and
chapter 12) and debated the issue of the destination of certain categories of records created

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by State agencies acting within a local community, such as courts and chambers of
commerce. These were State property but held information that was essential to the local
communities. The legal argument of Crown property prevailed over an interpretation of
provenance that was more community-oriented (see 4.9.2). Those fonds stayed in the State
repositories in the provincial capitals, and not in their places of origin.

A consequence of these debates was the creation of a National Council of Municipal and
Regional Archivists (Landelijke Kring van gemeente- en streekarchivarissen, LKGS) in
1974. Until 2000, the LKGS provided services to its members, participated in consultations
with authorities on their behalf, and lobbied for improvement of archival legislation
regarding local archives. It then transferred its functions to a new national service
organization for records management and archival institutions, Documentaire
informatieverzorging en archieven (DIVA). DIVA in turn was absorbed by Cultural
Heritage Netherlands (Erfgoed Nederland) in 2007. This organization was funded by the
Ministry of Culture and served the whole sector of cultural heritage until its demise in
2012, when the ministry changed its way of funding projects for archives, monuments,
museums, and archaeology. Some activities of Erfgoed Nederland were taken over by the
Association of Archival Institutions (Branchevereniging archiefinstellingen Nederland,
BRAIN), founded in 2007, others by the Royal Association of Archivists in the Netherlands
(see 12.4).

4.9 The Modern Paper City

4.9.1 French Influences
The great societal and institutional changes between the Batavian Revolution (1795) and
the Municipalities Act of 1851 had little effect on local archiving. As René Kunst remarks
in his inventory of the city archives of Leeuwarden, this is ’an indication not only of the
administrative organization conforming to its own patterns, but also for the slowness with
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which it adapts to a changed context’.35 Names and competencies changed, bureaucratic
practices were introduced, and after the annexation by France (1810), French examples of
registration of incoming and outgoing documents and filing were adopted in some places.
The indicateur made its appearance (see 3.4 and Fig. 3.7) and continued to be used—in
Amsterdam even until far into the 20th century—as a Registratur tool for controlling work
processes and archiving.36

An important and lasting change in archives management came about during the
Batavian-French period (1795-1813) as a result of the separation between judiciary and
executive. In the ancien regime, government and administration of justice at local level
were executed by one body, but after the Batavian Revolution separate courts administered
justice. Anticipating the separation of ‘police’ and justice, in 1800 the Executive
Administration (Uitvoerend Bewind) of the Batavian Republic ordered inventorization of
the town archives by sorting and describing all papers concerning justice respectively
administration.37 In many places it was the first comprehensive inventorization of local
archives ever. The registers and papers concerning the judiciary were turned over to the
local courts established in 1802 (see 9.4). For some time most local institutions remained
the same, while governmental and judicial tasks were separated. Only on 1 March 1811
did the separation of powers become definitive.

4.9.2 Communities of Archives

38

35 Kunst, Inventaris, pp. 70-71.

36 J.H. van den Hoek Ostende, ‘De invoering en de
ontwikkeling van het indicateurstelsel in Amsterdam’,
Jonkheer Theodoor van Riemsdijk took office as city archivist of Zwolle, succeeding the
Nederlands archievenblad 68 (1994): 57-63; Peter first city archivist, Huberts, on 1 October 1875. Three months after his appointment Van
J. Horsman, ‘A French legacy. The transition from
collegiate to bureaucratic record-keeping in a Dutch
Riemsdijk submitted a detailed report to the municipal council about the history and
town, 1800–1900’, Archivaria 60 (2005): 125-44. current state of the city archives and the measures that should be taken to improve their
37 Hazewinkel, Honderd jaar, p. 33; Schuitema Meijer, preservation and accessibility. With great energy, Van Riemsdijk brought an end to the
Historie, pp. 90-91.
‘appalling chaos’ in only a year and a half (see 12.3). Utrecht archivist Samuel Muller wrote
38 Peter Horsman, Eric Ketelaar and Theo Thomassen,
‘New respect for the old order. The context of the
to his former assistant Van Riemsdijk that he was really astonished about what the latter
Dutch Manual’, American archivist 66 (2003): 249-70. was doing in the Zwolle archives: arranging these archives (that rudis indigestaque moles)

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‘without any manual, according to your most excellent and precise method by which every
document is kept in its original context’. This approach was to be codified in 1898 in the
‘Manual for the arrangement and description of archives’, a book that, translated into eight
languages, would bring universal fame to Dutch archivistics (see 12.4). The definition of
archives in the Manual concerns the whole body of documents officially received or
produced by an administrative unit. At first, the definition mentioned ‘the governing body
of a community’ (het bestuur eener gemeenschap). That was an invention by Van
Riemsdijk, adopted by Muller (who changed his own definition from 1879 which referred
to ‘a corporation (…) respectively a family, a college, a province, etc’.) and accepted by the
Association of Archivists in the Netherlands in 1893. However, upon reflection, the
authors of the Manual (Muller, Feith, and Fruin) argued ‘The community itself has no
archives’: the archives are formed by the bodies (organen) of the community (see Fig. 12.0).
Consequently, there are as many archives of a community as there are bodies. Van
Riemsdijk (who had become General State archivist in 1887) (Fig. 12.2), however, wanted
congruency between authorities and community. Much later archivists embraced the
concept that a town, region or another community may be represented not only in
government archives, but in private archives and collections as well (see 1.7.3 and 7.3), and
one might consider this as an expression of Van Riemsdijk’s ideas.
39 Jeannette A. Bastian, Owning memory. How a
Caribbean community lost its archives and found
its history (Westport Conn./London: Libraries More recently American archival scholar Jeannette Bastian has proposed the concept of a
Unlimited, 2003), pp. 5, 83. See also Eric Ketelaar,
‘Sharing. Collected memories in communities of
community of records. Bastian imagines a community of records ‘as the aggregate of
records’, Archives and manuscripts 33 (2005): 44-61; records in all forms generated by multiple layers of actions and interactions between and
Sue McKemmish, Anne Gilliland-Swetland, and
Eric Ketelaar, ‘“Communities of memory”. Pluralising
among the people and institutions within a community’.39 In a community of records ‘all
archival research and education agendas’, Archives and layers of society are participants in the making of records, and the entire community
manuscripts 33 (2005): 146-75.
becomes the larger provenance of the records’. This view is a contribution to the debate
40 See Eric Ketelaar, ‘Archives, memories and identities’,
in Archives and recordkeeping. Theory into practice, ed.
among scholars of memory studies concerning the social frameworks of memory as well as
Caroline Brown (London: Facet, 2014), pp. 131-70. to the debate among archivists concerning community archives.40 ‘The defining
41 Andrew Flinn, Mary Stevens and Elizabeth Shepherd, characteristic of community archives,’ British scholars Flinn, Stevens, and Shepherd write,
‘Whose memories, whose archives? Independent
community archives, autonomy and the mainstream’,
‘is the active participation of a community in documenting and making accessible the
Archival science 9 (2009): 75. history of their particular group and/or locality on their own terms.’41
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4.9.3 Departmentalization and

Archiving Cities

Commercialization
Towards the end of the 19th century a new vision on the role of government developed:
government of the ‘Night Watch State’ was gradually replaced by an actively steering
government which takes responsibility for its citizens’ well-being and therefore intervenes
in social-economic life. This led to new tasks and organizational forms. Many municipali­
ties started departmentalizing the town clerk’s office. New departments (such as general
affairs, population, and social housing) were created, each with its own superior reporting
to the town clerk. New departments for bookkeeping and financial control were formed.
In 1897 Dutch local councils were given permission to make a profit on utility companies.
As a result, the number of new municipal telephone, gas, and electricity companies grew.
This was further increased by the municipalization of former private concessions.

In accordance with the model of the archiving context presented in the General
Introduction (Fig. 0.2), this resulted in new practices of documenting and archiving. The
classical methods of organizing information were no longer sufficient for an enterprising
and interventionist government.

4.10 The Code

42

Johan Zaalberg, like Jan van Hout three centuries earlier, reorganized records management
drastically. In 1890 Zaalberg became town secretary of Zaandam. He began by clearing the
42 Based on Eric Ketelaar, ‘Recordkeeping disorder of the chronologically arranged 19th-century records. For the future he envisaged
systems and office technology in Dutch public
administration, 1823-1950’, Jahrbuch für europäische
a new filing system and he looked for examples. Zaalberg got hold of the German
Verwaltungsgeschichte/Yearbook of European Katechismus der Registratur- und Archivkunde (1883) by Holtzinger, a manual that
administrative history 9 (1997): 213-22; and
Eric Ketelaar, ‘ “Control through communication” in a
describes the Sachaktenregistratur used in Germany since the 18th century. Documents
comparative perspective’, Archivaria 60 (2006): 71-89. concerning one subject were bound together in one file; the different files were arranged

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according to a systematic plan. To replace the traditional sewing of files, the German
firm of Stolzenberg put on the market file covers with a mechanical binder (Schnellhefter).
At least since 1898 these Stolzenberg files were imported into the Netherlands by the
Amsterdam firm of F.W. Salomons. Around 1900 Zaalberg saw one of these Stolzenberg
files and became interested. On the advice of Salomons, Zaalberg wrote to the towns of
Colmar and Muhlhausen in the Alsace (at that time German territory) asking for
information on the Stolzenberg filing system. Following the German example, the
Zaandam records were rearranged. To connect the older archives with the new ones,
Zaalberg pulled the documents that had been received since the Municipalities Act of 1851
out of the volumes in which they had been bound together. He had extracts typed from the
council minutes and letter books and filed these into the new system. The archives from
before 1850 were presented to the provincial council.

The newly created files were stored horizontally in drawers in filing cabinets manufactured
by Stolzenberg. Drawers and files were accessible via a filing plan in the form of a card
index. If necessary, an indicateur (listing all incoming and outgoing documents and the
actions taken) in the form of a card index could be made.

Zaalberg’s filing plan was not a German Registraturplan, but an Aktenplan. The former
registers the result of actions; the latter is a ‘forward-looking’43 arrangement of functions
and subjects preceding the actual filing. Zaalberg described his index as ‘the classification
table of all administrative subjects with which government is related’.44 The form of the files
was borrowed from the German Sachaktenregistratur. The form of the card index was
derived from an idea of J.C. Beth, who worked at the National Archives in The Hague.
Their function and structure, however, were inspired by Paul Otlet in Brussels.
43 Angelika Menne-Haritz, Schlüsselbegriffe der
Archivterminologie (Marburg: Archivschule Marburg, In 1895, Paul Otlet, together with Henri Lafontaine, had founded the Institut international
1992), p. 34.
de bibliographie (IIB). The main goal was putting together a universal bibliographic
44 J.A. Zaalberg, Het nieuwe registratuur-stelsel bij de
gemeente-administratiën (Amsterdam: L.J. Veen,
repository: an enormous card index of abstracts (ultimately 15 million cards!) of all books
1908), p. 17. and all journal articles published all over the world since the invention of the printing
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press. This repertory would make accessible the whole of the scientific, literary, and artistic
production of all times and in all countries. For the arrangement of the cards (on the
standard format propagated in the United States by Melvil Dewey) the IIB used Dewey’s
decimal code, created between 1873 and 1876. Otlet and Lafontaine expanded Dewey’s
code with signs for the relations between concepts. Thus they developed the Universal
Decimal Classification (UDC), the first edition being published between 1899 and 1905.

Otlet propagated this code not only for use in libraries but also for the classification of files.
Within the Association of Archivists in the Netherlands, many archivists were sceptical, to
say the least (see 12.6). Like Zaalberg, Otlet had been impressed by the German filing
system and the American card indexes, while favouring vertical filing. At Otlet’s request,
Zaalberg engineered the foundation of the Dutch Record Management Bureau
Association (Vereeniging Nederlandsch Registratuur Bureau, NRB) in 1909. Zaalberg
and the NRB promoted the new filing system and stimulated a number of municipalities
and companies that had joined the NRB to reorganize their records management. In the
same year, Zaalberg established a joint venture with Blikman and Sartorius, a firm of
importers and manufacturers of office equipment. The imports of this firm included
Walker’s loose-leaf books from England and the Leitz arch binders (Stehordner) from
Germany. In 1907 they had already introduced the Fortuna card index and vertical filing
system, the first system of this sort made in the Netherlands. The hardware, together with
Zaalberg’s case filing system and Otlet’s decimal classification, was marketed in the
Netherlands and the Netherlands East Indies.

The NRB was taken over by the Association of Dutch Municipalities (Vereeniging van
Nederlandsche Gemeenten, VNG) in 1922 and a new records management bureau (VNG
Registratuurbureau) was set up. Zaalberg, the idealistic and persistent promoter of case
files and the UDC, had to hand over its management to his former associate, the practical
and tactful P. Noordenbos. The VNG Registratuurbureau took over the NRB contracts
with 52 municipalities and managed to raise the number to 312 in ten years. In all these
municipalities the traditional chronological series of documents were succeeded by

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subject files arranged according to the UDC classification. Often the older archives were
rearranged retrospectively according to the new system. For example, in 1931 Utrecht
switched over to subject filing and rearranged the chronological archives of the preceding
20 years. At the outbreak of the Second World War the VNG filing system was used in 657
(out of 1,054) municipalities. Cities like Leeuwarden and Amsterdam changed their
records management systems as late as 1941 and 1945. The provincial government of
Utrecht adopted subject filing as late as 1954, rearranging the archives retrospectively back
to 1920.

Municipalities were regularly informed about changes and additions to the UDC filing
plan. These reflected developments in the wider world. For example, immediately after the
outbreak of the war in 1939, municipalities were instructed how to file ‘correspondence
about the detention of Dutchmen who might jeopardize the integrity of the territory’
(file under 351.755), ‘measures against deserters’ (file under 351.756), and others. This
continued during the German occupation, causing record managers to create a new
category in the filing plan in rubric 08, Personnel: ‘Forbidden positions’, for records
concerning ‘preventing undesirable elements’. Apparently, everyone understood that this
newspeak concerned the removal of Jews from the civil service.45

4.11 The Datapolis

As we have seen in 1.6, archiving people creates a ‘legible citizen’. That citizen/customer/
client is subject to the panoptical gaze of various governmental agencies and commercial
parties. The ‘datafication’ of people happens through the continuous and mostly
automated collection, organization, and combination of data concerning people’s activities
in society. Modern ‘smart cities’ are datafied cities; all activities, situations, incidents,
45 Johan Joor, Niet de instructie, doch het inzicht bouwt conversations, and interactions are being turned into data. Political scientist Albert Meijer
een goed archief: tachtig jaar overheidsdocumentatie
en administratieve organisatie (…) (Den Haag: Sdu
proposes the concept of the ‘datapolis’: a public governance perspective on the smart city
Uitgevers, 2011), p. 73.
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understood as a complex set of interactions between private, public and civil society
actors. They all have systems for collecting and processing data and they also
exchange and use data from other actors. Governance of the smart city is not only
about public structures but about influencing all these interactions in modern
cities.46

The datapolis can be seen as a new phase in the development (mentioned in 4.9.3) of a
government which profoundly intervenes in social life and, in doing so, increasingly needs
more information. According to the model of the archiving context (Fig. 0.2), datafication
is caused by changes in work processes due to changing societal notions of the role of
government. The changes in work processes cause changes in documenting and archiving.
Only the future can tell what the changes will be in the datapolis.

4.12 Conclusion
Archiving in 13th-century cities in the Netherlands focused on foundation charters,
privileges, treaties, and other charters. These were transcribed into the city book, allowing
the originals to be safely stored, most often in the local church. Another early documentary
genre was the book of statutes. For writing these books and other documents, the city
relied on religious institutions whose clerici acted as clerks to feudal lords and communes.

In the 14th century, textualization (verschriftelijking) prevailed in many cities, due to

various social and cultural causes. The first was the rapid increase in population and the
allied need of regulating social interaction. The city deemed accurate registration
necessary because citizens had other rights and obligations than non-citizens (residents),
and because the status of people played an important role in conflicts with or about people
from other cities. Also, for fiscal and military reasons, the magistrate had to know who
were citizens and who were not. Finally, the fees for granting citizenship had to be
46 Albert Meijer, ‘Datapolis: A public governance
perspective on “smart cities”’, Perspectives on public
accounted for. At first, the names of new citizens appear in the accounts of the town, but
management and governance, 1 (3) (2018): 195-206. sooner or later separate citizens registers were begun.

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Burghers wanted the town’s management to be publicly accountable, and this wish led to
financial control, accounting, and recording. Another factor for the ‘scriptural revolution’
was the extension of mercantile activities beyond the city. Trade and banking became
international and much of the oral communication was replaced by writing.

Next to the cartularies (registers with transcripts of received documents), registers of

outgoing charters began to be kept. Instead of the static keeping of charters, civic
authorities developed practices of dynamic recordkeeping in the administration of
executive, legislative, and judicial acts: registering new citizens, listing office-bearers,
soldiers and guild members, keeping track of the exploitation of town assets, statutes,
court proceedings, and judgments. To record all this, specialized registers were created,
often in connection with the differentiation of city government through the establishment
of specific offices. All these registers formed one intertextual genre system in which one
event (for example the admittance of a new burgess) was recorded in several different
registers. The citizen was made ‘legible’ in his or her different roles—in snapshots, and not
with a panoptical gaze as the 19th-century State was to introduce.

The accessibility of the registers was enhanced using new technologies such as foliation,
tabs (markers fixed to the fore-edge of a codex), and alphabetical tables. Further
innovations in recordkeeping stretching into the modern period were the work of
ingenious city clerks like Jan van Hout in Leiden and Johan Zaalberg in Zaandam.

Apart from the privileges and the series of bound registers, there was a mass of loose
papers stored in boxes and chests and hung on liassen. At first, the documents stayed at the
secretariat, but ultimately they were either destroyed or carried off to attics and cellars.
Time and again, city councils stressed the need to create order in this mass. An attempt to
reorder was made, but structurally little changed (see Amsterdam, Groningen,
Leeuwarden, Rotterdam, and Utrecht). Structural records management was not
introduced before the 20th century.
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Every burgher could request a search of the registers or an extract from them. Urban
records were communal texts often being read aloud and performed in public rituals. At
different moments in history, town records gained a special value as civic symbols and
touchstones of collective memory, making it possible to speak of a social ‘community of
records’. In the 19th century these communities founded Archives (with a capital A) as
institutions, independent (and detached!) from the records creating administration,
managing archival documents with a view to research by people other than the staff of the
records creating agency. Only a few Dutch archivists had anything to do with the ‘new’
archives created since 1812-1816 that were in the custody of the town clerk. This was to
change after the Second World War.

Consequently, it was a town clerk, Johan Zaalberg, who innovated the municipal
registratuur in the early 20th century. This may be seen as an answer to the challenges that
were the result of the city government becoming an enterprising and interventionist one.
In terms of the model of the archiving context (Fig. 0.2); mandate and business changed.
This entailed the need for different employees (people), other work processes, and
practices of archiving coupled with mechanization and Taylorian efficiency. New
instruments were shaped for an efficient records management that was becoming the
domain of a new professional, the registrator (see 12.6).

In medieval and premodern times, much of the urban administration was left to the
Church, the guilds, neighbourhood associations, and other agents. Strictly speaking,
the documents they created were not government documents, but rather governance
documents. The boundaries between the two were blurred. That is also the case today, as
an effect of privatization and outsourcing of public functions and the growing impact
business has on civic life. That public-private osmosis (or intrusion) is intensified by
modern information and communication technologies. These technologies subject the
‘legible’ citizen/customer/client to the panoptical gaze of various governmental agencies
and commercial parties. Modern ‘smart cities’ are cities in which all activities, situations,
incidents, conversations, and interactions are turned into data.

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125a kader

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A SOCIAL HISTORY OF
DUTCH ARCHIVES Chapter 5

Archiving Polders
and Commons
—
5.0 Introduction
5.1 Visitation with the
Dike Book
5.2 Peat Dredging
5.3 Draining
5.4 Caring for Water Board
Archives
5.5 Draining as a State
Enterprise
5.6 Commons and Communities
5.7 Conclusion

l Fig. 5.0 Map of the Beemster by

Pieter van der Keere, 1617-1622.
Rijksmuseum KAN 3566:364.

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Archiving Polders and Commons
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Archiving Polders and Commons
5.0 Introduction
Man has continually struggled to safeguard his living environment. In the Netherlands
this meant controlling water by building dikes against the sea, embanking rivers, and
making polders by draining lakes and fenlands. A polder is, technically speaking, a
composite of low-lying lands brought together by a need for better drainage. They are
surrounded by a dike enabling the maintenance of a more or less constant water-level.1
A polder is also a cooperative venture with its own rules, governance, and financial
organization. These cooperatives were not the only actors in water management. There
existed intricate relationships between regional and local authorities and officers of water
boards (waterschappen) who all maintained archives to support their work processes.
To what extent did their archiving practices differ from others, for example those in cities?

The first embankments were constructed in the early Middle Ages. According to an old
saying ‘he whom water may harm, must stem the flood’ (wie ’t water deert die ’t water
keert), owners and tenants of land in the polder had to contribute to the construction and
maintenance of the dike. How were these obligations and the corresponding rights
archived (5.1)?

Many polders in the western Netherlands were constructed by draining peat lakes, which
had been formed by peat dredging. In 5.2 and 5.5 I will show how peat dredging was
accompanied by archiving. Big reclamation projects in the 17th century were a profitable
investment for rich burghers, but led also to the improvement of water management and
an increase of productive agricultural land. These projects were paper-intensive (5.3).
1 Henk van der Linden, ‘History of the reclamation
of the western fenlands and of the organizations to The importance of archiving the polder was shown when the Association of Archivists in
keep them drained’, Proceedings of the symposium
on peat lands…, ed. H. de Bakker and M.W. van den
the Netherlands celebrated its centenary in 1991. Both the poster and the cover of the book
Berg (Wageningen: International Institute for Land accompanying the exhibition ‘Archive Treasures’ (Archiefschatten) showed the picture of
Reclamation and Improvement, 1982), pp. 42-73,
repr. in Land drainage and irrigation, ed. Salvatore
a 17th-century painting of Count William II of Holland granting the foundation charter to
Ciriacono (Aldershot etc.: Ashgate, 1998), pp. 101-33. the regional water board (hoogheemraadschap) of Rijnland in 1255. The painter had to use

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his imagination, but the charter he painted is real: it is still preserved in the archives of
Rijnland, which are the subject of section 5.4.

The western part of the country was (and is) predominantly the area of polders, whereas
the eastern, north-eastern and southern parts were dominated by commons
(markegronden, covered in 5.6). These were large sandy grounds and heathlands where the
commoners exercised collective rights, such as logging, cutting sods, or grazing. Out of a
total of nearly 1,000 commons that existed at one time, about 700 were in the current
provinces of Drenthe, Gelderland, and Overijssel.

2 M.H.V. van Amstel-Horák, ‘De morgenboeken

5.1 Visitation with the Dike Book

van Rijnland. Drie eeuwen ongeregeldheid’, Leids 2
Jaarboekje (1985): 150-79; M.H.V. van Amstel-
Horák, ‘De Rijnlandse morgenboeken, een unieke
bron uit het pre-kadastrale tijdperk ‘, Holland
26 (1994): 87-111; J.L. van der Gouw, ‘Morgen- The dike forced consensus and cooperation: ‘he who refuses to maintain the dike must
morgensgelijk. Dijkplicht in Hendrik Ido-Ambacht en
Schildmanskinderenambacht anno 1470’, Vereeniging
leave’ (wie niet wil dijken die moet wijken). Maintenance of the dike was done in kind:
tot uitgaaf der bronnen van het oud-vaderlandsche everyone had to see to a parcel of the dike with his own labour and materials. Everyone’s
recht. Verslagen en Mededeelingen 13 (1971): 491-
522; J.L. van der Gouw, ‘Het dijkcollege van de
share (hoefslag or dijkslag: a homestead’s share, a section of a dike, dam, or canal that is
Zwijndrechtsche waard in 1568’, Stichting tot uitgaaf allotted to the owner of a parcel of land for maintenance) was recorded in a special register
der bronnen van het oud-vaderlandse recht. Verslagen
en Mededelingen. Nieuwe reeks 3 (1982): 31-86;
(the hoefslag book). This share was based on the area and the location (near to the dike or
J.L. van der Gouw, ‘Rechtsbronnen van Heukelum’, at some distance from it) of one’s lot, and sometimes also on the quality of the soil. The
Stichting tot uitgaaf der bronnen van het oud-
vaderlandse recht. Verslagen en Mededelingen.
more land one kept, the greater the dike parcel one had to maintain.
Nieuwe reeks 4 (1984): 5-47; R.C. Hol, ‘Malder-
malderzaadsgelijk. Dijkplicht van de Baarbroekse dijk
onder Angerlo, anno 1480’, Nederlands archievenblad
The condition of the dike was inspected a few times a year by the dike-reeve and the
84 (1980): 330-47; Milja van Tielhof and Petra J.E.M. members of the polder board (dijkgraaf en heemraden) and by the sheriff and the members
van Dam, Waterstaat in stedenland.
Het hoogheemraadschap van Rijnland voor
of the local council (schout en ambachtsbewaarders). A few weeks before the visitation
1857 (Utrecht: Matrijs, 2006); Siger Zeischka, (schouw), the dike-reeve and polder board proclaimed which improvements the
Minerva in de polder. Waterstaat en techniek in
het Hoogheemraadschap van Rijnland 1500-1865
landholders had to make. At the visitation, all landholders had to be present, each on the
(Hilversum: Verloren, 2007). See also the glossary stretch of the dike for which he was responsible. Until far into the 16th century the
and bibliography on https://web.archive.org/
web/20190425205822/http://www.collective-action.
procedure was largely verbal, with traditional legal formulas being recited by the dike-
info/, archived 25 April 2019. reeve and board members. The dike-reeve started the procedure by asking aloud all
127a | 5 |
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present ‘once, twice, three, and four times whether the time of the day was right to inspect
the dike, according to the law of the land’. Each time the foreman of the polder board had to
give his approval using the traditional formulas. The dike-reeve then proclaimed peace,
forbidding unrest. Upon the pronouncement by the foreman of the board ‘I say that you
have levied the inspection according to the law of the land’, the dike-reeve, with the
hoefslag book in his hand, approached the first man standing on his dike parcel, asking him
to confirm his name, the amount of land, and the size of the dike parcel. Then the foreman
of the polder board would state whether he ‘praises or blames’ the dike. If he were to find
fault with the upkeep of the dike, the dike-reeve would ask the board to inflict a fine. The
gathering then moved to the second dike parcel and continued all along the dike. Finally,
the visitation was closed, probably with drinks and a meal.

The hoefslag book was kept in the archive chest of the polder board but had to be present
at the inspection of the dike, exposed to all weathers. No wonder that after a few years the
book was in bad shape—soiled with moisture and mud, sometimes by liquor stains as
well—and had to be replaced. When the register, because of all changes and additions such
as in ownership and tenure, had become less usable over time, the book was replaced by
a new one. Of the medieval hoefslag books, only a few have therefore been preserved.
Moreover, the registers lost their value once the maintenance of the dike (and other
facilities like sluices, bridges, and water mills) had been made common—that is, that
maintenance was paid no longer in kind but in money. This monetization of a physical
obligation happened in Holland and Zeeland in the 16th century, in Gelderland in the 17th,
in Friesland as late as the 18th century. The last physical obligation of landholders was
abolished as late as 1986: this was the duty to participate in the ‘dike army’ that had to serve
in emergencies such as extremely high water and floating ice.

In the district of Rijnland (the area around Leiden) the monetary contributions were
registered in a ledger (the word comes from Dutch legger) specifying the number (tal) of
acres (morgentalen; one morgen equals approximately two acres). Quite often the hoefslag
book was adapted and took on a second life as a ledger of morgentalen. In the 1530s

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Rijnland’s steward discovered major differences between the registered area and the real
area in several polders. A new assessment was undertaken based on a survey made by
sworn surveyors. When the surveyor started his work, the polder board and the
landholders had to demonstrate the boundaries, the area, and to furnish the names and
place of residency of owners and tenants with written evidence (mit goeden bescheyde).
The surveyors’ reports were textual maps. The Court of Holland established the new
morgentalen in 1550; they were then registered in new ledgers, the morgenboeken, which
were kept until the 1850s.

The ledgers were kept up to date. Therefore, every transfer of property, after having been
registered by the local court of aldermen (schepenen, see 6.2.1), had to be registered again
by the polder board. The ledger was taken out of the chest only to be opened when all
members of the board were present; sometimes the sheriff had a key as well.

Each year the secretary of the polder board made a valuation list (kohier; in Zeeland known
as vergaarboek or collecting book) from the ledger. This was topographically organized,
listing the total amount of contributions for all properties for each landowner. Whereas
the ledger was a hefty register, the valuation list was a small volume, easy for the collector
to take along. In Rijnland the regional water board ordained that every leap year an extract
from the ledger had to be submitted. In case the ledger got lost in a fire, flood, or war, a
reconstruction could thus be based on the extract. Rijnland kept the administration of the
larger water management structures and apportioned the maintenance costs among the
local councils and polder boards. Rijnland also kept financial control: the polder boards
had to hand in a copy of the annual accounts for auditing.

At the top of Fig. 5.2 is the situation as recorded in the 1540s: the original owner was
Jacob van Noorden, the tenant (huyrman) was Claes Dircxz, and the area measured 7
morgen and 366 roeden (16 acres). The names that follow are the subsequent owners and
users: Reynout van Oij, followed by Adriaen Taets van Amerongen, the husband of
(Reynout’s daughter) Margareta van Oij van Treslong (Treslong was her mother’s name).
128a | 5 |
PAGE CHAPTER ARCHIVING PEOPLE
Archiving Polders and Commons surveyor’s assessment (2 copies)

polder board hoogheemraadschap

Rijnland

ledger (morgen book) every leap year:

extract from the ledger

valuation list

Fig. 5.1 The Rijnland morgenboek system, after M.H.V. van Amstel-Horák,
‘De morgenboeken van Rijnland’, in Bronnen betreffende de registratie van
onroerend goed in middeleeuwen en ancien régime, ed. G.A.M. van Synghel
(Den Haag: Instituut voor Nederlandse geschiedenis, 2001), p. 243.

Fig. 5.2 Morgenboek of Koudekerk, 1628. Hoogheemraadschap van Rijnland,

Leiden, oud archief Rijnland (OAR), inv. nr. 5283a.

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They sold the plot to the current owner, Bruijn Jacobsz (according to the register of
conveyances of Koudekerk the purchase took place in 1621). This is an extract submitted in
the leap year 1628 to the hoogheemraadschap Rijnland. The original morgenboek would
have been updated regularly, often with the date of each transfer.

In the province of Zeeland, field books (veldboeken) had the same function as the registers
of morgentalen in Rijnland. The books were also called perambulators (overlopers or
ommelopers) because the surveyor recorded the data while walking a fixed route through
the village. In Groningen they had sluice tax (zijlschot) ledgers; in the middle of the 18th
century complaints about authorities tampering these ledgers played a role in the political
agitation against abuse of power. Stadholder William IV intervened and gave the High
Court of Groningen more authority to control the polder boards (in Groningen: zijlvesten).
The polder boards were obliged to submit their ledgers to the court to do the accounting,
and their ledgers were open to public inspection (1755) so that anyone could verify
whether the ledgers had been tampered with.

Originally the morgen books only served to levy polder contributions. From the 16th
century onwards, these registers served an added purpose in the district of Rijnland: the
levy of land tax (verponding). Furthermore, separate assessment lists pertaining to
buildings were made (see 8.3). It often happened that a registration which was originally
set up for a particular use obtained another purpose after some time. In the above case,
this even happened circuitously; after the introduction of a national fiscal system in 1806,
the morgen books were no longer used for the levy of the land tax but continued to be used
for their original purpose (assessing polder contributions) for another 40 years. All of
Rijnland’s morgen books were digitized and have been made available on the Internet.

The ledgers and registers constituted only part of the administration of the polder board,
which was already fairly limited. Many affairs were handled orally, especially in the smaller
polders. However, a written administration was often introduced in places where regents
from the towns exercised great influence as lord of the manor and owner of vast areas of
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polder land. These landowners lived outside the polder and had to be informed by writing.
The need for written administration diminished in the 18th century when the urban elite
retreated from the polders and rural landowners regained control.

Even so, archiving in Rijnland expanded, not only because the business of the hoogheem­
raad­­schap increased, but also because of changes in the nature of information needs and
the way that information was collected. The engineers could be said to have brought about
these new developments because they realized the value of systematically collecting
information to underpin policies regarding water defence and water management. An
example of the sort of information they wanted was the registration of temperature and
weather conditions at Rijnland’s office in Halfweg three times a day between 1735 and
1866.3 These observations are among the oldest meteorological records in Europe.

5.2 Peat Dredging

4

Peat was already produced on a commercial scale in the 14th century. In the 16th century
the need for fuel for industrial and domestic use had grown to such an extent that cutting
raised and dried bog peat (hoogveen) was no longer sufficient and was replaced by
3 Charles Jeurgens, ‘Statistics as an instrument in the slagturven. This process required dredging fenland peat (laagveen) from below water level.
struggle against water 1790-1850’, in: The statistical
mind in a pre-statistical era. The Netherlands 1750-
In Utrecht and Holland roughly 200 hectares of land were turned into artificial lakes
1850, ed. Paul M.M. Klep and Ida H. Stamhuis annually between 1600 and 1700, totalling approximately 61,000 hectares. A large part of
(Amsterdam: Aksant, 2002), p. 304.
this artificial lake system was later drained. Today there are extensive peat lakes such as the
4 M.A.W. Gerding, Vier eeuwen turfwinning. De
verveningen in Groningen, Friesland, Drenthe en
Loosdrecht and Vinkeveen lakes. In the north, in Drenthe, Groningen, Friesland, and
Overijssel tussen 1550 en 1950 (’t Goy-Houten: Overijssel, peat was produced from around 42,000 hectares of fenland and 100,000
HES, 1995); Arjan van ’t Riet, Meeten, boren en
besien. Turfwinning in de buitenrijnse ambachten
hectares of raised bog peat between 1617 and 1950, about a third of which was produced
van het Hoogheemraadschap van Rijnland 1680- in the 17th and 18th centuries.
1800 (Hilversum: Verloren, 2005); Arjan van ’t Riet,
‘Turfwinning’, in Geschiedenis van het Groene Hart,
ed. Adrie de Boer et al. (Zwolle: Waanders, 2011), Permission (consent) for peat dredging was needed from the lord of the manor (ambachts­
pp. 93-112; J.W. de Zeeuw, ‘Peat and the Dutch Golden
Age. The historical meaning of energy attainability’,
heer) and the regional water board. Consent was awarded after interested parties had been
AAG Bijdragen 21 (1978): 3-31. summoned by promulgation in church (kerkgebod) to voice any objection, and after an

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agreement had been reached. The consent specified that a sworn surveyor had to draw up
a map in triplicate. One copy was for the local council, another copy for the regional water
board, and a third one for the lord of the manor. The latter was compensated for the loss of
tithes from the land that was turned into water. The hoogheemraadschap of Rijnland had to
be compensated as well, as no taxes could be levied from land that had become water.
This became an acute problem when owners abandoned the parcels that had been turned
into water, thereby avoiding both taxes and the obligation to contribute to future drainage
of the lakes. The dire war years around 1672 were especially problematic in this regard.
In 1680 Rijnland therefore introduced the stuiver fee (stuivergeld) (1 stuiver is 1/20 of a
guilder); this amounted to one or two stuivers per square roede (approximately 152 square
feet) of peatland. A proper administration was important. In the so-called stuiver letter
(stuiverbrief ) the amount of peat produced from a particular plot and the paid stuiver fees
were recorded annually. Each local council drew up an assessment list (verveningskohier, a
copy of which went to Rijnland) recording the awarded licences and the amounts of peat.
Every year, the local council transferred the stuiver fees to the regional water board, which
invested the income in bonds. From the interest on the bonds, the taxes charged on the
dredged parcels were paid. The local council received a proof (renversaal) of the bond,
which had to be kept carefully because at the back the annual payment of the tax was
recorded. As archivist Ludy Giebels writes, this cumbersome system required great
‘endurance of the documents’; the recordings sometimes stretched over a century or more
(see also 8.2.1).5 When drainage was undertaken many years later, Rijnland could subsidize
the project from the invested stuiver fees. The Rijnland system of stuiver fees was adopted
elsewhere in Holland and Utrecht and practised until well into the 20th century.

The entrepreneurs in peat dredging often worked as a company (compagnieschap),

recruiting seasonal workers, mainly from Germany. The peat was dredged, then dried, trod
out by women using their feet, and cut into blocks. The peat could be transported fast and
cheap, thanks to the famous Dutch network of natural waterways and canals. Upon arrival
5 L. Giebels, ‘Het waarborgfonds van het
Hoogheemraadschap van Rijnland’, Holland 21 (1989):
in town, sworn female peat packers (turftonsters) assessed the amount of peat (for taxing)
160-80. and female and male peat carriers (turfdragers) carried the peat to the peat market.
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5.3 Draining
Archiving Polders and Commons 6

The draining of the Beemster lake 25 kilometres north of Amsterdam was completed in
1612, and the lake had become a polder (Fig. 5.0). In 1999 the Beemster was registered by
UNESCO as a World Heritage site. Visitors then and now admire the almost architectural
design of the polder and its rational ordering by a symmetric grid of canals and roads. Such
a grid of squares had been promoted by engineer Simon Stevin for the layout of fortresses,
cities, and houses. The grid indicated rational order, harmony, and legibility, Elizabeth
Sutton writes. She argues that the rationalization of a space such as the Beemster reflected
part of the increasing rationalization of Dutch society. Among the 15 originators of the
Beemster reclamation were rich Amsterdam merchants such as Dirck and Hendrik van Os
and Arent ten Grootenhuis, all of whom had been among the founders of the United East
India Company (VOC) and its predecessors. They were familiar with Stevin’s interest
tables, his manuals on architecture and bookkeeping (see 8.2.3), and his wiskonst (Stevin’s
6 G.J. Borger, ‘De Beemster—ideaal of compromis’, in neologism for mathematics, but literally meaning the art of what is certain), a mathematics
Geordend landschap; 3000 jaar ruimtelijke ordening in
Nederland, ed. R.M. van Heeringen et al. (Hilversum:
which considered the whole first before subdividing or parcelling.7 The reclamation of the
Verloren, 2004), pp. 75-102; Alette Fleischer, ‘The Beemster costed 1.6 million guilders (the equivalent of 54 million euro).
Beemster Polder. Conservative invention and
Holland’s great pleasure garden’, in The mindful hand.
Inquiry and invention from the late Renaissance to Reclamation projects like the Beemster one led to the improvement of water management
early industrialisation, ed. Lissa Roberts, Simon
Schaffer, and Peter Dear (Amsterdam: Koninklijke
and an increase of productive agricultural land. Rich burghers saw such a project as a
Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen, 2007), profitable investment for their surplus capital. The total amount of money involved in land
pp. 145-66; Elizabeth A. Sutton, Capitalism and
cartography in the Dutch Golden Age (Chicago/
reclamation in Holland north of Amsterdam between 1598 and 1643 is estimated at
London: University of Chicago Press, 2015); Han van between 9.5 and 13 million guilders, one and a half to two times the starting capital of the
Zwet, Lofwaerdighe dijckagies en miserabele polders.
Een financiële analyse van landaanwinningsprojecten
VOC in 1602. On a slightly smaller scale, merchants in the western Netherlands invested
in Hollands Noorderkwartier, 1597-1643 (Hilversum: in peat production in the north of the country.
Verloren, 2009).
7 Wim Nijenhuis, ‘Stevin’s grid city and the Maurice
conspiracy,’, in Early modern urbanism and the grid.
For each drainage project records were important, as such a project
Town planning in the Low Countries in international
context. Exchanges in theory and practice 1550-1800,
ed. Piet Lombaerde and Charles van den Heuvel
entailed extensive paperwork: information regarding the lake, patents, lawsuits,
(Turnhout: Brepols, 2011), pp. 45-62. minutes, charts, correspondence, decrees, general announcements flowed in and

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from the board’s office. Collecting data, making decisions, reporting back to the
other stakeholders and filing all the paperwork was in fact a mercantile invention
that made Amsterdam an important information and commercial exchange.8

We can identify the genre systems (see the General Introduction), using the model
scenario of reclamation provided by Han van Zwet.

The originators (dikers, in Dutch bedijkers) were united by contract into a company
(sociëteit or compagnie), a legal form in use in shipping and trade since the 15th century
(see 7.2). They committed themselves to share the costs of preparation and drainage.
Sworn surveyors made a map of the lake that was to be drained and valued the land. This
led to a budget plan. Thereafter, interested people could sign up as a participant for a
determined sum. The average participation in the Beemster was 11,000 guilders (in the
VOC shareholders bought an average of 3,215 guilders in shares!). They were mostly very
wealthy investors, but just as in the case of the VOC, there were also many smaller
investors among them.

The costs of preparation and drainage were shared among the participants in phases, the
company’s treasurer serving an assessment notice (aanslagbiljet) on them each time.
The dikers approached the States of Holland with a petition for letters patent (octrooi).
Having received the advice of the Audit Office of the domains (Rekenkamer der domeinen),
the States granted the letters patent. At the registry of the States the practice was to rework
the petition and the advice from the Audit Office into a draft from which the letters patent
were made and handed out to the petitioner. Letters patent (for diking, inventions, printed
books, etc.) were granted with the restriction that the rights of third parties had to be
considered. Therefore, third parties were summoned and engaged in negotiations.
Owners of adjacent lands, towns, and other interested parties had to be compensated
by compromise or in cash ‘to their satisfaction’ (contentement). The contentment clause
protected the rights of third parties, but ‘it also protected investors in drainage from
8 Fleischer, ‘The Beemster Polder’, p. 153. litigation. If investors and those affected by drainage could not reach an agreement,
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members of the Court of Holland arbitrated.’9 The negotiations (in which maps played an
important role) and agreements involved a lot of paperwork, but sometimes assurances
were made which one preferred not to put in writing. Similarly, the advice from experts
in mill building and drainage was by no means always recorded in writing.

Land was bought or exchanged for the construction of the enclosing dike (ringdijk) and
the ring canal. Specifications (bestek) were drawn, advertised and the drainage
contracted out in subprojects.

Fig. 5.3 Specifications (bestek) for constructing

a part of the Beemster dike, 1609.
Waterland Archives, Polder- en dorpsbestuur
Beemster (0205), inv. nr. 1186.

9 Piet van Cruyningen, ‘Dealing with drainage. State

regulation of drainage projects in the Dutch Republic,
France, and England during the 16th and 17th
centuries’, Economic history review 68 (2015): 426.

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The contracts with the contractors (who employed thousands of workers) were very
detailed. Upon completion, surveyors were called in again. Subsequently, the ring dike had
to be inspected by the regional water board. As soon as the ring dike was completed,
pumping could start. Windmills for pumping were built by highly specialized mill builders
and according to specifications. In the Beemster (7,100 hectares), 21 mills were needed
for draining, plus 29 mills for regular water management in the polder. Many mill builders
proposed new techniques and installations, from which the polder board had to choose.

When the draining of the Beemster lake was finished, the participants organized a festive
meal in a tent in the middle of the polder on 4 July 1612, at which Stadholder Prince
Maurice of Nassau and his half-brother Prince Frederick Henry were also present.
After this party, the allotment of the polder followed according to the allotment plan
(verkavelingsplan). Allotment ditches were dug, and exploitation started. The surveyor
made a new map that was kept up to date regularly: a living document.

The works for roads, bridges, and sluices were contracted out and executed. The allot­
ments were distributed among the participants according to the allotment conditions
(kavelcondities) and surveyed again. Others who were not members of the company had
the chance to buy allotments. The result was recorded in the allotment register
(kavelregister). Every landholder received a map on which his property was recorded.
The allotment register and the allotment conditions were almost always published
(sometimes after a few years), joined by the letters patent and a map of the polder. This
map was meant for promotion, unlike the preceding maps that were predominantly tools
of work (although the first map was aimed at interesting prospective investors).

The dikers gained full ownership of the land in the polder. They formed the board of chief
landholders (hoofdingelanden), to whom the dike-reeve and members of the polder board
were accountable. Hoofdingelanden appointed the members of the polder board, as well as
the treasurer and the secretary (the former earned three to five times more than the latter).
The dike-reeve was appointed by the provincial States.
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5.4 Caring for Water Board Archives
In 5.1 I pointed out that the administration of a polder was not very extensive. The polder
archives were generally kept in a chest or cupboard in the meeting room of the polder
house or the town hall (see 11.1.3). Until the 20th century, the polder archives were often
stored in a cupboard at the inn where polder board and landholders met, or the secretary
kept the archives at home. Much has been lost.

At regional level, systematic archiving by the regional water boards of Rijnland and
Delfland began quite late only, in the 15th century, possibly in connection with the
professionalization and bureaucratization introduced by the Burgundian dukes (see 3.1).
At first, as we have seen in previous chapters, people were concerned mainly about the
charters and other muniments. Those of Delfland water board were in the custody of the
city magistrate of Delft, who kept them safely in the main church.10 In 1449, when a
conflict arose with the neighbouring water board of Schieland, Schieland was not satisfied
with copies but insisted on seeing the original charters. Delfland therefore wanted to take
its documents from their depository. The city magistrate refused, claiming that the custody
of Delfland’s charters had been granted to the City by the counts of Holland. Delfland took
Delft to court. Pending judgment, the small coffer with Delfland’s charters was deposited
with the Court of Holland in The Hague. In 1453, however, the Great Council of Mechelen
ordered that the coffer be returned to the church and that the keys should be given to
the members of the Delfland water board (heemraden), who would be free to check the
charters and to make copies. The Delft city aldermen had to be present when the
10 Th. F. J. A. Dolk, Geschiedenis van het hoogheemraad­ heemraden wanted to take an original document out of the church for any time. Both
schap Delfland (’s-Gravenhage: Nijhoff, 1939), pp. 28-
42; Rechtsbronnen der vier hoofdwaterschappen van
parties gained in this power game; the heemraden acquired access, the city kept custody.
het vasteland van Zuid-Holland: (Rijnland, Delfland,
Schieland, Woerden), ed. S.J. Fockema Andreae
(Utrecht: Kemink, 1951), pp. 59-76.
Rijnland began archiving its registers of ordinances and licences in 1434; the series of
11 G. ’t Hart, Gids van Rijnlands archieven, vol. 1 (Leiden:
proceedings of the board starts in 1444.11 The archive chest with muniments was kept at
Hoogheemraadschap Rijnland, 1975). home by the oldest heemraad, and from 1535 by the clerk who then also began archiving

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the loose papers. Beginning in 1508 the annual accounts were stored in a chest at the
Court of Holland, which audited the accounts. After 1545 Rijnland kept a copy of the
accounts for its own use. In 1578 the board bought a mansion in Leiden to serve as its
meeting chamber and as a home for the dike-reeve. After the acquisition, they immediately
had a so-called iron office (ijzeren comptoir) built, a muniment room closed by a heavy
ironclad door (Fig. 5.4). On the door it says:

This office has been established here by a reasoned decision

Against force and fire, for secret affairs
By the high heemraden of Rijnland themselves
Who have caused it to be made strong

Dit comptoer is hier geset met guet verstant

Tegens ghewelt en brant voor secreete saecken
Doer den hoogen heemraet van Rijnlant
Die ’t metterhant sterck hebben doen maecken.

In this room a carpenter made a big cupboard, a muniments chest, and two large boards
with pegs for hanging the files (liassen, see 3.2).

In 1610 it was ordained that even the reeve and the members of the board no longer had
free access to the iron office. Only the clerk could enter freely. When the board needed any
documents, the clerk provided copies. Those documents that were used frequently were
kept in a large cupboard with compartments and drawers in the meeting chamber.

However, archives were stored as well in other places, in chests and cupboards, as
Fig. 5.4 Door of the iron office in Rijnland evidenced by an inventory made between 1626 and 1631 and supplemented many times.
House, 1578, from G. ’t Hart, Rijnland’s huis
1578-1978 (Leiden: Hoogheemraadschap van That inventory was alphabetically arranged according to the names of the polders and local
Rijnland, 1979), fig. 5 (photo Van der Plas, councils (ambachten). Numbers on the files and references to their place in the cupboards
Wassenaar). facilitated findability. In 1721 a muniment room was established in Rijnland House in
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Leiden to store documents for which there was no storage space in the iron office. A year
later the clerk was given an assistant whose work included the management of the
archives. This appointment was probably related to the increase in tasks, particularly the
administration of the stuiver fees and the bonds, mentioned in 5.2.

The 16th-century repository was used until 1933, when a new repository was built in the
garden of Rijnland House. The new repository stayed in use until 2000, when Rijnland
moved to an entirely new office building. However, the iron office can still be seen when
visiting Rijnland House in Leiden.

The water boards at regional and local levels were public bodies, recognized in the first
constitution of the Kingdom of the Netherlands (1814). They were responsible for their
archives management, and this continued under the successive archives acts. The larger
water boards appointed their own archivist (this was done in 1859 in Rijnland) and they
often kept the archives of the smaller polders within their territory as well. Some decades
ago the merger of water boards into larger units began. In 1950, the country numbered
2,500 water boards, today there are 21 (in the same period the number of municipalities
decreased from 1,015 to 380). That amalgamation had consequences for the archives.
For example, the Rivierenland water board (stretching across parts of four provinces) has
474 predecessors.12 Their archives are kept in Tiel, Nijmegen, Heusden, and Gorinchem.
However, they are accessible via one Internet portal. Six of the 21 water boards have their
12 https://web.archive.org/web/20190508223942/
https://regionaalarchiefrivierenland.nl/waterschap-
own archivist, the others operate in a joint venture with local or regional public archives.
rivierenland, archived 8 May 2019.
13 C. Jeurgens, De Haarlemmermeer. Een studie in
5.5 Draining as a State Enterprise
13
planning en beleid 1836-1858 (Amsterdam: NEHA,
1991); A.J. Thurkow, ‘The draining of the lakes in
the Netherlands (18th-19th centuries)’, in Eau et
développement dans l’Europe moderne, ed. Salvatore
Ciriacono (Paris: Fondation Maison des sciences de
Interest in draining diminished considerably by the middle of the 17th century. Between
l’homme, 2004), pp. 103-16. 1665 and 1790 the reclaimed area (15,788 hectares) was less than half of what had been
14 Jan de Vries and Ad van der Woude, The first modern drained between 1540 and 1665 (32,666 hectares).14 Rich burghers found other objects for
economy. Success, failure, and perseverance of the
Dutch economy, 1500-1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge
investment, and only in the 18th century was their role in drainage taken over by public
University Press, 1997), ch. 2.3.1. bodies such as local authorities. The latter limited themselves to the drainage proper and

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left (following new economic ideas) the exploitation to private owners. For example, the
city of Rotterdam and the province of Holland each drained several polders in the 18th
century. For every project a special board of commissioners was established, each forming
their own archives. After the draining, the new lands were sold. This practice was—with
some exceptions—followed in other drainages (droogmakerijen). Drainage had become a
government affair. After 1795 central government carried out big drainage projects,
particularly at places were (as the poet Joost van den Vondel wrote in 1641) the ‘water wolf ’
was threatening the safety of inhabitants. Drainage as a state enterprise knew other
information flows and other archiving practices than in the past, as can be demonstrated
with a case study of the draining of Lake Haarlem (Haarlemmermeer, 18,100 hectares).

The Haarlemmermeer had been formed out of peat lakes dating from the Middle Ages
and the continuous erosion at the borders of the lake (Fig. 5.5). In the 18th century the lake
was two and a half times bigger than the Beemster. Plans for draining (using 112 windmills)
did not materialize, partly because of the opposition from the cities of Leiden and
Haarlem, and partly because of external factors in the 1740s such as an agricultural crisis
and the involve­­ment of the Republic in the War of Austrian Succession. In 1837, King
William I established a State commission charged with designing the draining of the
Haarlemmer­meer. The plan was reviewed by the ministers of the Interior and Finance,
who, at the King’s request, had two committees organize trials with steam engines. Finally,
the plan had to be approved and enacted by Parliament. This happened in 1839. The
drainage was entrusted to a ‘committee of management and control’ (commissie van beheer
en toezicht) on which the King and the Minister of the Interior had great influence. Not
before 1858, when the drainage and the allotment were finished, could the committee
terminate its affairs.

In 1839 the committee (having among its members two engineers from the Department
of Water Works) started making the specifications, budget plans, and drawings of the ring
dike and the ring canal. These were contracted and carried out by contractors employing
thousands of ‘polder workmen’. Just as with the draining projects in the 17th century,
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all sorts of people came forward with plans and inventions requesting a reaction from the
committee. The committee members had trials done with machines and other equipment.
They went to Cornwall to observe the use of steam to pump water out of the mines.

Fig. 5.5 Map of the water boards of Rijnland, Amstelland and Woerden, published by Isaac Tirion,
1745. Erfgoed Leiden, PV 70294.

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Everything was reported in writing. The Ministry of Defence played a part in the
information network; it should be possible to inundate the drained Haarlemmermeer
quickly in times of war, in order to defend Amsterdam. This concern influenced the
allotment plan of 1845. The Ministry of Finance was responsible for financing the whole
project, in particular for issuing a loan of eight million guilders, in six portions between
1840 and 1849. Pumping started in 1848. In 1853 the first parcels of reclaimed land (3,150
hectares) were auctioned. The remainder (13,692 hectares) followed between 1854 and
1855. The committee ensured the construction of roads and two villages. The polder had
its own polder board and municipal council.

According to Charles Jeurgens, who wrote his PhD thesis on the history of the Haarlem­
mer­meer drainage, the committee of control was convinced that a plan could only come to
fruition if all parties concerned were to be involved in the development. This project was
indeed an almost literal example of what was later called ‘the polder model’ (see chapter
13). Such a ‘sociocratic’ working method implies more consultations, more exchange of
information before decisions are reached, and more archiving.

In 1886 the Zuiderzee Association began lobbying for the draining of the Zuiderzee.
The Zuiderzee Act of 1918 provided the basis for constructing the Afsluitdijk (turning the
sea into a lake, the IJsselmeer), the reclamation of the Wieringermeer, and the formation of
the Noordoostpolder, Oost-Flevoland, and Zuid-Flevoland. In the 1930s plans were made
to establish a Zuiderzee archives to be deposited with the Nederlands Economisch-
Historisch Archief (see 7.7). These archival plans (revived in the 1960s) came to nothing.15
However, following the creation of the new province of Flevoland (1986), a State Archives
was established in the provincial capital in 1992. The archives of the various institutions
that had been involved in the Zuiderzee works since 1918 were transferred to the new
State Archives (now the Flevoland Archives).

15 Roxana Chandali, ‘Het Zuiderzee-archief ’, Nederlands

As mentioned before, since the 18th century drainage was largely considered a govern­
archievenblad 96 (1992): 22-7. mental responsibility. Still, draining by private parties was possible. These endeavours
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were governed by Napoleonic regulations dating from the years 1807 to 1811, which
remained in force until their replacement by an Act of Parliament in 1904. Originators had
to apply to the State for a concession. Together with the application, maps, drawings, and a
budget plan had to be submitted. These were open to public inspection allowing interested
parties to oppose the plan. The Provincial Executive advised the Crown and ensured that
the drainage was carried out in accordance with the concession. The last time the act of
1904 was applied was in 2008 when the Port of Rotterdam Ltd. requested a concession for
reclamation of land in order to expand the Maasvlakte (created in the 1960s). In 2009 the
act was revoked; the Water Act is now in force.

5.6 Commons and Communities

16

Control of the commons (markegronden), situated mostly in the east and north-east, was
in the hands of the collectivity of commoners (markegenoten) or of a natural or legal
person. Among the latter could be subsumed the meenten in the east and the gemeynten in
the south.

The markegenoten assembled, usually once a year, constituting the markegericht or holtink,
chaired by the justiciary of the commons (markerichter). The markerichter was elected.
16 Jan Luiten van Zanden, ‘Chaloner memorial lecture. However, there were many commons where the office of justiciary was connected to a
The paradox of the marks. The exploitation of
commons in the Eastern Netherlands, 1250-1850’,
certain homestead (erf) or a noble house. The commons assembly had judicial authority
The agricultural history review (1999): 125-44; (hence the name markegericht, or commons bench). Just as in the polders (see 5.1) the
Peter Hoppenbrouwers, ‘The use and management
of commons in the Netherlands. An overview’, in
procedure was almost always oral, with traditional legal formulas being recited by the
The management of common land in north west Europe markerichter and the landowners. Most commons gradually changed over to writing down
c. 1500-1850, ed. Martina De Moor, Paul Warde, and
Leigh Shaw-Taylor (Turnhout: Brepols, 2002),
the rights and duties of the commoners in a commons book (markeboek). As early as 1300
pp. 87-112; René van Weeren and Tine de Moor, the ordinances of the commons of Berkum (province Overijssel) were set out in writing.
‘Controlling the commoners. Methods to prevent,
detect, and punish free-riding on Dutch commons in
The marke Wesepe (Overijssel) decided in 1603 to make a new markeboek into which the
the early modern period’, Agricultural history review old papers (cedulen) were copied; from now on the book would be used to record all.17
62, no 2 (2014): 256-77.
Future landowners ,the book sets out, would not only be able to verify what their
17 J. de Graaf, Markeregt van Wesepe (Kampen: Zalsman,
1967), pp. 9-10.
forefathers had decided for the common profit, but they could also read and accept as

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binding the decisions from the past, just as if their ancestors had confirmed these with
their signature. Thus, the markeboek was valued as memory and as evidence.

The markeboek contained the minutes of meetings, lists of shareholders, financial data,
and by-laws concerning the organization of the commons and the use of the common
lands. By-lawswhich in fact concerned the village community (buurschap—a marke could
encompass several villages), were also implemented, for example those regarding the
visitation of the dikes and the maintenance of waters and roads. In Drenthe, separate
associations of commoners did not exist, and managing the commons was the task of
the buurschap.

Fig. 5.6a en b Markeboek of Gorssel

(Gelderland), 1560-1758. Regional Archives
Zutphen, Marke Gorssel (5004), inv. nr. 1.
On the first page is written ‘This book belongs
to the commoners of Gorssel. Whoever finds it,
may bring it to Derick Stakebrant who will give
him a vaene (3.5 litres) of beer.’
136a | 5 |
PAGE CHAPTER ARCHIVING PEOPLE Sometimes special registers were branched off from the markeboek. For example, the
Archiving Polders and Commons
people entitled to the common Speuld woods (near Ermelo, Gelderland) gathered on
27 March 1604 ‘under the beech tree on the commons’, decided that transfers of shares
which until then would be found dispersed through the commons book, were to be
recorded in a separate register.18

The markeboek was kept in the commons chest. Thus the book of the Asselter woods
commons (near Apeldoorn, Gelderland) was kept in a chest either in Saint Anthony’s
Chapel in the woods or in the church in Apeldoorn.19 The commons chest was often fitted
with several locks. The four keys of the chest in Woolde (near Hengelo, Overijssel) were
held by the markerichter, the oldest landowner, the chapter of Oldenzaal, and at Twickel
Castle. Today the archives at Twickel Castle contain a copy of the markeboek which was
kept since 1482 (copied in 1757 and continued until 1832). These archives also contain the
books of another eight commons which the lord of Twickel used in his function of
markerichter.20 Sometimes the markeboek was kept in duplicate: one copy for the
markerichter, the other kept by the clerk. The States of Overijssel prescribed such duplicate
archiving in 1758, but that requirement was not followed everywhere. In 1797 marke
Borgel (near Deventer) had great difficulty in retrieving the books from clerk Arnold van
Suchtelen after he was dismissed. It was only after a year that the markerichter received
two markeboeken and some papers from Van Suchtelen’s lawyer, but many documents
18 J. J. S. Sloet, Geldersche markerechten, vol. 1 were still missing and were only returned after repeated requests by the marke’s lawyer.21
(’s-Gravenhage: Nijhoff, 1911), p. 428.
Elsewhere, marke archives were kept by the family that had the hereditary presidency of
19 Sloet, Geldersche markerechten, pp. 104-05.
the commons, or by the municipality onto which the rights and duties of the commons had
20 Twickel Castle (Delden), Huisarchief Twickel, inv. nr.
5114.
been transferred.
21 J. de Graaf, Markeregt van Borgel (Zwolle: Tijl, 1948),
pp. VIII-IX. Commons could be partitioned (enclosure) wholly or partially, and under certain condi­
22 F.C.J. Ketelaar, Oude zakelijke rechten, vroeger, nu en tions. Between 1809 and 1810, when Holland was a Kingdom, regulations on enclosure
in de toekomst (Leiden/Zwolle: Universitaire Pers
Leiden/W.E.J. Tjeenk Willink, 1978); H.B. Demoed,
were enacted to stimulate the exploitation of wastelands, but these had virtually no effect.22
Mandegoed Schandegoed. De markeverdelingen in The commoners needed the wastelands for grazing sheep and cows that produced the
Oost Nederland in de 19e eeuw (Zutphen: Walburg
Pers, 1987).
manure for fertilizing the farmlands. Woods, thickets, and heather were all of use to the

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villagers, but they had little idea of the nature and size of their common lands. That
changed with the introduction in 1832 of the cadastre (see 6.2.2): the boundaries and the
monetary value of the commons and the rights of use became clear. In the 1830s and 1840s
the provincial governments of Drenthe and Overijssel were actively involved in
partitioning nearly all commons, underpinning this by issuing manuals for enclosure in
1837 and 1840. Between 1840 and 1879 the enclosures in Drenthe and Overijssel
numbered 92 and 89, respectively. Other provinces, especially Gelderland, failed in their
efforts to enclose land. After much lobbying by agricultural organizations, the government
proposed an act to promote partitioning of common grounds in 1882. At the time there
were still 39 commons in Gelderland, eight in Overijssel, three in Drenthe, and four in
other provinces.

In 1885 the Enclosure Act (Markenwet) came into force and the act was never repealed.
The procedure of the Enclosure Act includes various work processes, each with their own
‘archiving moments’ (most of them already described in the provincial manuals of 1837
and 1840), forming a genre system (see the General Introduction) with multiple agents and
genres acting together.

According to the Enclosure Act, the Provincial Executive draws up a list of commons
(staat van markgronden) in their province. When consensual partitioning of a marke is not
feasible, any commoner is entitled to claim a judicial allotment. In that case, the court, in
its judgment to partition (vonnis tot verdeling), appoints a supervisory judge, who in turn
appoints a committee of three to five people, preferably from among the commoners, and
a surveyor. The committee is to oversee the surveyor, who makes a map of existing and
future roads and waterways (kaart van bestaande en nieuw aan te leggen wegen en
waterleidingen). During a meeting of commoners and other interested parties (including
tenants), a provisional and a final list of rightful claimants (lijst van rechthebbenden)
is established. Opposition against the list can be brought to court. As soon as the list of
rightful claimants is closed, the nature and extent of everyone’s rights are definite. The
committee and the supervisory judge then proceed to value the lands and determine
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the compensation. This is recorded in the allocation plan (plan van toedeling). Appeal to
the court concerning the proposed allotment or compensation is possible. Finally, a notary
draws up the deed of partition (akte van scheiding) which is then entered into the land
register.

The Enclosure Act served as a model for the Land Consolidation Act (Ruilverkavelingswet)
of 1924 (revised 1938 and 1954), the subsequent Land Development Act (Landinrich­
tings­wet), and the current Rural Areas Development Act (Wet inrichting landelijk gebied)
of 2007.23 The main difference is that today the list of rightful claimants and the allotment
plan are integrated into one so-called exchange plan (ruilplan). The notarial deed of
partition is now called the deed of exhange (ruilakte).

The Enclosure Act also regulated the fate of the archives of the defunct commons. The
government judged these archives to be indispensable ‘for the knowledge of the original
state of land tenure and [as a source for] the associated legal history’.24 The archives were
therefore transferred to the State Archives in the provincial capitals (earlier, in 1859, the
provincial government of Overijssel had opened its archival repository for depositing
archives of defunct commons). Interested parties are entitled to copies or extracts. In spite
of these regulations, many marke archives entered public repositories as part of the
archives of families whose members were magistrates of the commons.
23 Margaret Rosso Grossman and Wim Brussaard,
‘The land shuffle. Reallocation of agricultural land
under the land development law in the Netherlands’,
At the time of the enclosure of the commons, land that was not fit for farming was often
California Western International law journal, 18/2 not allotted and remained subject to the grazing rights of the former commoners. Some
(1987-88): 209-89.
of the commons live on as a joint stock company or as a neighbourhood association,
24 Bijlagen Handelingen Tweede Kamer (1881-1882), nr.
163/3, p. 9.
sometimes snippets remain common property.25 An example is the commons of Berkum.26
25 A.J. Mensema, Inventaris van de archieven van de
After the partitioning of the commons, some of the land remained undivided. This was
marken in de provincie Overijssel, 1300-1942 (Zwolle: sold over the years and the proceeds were invested. The commons as an institution
Rijksarchief in Overijssel, 1978).
remained in existence. In 1994, a member of the Sichterman family (who had provided the
26 https://web.archive.org/web/20151017124951/http://
www.collective-action.info/_CAS_COM_NET_
magistrate of the commons for generations) transferred the assets of the commons into a
Berkum, archived 17 October 2015. trust fund, for the benefit of nature and monument conservation and legal scholarship.

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In Brabant there were two special types of commons: gemeynten and vroonten.27 In the
eastern part of the current province of Noord-Brabant, the Duke of Brabant and other
overlords issued charters entitling the use of the gemeynt (sometimes they donated the
land) against payment of a lump sum and an annual fee. The gemeynt was transferred to a
community, sometimes coinciding with a parish or village. A gemeynt covered a
determined area, its use was regulated and there was some form of governance, usually
established by the lord of the land. Parts of the gemeynt could be sold for the profit of the
community (from 1629 this needed letters patent (octrooi), from the Council of State).
Apart from the letters patent, the board of the gemeynt (consisting of jurors, or
gezworenen) kept other important documents, such as ordinances pertaining to the use of
the gemeynt, judicial files, appointments of officers to maintain law and order, series of
sales documents, and licences for planting trees on the gemeynt. Judicial files are abundant.
Disputes with neighbouring communities about the boundaries date from the 14th
century. As Hein Vera states, every community in the eastern part of Noord-Brabant at
some point had a conflict with its neighbours, often long-lived. Even after a sentence, a
conflict could rekindle after a few decades. ‘Apparently, collective memory was poor in
these cases. This may have worsened by the fact that the sentence was seldom collected
from the court, not only because of the fee but also because no right could be derived from
it in the future.’28 Archiving was not only done by the gemeynt, but also by the stewards of
the overlord. After the capture of ’s-Hertogenbosch by Prince Frederick Henry in 1629, the
Duke’s steward took the greater part of his administration to Antwerp, which had
27 This paragraph is a summary of K.A.H.W. Leenders, remained Spanish. After the Peace of Westphalia (1648), the Spanish Audit Chamber in
‘Van gemeynten en vroonten’, Jaarboek De Oranjeboom
40 (1987): 45-78; Henricus L.M. Vera, ‘Gemene
Brussels expected the Dutch to come forward and claim the rentals (cijnsboeken), a claim
gronden’, in Noord-Brabant tijdens de Republiek der they could not refuse according to the peace treaty. As a pre-emptive measure, the steward
Verenigde Nederlanden, 1572-1795. Een institutionele
handleiding, ed. Jan Sanders and Willem van Ham
was to send his updated administration to Brussels and take counsel with the Audit
(Hilversum: Verloren 1996), pp. 214-30; Hein Vera, Chamber as to see which records were to be conceded and which not. In 1649, part of the
….dat men het goed van den ongeboornen niet
mag verkoopen. Gemene gronden in de Meierij van
archives of the Spanish steward was relinquished to the steward of the States. However,
Den Bosch tussen hertog en hertgang 1000-2000 some rentals and other records from before 1648 remained in Brussels (in the National
(Oisterwijk: BOXPress, 2011).
Archives), while some 16th-century registers are still kept in the State Archives in
28 Vera, …. dat men het goed, p. 404. ’s-Hertogenbosch, together with the rentals made after 1629.
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Regulating the gemeynt often developed into controlling the entire local administration.
Gradually, the gemeynte as an institution developed into a municipality. In 1811 much
common land became municipal property. It was not disposed of by the community, but
by the municipal council. During the 19th century nearly all common land became private
property as a result of partitioning and sale.

In the western part of Noord-Brabant most of the uncultivated land was called vroonte,
meaning land of the lord. However, the villagers were entitled (on payment of an annual
fee) to use the topsoil. Grazing and mowing were allowed but digging was forbidden or
attached to rigorous conditions. The rights to use the land were in fact no different from
those in the gemeynten in the east of the province. However, in contrast to the rules for
gemeynten, selling parts of the vroonte was not allowed. On the whole, the vroonte did not
become municipal property after 1800.

5.7 Conclusion
Diking polders and draining lakes necessitated cooperation and consensus. The typically
Dutch practice of consensual decision-making is today still known as the polder model
(see chapter 13). Much of the business of constructing and managing the smaller polders
and the commons was done verbally, sometimes in ritual legal performances. Textualiza­
tion (verschriftelijking) happened in polders where the land was no longer owned by people
living in the polder; the absentee landlords had to be informed in writing and this led to
archiving. Furthermore, monetization of the duty to contribute labour to the maintenance
of polders and dikes led to extensive archiving. At least in Rijnland, the ledgers of
maintenance debtors were also used for the assessment of the land tax—such a dual use
or functional extension of ledgers is quite common.

From the 17th century onwards, diking and draining were document-intensive works, as is
shown by the administration of peat dredging operations and the intricate paper trail of

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the draining of the Beemster polder (17th century) and the Haarlemmermeer polder
(19th century). Each of these drainage projects was an aggregate of various work processes
leading to and supported by various document genres. These documents (of which
surveyors’ maps were an essential part) and the people who used them were participating
in a genre system (see the General Introduction) by which responsibilities and
relationships were defined. This applied to the contentement of injured parties and public
bodies, but also to the partners in the compagnieschap—a temporary association of
business partners as was usual in shipping and trading, in dredging, draining, and in
manufacturing. Comparable considerations (and thus comparable genre systems)
characterized the 19th-century enclosure of commons that served as a model for modern
legislation concerning the development of rural areas. Both polders and commons may be
seen as ‘communities of records’ (see 4.9.2), embracing landowners, tenants, investors,
surveyors, public bodies, feudal lords, and families, all participating in genre systems.

Archiving by the oldest regional water boards in Holland initially focused on the privileges
and other charters, analogous to early archiving by the Church, by feudal lords, and the
cities. Registers and other new genres were introduced as elements of professionalization
and (premodern) bureaucratization beginning in the 15th century. The Rijnland water
board built an iron office to house its archives in 1578. Rijnland may have followed the
example of the States of Holland, which had their muniment room built in 1560 (see 3.2).
Rijnland’s iron office was used until 1933. In the smaller polders the archives often did not
contain much more than the polder book, which was kept in the polder chest. This is
comparable to archiving in villages and commons. Some control of the archiving by
polders and commons was exercised by higher authorities.
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A SOCIAL HISTORY OF
DUTCH ARCHIVES Chapter 6

Archiving Property

—
6.0 Introduction
6.1 Transfer of Property
6.1.1 Transfer of Property before 1811
6.1.2 Transfer of Property since 1811
6.2 Property Management
6.2.1 The Abbey’s Cartularies and
Rentals
6.2.2 For Pious Uses
6.2.3 Of Riches and Regents
6.2.4 Estate Inventories
l Fig. 6.0 Relief above the door to the Chamber
of Desolate Estates in Amsterdam City Hall 6.2.5 Orphan Chambers
(now the Royal Palace) showing Icarus’ Fall 6.3 Insolvent estates
accompanied by rats nibbling moneyboxes, 6.3.1 The Chamber of Desolate Estates
papers, and account books of insolvents.
Sculpted by Artus Quellinus between 1650 and 6.3.2 From Paper to e-Justice Portal
1664. National Archives, Fotocollectie RVD 6.4 Holocaust Assets
(2.24.26), inv. nr. 012-1363. 6.5 Conclusion
ˇ
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Archiving Property
6.0 Introduction
One of six basic types of records ‘that may be called constants in record creation’, according
to Posner1, are records regarding real estate. Indeed, in the archival history of what is now
the Netherlands, archiving rights pertaining to immovable property is a constant. This
explains why of all preserved public and private archives so much concerns real property.
An important factor is that before the 19th century many rights on real property related to
the juridical community to which the owner or tenant belonged. Examples are the specific
rules that existed for property held in feudal tenure (which I do not deal with in this book)
and for property in polders and commons (see 5.1 and 5.6).

The oldest documents concerning real property are records of donations of properties to
religious institutions that carefully archived these muniments, as was shown in 2.1. In the
present chapter, the main questions are: what role did archiving of property play in
different contexts, as determined by differences in mandate, business, people, and work
processes (see Fig. 0.2), and did this role differ in time and place? What was the
involvement of government? These questions do not only concern real property, but also
estates which encompass all assets and liabilities.

In 6.1 archiving the legal conveyance (eigendomsoverdracht) is discussed. Since the Middle
Ages transfer of title to immovable property took place at the local court. This was
recorded in a deed handed out to buyer and seller (sometimes the buyer only), but initially
the court did not archive the transfer. Towns started to register such transfers in the town
register (stadboek), and later in special registers of conveyances (see 4.2). Sometimes a
register of real property (cadastre) was created which shows the history and legal status of
every property. Both forms of local registration were centralized in the French period
(1811). Since then, registration and archiving have developed and experienced various
1 Ernst Posner, Archives in the ancient world
(Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972),
transformations. What was the influence of societal challenges and new technologies on
p. 3. these registrations?

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The registrations treated in 6.1 provided snapshots of acts concerning property at a
particular time. Whether this was sufficient for long-term asset management and
exploitation of immovable property is the subject of 6.2. In 6.2.1 property management by
the Abbey of Mariënweerd is presented as a case study of the ways the Church (like other
owners of large estates) administered the exploitation of its properties. In 6.2.2 the
archiving of Church assets confiscated after the Reformation is dealt with. In 6.2.3 estate
management by burghers and civic institutions is discussed. In this case, the management
concerned real property and other assets. This wider scope also applies to the treatment of
archiving insolvency, a paper-intensive (and nowadays data-intensive) process (6.3).
In that process, the focus has gradually shifted from government (bankruptcy court) to
the trustee and the insolvent. Also of interest is the development of the publicity of
insolvencies: from paper to digital and from local to national and international levels.

In the General Introduction I stressed the importance of the contextual history of the
record. To know what archivers did since the creation of a record is essential for
understanding the record. Part of that contextual history is the custodial history. Most
archives have been subject to intricate adventures during and after the Second World War:
dislocation, dispersion, confounding disarrangement, re-use of original documents in
building new files, destruction of parts of an archival fonds, and restructuring of the
remainder (see also 10.7). The result is not only bound to confuse and intimidate any
researcher, but it has also made the evidential and historical value of many archives and
records questionable, not to say void. I demonstrate this in 6.4 with a case study of the
administrative history of the seizure of jewellery from Dutch Jews.
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6.1 Transfer of Property
6.1.1 Transfer of Property before 1811
2

On 5 January 1639 Rembrandt van Rijn appears before the

Amsterdam notary Sebastiaen van der Piet.3 He is accompanied by
Christoffel Thijsz. Christoffel and his brother-in-law Pieter Beltens
are the heirs of Pieter Beltens Senior, and they sell Rembrandt the
house on Breestraat they inherited. The notary records the sale in
a deed, which also mentions that the house is not mortgaged.
How­ever, for taxes and other charges the deed refers to older deeds
which, as usual, will be handed over to the buyer. Rembrandt will
take possession on May Day, when the parties will exchange the
title deeds. The purchase price is 13,000 guilders, of which a quarter
will be paid in instalments in 1639 and 1640. The remainder will be
paid later in five or six years at an interest rate of five percent. The
2 C.L. Verkerk, ‘De schepensignaten en protocollen
van bezwaar te Arnhem’, in Bronnen betreffende deed is signed by the notary, the sellers, and the buyer. The signed
de registratie van onroerend goed in middeleeuwen
en ancien régime. Broncommentaren 4, ed. copy will remain in the notary’s archives while copies are handed
G.A.M. van Synghel (Den Haag: Instituut voor
Nederlandse geschiedenis, 2001), pp. 21-54;
out to Rembrandt and Beltens’ heirs. The latter copies have not been
R.F.J. Paping and P. Brood, ‘De protocollen van preserved, in contrast to the former which was bound into the
verzegelingen in de Groningse oud-rechterlijke
archieven’, in Broncommentaren 4, pp. 55-82; notary’s protocol and which, after the death of the notary, was trans­
E.T. van der Vlist, ‘De bonboeken te Leiden’, in
Broncommentaren 4, pp. 83-108. ferred to the City Hall and hence to the Amsterdam City Archives.
3 S.A.C. Dudok van Heel, Dossier Rembrandt.
Documenten, tekeningen en prenten. The Rembrandt As long as the purchase price was not paid in its entirety, transfer
papers. Documents, drawings and prints (Amsterdam:
Museum Het Rembrandthuis, 1987). of ownership through conveyance before aldermen could not take
place. Rembrandt defaulted for a long time: in 1653 only 6,000 of

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on 8 January 1653 and was duly registered. However, the deed of
conveyance made and sealed by the aldermen (in Amsterdam
called quittance, or kwijtschelding) was given to Rembrandt only
after he had delivered a debenture for the remaining debt.

Fig. 6.1 Registration of the conveyance

of Rembrandt’s house, 8 January 1653.
Amsterdam City Archives, Schepenen:
kwijtscheldingsregisters (5062), inv. nr. 45,
fol. 195 verso.
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In the Middle Ages, transfer of title to immovable property happened in the presence of
neighbours and family members as witnesses. Members of the local court could act as a
witness as well. A deed with the seals of the court members had special evidential value.
Already at an early time, this conveyance before aldermen or councillors (schepenen)
became the rule. The oldest provision is found in the city privilege of Middelburg of 1217:
‘No citizen can transfer ownership of land, unless [it is done] before the aldermen of
Middelburg.’4 Aldermen kept note of the conveyance in the city register (see 4.2); only later
did the deliverance of a charter sealed by aldermen come into use. Elsewhere, the
aldermen’s deed could be stored in the aldermen’s chest (schepenkist). This was the case in
Arnhem, where 318 unsealed schepenkist charters from 1293 to 1334 have been preserved
in the Arnhem city archives. Interested parties could get a copy of a schepenkist charter.
Nearly everywhere else the deed, after sealing, was handed over to the buyer and the seller.
At the beginning of the 14th century the Hanseatic city of Kampen started registering
conveyances in the city register, into which other affairs are recorded as well. This way of
registering legal transactions of citizens in the city register was followed by other towns
in Overijssel, including the Hanseatic cities of Zwolle and Deventer.

In ’s-Hertogenbosch registration of conveyances in a separate book (protocol) began in

1350. In Arnhem the practice of schepenkistoorkonden was replaced from the beginning
of the 15th century by recording conveyances in special registers (schepensignaten).
However, the towns mentioned are exceptions. In general, archiving of a conveyance was
left to the buyer, while the town or village did not keep a record. It was therefore difficult
for third parties—particularly for those who were living elsewhere—to ascertain the
ownership of a plot, its boundaries and whether or not the parcel had been mortgaged.
In an expanding economy in which much of the oral communication was gradually being
replaced by writing, publicity of transactions alone provided insufficient legal security
(rechtszekerheid). Therefore, governments started registration in the 16th century.
The authorities in Groningen started recording copies of the issued deeds in so-called
4 A.C.F. Koch, Oorkondenboek van Holland en Zeeland
protocols of sealings (protocollen van verzegelingen) as late as during the 17th and 18th
tot 1299, vol. 1 (’s-Gravenhage: Nijhoff, 1970), nr. 386. centuries.

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Fig. 6.2 City register (Oudste Foliant) of

Kampen. Kampen City Archives, Stadsbestuur
(00001), inv. nr. 3. On this part of folio x verso
have been registered a grant of usufruct, a
conveyance, a loan on collateral, and a division
of estate in the presence of councillors (coram
scabinis) in 1324.
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How was the registration of transfers introduced? 5 Let us follow the bailiffs (deurwaar­
ders) of the Court of Holland. One of them, Job Jansz, standing on a platform in front of the
Leiden City Hall on 25 May 1560, reads aloud an ordinance (plakaat) enacted by King
Philip II in Antwerp on 9 May prescribing that all secretaries and clerks of all towns and
villages should hold an accurate register of all sales of real property. On the same day, the
ordinance is proclaimed by another bailiff, now from the landing of the City Hall of
Haarlem. A third bailiff reads the plakaat on 16 May in Muiden, Naarden, and Weesp
consecutively, and yet another bailiff published the new law in Dordrecht on 30 May.

Each of the four bailiffs also visits other towns, Geertruidenberg and Zevenbergen being
the last ones on 8 June. The ordinance has thus been promulgated, maybe not literally
‘everywhere in Holland’, but indeed, as the King prescribed, ‘wherever it is proper’.

Following the example of an ordinance from 1545 for Utrecht by the father of the King,
Charles V, the ordinance of 1560 commissions the secretaries and clerks everywhere in
Holland to register henceforth all deeds of sale or mortgage of real property at a penalty of
three guilders. For cities like Dordrecht, Rotterdam, and Schiedam, this was nothing new
as they had been practising registration of conveyances already for some time. But in
Schoonhoven, in 1560, the clerk began a constitutieboek to register transfers of title. His
colleague in Leiden also started a new register, but this was an addition to an already
existing registration of sales of real property. At least since 1420 sales in Leiden had to be
confirmed before the aldermen. This was recorded in the city register, later in a separate
boeck van memorie, another name for the book of presentations (inbrengboek). The
presentation (inbreng) was a confirmation of the sale but did not result in the transfer of
5 This paragraph and the next ten are a summary of
F.C.J. Ketelaar, ‘Van pertinent register en ordentelijk
title. The new register begun in 1560 was a register of guarantees (waarboek), registering
protocol. Overdracht van onroerend goed in de tijd warrants that hitherto had been exchanged between parties but had not been registered.
van de Republiek’, in De levering van onroerend goed.
Vijf opstellen over de overdracht van onroerend goed
In a warrant (waarbrief), the seller guaranteed to compensate the buyer for any ‘concealed’
vanaf het Romeinse recht tot het Nieuw Burgerlijk (not declared) claims on the plot, while the buyer promised to pay the purchase price.
Wetboek (Amsterdam/Deventer: Stichting tot
bevordering der notariële wetenschap/Kluwer, 1985),
Both pledges were secured by collateral.
pp. 39-46 (Holland), pp. 46-56 (other provinces).

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Twenty years after Philip’s plakaat the States of Holland found it necessary to repeat the
regulations once again in their Political Ordinance (Politieke Ordonnantie) of 1 April 1580.
One of the reasons was that the earlier ordinance had not been implemented properly.
Even in places where registers of conveyances had been kept, many had been destroyed or
had disappeared in the aftermath of the wars in the 1560s and 1570s. The States ordained
that the registers should be stored in a separate chest with two locks; one key to be kept by
the bailiff, the sheriff, or the clerk, the other by the eldest alderman. Judges and their clerks
were instructed to take care not to seal, sign, or hand out any deed of transfer or mortgage
that had not been registered. Failing to observe the ordinance would cost the clerk a fine of
six guilders and subject him to criminal charges.

The primary aim of the registration of transfers was to enhance legal security through
publicity. The registers would allow ‘anyone to acquaint himself with all sales and charges
pertaining to real property’, according to a Leiden ordinance of 1589.6 Foreigners were
impressed by this publicity. When, in 1668, Sir Josiah Child (later Governor of the
English East India Company) enumerated the causes of the ‘prodigious increase of the
Netherlanders in their domestick and forreign Trade, Riches, and multitude of Shipping’
(see 8.2.2), one of his 15 arguments was the Dutch ‘keeping up PUBLICK REGISTERS of
all Lands and Houses, Sould or Mortgaged, whereby many chargable law Suits are
prevented, and the securities of Lands and Houses rendred indeed, such as we commonly
call them, REAL SECURITIES.’

The transfer registers were accessible to the public and often supplied with alphabetical
tables to facilitate research. Nevertheless, the registers did not provide the sort of publicity
Fig. 6.3 Certificate issued by the city clerk as the modern land registry does, particularly because there was no comprehensive
of Amsterdam, having checked his registers registration of all charges burdening a specific plot. The city of Leiden is an exception
for mortgage and other duties, 1784. Belasting- because, in 1585, the unsurpassed city clerk Jan van Hout (see 4.3) established, at his own
en Douanemuseum, Rotterdam, 45968. costs, a real land register. The Register Vetus was arranged not by name of buyers and
sellers, but geographically, parcel by parcel. Burghers could check if there were a mortgage
6 Ketelaar, ‘Van pertinent register’, p. 42. or any other charge on a house, the name of the owner, the names of the neighbours,
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and other data. The register was kept up to date. In 1601 the inscriptions in the Register
Vetus that were still valid were transferred to a new register with references to the former
inscriptions. This so-called Second Register was kept until 1644. In 1642 the Gerecht
(sheriff, burgomasters, and aldermen) decided to renew the registration. The new registers
(later called bonboeken because they were partitioned according to the bonnen, or
neighbourhoods) were ready in 1648. Comparable registers are those of encumbrances
(protocollen van bezwaar) in Arnhem (since 1618), Nijmegen (since 1659), and elsewhere.
They remain important sources for researchers; many registers have been digitized and
are accessible on the Internet.

In 1569 the Middelburg city government decided to draft a regulation on registration of

aldermen’s deeds. It took until 1597 before an office of registration (comptoir van
registrature) was established. At that office, all transfers, testaments, marriage settlements,
mortgages on ships, and other deeds had to be registered.7 Nine registers were filled with
deeds dating from before 1597. Access was facilitated by alphabetical indexes and registers
for each neighbourhood, indicating transfers and mortgages for each parcel. Anyone could
get an extract from the registers. All registers kept up to 1811 were lost in the bombing of
Middelburg on 17 May 1940. A similar disaster befell Delft in May 1536. A fire destroyed
nearly all the city archives, including the registers of marriage settlements. Later, people
came to the City Hall to have the deeds registered anew.

The secretary (landschrijver) of the Quarter of Veluwe and Veluwezoom in Gelderland

began registering the deeds of transfer in 1538, probably because of the improvement of
legal practices that had been ordained in a treaty. Registration was formally established by
the Veluwe legal code (Landrecht) of 1593: if purchasers wanted they could ask the
7 M.H. van Visvliet and W.O. Swaving, Inventaris
der rechterlijke archieven van Middelburg door
secretary to register the deed ‘so that, in case the deeds get lost, they may have access to the
den vorigen archivaris dier gemeente (Middelburg: protocol’ (updat, so hun dieselve brieven muchten affhendich warden, sy alsdan oehren
Altorffer, 1906), pp. XXXI-XXXIV; Resolutie tot
ampliatie der ordonnantie op ’t registreeren van
thoganck moegen hebben tot het prothocol).
transporten en verbintenissen ten comptoire van Protocolling was made compulsory as late as 1632. It is significant that the land tax was
registrature binnen Middelburg (Middelburg:
Callenfels, 1781). Koninklijke Bibliotheek,
introduced at the same time. In spite of the regulation that non-registered transfers would
Plakk Q308:3. be null and void, registration did not work. In 1654. Arnoldt Penninck was appointed

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secretary to the quarter and two years later he proposed a reorganization of the
registration following the example of the Quarter Nijmegen. It was only in 1675 that new
regulations on protocolling came into force, undoubtedly in connection with the need to
improve the levying of the land tax. This was necessary because the financial situation of
the quarter had greatly deteriorated during the war. The ordinance of 1675 conceals any
fiscal motive but emphasizes ‘the service and security of the inhabitants’. The protocol was
public; if requested, the protocol registrar had to check the register at a fee of six stuivers
(1 stuiver is 1/20 of a guilder). An extract costed ten stuivers.

Fig. 6.4 First page of the register of deeds of

transfer and bequest issued by the magistrate
of Veluwezoom, 1538. Gelders Archief, ORA
Veluwe en Veluwezoom (0203), inv. nr. 588,
fol. 2. The little note states that from now on
parties could request a copy of a deed, whereas
in other places only extracts were given. The
note, however, does not belong to the first page,
since it refers to a deed registered in 1623 on
folio 215verso.
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The desired centralization of protocolling for the whole quarter failed, despite the
appoint­­ment of deputies of the protocol registrar outside the capital of Arnhem. The death
of registrar Ellard Brouwer in 1733 paved the way for a reorganization. Henceforth, each of
the sheriffs in the 13 districts would hold a protocol. Defaulting the registration not only
meant losing preference over other creditors but also entailed double taxation. This reveals
the fiscality of the measure, which also obliged the registrars to report annually all
regi­stered acts for which land tax was due. The protocols had to be checked by the local
courts.

Elsewhere the fiscal interest dominated as well, for example in Friesland, where
registration of real property (aanbrengregisters or floreenregisters) was introduced in 1511
for the sake of taxation. In other provinces comparable registrations for levying the land
tax (verponding) and other taxes on real property were set up (see 8.3). One of these
charges was the tax on the transfer of property. In Holland extensive regulations came
about in 1598: at the transfer, 2.5 percent of the value of the property was levied. Clerks
were again and again instructed to keep meticulous registers and to ensure that the tax of
the fortieth penning was paid before the transfer of real property had taken place. The
registers were to be checked by the tax collectors. A transfer for which no tax was paid
would be null and void.

At the end of the 18th century the transfer tax (over and above the land tax), which had to
be shared between seller and buyer, was two percent in Groningen and the Gelderland
quarters of Zutphen and Arnhem; two and a half percent in the Quarter of Nijmegen,
Zeeland, and Friesland; 2¾ percent in Holland; three percent in Overijssel; and four
percent in Utrecht. Collecting the transfer tax necessitated a scrupulous administration
that served fiscal purposes and was not meant to secure legal protection for third parties
or legal security of society generally (see 8.3).

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6.1.2 Transfer of Property since 1811

Archiving Property 8

The registrations of real property discussed so far were local registrations with local and
regional differences. All this was standardized country-wide after France had incorporated
the Netherlands (1810-1811, though Limburg and Zeelandic Flanders had become part of
France already in 1794-1796) through the introduction of French legislation with regard to
the public registration of the quantity, value, and ownership of real property (cadastre) and
the land register. This legislation remained in force after the liberation in 1813, but not
without some modifications. The whole system experienced numerous changes over time
due to societal challenges and technological factors.

In 1812 the government started measuring and mapping municipal boundaries and every
parcel. This was done exactly according to the French directives and, wherever possible,
with the assistance of landowners who were traced on the basis of the old tax registers.
The revenues of each parcel were assessed. The work was carried out by surveyors and
their assistants, appraisers, and cartographers, and supervised by the prefect. The result
was a genre system (see the General Introduction) of measurements, maps, tables, ledgers,
alphabetical lists, and the people who made and used these documents.

The core of the system was the draft map (minuutplan) and the cadastral ledger of each of
more than 1,200 municipalities. The former was a map (scale 1:5,000 to 1:2,500) showing
all parcels, each with a unique number. Each of the ten different colours on the map had a
specific meaning: red for private buildings, cobalt blue for public buildings (which were
8 F.J.M. Otten, ‘De registers van overschrijving van
exempted from land tax), brown for roads, blue for waters, etc. Twenty thousand
akten van eigendomsovergang vanaf 1811’, ín minuutplannen were made. The cadastral ledger contained data of all parcels within a
Broncommentaren 3, ed. G.A.M. van Synghel (Den
Haag: Instituut voor Nederlandse geschiedenis, 1997),
municipality. A separate index listed all owners, with reference to the parcels they owned.
pp. 113-43; Aan de slag in de kadastrale archieven. After years of preparatory work, the cadastre was implemented in 1832 (in the province
Een handleiding voor de particuliere onderzoeker
(Apeldoorn: Dienst voor het kadaster en de openbare
of Limburg not before 1842).
registers, 2014).
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Fig. 6.5a and b Draft map (minuutplan) and

cadastral ledger (oorspronkelijk aanwijzende
tafel) (detail) of Aalst (Noord-Brabant), 1832.
Brabants Historisch Informatie Centrum,
Minuutplans en OAT’s (2104).

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The minuutplan and cadastral ledger were snapshots. To process later changes, a second
interlocking system was created. The input in this system—in principle still unchanged—
is either a deed of sale drawn up by a notary and transcribed into the land register (see
below), or a declaration of inheritance (memorie van successie) indicating which heir
inherits which parcel. When necessary, new measurements were made by surveyors and
recorded in ‘fieldwork’ (sketches made in the field) as a basis for updating the maps in the
office. On ‘auxiliary maps’ one could see both the old and new situations. When the
cadastre was implemented, every municipality and every water board received a full set
of the cadastral documents. These could be used to make ledgers for municipal and water
board taxes. Once a year these documents were returned to the office of the cadastre to be
updated. Until around 1987 this was done by hand, with pen, ink, and colour paint, using
drafting compasses, rulers, and set squares. After the introduction of photocopying
around 1950, it was sufficient to provide municipalities annually with copies of what had
been brought up to date.

Analogue methods of measuring and registering were later replaced by digital ones. The
surveyors exchanged their measuring tapes for modern tachymeters and GPS-trackers.
Only in 1974 was the book form of the cadastral ledger replaced by a loose-leaf system.
Before that, a card index was introduced in two municipalities and in the village of Borculo,
which had been severely damaged by a tornado in 1925, the time when many authorities
and businesses embraced the card index as a technological innovation (see 11.2.2). Since
the change to a loose-leaf system, the tables were no longer made by hand but inscribed
with a typing machine. Since 1990 the system has been automated.

In 1811 the French land register was introduced as well. It was initially restricted to
compulsory registration of mortgages, but in 1838 it was expanded to include transfers of
real property. Yet, until 1992, the land registrar bore the title of keeper of mortgages
(hypotheekbewaarder), forming an office together with the employees of the cadastre in
each of the 34 court locations. In the land register (in fact consisting of more than five
different registers with indexes) deeds of transfer of ownership (and other property rights)
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were transcribed word for word. The land register was accessible if one knew the location
of a parcel (the cadastral reference). A separate register, however, contained a summary of
all transactions of each landowner referring to the land register. An alphabetical index
provided access to this register. The register was replaced by a card index in 1929 and was
automated in 1979.

Land register and cadastre contained mutual cross-references which made for a rather
complex administration; ten to 12 tables and maps had to be kept up to date
simultaneously, everything done by hand and in the two separate departments of the same
office (land registry and cadastre). Transcribing was replaced in 1950 by inserting the copy,
typed at the notary’s office, into a loose-leaf binder, the outward appearance of the
traditional registers thus being kept up. Since 1975 the registers are filmed annually,
whereupon the originals are destroyed. Since 2006 it is permissible to submit electronic
deeds and to provide information to the public online (from 1990 a great deal of the
cadastre was automated). All 15 million deeds dating from after 1950 have been digitized.

There were, and still are, separate registers containing extracts of mortgage deeds. In 1878,
and again in 1948, all registrations of existing mortgages were renewed and transferred to
new registers. The old registers lost their value and were destroyed: the registers dating
from 1838 to 1878 in 1949, and the registers dating from 1879 to 1948 in 1988 (the original
mortgage deeds have been preserved in the notarial archives). The registers from 1838 to
1878 were never transferred to the State Archives, in contrast to the 20,000 volumes from
the period between 1879 and 1948 transferred in 1969. The little interest researchers
showed in these registers and the fact that they swallowed up much space were reasons
to destroy these registers, except the journals (dagregisters) summarizing mortgages and
referring to the notary who drew up the deed. Even so, the archives of mortgages and
cadastre between 1811 and 1989 are extensive, an example being those in the State
Archives in the province of Overijssel, covering around 825 metres of shelving.

The cadastral maps dating from 1811 to 1832 are kept by the National Archives and the
regional historical centres (of which the State Archives form part, see 3.6.3). Accessible on

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the Internet are more than 17,000 scans of the maps and more than 143,000 scans of the
indexes.

Until the 1970s the aims and the organization of land registry and cadastre were (just as in
1832) primarily focused on levying the land tax. However, the system also served legal
security in society; anyone could consult the public registers to assess the legal status of
properties and the solvency of parties. Besides, the cadastral data form the basis for various
acts concerning land usage and land development. Having been part of the Ministry of
Finance for more than 140 years, the land register and cadastre were transferred to the
Ministry of Public Housing and Spatial Planning in 1973. In 1989 they merged into one
agency and this, in turn, merged with the Mapping Agency (comparable to the UK
Ordnance Survey) in 2004.

6.2 Property Management

6.2.1 The Abbey’s Cartularies and Rentals
In the 12th century ecclesiastical and temporal rulers across Europe developed new forms
of administration, accounting, and archiving to improve exploitation of their estates.
Abbot Suger of St. Denis (1122–1151), for example, used the abbey archives as a source for
listing and recording assets to achieve a more efficient exploitation of the abbey’s real
property.9 The same was done by Henry of Winchester, Abbot of Glastonbury (1126-1171)
9 Lindy Grant, Abbot Suger of St-Denis. Church and
state in early 12th-century France (London/New York:
and, in the Netherlands, by Abbot Wouter of Egmond Abbey (1130-1161).10 Upon his
Longman, 1998). arrival in 1130, the latter started reforming the neglected management. He began a register
10 P.A. Meilink, Het archief van de abdij van Egmond (later called urbarium) of the proceeds in various places. This register is an early example
(’s-Gravenhage: Ministerie van Onderwijs, Kunsten
en Wetenschappen, 1951); J.W.J. Burgers, ‘De
of a rational and orderly administration. Abbot Wouter had gained his administrative
abdij van Egmond en het begin van het Hollandse experience previously as provost of a domain of Saint Peter’s Abbey in Ghent. A contem­
oorkondewezen’, in Het klooster Egmond: hortus
conclusus, ed. G.N.M. Vis (Hilversum: Verloren, 2008),
porary celebrated him in a poem: while he was abbot of the happy brethren of Egmond, law
pp. 71-101. blossomed, and revenues rose. One may interpret this different view on the archives as a
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development (using Hagen Keller’s expression) ‘from holy book to bookkeeping’; ‘people
discovered that the venerable codices could also be used for quite commonplace purposes,
as merchant’s books’.11

Property management and archiving have been thoroughly researched by Bas van Bavel in
a study of the Norbertine Abbey of Mariënweerd in Beesd (near Culemborg).12 The abbey
was founded in 1128-1129 by members of the influential Van Cuijk family who later on
also presented the abbey with many donations. Between 1190 and 1265 the counts of
Holland were great benefactors of Mariënweerd. From 1220 the Abbey also started buying
property itself. In the first half of the 14th century the Abbey was in its heyday, receiving
numerous smaller donations while being able to buy much property. The large increase in
acquisitions had been made possible by Mariënweerd raising its income considerably by
leasing its lands instead of exploiting them. All this led to an increase in the number of
deeds (to around 550) so that the Abbey urgently needed a new cartulary (a register with
transcripts of charters, see 2.1). This was set up in 1346, as a successor to a 13th-century
cartulary (which we only have knowledge of through references in two charters). The new
cartulary was geographically classified according to the location of the property. The
transcribed charters bore no dorsal references which might have suggested a particular
arrangement. However, they were probably stored in a geographically ordered cupboard
with drawers. Some of the charters that are still preserved indeed bear a dorsal annotation,
but these were made by later owners and not by Mariënweerd.

11 Hagen Keller, ‘Vom „heiligen Buch“ zur Buchführung.

When properties were sold, donated, or inherited, it was customary to transfer the
Lebensfunktionen der Schrift im Mittelalter‘, relevant muniments to the new owner. Thus, many old Mariënweerd charters came into
Frühmittelalterliche Studien 26 (1992): 1-31.
the hands of Hendrik van Naaldwijk, to whom the Abbey sold its properties in the County
12 The following is for the greater part a summary of
B.J.P. van Bavel, Goederenverwerving en
of Holland in 1408. After the acquisition by Prince Frederick Henry of Nassau (son of
goederenbeheer van de abdij Mariënweerd (1129-1592) William of Orange) of the properties in Naaldwijk in 1612, the charters came into the
(Hilversum: Verloren, 1993).
archives of the Council of the Nassau Demesne (Nassause Domeinraad).13 The next year
13 M.C.J. van Hoof, E.A.T.M. Schreuder, and B.J. Slot,
De archieven van de Nassause Domeinraad 1581-1811
his half-brother Maurice acquired the Mariënweerd properties in the Land of Cuijk (today
(Den Haag: Algemeen rijksarchief, 1997). one of the titles of the Dutch King is Baron of Grave and the Land of Cuijk) and with them

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a large package of charters and other documents. He deposited these with the Nassause
Domeinraad, which dedicated a separate drawer to the documents. In 1685 clerk Tollius
made a comprehensive inventory of the documents as part of his inventorization of the
entire archives of the council. The Nassause Domeinraad managed the domains of the
Nassau and Orange families within the Netherlands and administered law.

The Mariënweerd archives suffered a great deal in the 15th and 16th centuries through
plunder, fire, and theft, particularly during the troubles preceding the Reformation.
Currently, the core of the Mariënweerd archives is kept at the Abbey of Berne founded by
Mariënweerd, but they comprise a mere two and a half metres: roughly 50 charters, some
accounts, and registers, including three 15th-century rentals. The aforementioned
cartulary of 1346 is in the Royal Library of Belgium. Even so, this material and the many
documents from and about Mariënweerd in other archives enabled Van Bavel to
reconstruct the abbey’s property management in the 15th and 16th centuries. The
following exposé is based on that reconstruction.

The rentals formed the basis of the administration. Properties, tenants, terms, and the
amount of the lease were registered in the rentals. Such ledgers indicating the fixed income
to be received annually were called blaffaards (see the next section). However, they did not
reveal how much was actually received. The difference between the nominal lease and the
rent received was booked in the annual accounts as expenses, as was usual in the Middle
Ages. Any arrears received in the next year were booked as extra income. As long as the
tenants paid on time, the system worked, but as arrears increased the bookkeeping became
largely fictitious and could not yield a real insight into the financial position of the Abbey.
No wonder that Mariënweerd chose another system for its accounts between 1488 and
Fig. 6.6 Ledger (manuaal) of land rents of 1492. Each year a new rental was made up, but in the accounts only the real income was
Mariënweerd Abbey. Gelders Archief, Abdij shown.
Mariënweerd (1170), inv. nr. 70, fol. 56. On
this page, the rent for a plot in Beesd owed by
Jan die Smit is recorded, as well as his annual The abbot himself kept the rentals up to date, but this took too much of his time, as
payments between 1531 and 1535. hundreds of payments had to be booked annually. Therefore, a new function was created in
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the 16th century, that of a chaplain, to act as the right hand of the abbot and be responsible
for the control of the estate. Moreover, the Abbey permanently employed a highly paid
lay-steward (lekenrentmeester). The estate (1,720 hectares) was divided into rent offices
(rentambten), each with a local lay-steward who did not receive a fixed salary, but a
percentage of the income. Managing a rent office was not a full-time job, and several
stewards worked for other domain proprietors as well. Jan Pleunis, steward of
Mariënweerd in Buren (from around 1555 to 1572), was simultaneously steward of the
Count of Buren, Prince William of Orange. Pleunis recycled documents; a Mariënweerd
account was bound into a cover made from two deeds of fief from William of Orange.
The estates (uithoven) of Mill, Weert, and Kessel stayed separate from the rent offices as
more or less autonomous centres with their own steward.

Van Bavel argues that the administration of the Abbey’s income in the 16th century was
divided according to several criteria. Firstly, geographically by rentambten and uithoven.
Secondly, by office; the cellar master and the abbot kept their own administration, separate
from that of the Abbey as a whole. Thirdly, by categories of income: within the central
Abbey administration there were separate books for respectively leases, tithes, and sales of
natural goods. Unfortunately, the central Abbey accounts are lacking, so that we cannot
know how the results of the separate accounts were consolidated.

In 1567 Mariënweerd was plundered and destroyed. It was the beginning of the end. In
1580, after the Reformation, the States of Gelderland claimed the properties and used
them for pious aims (see the next section) such as the livelihood of 24 students and the
assistance of widows of ministers. However, much of the Mariënweerd estate was donated
or sold at a very low price to, among other people, the sons of William of Orange, Prince
Maurice and Prince Philip William of Nassau, Count of Buren. On the foundations of the
former Abbey, the house of Mariënwaerdt was built in the 18th century. Since then the
estate of Mariënwaerdt (900 hectares) has been handed down in a direct line to the present
owners.

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6.2.2 For Pious Uses

Archiving Property

What happened to Mariënweerd also happened to other monasteries, churches, and

Roman Catholic institutions and their estates: they were all confiscated after the
Reformation. This was also the case with foundations for the livelihood of the priest,
hospitals, and other properties of church and religious institutions. The money was spent
ad pios usus (for pious uses), in particular for salaries of Protestant ministers, but also for
scholarships and pensions for the remaining monastics. The war with the Catholic King of
Spain was also considered a pious aim. It was used as an argument by the province of
Groningen to finance its share in the West India Company (WIC) from the income yielded
by the confiscated goods of the monasteries, as the WIC was fighting and pirating Spain.
The universities of Leiden (founded in 1575), Franeker (1585), and Groningen (1614) were
largely financed with the money from religious goods, and they used former monastic
buildings. The Amsterdam Athenaeum Illustre (forerunner of the University of
Amsterdam) transformed the chapel of the women’s cloister of Saint Agnes into its first
lecture hall in 1632.

All this ‘meant that apart from the administration of traditional municipal income and
expenses, a wholly new administration of the “diaconate goods” (diakelijke goederen) had
to be introduced’14 (in the Protestant church the deacons were responsible for the care of
the poor). First, the goods had to be assessed. To that end, the monasteries and church
institutions had to hand in their archives and administrators had to submit their registers
and accounts.

In Leiden, for example, great numbers of archival documents from the churches and the
monasteries within and around the city arrived at the City Hall. City clerk Jan van Hout
(see 4.4) described and numbered all documents and made an extensive inventory in 1583.
14 René Kunst, Inventaris van het archief van de stad
Leeuwarden 1426-1811 (Leeuwarden: Historisch
The charters of each monastery were stored together. Tables in the inventory refer to the
Centrum Leeuwarden, 2012), p. 127. places where the properties are located.
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For the management of the former Roman Catholic properties, the government appointed
stewards (rentmeesters) accountable to the city or the States. Lodewijk van Treslong was
appointed warden of the estate of the chapter of Saint Peter’s Church in Leiden in 1573.
He was a canon of the former chapter. After some time he left the administration to a
substitute, notary Jacob van Tethrode, who would succeed Van Treslong in 1606. When
Van Tethrode relinquished his office in 1627, a schedule of all his books and papers was
drawn up. From this schedule and the preserved registers, we can determine which
documentary genres were used by wardens like Van Tethrode in their administration and
for their accountability. The most important were the blaffaards and rolls. A blaffaard
indicates what fixed revenues and expenses are expected annually. When such a register
also shows the real income and expenses it is called a manuaal or staatboek in Dutch
archival terminology.

Blaffard in French means pale, and probably these registers originally had an ashen cover.
In a blaffaard all debtors were registered with the amount of rent payable . All debtors in
one village were listed under the same heading. Sometimes a reference was made to the
original deed. Subsequently, in a separate column the sums received were noted. Usually,
the institution would hand out a blaffaard (or ledger) to all accountable officers, this being
a copy of the original in the archives. The officers then noted the monies received, whereby
the copy was transformed into a manuaal. A manuaal is essentially a book which is kept
on hand (from the Latin manus, hand; see Fig. 11.6), but in Dutch archival terminology,
a manuaal is a register in which data concerning income and expenses are recorded under
separate headings derived from the accounts.

A roll (rol) is generally a list of cases to be dealt with in a court session, recording
processual acts during the session (see 9.1). It is therefore a combination of an agenda and
a report. The term roll was also used in property management. For example, the roll of
leases in Westland was made by Van Tethrode in view of the five-year-long leases. It
indicated the name of the last tenant and the amount of rent. During the public session in
which the steward renewed the leases in the presence of witnesses, he noted down the

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name of the new tenant. The tenant then signed the entry in the roll and would receive
the lease agreement (huurcedul) later.

To record expenses, Van Tethrode used a blaffaard. Herein the expected annual expenses
for the allowances of the (former) canons and the salaries of ministers were noted, with
space to record the actual amount spent. The final pages of the blaffaard contained a
register of expenses for which there was no annual budget, for example the travel costs of
ministers and members of the church council.

Over time, the separate administration for the former Roman Catholic properties merged
with that of the domains of the city and the States.

6.2.3 Of Riches and Regents

15

Nearly every family archive contains documents concerning property management.

An example is the archive of the De Jonge van Ellemeet family, presently to be found at
the Zeeuws Archief in Middelburg. The largest part has been bequeathed by Cornelis de
Jonge van Ellemeet (1646-1721). His bookkeeping was the subject of a thesis by Bernard
de Muinck in 1965.16 From 1674 to 1707 Cornelis was Receiver General of the Republic.
Around 1710 his fortune was one and a half to two million guilders (130 to 170 million
15 The title is borrowed from J.G. van Dillen, Van rijkdom euro in today’s money), enough to rank him fifth on the list of the richest people in the
en regenten. Handboek tot de economische en sociale
geschiedenis van Nederland tijdens de Republiek
Golden Age.17
(’s-Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff, 1970).
16 Bernard de Muinck, Een regentenhuishouding Land and legal rights connected with land were sought after as objects of investment, but
omstreeks 1700 ( ’s-Gravenhage: Nijhoff, 1965).
See also Simon Schama, The embarassment of riches.
also because of the status the ownership of a seigniory bestowed on the lord of the manor.
An interpretation of Dutch culture in the Golden Age Cornelis de Jonge was four years old when he inherited the seigniory of Ellemeet and a
(New York: Knopf, 1987), pp. 320-322.
portion in that of Elkerzee from his father. In 1691 Cornelis bought the seigniories of
17 Kees Zandvliet, 500. De rijksten van de Republiek.
Rijkdom, geloof, macht & cultuur (Zutphen: Walburg
Schipluiden, Hodenpijl, and St. Maartensrecht, and later the seigniories of Dalem and
Pers, 2018). Poortvliet. He furthermore acquired a stately home in Rijswijk and the Duinrell estate in
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Wassenaar where he had a new house built. He owned several houses in The Hague,
including his home on Lange Vijverberg, where he also had his office. In Rotterdam he had
a second home built for 128,000 guilders. All in all, De Jonge owned real property worth
709,000 guilders in 1710. As Receiver General he earned 35,000 guilders annually between
1700 and 1704, but his private annual income amounted to 56,000 guilders. He had
acquired it, as was customary in Holland, by investing a large part of his income in bonds
and real property. De Jonge’s total income after tax was (in that period) 81,654 guilders
(713,000 euro today), of which he reserved three quarters for investment.

According to De Muinck, Cornelis was successful in his function of Receiver General

because of his exactitude in managing public finance. He showed this quality also in the
management of his private fortune. His wife Maria noted down income and expenses just
as conscientiously. Apart from overseeing the housekeeping, she controlled the
maintenance of the houses, including those put out to lease. After her husband’s death,
she continued the bookkeeping until her own death in 1732.

De Jonge structured his own bookkeeping in a similar way as the one he maintained as
Receiver General (on accounting practices, see 8.2). Income and expenses were recorded
in waste books (journalen). In the groot journael De Jonge also accounted for his income as
Receiver General, including his salary, compensation of office costs and fees for his
brokering of foreign loans. In blaffaards (see the preceding section) Cornelis rearranged
the items from the waste books per category of assets, such as lands, houses, bonds, and
shares. He noted acquisitions (conquesten) such as assets acquired by inheritance or sale in
the grand ledger.

Part of the lands and houses were not managed by Cornelis and Maria themselves. The
properties at some distance from The Hague and Rotterdam were managed by stewards.
From their accounts, only the balance was booked.

The emphasis of his estate was on real property, but De Jonge had a considerable securities
portfolio. He speculated as well, but rather cautiously. For example, he participated in the

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1720 bubble (windhandel, or trade in winds) by buying shares in the Insurance Company
of Rotterdam (Maatschappij van Assurantie) for 20,000 guilders. On the first day of trading
(21 June), subscriptions rose as high as 12 million guilders. De Jonge sold his shares quickly
at 28 or 29 percent. Some weeks later the shares increased to 900 percent, but in
September the bubble suddenly collapsed. At that time De Jonge had earned a moderate
profit of 5,700 guilders.

De Jonge’s bookkeeping reflected his investment policy against the background of the
societal, economic, and political macro level, as shown by two other examples. His
securities portfolio decreased once the War of the Spanish Succession ended in 1713,
ending the issuance of war loans as well. For three small houses and a coach house in
The Hague De Jonge did not charge rent, as they were inhabited by Huguenots who had
fled from France.

Apart from the bookkeeping, the family archives contain many more documents
concerning asset management. These include testaments, divisions of estate (boedel­
scheidin­gen), and conveyances (see 1.7). The archivist who processed the De Jonge archives
in 1914-1915 had to make some choices. For example, testaments and documents
concerning inheritances are classified as ‘originating from or concerning’ the testator, and
not as documents received by the heir. Strictly speaking, this is not right. A testament is a
property deed for the heir, not for the deceased, and thus its archival provenance is the heir.
It is possible that De Jonge ordered the documents in this way. He and his descendants
would have kept the bookkeeping apart, and they would also have kept the documents
concerning the seigniories separate and not divided them among the archives of Cornelis
de Jonge, his son, and the latter’s daughter. A family archive is a combination of personal
archives (see 1.7.3), but it often contains a common core which is difficult, if not
impossible, to allocate to individual family members.

A family archive inherits, as was the case with the De Jonge archive. With the death of
Cornelis’ granddaughter in 1747, the family lineage had died out. When her husband had
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died as well, the seigniories came into other hands. The family archive came in the
possession of the Van Rechteren family, who deposited it with the State Archives in
Zeeland in 1914. However, several documents from the De Jonge archives ended up in
other archives. For example, the deeds of feoffment (leenakten) (conveyances of a fief )
of the Poortvliet seigniory ended up in the archives of the Tak family (who bought
Poortvliet in the 1840s and amended their name to Tak van Poortvliet).

Fig. 6.7 Two pairs of transfixed deeds of feoffment (leenakten) of the Poortvliet seigniory,
1704-1788. Zeeuws Archief, Mathias-Pous-Tak van Poortvliet (255), inv. nr. 471/12 and 13.

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Eight of the 17 deeds are physically connected by the tag of the seal hanging on each char­-
ter that was pierced through that of the previous charter. This is called a transfix. The usual
practice was to hand over to the buyer the former deeds as retroacta (preceding acts). That
practice was codified in 1838 and, even today, the seller is obliged to hand over the deeds (if
available) and other documents pertaining to the property, either as originals or as copies.

6.2.4 Estate Inventories

On 25 July 1656 clerks of the Amsterdam Chamber of Desolate

Estates (Kamer van de desolate boedels, see 6.3.1) knocked on the
door of Rembrandt’s house on Breestraat.18

The painter had requested cession of estate (cessio bonorum). This

meant the surrender of his estate as payment for all his debts and
accepting full control by the commissioners of the Chamber of
Desolate Estates. They would sell everything and use the yield to
pay the creditors. Therefore, on 25 and 26 July 1656 an inventory
was made of all paintings, furniture, and other household effects.
The Chamber’s clerks walked from room to room, noting down
everything. They started in the entrance hall:

18 Dudok van Heel, Dossier Rembrandt; Walter L. A small piece by Ad. Brouwer, representing a pastry cook
Strauss and Marjon van der Meulen, The Rembrandt
documents (New York, NY: Abaris Books, 1979), One ditto of players by the same Brouwer
nr. 1656/12, http://remdoc.huygens.knaw.nl/#/
document/remdoc/e4706, accessed 29 Nov. 2018.
One ditto of a woman with a little child by Rembrandt van Rijn
See also the Prologue and 11.1.1.3. A painter’s studio by the same Brouwer
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Archiving Property A lavish kitchen piece by the same Brouwer
A plaster head
Two plasters of naked children
A plaster of a sleeping child
A shabby shoe
A small landscape by Rembrandt
Another landscape by the same
A small standing figure by the same
A candlelight scene by Jan Lievensz
(…)

The inventorization ended in the hallway:

9 white bowls
2 earthenware dishes
Linen said to be at the bleaching field
3 men’s shirts
6 handkerchiefs
12 napkins
3 tablecloths
A few collars and cuffs

The inventory does not mention easels, brushes, or paint. Equip­

ment, necessary to continue working in one’s occupation, was not
liable for confiscation benefitting creditors.

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Inventories of a person’s movable and immovable properties marked important moments
in life.19 They were drawn up after death (particularly when the deceased’s heirs were
minors), before marriage, in bankruptcy, upon admittance to a charitable institution, and
other similar occasions. The number and nature of the inventories that have been
preserved differ considerably from province to province and from era to era, though in
general hardly any inventories from before the 16th century are left. Thera Wijsenbeek,
the expert on the history of this genre of documents, suggests that, apparently, people
previously felt no need to keep the estate papers for a longer period. The significant
increase in the number of inventories since the 16th century may have been related to the
extension of the notarial practice (see 9.5), as well as a change of mentality. Appreciation,
respect, and a penchant for material goods became stronger in the 17th and 18th centuries.
This was partly due to the increase of personal affluence which was expressed in luxury
goods.

In several cases, inventorization of an estate was required by law. In the first place to
protect heirs under age. The widow or widower or another guardian had to make an
inventory and submit it to the magistrate who was considered the ‘superior guardian’
(oppervoogd) of personae miserabiles such as widows and orphans and the poor, sick, and
destitute. In some towns a separate orphan chamber was established to implement this
guardianship, whereas elsewhere burgomasters or aldermen acted as orphans’ trustees
(see the next section).

The law made it mandatory for the executor appointed by testament to inventory the
estate. In case someone on board a ship of the United East India Company or the West
India Company died, it was the captain who had to draw up an inventory. In cases of
bankruptcy, an inventory was compulsory, just as when the deceased did not leave direct
heirs. Not required, but usual, was the inventorization of an estate either when a prenuptial
agreement was made or when someone had died and the heirs wanted an inventory to be
19 Th.F. Wijsenbeek-Olthuis, ‘Boedelinventarissen’,
in Broncommentaren 2 (Den Haag: Instituut voor
made. Furthermore, an inventory was made as the basis for a division of estate (boedel­
Nederlandse geschiedenis, 1995), pp. 1-74. schei­ding), such as after death, during a marriage, or after a divorce. Although the legal
 154a | 6 |
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basis was different, the inventories made by notaries from the 17th century show a striking
uniformity through adherence to the notarial ‘style’ as codified in the manuals (see 9.5).20
They are easily recognizable because the head of the deed is written in the right-hand
column of the first page. Then the enumeration (and valuation) of the goods follows,
usually mentioning the real property first. The description of the movable goods generally
follows the layout of the house where the notary or clerk walked from room to room, as in
Rembrandt’s case. A separate list was made of business assets and merchandise. This was
followed by an inventory of the liabilities: first the expenses for medical care and the
funeral, then the other debts, including interest payable.

Drawing up an inventory would often take a few days and was therefore fairly expensive.
An illustration is the cost of the inventory of 87 pages of the estate of a Doesburg
burgomaster which amounted to 75 guilders in 1669.21

Estate inventories are to be found in family archives and in notarial archives (see 9.6).
Around 1640 the flow of inventories in notarial archives started. According to Thera
Wijsenbeek, the notarial archives of Delft from 1602 to 1620 only comprise 43 inventories,
but between 1640 and 1649 they number 443. In the entire 17th century the number of
inventories in Delft is around 4,500. As of January 2019, the team which is processing the
notarial archives of Amsterdam had identified 4,746 inventories of which 2,425 are from
before 1737.

The notary archived the final draft (minuut) of the inventory after it was signed by
witnesses and parties; the latter received an authentic copy each. That is why so many
inventories are found in family archives. The archives of orphan chambers, courts, and
20 A.F. Gehlen, Notariële akten uit de 17e en 18e eeuw.
orphanages contain many inventories as well. Other charitable institutions, such as
Handleiding voor gebruikers (Zutphen: Walburg Pers, hospitals, very often destroyed the inventories made by or on behalf of their patients. They
1986), pp. 54-55.
mostly listed only a few belongings. What was still left of these inventories became the
21 Hester Dibbits, Vertrouwd bezit. Materiële cultuur in
Doesburg en Maassluis 1650-1800 (Nijmegen: SUN,
object of massive cleansing to save space in the 19th century.
2001), p. 29.

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6.2.5 Orphan Chambers

Archiving Property 22

Orphan chambers (weeskamers) existed since the 14th century, predominantly in Holland
and Zeeland. Utrecht, Noord-Brabant, Gelderland and the cities of Kampen and
Groningen also had orphan chambers. Other provinces and towns did not have separate
orphan masters (weesmeesters), instead magistrates handled cases of guardianship and
orphans’ estates.
The Orphan Chamber mostly consisted of two or three weesmeesters who were appointed
by the magistrate. They were in session two to four times a week to hear and decide
disputes about guardianship and estate management.

Orphans and their estates stayed under the control of the Chamber until their majority at
25 years, or until they married. The Chamber appointed the guardians (trustees),
preferably family members of the orphan. They had to submit an estate inventory within
four weeks. This inventory was usually drawn up by a notary, with the assistance of sworn
male and female appraisers.

The clerk of the Chamber recorded all acts of trustees and weesmeesters. This was not only
22 L. de Gou, De weeskamer van ’s-Gravenhage
in the interests of the orphans but also of the accountability of guardians and weesmeesters.
(’s-Gravenhage: Trio, 1943); W.F.H. Oldewelt, The oldest register of guardianship is the one of Montfoort (1382); the series of divisions of
Amsterdamsche archiefvondsten (Amsterdam:
De Bussy, 1942), pp. 123-27; L.P.E. Kretzschmar,
estate (boedelscheidingen) begins in 1417. The oldest orphans’ register of Rotterdam begins
Archief van de Weeskamer en Commissie van in 1444, that of Amsterdam dates from 1468. When the Amsterdam City Hall burned
liquidatie der zaken van de voormalige Weeskamer
[in Amsterdam]: https://web.archive.org/
down (see the Prologue), some burghers dared to venture into the flames to salvage books
web/20190531122843/https://archief.amsterdam/ and papers. As the 18th-century city historian Jan Wagenaar wrote:
inventarissen/printversie/5073.nl.pdf, archived 31
May 2019.
23 Jan Wagenaar, quoted by Marius van Melle and
Among them was someone who went to the Orphan Chamber that was in flames
Niels Wisman, ‘Hier gebeurde het… Dam, 6 juli 1652’, and who tried to get hold of every book and register to throw them out of the
Ons Amsterdam (2007), https://web.archive.org/
web/20190531122201/https://onsamsterdam.nl/hier-
windows where they were picked up and salvaged, whereupon he came down by a
gebeurde-het-dam-6-juli-1652, archived 31 May 2019. rope because the stairs he had ascended had already burnt down. 23
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Fig. 6.8 First register of guardians (voogden)

in Leiden, 1575. Erfgoed Leiden, Weeskamer
Leiden (0518), inv. nr. 241.

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Of the Chamber’s archives only the 22nd inbrengboek (1633-1636) was lost in the fire;
after the fire, it was reconstructed from data that were still available.

In Amsterdam the municipal gravediggers had to report to the Chamber whether those
just buried had left infants behind.24 At the Chamber this was noted down in so-called
death registers (doodboeken). The orphans were also registered by the municipal
orphanage, or one of the orphanages of the Reformed, Catholic, Mennonite, or Walloon
churches. The orphanage took over the administration of their possessions. It had to keep
all records safe and up-to-date until the day the orphan was allowed to leave and find a
place in society. Then, the archives of the orphanage had to provide the information—
often the original documents—relating to the estate to which the young man or woman
was entitled (see 1.3 and Fig. 1.0).

The Orphan Chamber registered the trustees. For each estate (boedel) an account
recording income and expenses was opened in the register of receipts (inbrengregister,
though elsewhere known as administratieregister, or staatboek). The funds of the orphans
were invested, from the 17th century onwards this was mostly in bonds. The Chamber
managed the funds and securities belonging to an estate. The Chamber’s cautious
investment policy was not always to the liking of the family of the orphan. This was one of
the reasons why (particularly from the 18th century onwards) testators often excluded
the Orphan Chamber from involvement in the heritage.

Weesmeesters had to give permission for any transaction between an orphan and third
parties which could affect the orphan’s financial position. Permission was also required if
the surviving parent wanted to remarry. In such a case the Chamber’s permit had to be
shown to the commissioners of marriages. Testaments containing a clause of exclusion of
24 Henk Looijesteijn and Marco H.D. van Leeuwen,
‘Establishing and registering identity in the
the Orphan Chamber had to be shown to the weesmeesters. In Amsterdam these affairs
Dutch Republic’, in Registration and recognition. were written up in the register of memoranda (register van de memoriën). Sales of houses
Documenting the person in world history, ed. Keith
Breckenridge and Simon Szreter (Oxford: Oxford
and estates were noted down in special registers to which the public had access. All these
University Press, 2012), pp. 226-27. documents (including minutes of the meetings of the Chamber) were written by clerks
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of the Chamber. The Chamber also received many documents. The trustees submitted
documents such as inventories, accounts, and deeds of division of estate. Generally, all
papers created outside the Chamber and concerning the estate had to be delivered at the
Chamber. These estate papers had to be handed to the family upon termination of the
control by the Chamber, but often they remained there. Theoretically, these papers, not
being created by the Chamber, do not belong to its archives and are therefore mostly
described in an annexe to the inventory (see 9.1 for a comparable practice regarding files
submitted to the court).

In many town halls, the weesmeesters had a separate room. In Enkhuizen they had
tapestries made in 1710 for three of the four walls of the Orphan Chamber, showing
allegorical pictures of Charity and Mercy. Guardianship is pictured with an account book
(schultboek) to point out that fairness and accountability are duties of trustees managing
an orphan’s estate.25 In the Amsterdam Orphan Chamber in the City Hall (now the Royal
Palace), dating from 1655, guardianship is also pictured with an account book. Along the
walls were cupboards with 800 to 900 drawers. They contained estate papers, securities,
money, jewellery, and other trinkets. Many of these drawers are still preserved at the
Amsterdam City Archives.

French legislation introduced in 1811 included new rules for guardianship of minors,
controlled by the local courts. The orphan chamber did not figure in the new legislation.
The chambers and the estates were only liquidated by 1852. The chambers’ archives had to
be transferred to a national committee charged with the liquidation. When the committee
was dissolved in 1880, municipalities were allowed to have the archives of their orphan
chamber back. If the municipality showed no interest, the archives went to the Ministry
of Finance. The archives of the Amsterdam Orphan Chamber arrived in 1880 packed in
70 large chests (over 235 shelf metres). Elsewhere, the papers of the chamber had been left
25 Jan Baptist Bedaux, Agnes Groot, and Aernout Hagen, among the magistrate’s judicial archives. As had been the case with the old registers of
‘Allegorieën van goed bestuur; het decoratieprogram­
ma van het stadhuis van Enkhuizen (1687-1710)’,
baptisms, marriages, and deaths (see 1.2.2), the archives of the orphan chambers became
Jaarboek Monumentenzorg (1992): 142-80. the subject of archival policy. In other words, they became the subject of a conflict between

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State Archivists and municipal archivists. At the recommendation of the former, the
government proposed an amendment to the Archives Act in 1927, which was to require
the transfer of all archives of orphan chambers (considered to be judicial archives and
therefore State archives) to the State Archives. That touched a tender spot with the
municipal archivists. After opposition within and outside Parliament, a new proposal was
tabled. Transfer of archives of orphan chambers to the State Archives was to be restricted
to cases where the municipality did not have a professional archivist nor an efficient
repository. Once a municipality could meet both quality standards it was allowed to
receive the archives, but only as a deposit (according to the same treatment as judicial
archives, see 9.4). In 1995, a new Archives Act reversed this. On the condition that the
municipality had a professional archivist and an appropriate repository, deposits were
changed into a transfer of ownership. There are still a few municipalities that do not
comply with these requirements, with the result that the archives of their orphan chamber
remain in the State Archives.

6.3 Insolvent Estates

26

6.3.1 The Chamber of Desolate Estates

One of the duties of the aldermen of a city was to protect commerce by controlling
insolvency. If someone could no longer pay his debts, his ‘forlorn estate’ (desolate boedel)
was seized by the aldermen who would then manage the estate and pay the creditors. The
26 Goswin Moll, De Desolate Boedelskamer te Amster­ increase in work of aldermen led to specialization or branching off of tasks. In Dordrecht,
dam. Bijdrage tot de kennis van het oud-Hollandsch
failliten-recht (Amsterdam: De Roever-Kröber-Bakels,
for example, three aldermen were specially entrusted with winding up insolvency affairs
1879); Arnoud J. Noordam, Schuldsanering en goede beginning in 1668. In Amsterdam a separate Chamber of Desolate Estates (Kamer van
trouw, LLD thesis Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam,
2007; the introduction of the inventory of the archives
desolate boedels, hereafter: the Chamber) was established in 1643. It consisted of five, and
of the Chamber of Desolate Estates in Amsterdam later seven, commissioners. The Chamber was equivalent to a bankruptcy court and it
(Commissarissen van de Desolate Boedelkamer).
I thank Hans Ernst (retired from the Amsterdam City
took over the authority of the magistrate in these matters, as happened before with the
Archives) for his comments on a draft of this section. jurisdiction in matrimonial affairs, guardianship, insurance, and maritime affairs.
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The register, kept by aldermen since 1617, and recording the appointment of trustees
(curators) and composition agreements (akkoorden), was taken over by the Chamber and
continued as its own registration from 1644. In Dordrecht the ordinance of 1668 did not
imply a break: the three aldermen who were in charge of estate affairs continued the
registers held by the plenary.

The Chamber was the main actor in a paper-intensive genre system (see the General
Introduction). Agents in the Chamber were the commissioners, the clerk and his deputy,
three bookkeepers, and three scriveners. They dealt with external agents such as debtors
and creditors, sequesters and trustees, lawyers and notaries, burgomasters, aldermen, the
Orphan Chamber, the Bank of Exchange, and other institutions. Their interests differed,
but all realized—as the Chamber itself knew—that legal security and their own
accountability were dependent on archiving. To demonstrate the paper trail of the
insolvency process, I take the procedure in Amsterdam as a point of departure.

PS • Process Step
I/O Archival Input/Output

PS • The insolvency procedure was triggered by a petition submitted to the Desolate

Boedelkamer by the debtor or a creditor.
I/O Insolvency petition.

PS • The Chamber appointed two of its members to seal the estate, to seize the books and
papers of the insolvent, to draw up an inventory, and appoint trustees (curators).
I/O Inventories of movable properties, mostly furniture and household
effects, sometimes merchandise from the shop.
I/O Registers of inventories.
I/O Registers of insolvencies.
I/O Archival material originating from estates.

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PS • Sometimes, the books and papers of an insolvent have remained at the Chamber.
They are partly in the archives of the Chamber and partly in a separate collection of
merchant’s books which was formed in the 20th century.

PS • In the case of cession of estate (cessio bonorum; allowing the debtor to waive the
estate) a separate inventory was drawn up (see 6.2.4).

PS • The balance of the account of the insolvent with the Bank of Exchange was requested.
I/O Extract from the account.

PS • The Chamber’s bookkeeper drew a balance from the books of the insolvent, which
was copied by the scriveners into the capital register (kapitaalboek) of the trustee.
I/O Capital registers (kapitaalboeken), in which each insolvent had an
account.

PS • Creditors could check the balance and eventually challenge it at the Chamber.

PS • The Chamber appointed sequestrators (sequesters) to control the estate since 1777;
if the estate became insolvent, the sequestrators became trustees.
I/O Registers of sequestered estates.

PS • Commissioners of the Chamber held daily sessions (later this was done twice a week).
I/O Minutes (notulen).

PS • All acts concerning the estate were recorded in a verbaal. In 1958 the verbalen were
numbered according to the registers of sequestered estates.
I/O Verbalen.

PS • The estate was liquidated by selling all assets and cashing debts.
I/O Registers of sequestered estates. Write-off (or assignation) registers
(afschrijf- or assignatieboeken)
I/O Final balance (or debtors) registers (uittocht- or debiteurenboeken).
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PS • Creditors were publicly summoned by advertisements to lodge their claims and…
I/O List of creditors.
I/O Registers of summons concerning preferences
(weetbrieven op praeferentiën).
I/O Registers of summons and edictal citations
(insinuatiën en edictale citaties).
I/O Registers of advertisements (advertentiën).

PS • …to participate in a meeting to try and reach an agreement with the debtor.
I/O Registers of agreements (akkoorden).
I/O Registers of ‘unsigned creditors’ (ongetekende crediteuren)
who have not signed the agreement.

PS • The agreement was made available for public inspection…

PS • …and, after a meeting of the creditors at the Chamber…

PS • …the agreement was ratified by the Chamber, thereby liberating the estate from the
sequestration. The agreements (1,654 files) were ordered alphabetically but were
rearranged in chronological order in 1892. The agreements were numbered in 1958.

PS • If no agreement was achieved, the insolvency was proclaimed…

PS • …and the Chamber appointed two trustees (curateuren)…

I/O Registers of trustees.
I/O Registers of insolvent estates and trustees.

PS • …who had to manage and liquidate the estate.

I/O Verbalen.

PS • Creditors were publicly summoned to lodge their claims.

I/O Lists of creditors.

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I/O Registers of summons and edictal citations (insinuatiën en edictale citaties).
Archiving Property
I/O Registers of advertisements (advertentiën).

PS • Contestation of a claim and other disputes were adjudicated or settled after

a lawsuit before commissioners of the Chamber.
I/O Agendas (lists of cases with the Chamber’s decision) (rollen).
I/O Agendas of cases in disputes about preferences (preferentierollen).
I/O Agendas of petty cases (rollen van kleine zaken).
I/O Registers of filed papers (dingtalen).
I/O Agendas of pleadings (pleitrollen).
I/O Agendas of justification of claims by creditors on oath (justificatierollen).

PS • Trustees had to account monthly at the Chamber.

PS • All acts concerning the estate were recorded in a file for every estate.
I/O Accounts.
I/O Verbalen.

PS • Monies received were managed and recorded.

I/O Cash books, journals, grand ledgers, and annual balances.
I/O Registers of accounts with the Bank of Exchange (Wisselbank) and
with sequestrators and trustees.

PS • After liquidation of the estate, by public or private sale…

Final balance (or debtors) registers (uittocht- of debiteurenboeken).

PS • …the Chamber received an account of the sold goods…

I/O Registers of sales.

PS • …and trustees could proceed to partition the balance among the creditors.
I/O Registers of partitioning (repartitie).
I/O Registers of discharges (kwitantieboeken).
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PS • The Chamber ensured payment…
I/O Registers of payment to preferential creditors.
I/O Registers of payables (restantenboeken).

PS • …and the final statement, ending the insolvency.

PS • An insolvent could be rehabilitated based on a certificate of his good faith, issued

by the majority of the creditors.
I/O Registers of rehabilitation deeds.

The procedure in Amsterdam was regulated in an ordinance from 1643, which was
replaced in 1659. However, in the 18th century the ‘changes of times and circumstances’
demanded other provisions to protect creditors and debtors. The cost of managing estates
by the Chamber and the length of settling insolvency caused people to avoid the Chamber,
if possible. Creditors preferred the certainty of a rapid settlement with a lower pay-out
over ‘coming to the Chamber’ which was ‘usually always a costly and protracted’ affair.27
After the outbreak of a financial crisis in December 1772, when the survival of the Clifford
bank and many other firms was at risk, a great number of bankers and merchants proposed
codification of the informal (and conflicting with the ordinance of 1659) practice of
sequestration. A new ordinance was drafted in 1777 with input from experienced
27 Gedenkzuil der noodlottige koopjaaren, of Verzaame­
merchants and top lawyers, including the renowned Nicolaas Bondt, who had been the
ling van plannen [...] die, ter gelegenheid [...] van de legal advisor to one of the bankers.28 The ordinance regulated that the estate of a merchant
droevige commercie-tuimels [...] het licht hebben gezien
(Amsteldam: G. Bom, 1773); W.P. Sautijn Kluit,
who could no longer pay his debts would not become insolvent, but merely ‘deranged’. His
De Amsterdamsche beurs in 1763 en 1773. Eene estate would be sequestrated. Sequestrators together with the debtor were to manage and
bijdrage tot de geschiedenis van den handel
(Amsterdam: W.H. Zeelt, 1865), pp. 98-99, 128.
liquidate the estate, supervised by the Chamber. Insolvency would only follow if no
28 Nieuwe Nederlandsche Jaerboeken 12 (1777): 289-335.
agreement with the creditors could be achieved. The authors of this ordinance had looked
29 Ann M. Carlos, Edward Kosack, and Luis Castro
at regulations in other cities and in England. From the English Bankrupts Acts 1706 and
Penarrieta, Bankruptcy discharge and the emergence 1707 the possibility of discharge from bankruptcy prior to full repayment of all debts was
of debtor rights in 18th century England (2015),
http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2607585, accessed
adopted. To this end, a certificate of good faith of the debtor signed by the trustees and
29 Nov. 2018. the majority of the creditors was needed.29

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Another important innovation was the greater publicity. The ordinance of 1659 provided
for the summoning of creditors and posting of advertisements. These advertisements were
registered by the Chamber. The customary calling out of insolvencies at the Exchange
(Beurs) was codified in 1777. An advertisement had to be inserted in three newspapers and
placarded at the Exchange. This took place when the draft agreement with the creditors
was made available for public inspection. When an estate was declared insolvent and
trustees were appointed, a notice would be published in three newspapers and posted at
the City Hall. In later phases of the insolvency procedure, advertisements were also
dictated, for example to give notice when the balance and the books of the debtor were
available for public inspection and before any repartitioning among creditors. The
ordinance prescribed nothing less than 32 advertisements! The cost of advertising meant
less benefit to the creditors. This, in turn, led to a preference for an adverse settlement over
pursuing until the insolvency phase with the associated publicity.

Greater publicity was also achieved by improving the accessibility of the registers. From
1777 the registers of filed claims and judgments on preferences (dingtalen) were accurately
indexed. The report (verbaal) kept by the commissioners was accessible for debtors and
creditors. From 1777 onwards 4,425 verbalen have been preserved. Creditors also had
access to the settlement, the balance, and the books and papers of the debtor. All were pre­-
served at the Chamber. When a claim was contested, a lawsuit had to be tabled in writing
at the commissioners, who then acted in their judicial capacity. Parties had access to the
filed papers. The archives of the Chamber were accessible as well. The cost of searching the
registers amounted to six stuivers, while extraordinary services were charged separately.

In the 18th century the Chamber tried to improve efficiency by introducing pre-printed
forms for various deeds and registers. The paper ‘flood’ filled the ‘books room’ and other
storage areas.30 In 1720 the registers from the establishment of the Chamber up to and
including 1684 were sold as waste paper ‘as a heap, not measured and just as it is in
30 Amsterdam City Archives, Desolate boedelkamer
whatever condition’ (voetstoots en bij de hoop) for 2,200 guilders. It is not clear which
(5072), inv. nr. 59, fol. 37-38, 102verso, 106, 160. criteria for selection were used. In 1756 the archives from 1684 to 1714, stored in the
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Chamber’s warehouse and in the attic of the Amsterdam City Hall, were sorted and largely
disposed of: sixty-seven bales for which a waste paper trader from Krommenie paid 517
guilders. In 1773 the archives from 1714 to 1735 followed. This time the papers were
destroyed in a paper mill, in the presence of a servant of the Chamber.

6.3.2 From Paper to e-Justice Portal

The French Code de Commerce, introduced in 1811, gave the responsibility of handling
insolvency (faillissement) cases to the commercial courts. This was the end of estate
management by aldermen and chambers of desolate estates. The French Code was
replaced by the Dutch Code of Commerce in 1838. Its regulations on insolvency derived
from the French Code, but also from the Amsterdam ordinances of 1659 and 1777. The
difference between sequestration and insolvency disappeared. Any merchant who ceased
to pay was sentenced by the court to be insolvent (failliet) after a submission by either the
debtor or one or more creditors. The whole procedure, beginning with the submission,
was mainly done on paper, but less so than before 1811, because the bureaucracy was
much less than in the days of the former Chamber. The old Chamber kept around 40 series
of registers and papers, and from 1838 each of the courts kept around 15 series.

After submission and inscription of the case in the agenda, the court passed sentence.
Arising from the judgment the debtor lost disposal of his estate. The judgment included
the appointment of a supervisory judge and one or more trustees. Trustees and court
archived the various phases of the insolvency, which means that the documents (if not
destroyed) may be found in court archives and in the estate administration kept by the
trustee. The trustee also kept the books and papers of the insolvent. The insolvency was
terminated upon reaching an agreement (akkoord) with the creditors; the court then
sentenced the rehabilitation of the insolvent. If no agreement could be reached, the estate
was declared insolvent and had to be settled by the trustees. They therefore had to placard
an extract from the judgment at the town hall, the court, and the stock exchange. This
extract had to be published in a newspaper as well. The same publicity was prescribed for

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summoning the creditors to a meeting in which the claims would be verified (the known
creditors received the convocation by mail). As soon as the trustees had classified and
ranked the claims, the ranking (rangregeling) was made available for public inspection at
the court and was advertised. The insolvency was not terminated with the final account by
the trustees and their discharge, but with the rehabilitation by the court.

The regulation of insolvency in the Commercial Code remained in force until 1896, when a
separate insolvency act was introduced.31 For years people had pressed for a new law. The
system introduced in 1811-1838, which partly reproduced former ordinances, no longer
satisfied. This was exacerbated by the substantial increase in the number of insolvencies.
Between 1875 and 1879 they amounted to an average of 473 annually, and between 1880
and 1884 the average was 780. Critics pointed to the high cost—court registry duties,
stamp duties, and registration duties—and the large amount of mandatory formalities.

The new act modernized the publicity by replacing posting at the town hall and the stock
exchange by publication in one or more newspapers which had become ‘the quintessential
medium for publicity’. The act furthermore introduced publication in the Official Gazette
(Staatscourant) to make any insolvency throughout the country findable. Moreover, each
court had to keep a register of insolvencies accessible to anyone. A few members of
Parliament were in favour of a national register, but government preferred the registers to
be near the citizens.

It took more than a century and an explosive increase in the number of insolvencies
(annually 3,625 between 2006 and 2008 and 4,721 during 2010 and 2011) before a national
register was set up. Technology (the Internet) made it feasible to centralize the registration
while at the same time keeping it close to the citizen. Advertising in newspapers was
abolished due to the high cost. However, publication in the Official Gazette (digital since
2009) was continued, as were the paper registers kept by the courts. They provide the input
31 G.W. van der Feltz, Geschiedenis van de Wet op
het faillissement (…), 2 vols. (Haarlem: Erven F. Bohn,
for the nationwide system. The two are, however, not identical. For example, a request for
1896-1897). debt rescheduling for private individuals (schuldsaneringsregeling voor particulieren) is
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not entered into the public register at the court’s registry, but in the nationwide register
only, as the latter is linked to a database of financial data and background information
about the origin of the debts. This database is used for managing debt rescheduling.

Digitization made the insolvency process more transparent. The trustee’s reports
(insolventieverslagen) are accessible via the Internet, provided the trustee has submitted
them to the court both on paper and in digital form. Such a publicly accessible quarterly
report was required since 1977 after Parliament had urged the necessity of greater
transparency in 1969. Today there are digital models for these reports that follow
guidelines drafted by the consultative bodies of insolvency judges and the Bar. These
guidelines also comprise other rules for archiving.
As in the past, much archival material can be found in public archives, in this case the
archives of the bankruptcy courts. Gradually, however, the focus in archiving has shifted to
the trustee and the insolvent. Together with the request for insolvency, the debtor must
submit a binder with information of which part will be reproduced in the public registers.
In the next phase the trustee will require even more documents:32

• List of debts and receivables

• Description of the cause of the insolvency
• Identification
• Extract from the company register (not older than one month)
• Articles of association (authenticated copy)
• Register of shareholders
• Minutes of the shareholders’ assembly which decided to apply for insolvency
• Approval of that decision by the Board of Directors
• Most recent annual account
• A recent balance
• Information about the number of staff
32 Manon van der Voort, Het F-woord. Handboek bij
faillissement (Amersfoort: BBNC Uitgevers, 2012),
• Insurance policies, lease contracts, and rent contracts
pp. 99-100. • List of current orders and commissions
• and, of course, the bookkeeping, usually in digital form

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The trustee starts working with these documents, adding the documents he archives for
his own accountability: the quarterly insolvency reports (already mentioned) and much
more.

The development of publicity of insolvencies—from local to national, from paper to

digital—is still ongoing. Within the European Union, a regulation on trans-border
insolvencies has applied since 2002. In 2017 the regulation was revised. Any judgment
opening insolvency proceedings handed down by a court of an EU member state is
recognised in all other member states. States are required to publish relevant information
in cross-border insolvency cases in a publicly accessible electronic register. If required
by national law, that information may be registered in the land register (kadaster) and the
company register (handelsregister). The EU regulation provides interconnection of the
insolvency registers via the European e-Justice Portal that will serve as a central public
electronic access point. The minimum amount of information to be published in the
insolvency registers is regulated. The information in the registers is publicly available.

6.4 Holocaust Assets

33

The complexity of Holocaust-era archives is aggravated by the intricacies of the admini­

stra­tive organizations, agencies, and institutions that created, processed, used, and
maintained the records—both during and after the war. Let me present as an example the
fate of diamonds belonging to Dutch Jews. In 1942, Jews had to hand in all jewellery and
other valuables to the bank of Lippmann Rosenthal & Co. (Liro) on Sarphatistraat in
Amsterdam, who also received all or most goods confiscated by the Germans on deporta­
tion. Diamonds were used by Jews as payment to get a temporary exemption from
33 The following is for the greater part a summary of
Eric Ketelaar, ‘Understanding archives of the people,
deportation. Diamonds deposited by Jews with the Amsterdamsche Bank were confiscated
by the people, and for the people’, in Washington by the Foreign Exchange Protection Commando (Devisenschutzkommando Niederlande)
Conference on Holocaust-Era Assets Proceedings,
ed. J.D. Bindenagel (Washington D.C.: United States
and sent to Berlin in January 1945. Reichskommissar Seyss-Inquart personally took the
Government Printing Office, 1999), pp. 749-61. diamonds to Berlin which had been ‘safeguarded’ by the State Bureau for Diamonds and
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looted by the Germans in September 1944. A third shipment to Berlin consisted of the
diamonds of Jewish diamond cutters and dealers, requisitioned by the leader of the
Devisenschutzkommando and sent by him to Berlin in March 1945.

After the war, restitution and reparations payment with regard to diamonds were dealt
with by different agencies and organizations: the Liquidators of Liro (LVVS), the
Recuperation Bureau of the Ministry of Finance, the Jewellery-Committee Foundation
(Stichting Sieraden-Comité), the Recuperated Diamonds Foundation (Stichting
Teruggevoerde Diamant), the Commissioner General for Netherlands Economic
Recuperation, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Netherlands Military Mission at the
Allied Control Council, the Restitution Control Council of OMGGUS (Office of Military
Government, United States), the Reparation, Deliveries, and Restitution Division of the
UK, and the German restitutions offices (Wiedergutmachungsämter).

To discover the fate of a particular set of diamonds, before actually searching the archives,
one has to get acquainted with the different ‘missions’ of both looting and restituting
agencies and organizations. Then one must check to which competency the looting,
restitution, and reparation of that type of diamond might have belonged. Furthermore, one
must study the administrative histories of the institutions and the vicissitudes of their
archives and to ascertain where one has to search within the archival remains of an
individual agency. All this pertains to the contextual and custodial history of the records.

Serving as an itinerary in the Netherlands is a guide of actions and actors involved in the
looting of assets (1940-1945), their recuperation (1945-1950), restoration of legal rights
34 J.M.L. van Boxmeer, P.C.A. Lamboo, and H.A.J. van
and restitution (1945-1971) and compensation (1950-1987).34 It is a 364-page guide of 75
Schie, Archieven Joodse oorlogsgetroffenen. Overzicht agencies, both public and private, Dutch and German, and their archives (ranging from
van archieven met gegevens over roof, recuperatie,
rechtsherstel en schadevergoeding van vermogens
one file to more than 2,500 metres of shelving). The guide also lists finding aids which may
van Joden in Nederland in de periode 1940-1987, guide the searcher to document level. Sometimes a particular fonds is enriched by lists and
vervaardigd in opdracht van de Commissie van
Onderzoek Liro-archieven (Den Haag: Algemeen
indexes with names. In other cases, the files may be arranged physically according to
rijksarchief, 1998). names. The guide explains the meaning of the various signs, symbols, stamps, and

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references on the Liro index cards like ‘H.R.’ (presumably for Hausrat, or household
effects). These cards, numbered between 1 and 23,015, were created by Liro and, after the
war, used by various recuperation, restoration, and restitution agencies who often added
information to the original cards. German and Dutch bureaucrats maintained their files,
card indexes, and ledgers so meticulously that, once one understands the administrative
and recordkeeping history, their detailed accounts can be checked as if their creators are
still working at their desks.

Fig. 6.9 A Liro card, used in 1943 and in 1953. From Henny van Schie, ‘Joodse tegoeden
en archieven. Context in de praktijk’, in Context. Interpretatiekaders in de archivistiek, ed.
P.J. Horsman, F.C.J. Ketelaar, and T.H.P.M. Thomassen (’s-Gravenhage: Stichting
Archiefpublicaties, 2000), p. 262.
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Files and card indexes created during the war which account for the looting were re-used
for the post-war recuperation, restoration, and compensation. These re-activations added
new meaning to the records (see the General Introduction). After the final payment, only
some 3,100 cards which did not serve as a basis for any claim were preserved, the rest were
destroyed. Those 3,100 ‘useless’ cards sitting in a few drawers were discovered by chance
in 1997 when the premises of the Amsterdam subsidiary of the Ministry of Finance were
vacated. When this became known, it provoked a public outcry that increased when it
became clear that the files related to these cards had been destroyed as late as 1984, with
the authorization of the General State Archivist, because the records no longer had any
administrative or historical value. What the archivists had underestimated was the
symbolic value of those cards for survivors of the Holocaust.35 Someone once said to me:
‘I know the golden watch looted from my grandfather cannot be returned, neither will he
himself ever return—but could I hold that little card for a moment, to connect with my
grandfather?’ Because of their emotional and symbolic value, the ‘useless’ cards were
transferred to the National Archives.

6.5 Conclusion
Through the ages the need for archiving property, particularly archiving real estate, was
felt. Private people and institutions recorded their properties, used administrative tools for
managing their properties, and controlled the destiny of these properties and the
associated administration after marriage or death. Government also had an interest in
efficient archiving of properties, on the one hand to protect the legal security
(rechtszekerheid) of transactions between their subjects, and on the other hand with regard
to taxation. Archiving property was therefore done by different parties and with different
aims (see Fig. 0.2), which by no means always overlapped.

35 Theo Thomassen, Archiefwetenschap, erfgoed en

Archiving property was done with a multiplicity of documentary genres that were dealt
politisering (Amsterdam: Vossiuspers, 2010). with in this chapter (see for example 6.2.1 and 6.3.1). They may present a static and

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unchanging situation (for example a cartulary), or they may provide a picture of a changing
situation dynamically, such as the regularly updated land register. One of these static
genres is the estate inventory—a snapshot—like the inventory drawn up after Rembrandt’s
insolvency in 1656. Not everything was included in such an inventory, or in any of the
other document genres. Sometimes properties were hidden or were legally exempted from
inventorization and registration.

Legal security was a condition for social order, but also for security in trading. Both
arguments (together with the accountability of government) played a role in the archiving
by orphan chambers, the Chamber of Desolate Estates, and comparable institutions in
modern times. Their work processes were paper-intensive—though nowadays mostly
digital. The sequential steps in the insolvency (faillissement) procedure were triggered by
documents which steered the process and the activities of participants acting together in
this genre system (see the General Introduction).

Legal security necessarily meant publicity, not only of the transfer and mortgage of real
property but also of insolvencies and the guardianship of the assets of minors. The need for
publicity entailed accessibility of registers and files. The limits of the publicity shifted over
time from local to national and international levels due to archivalization factors such as
changing views of insolvency and the geographical extension of legal relations. To make
the registrations accessible, different technologies were used. First, annual alphabetical
indexes of the registers of conveyances, then more sophisticated indexes of local
premodern land registers. This became even more comprehensive and standardized
throughout the country in 1832. Technologies continued to evolve with the land register
and cadastre since 1832, their mechanization, computerization, and digitization.
Technology enabled the linking of registrations. From the beginning of the 19th century,
land register and cadastre were complex interlocking genre systems, supported by tens of
thousands of maps and various registers. They now form a component of the national
system of basic registers (basisregistraties, see 1.6).
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We often owe innovations in archiving systems to individuals such as the 12th-century
abbot Wouter in Egmond, the 16th-century Leiden city clerk Jan van Hout, and the
18th-century lawyer Nicolaas Bondt.

Archiving property frequently entailed a layered administration, as in the 16th-century

administration of the Abbey of Mariënweerd which was split up geographically, by
rentambten and uithoven, secondly by office, and thirdly by categories of income. Each
category was accounted for in separate books. Such a ‘cascade’ of records (see 10.5) is also
encountered elsewhere, for example in double-entry bookkeeping (see 8.2). Important
was the distinction between collectable revenues and those actually collected. The former
were registered (mostly annually) in a rental or blaffaard, while the actual income was
booked in a manuaal. In a roll one may find both quota and actual monies, parcels to be
rented out, as well as the actual tenants. As in other domains, records of properties could
be re-used and expanded over time, each activation adding meaning to the record, as is
shown in the example of the registration of Jewish assets during and after the Second
World War. The stages of such continuous use and re-semiosis have to be documented
carefully in order to fully understand the contexts and contents of the multi-faceted
record.

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A SOCIAL HISTORY OF
DUTCH ARCHIVES Chapter 7

Archiving Trade
and Industry
—
7.0 Introduction 7.6 Dutch Paper and Dutch Gin
7.1 Business Letters 7.6.0 Land of the Windmills
7.2 Partners in Trading and 7.6.1 Making Paper
Shipping 7.6.1.1 Starting a Papermill
7.3 Office Archives 7.6.1.2 Getting up Steam
7.3.1 The Merchant’s Comptoir 7.6.1.3 Rationing
7.3.2 On Board 7.6.1.4 Automation
7.3.3 The Office as a Memory Centre 7.6.2 Dutch Courage
7.4 Mastering Time and 7.6.2.1 Malting, Roasting, and
Distance Distilling
7.5 Trading and Shipping in 7.6.2.2 Taxation
the First World War 7.6.2.3 Associating
l Fig. 7.0 Antoon van Welie, The Executive 7.7 Collecting Trade and
Committee of the Netherland Oversea Trust
Company (NOT), 1922-1924. On the table to Industry Archives
the left a NOT certificate (see Fig. 13.6). 7.8 What to Keep?
Rijksmuseum SK-A-4698. 7.9 Conclusion
ˇ
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7.0 Introduction
For centuries the Dutch have excelled in shipping and trading. As Sir William Temple,
English Ambassador to the Dutch Republic, wrote in 1672:

no Countrey can be found either in this present Age, or upon Record of any Story,
where so vast a Trade has been managed, as in the narrow compass of the Four
Maritime Provinces of this Commonwealth.1

How did people deal with this disparity between the limited area within the boundaries
of the Republic and the vastness of its trade? And how did archiving bridge the difference
of space, suggested by Sir William, which also entailed a difference in time between the
local and the global?

From the vantage point of reconciling differences in space and time, this chapter
investigates how Dutch merchants recorded information, how they used and archived
their records, and the fate of their archives. ‘A merchant should always have his hands
stained with ink’, the Italian humanist Leon Battista Alberti wrote in the 15th century.2
Textualization (verschriftelijking) of the merchant’s business had begun even earlier.
In north-western Europe it occurred in 14th-century Lübeck. This shift meant a revolution
in management. The merchant could stay in his office at home and send his representatives
to foreign markets while keeping contact continuously. To this end, records were
indispensable.

1 George Clark, Observations upon the United Provinces

Sections 1 to 5 follow each other in chronological order, from the 16th to the 20th century.
of the Netherlands by William Temple (Oxford: The ‘nerve of commerce’ were business letters (7.1) which bridge space and time. Apart
Clarendon Press, 1972), ch. VI.
from correspondence, the merchant kept the books to account for his dealings over time
2 Leon Battista Alberti, I libri della famiglia, ed.
R. Romano and A. Tenenti (Torino: Einaudi, 1994),
(on bookkeeping see 8.2). Trading and shipping were often conducted in partnership
p. 218. (compagnie) of several merchants and skippers, entailing specific requirements for

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archiving (7.2). The merchant’s office (and its extension, the ship’s office) was a junction of
various techniques for the production, reproduction, and keeping of records (7.3). These
practices are dependent on mastering time and distance by using communication and
information technologies (7.4). The First World War confined the neutral Netherlands to a
‘narrow compass’ with only limited means to continue its vast trade overseas. What were
the consequences for archiving trade and shipping (7.5)?

No great merchant’s archives from the Middle Ages, like those of Francesco Datini, the
merchant of Prato (1363-1410), have been preserved in the Netherlands. However, we
possess merchant’s archives from the 16th century—those of Claes Adriaensz van
Adrichem and of Daniel van der Meulen—and we have the archives of the United East
India Company (VOC, see 1.4 and chapter 10) from the 17th and 18th centuries. From the
18th and 19th centuries, the archives of merchant bankers like Hope & Co and Van Eeghen
(and Kingma, see 8.4) have come down. The archives of the Netherland Oversea Trust
Company (7.5) came about as a consequence of the First World War. A concern for
endangered archives of businesses and trade unions emerged in the 20th century (7.7),
while on the other hand, a debate began about the appraisal of trade and industry records:
what to keep, and what to destroy (7.8).

Archiving industrial business (7.6) is treated in two case studies of typically Dutch sectors
that may be considered examples of early modern industrialization: paper manufacturing
and the production of Dutch gin (jenever). Following my model of the archiving context
(Fig. 0.2), I propose to show how in these industries archiving was interconnected with
people, business, and work processes. In fact, neither business could start or function if it
did not follow an extensive paper trail. Another question is to what extent archiving these
industries was influenced by societal challenges, particularly in the 19th and 20th
centuries?
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7.1 Business Letters

Archiving Trade and Indusrty 3

Claes Adriaensz van Adrichem (1538-1607), merchant, shipowner, and burgomaster, lived
in Delft, but the centre of his trade was Amsterdam.4 His business was characterized by
the efficient combination of shipping, trading, and distributing wares. This was a new way
of doing business. In Antwerp they stuck to traditional practices of trading, such as trading
at the periodic fairs. This difference was also expressed in the forms of recordkeeping.
To react quickly to price differences between different markets, regular and fast trade
3 Aksel Erhardt Christensen, Dutch trade to the Baltic information was of vital importance to the Dutch merchant. This aim was served by the
about 1600. Studies in the Sound Toll Register and
Dutch shipping records (Copenhagen/The Hague:
constant flow of commercial letters, as ‘the nerve of commerce is the business letter.’5
Einar Munksgaard/Martinus Nijhoff, 1941). A few Van Adrichem received his information about the Amsterdam market from his agent
paragraphs of this section were taken from Eric
Ketelaar, ‘The Dutch comptoir as information centre’,
(factor) there, Hendrick Hubertsz. The core of his market reports was the list of prices
Archival science 18 (2018): 333-41. of various goods. Later, around 1585, such lists were printed and developed into the weekly
4 P.H. Winkelman, Bronnen voor de geschiedenis van Amsterdam price-currents.
de Nederlandse Oostzeehandel in de zeventiende eeuw
III. Acten uit de notariële archieven van Amsterdam en
het Noorderkwartier van Holland 1585-1600. Commercial letters were information assets for merchants like Claes van Adrichem and
Het koopmansarchief van Claes van Adrichem 1585-
1597 (’s-Gravenhage: Nijhoff, 1981). See also Oscar
Daniel van der Meulen, a merchant from Antwerp who established himself in Leiden in
Gelderblom, ‘The governance of early modern trade. 1591. They also served a larger public because information was shared on the Exchange
The case of Hans Thijs, 1556–1611’, Enterprise and
society 4, no. 4 (2003): 606-39.
(Beurs), in the tavern, after church, and in meetings and committees. Commercial letters,
5 Christensen, Dutch trade, p. 179; See also Clé Lesger,
price-currents, and manuscript newsletters which were to develop into printed
The rise of the Amsterdam market and information newspapers, were instruments of this information supply. Amsterdam was an information
exchange. Merchants, commercial expansion and
change in the spatial economy of the Low Countries c.
exchange.6 As historian Clé Lesger writes: ‘Key to the exceptional position of Amsterdam
1550-1630 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006). in international trade was not holding buffer stocks, but the availability of information. The
6 Woodruff D. Smith, ‘The function of commercial city was more important as a centre of information exchange than as a staple market for
centers in the modernization of European capitalism.
Amsterdam as an information exchange in the 17th
goods.’7 In Amsterdam various genre systems (see the General Introduction) overlapped.
century’, The journal of economic history 44, no. 4 Information from all corners of the world was collected, exchanged and compiled, stored
(1984): 985-1005; Peter Burke, A Social history of
knowledge. From Gutenberg to Diderot (Cambridge:
and analysed, new information was created, and, finally, information was disseminated
Polity, 2000), pp. 168-9. from the city.
7 Lesger, The rise, pp. 183, 214-57.

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Van Adrichem kept a regular correspondence with Aper Jansz, his factor in Danzig (now
Gdansk, Poland), but also with the agents of companies where Van Adrichem functioned
as a bookkeeper (but in fact, as business manager, see the next section). Aper Jansz
numbered each letter so that Van Adrichem could ascertain that the correspondence was
complete, just as Van Adrichem numbered his letters to Jansz. The many letters from
Danzig were ‘enfiled’, meaning collected on a string, forming a lias (see 3.2 and Fig. 7.6).
Many of the records still show a small hole, sometimes even with a part of the string
attached. Putting loose documents on a string (Italian filza) or assembling them in bundles
was the standard business practice among Italian merchants and codified in Pacioli’s
Tractatus de computis et scripturis (1494). This book did not only treat bookkeeping (see
8.2.2), but also archiving. In the English edition of Jan Impyn’s adaptation of Pacioli (1547)
the merchant is advised:

ye shall gather together euery moneth all suche letters as are written vnto you and
bynde them vp in a bondell, and write vpon them the moneth and the yere when ye
bynd them vp: And at the yeres ende ye shall bynd all the twelfe bondelles that ye had
in the twelfe monethes in one bondell, and writyng likewise vpon them the date and
yere, that thei maie be redy whensoeuer ye shall fortune to haue any thyng to do
with them.8

The bundles were often arranged geographically and stored on liassen or in pigeonholes.
Thus, the archives of Daniel van der Meulen contain different series of letters and bills
from Italy, Bremen, Antwerp, Cologne, London, and other places. We know this way of
arranging from the inventory that was made after Van der Meulen’s death in Leiden in
1600 by notary and city clerk Jan van Hout (see 4.4). He relied on Van der Meulen’s
assistant Abraham Berrewijns, who collected and bundled the business records after his
master’s death.
8 P. de Waal, ‘De Engelsche vertaling van Jan Ympyn’s
Nieuwe Instructie’, Economisch-historisch jaarboek
18 (1934): 49; repr. In Selected classics in the history of
bookkeeping, series III, 2 (Osaka: Nihon Shoseki, 1977).
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Fig. 7.1a Inventory of Daniel van der Meulen’s

archives, drawn up by notary Jan van Hout,
1600, with references to the marks on the
bundles of papers. The third item is: ‘Another
bundle of an oblong format, entitled Accounts
from Sweden, and marked CF’. Erfgoed Leiden,
Daniel van der Meulen and Hester de la Faille
(096), inv. nr. 68, fol. 80verso.

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Fig. 7.1b Label of a bundle of papers in Daniel van der Meulen’s archives, 1600:
‘Accounts from Sweden’, and the mark CF referring to the inventory. Erfgoed Leiden,
Daniel van der Meulen and Hester de la Faille (096), inv. nr. 152.

In the Van der Meulen archives (12,000 documents), preserved in the Leiden municipal
archives (digital copies of which are available on the Internet), traces of the original way of
geographical arrangement can still be recognised.

Van Adrichem copied his letters to Aper Jansz and many others in his letter book between
1589 and 1597. Most of them are fair copies, but there are also some drafts. Van Adrichem
wrote the letter book himself, unlike the Italian merchants, of whom Impyn writes that
they left the job to their servants. Such letter books were prescribed, as supplementary
to the main bookkeeping registers, in merchants’ manuals as late as the middle of the
19th century (see 8.2.7 and 8.4.2). This, however, primarily related to the outgoing letters
 169a | 7 |
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(or, at the very least, for the most important outgoing letters), ‘to be able at all times to
check from it [the letter book] what we have written to them’.9 As regards the incoming
letters, the way of endorsing or docketing that Impyn had already advised, remained
in use:

And when ye receiue suche letters ye shal write the daie of the moneth that
ye receiue theim, vpon the letter and the name of the party and the place that
it commeth from. And when suche a letter commeth that requireth answere,
ye shall then write likewise vpon thesame letter the daie that ye answered
thesame in fewe words.

Apart from regularly reporting on the market prices, Van Adrichem’s factor Hubertsz
spent considerable time and effort in negotiating the ever-increasing stream of bills of
exchange.

A bill of exchange (wisselbrief) is a written order to one party to pay

a sum of money to another party. An example: Aper Jansz in Danzig
owes money to Hendrick de Hase in Amsterdam. Aper pays money
in Danzig currency to his fellow townsman Andries Fagel (the
drawer), who signs a bill of exchange on 14 March 1598, ordering
Vincent Vlamingh in Amsterdam (the drawee) to pay 210 pounds
in Amsterdam currency. The bill of exchange is sent to Hase (the
payee or beneficiary), who presents it to Vlamingh to get paid. But
it turns out that Vlamingh is insolvent, and his wife, upon being
9 Abraham de Graaf, Instructie van het Italiaans presented with the bill of exchange, refuses to accept. Hase goes to
boekhouden, met een memoriaal toegepast op de
negotie, particulier, in commissie, en in compagnie
Jan Franssen Bruyningh, a well-known notary public in Amsterdam
(Amsterdam: weduwe Gysbert de Groot, 1710), p. 106. (he drew up the register of Amsterdam shareholders of the United

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PAGE CHAPTER ARCHIVING PEOPLE
Archiving Trade and Indusrty East India Company in 1602), to lodge a formal protest (wissel­
protest). That protest is sent to Aper who will claim his money from
Fagel, who guarantees acceptance and payment.

7.2 Partners in Trading and

Shipping
The companies in which Claes van Adrichem participated were partnerships of the owners
of either a ship or the cargo. The accounts of the shipping company (rederij) were kept by
one of the owners who acted as bookkeeper. In Van Adrichem’s archives there are many
accounts drawn up either by him as a bookkeeper (predominantly in the 1570s and 1580s)
or by someone else and subsequently submitted to Van Adrichem as co-owner to be
checked in a meeting of the shipowners. The bookkeeper was more than a simple
accountant, he was a managing owner who represented the collectivity of owners, gave
instructions, and corresponded on behalf of the owners.

In Van Adrichem’s archives (in the National Archives), one can distinguish different
genre systems: the documents he made and kept for himself and those he maintained as
bookkeeper and manager of various companies. The former documents contain several
specialized registers, including a register of properties (1561) and a journal of purchase
and sale of wheat (graan). The subsequent second journal (1565-1571) is arranged fairly
systematically and provided with an index on the names of debtors and tabs fixed to each
of the pages where a new heading (rubriek) begins. Accounts of journeys to Danzig and
Riga date from 1569 and 1570. Registration of a new activity starts in 1570: buying of
shares in ships. The archives thus reflect the development of Van Adrichem’s business
from trading to shipping, as Danish scholar Aksel Christensen, who studied the archives
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and the business of Van Adrichem thoroughly, concludes. Nearly all registers show Claes’
trademark of a Lorraine double-barred cross. At the back of each ledger, Van Adrichem
inscribed genealogical notes over the period 1561-1579. In the register of properties
(1561-1578) the shares in ships are recorded amongst the other properties. However, in
the next volume (1579-1583) the ship’s shares are recorded under a special heading. This
indicates slightly more sophisticated bookkeeping. The bookkeeping manuals pay
considerable attention to the bookkeeping of a company, following the example of Impyn’s
instructions on how to keep the accounts of ‘a compaignie and parteners or felowship’.

Between 1579 and 1583 Van Adrichem recorded shares in 23 different companies. The size
of the shares varied, but on the average, a ship was owned by nine people including the
shipmaster. Besides the shipmasters, Van Adrichem’s partners were mostly family
members. Only a third of all shares were held by other merchants. These Delft shipping
companies were genuine family businesses.

In other towns, such companies of family members were also customary. For example, the
company founded by the brothers Archibald and Thomas Hope in Amsterdam (since 1762
known as Hope & Co), was almost continuously in the hands of descendants and relatives
of the Labouchere, Sillem, Borski, and Van Loon families. This firm—in the 18th century
the undisputed leader of trading firms in the Republic10—continued as an autonomous
family company for 200 years, until the merger with Rotterdam-based family company
10 Joost Jonker and Keetie Sluyterman, At home on the
Mees in 1962.11 After 1762 the firm (with a capital of more than four million guilders)
world markets. Dutch international trading companies added a new venture to trading: financing commercial transactions and brokering loans by
from the 16th century until the present, transl. Diederik
van Werven (The Hague: Sdu Uitgevers, 2000), p. 119.
foreign governments and owners of plantations in the Danish, Dutch, and British West
11 The following is for the greater part a summary of
Indies. Banking became by far the most important activity of Hope & Co (see 8.4.2), but
A.M. Bendien and J.C.A. Blom, Archief van de firma the firm continued as merchant bankers. They continued trading in money, wheat, colonial
Hope & Co. met verwante archiefvormers, https://web.
archive.org/web/20190531123216/https://archief.
produce, tea, wine—anything, including slaves, that could be sold at a profit.
amsterdam/inventarissen/printversie/735.nl.pdf,
archived 31 May 2019, and M.G. Buist, At spes non
fracta: Hope & Co. 1770-1815. Merchant bankers and
Several of the trading firms with widespread networks founded in the 17th and the
diplomats at work (Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974). beginning of the 18th century, continued for a century or more. One even still exists today,

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Fig. 7.2 Conveyance by mortgage of half of the

plantation Vlissingen, including 20 enslaved
people, in Demerary, modern-day Guyana,
as security for a loan by Hope & Co, 1772.
Amsterdam City Archives, Hope & Co (735),
inv. nr. 1852.
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Van Eeghen, which was established in 1662, worth 1.7 million guilders in 1798, and now
managed by a member of the 15th generation. Van Eeghen has resided at Herengracht 462,
Amsterdam, since 1850, when the oldest partner moved into the house. Seven clerks,
seated on high stools at sloping desks, worked at the back of the house. The office of the
partners looked out onto the Herengracht.12

7.3 Office Archives

7.3.1 The Merchant’s Comptoir
13

A businessman dealing with his paperwork is a well-known theme in 16th- and

17th-century portraiture. However, the merchant is not often shown in his comptoir,
surrounded by his books and papers, as he is in the 17th-century doll’s house that was built
for Petronella Delacourt (1624-1707), or in Jan Luyken’s etching (1694) of an emblematic
Dutch merchant (koopman). Originally a comptoir was a counting table (related to
counter), but this word, just as the names bureau and cabinet began as a piece of furniture,
came to denote a particular space: in Dutch one uses the word kantoor when talking about
an office. In Luyken’s image, the merchant is giving instructions to his clerks who are
surrounded by liassen (some of them marked: England, France, Spain, etc.), registers, and
other records. As the comedy writer Gerbrand Bredero wrote mockingly in 1617 about
a merchant:

He was always in his office, with his nose in the books;

His little cap on his head, in his oversleeves to prevent wear of his suit
For he was always busy writing this that and the other:
Fig. 7.3 Jan Luyken, The merchant (De koop­ He would either be drawing up a balance sheet or counting cash,
man), 1694. Rijksmuseum, RP-P-OB-44.553. Yes, he had so much to do that it was a miracle!
For his head is filled with nooks and cupboards
12 Jonker and Sluyterman, At home, p. 201. And pigeonholes and drawers and dozens of files
13 Based on Ketelaar, ‘The Dutch comptoir’. Full of money orders, full of debentures, full of bottomry [deeds].

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The comptoir did not only house business papers, but also personal and family records, as
well as documents pertaining to the public offices held by the merchant and members of
his family. This is known, for example, from the comptoir of Johannes Hudde, who died in
1704. Hudde was burgomaster of Amsterdam for 21 years, director of the VOC, lord of the
manor of Waveren, and in his day he was also a famous mathematician. He was one of
those experienced office-holders, typical of the regenten of the 17th and early 18th century,
described by Harold Cook as being:

comfortable in the daily routines of committee meetings, negotiations, memos and

reports, and sorting, filing and recollecting information. Indeed, this was a golden
age of archives and libraries. Magistrates and merchants alike found it necessary, for
the sake of good administration, to assemble vast repositories of books and
records.14

The inventory made after his death consists of nearly 100 pages and begins with a 36-page
inventory of the office at his house on Singel 284.15

There were three cupboards (cassen), two lecterns, a table, a cupboard with pigeonholes,
and shelves and even more pigeonholes on the wall. Papers were all over the place, even in
front of the window papers were piled up, as well as letters and handwritten books. Yet
there was some order. One of the cupboards contained papers about Hudde’s public
14 Harold Cook, Assessing the truth. Correspondence
functions in town, in Holland, and in the United East India Company. They were separated
and information at the end of the Golden Age (Leiden: from the mathematical writings that were kept in another cupboard next to even more
Primavera Pers, 2013), p. 15.
papers and manuscript books. Records regarding his wife Deborah Blaauw’s estate were
15 Amsterdam City Archives, Notarissen (5075),
notaris Casper IJpelaer, inv. nr. 5336B, pp. 1547-1643;
stored separately in a paper cupboard. The bonds and annuities were found together in a
notaris Wilhelmus Sijlvius, inv. nr. 4935, pp. 59-71; sealed inner cupboard. The cupboard with pigeonholes, mostly filled with receipts and
Dedel (728) inv. nr. 37; Stichting Hudde-fonds (not yet
inventoried); Handschriften (5059), inv. nrs. 47-49,
bills that had been paid, also showed some kind of ordering. One of the pigeonholes
https://web.archive.org/web/20190506202717/https:// contained the receipts regarding the Waveren estate, the other property tax statements,
archief.amsterdam/inventarissen/inventaris/5059.
nl.html, archived 6 May 2019 ; Bicker (195), inv. nrs.
and two more were filled with papers regarding two estates of relations by marriage. One
827; National Archives, Hudde (1.10.48). of the shelves on the wall had pigeonholes containing papers about Waveren, but also
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Fig. 7.4 Inventory of the contents of Johan

Hudde’s comptoir, here the contents of a
paper cupboard (papiere casje) with papers
concerning the estate of Hudde’s wife, Deborah
Blaauw. Amsterdam City Archives, Notarissen
(5075), notaris Casper IJpelaer, inv. nr. 5336B,
pp. 1547-1643.

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about polders around Amsterdam. On the shelf beneath were account books and tubes
containing maps. More maps were kept in other places in the office.

Hudde had bequeathed all his papers (apart from his mathematical writings) to his cousin
by marriage, city secretary Willem Dedel. However, Dedel died before the Hudde estate
was divided. The Hudde archive was put into temporary storage for some years, then
disappeared, as did the mathematical papers. Only the documents pertaining to Hudde’s
public offices were saved. He had bequeathed them to Dedel under the condition that any
confidential document had to be transferred to the city office, the treasury, or the
charterkamer, the city’s muniment room. Confidential papers regarding the VOC had to
go to the VOC lawyer. The Dedel family kept the documents, however; in 1871 they were
given to the Amsterdam City Archives and the General State Archives.

In the 17th and 18th centuries, the expansion of business and of the want of more privacy
at home, often necessitated moving the office elsewhere. An example is the Leiden cloth
merchant and art collector Allard de la Court (1688-1755), whose house on Rapenburg
canal was situated across from Van der Meulen’s. De la Court had a comptoir-cum-
warehouse built behind his house. Allard may have known the doll’s house of his great-
aunt Petronella, which contains a merchant’s office. Like the Van Eeghen family (see the
preceding section), the Hopes had their office at home and from 1758 onwards in an office
building in the garden of the partners on Keizersgracht 444-448 in Amsterdam. A visitor
reported there were 26 staff working in the office in 1759. In 1821 the firm moved to
another building on Keizersgracht. This was converted into a modern office in 1899.

7.3.2 On Board
Archives were also kept on board the ships to Danzig and other places freighted by Claes
van Adrichem. On each ship were offices filled with paper (see also 10.2) making the ship
into a component of a genre system. Among the documents were the muster roll and the
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sea-letter (zeebrief), a certificate of identity of ship and master that was issued by the
municipality of the home town. Then there were the certificates of the cargo, carrying the
names and places of the freighters and the addressees. Such a bill of lading (or waybill) is
often called a charte-partie.

A bill of lading was written in duplicate on a single sheet of parchment or paper. Between
the two texts some letters (A, B, C), a motto, or a word were written. The sheet was divided
(indented) along a zigzag line and each of the parties received a copy. In case of
contestation, their authenticity could be proven by putting together the two deeds. Such
an indenture (chirograaf or carta bipartita) was quite common and one encounters
written indentures well into the 19th century (see Fig. 13.4).

Both the sea-letter and the bills of lading had to be shown to customs on the way to Danzig
at the Sound toll at Elsinore (Denmark), who registered the data. The accounts of the
duties paid for ship and goods were kept from 1497 to 1857. The custom house officers
Fig. 7.5 Bill of lading (tzarter = charter) whereby provided the shipmaster with a receipt, the cocket (tollteyken), on both the outward and
Hans Strateken and Claes Wyes commission return trip. Of these cockets only a few have been preserved in the whole of Europe. As was
skipper Jan Claesz from Kampen to sail to
the Bay [of Bourgneuf ] to take in salt, which usual, Van Adrichem probably destroyed them after he had audited the shipmaster’s
he will then bring to Reval and deliver to account. The same fate befell other annexes to the accounts, including the receipts for
Herman Vogelsanck and Gherwen Borneman, registration duties (schrijfgeld) and beacon duties (vuurtorengeld). Amongst the records of
merchants of the German Hanse, 1461.
Van Adrichem there are no specific references to these sorts of documents in the
Kampen City Archives, Stadsbestuur Kampen
(00001), inv. nr. 294. shipmaster’s accounts. Other accounts do refer to annexes, for instance the account of the
herring fishery (1593) referring to the notes (celen) submitted by the shipmaster which has
been preserved together with some certificates of herring inspection. A settlement by
Claes van Adrichem and his brother is joined with the file (lias) of annexes. At the bottom,
a label describes the content of the lias: ‘requisites serving to verify my expenses’. The label
would have been visible when the file was hung, exactly as shown on the famous painting
of a merchant by Jan Gossaert (Fig. 7.6).

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Fig. 7.6 Portrait of Jan Jacobsz Snoeck by

Jan Gossaert (ca. 1530). National Gallery of Art,
Washington D.C.
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7.3.3 The Office as a Memory Centre

Archiving Trade and Indusrty 16

The office could develop into the centre of the business, but also into the memory centre of
a family and its business, as the history of Kingmahuis in Makkum (Friesland) shows.

The sons of skipper Jan Martens (1671-1737) founded the firm of Hylke, Gerben, and
Gorrit Jans in Makkum. At first it was a freighting office, the brothers being also active in
trading. Bookkeeping for the Baltic Sea traders was done on board. In Makkum the
spouses maintained the correspondence with freighters and traders. Around 1740 the sons
focussed on trade and decided to control shipping from home. Hylke Jans assumed the
surname Kingma and bought a house in Makkum in which a room on the ground floor was
furnished as an office. In 1785 the office was moved next door to the house built for his son
Marten Hylkes Kingma (1746-1825). This would become the centre of control for the
M.H. Kingma firm until 1932. Besides trade and shipping, the Kingma family became
active in industry, for example manufacturing pottery, shipbuilding, and oil milling. The
various businesses run by the firm did not create separate archives. Instead, a central
administration was kept at the firm’s office. Most registers carried a mark to distinguish the
bookkeeping of the various businesses from each other. When the business was continued
from the account of another partner, a new mark was introduced. In 1799, 1825, and 1875,
each time after the death of the sole owner of the firm, the bookkeeping was continued for
a while for the benefit of the heirs. The new owner would establish a new administration,
sometimes using the old books if they held enough blank pages.
16 The following is for the greater part a summary of
D.P. de Vries, Inventaris van de archieven van de
bewoners van het huis annex kantoor van de firma
Around 1900 the office was transferred from Kingmahuis to the adjacent warehouse.
M.H. Kingma te Makkum 1726-1932 en van archieven There the papers concerning the private life and the fortunes of the members of the
van familieleden 1694-1973, alsmede van archieven
die in het kantoor van de firma waren achtergebleven
Kingma family were kept as well. These family archives were kept separate from the
1750 - begin 20ste eeuw (Ljouwert: Fryske Akademy, business archives. Kingmahuis and the neighbouring buildings became the common
1989) and of Henk Nicolai, De Kingma-kroniek of:
Hoe een familiegeheugen meer dan tweehonderdvijftig
space for re-enacting the histories of the family and the business. The first to record his
jaar intact bleef (Groningen: Egbert Forsten, 1997). memories and to care for the preservation of important papers was Marten Hylkes.

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Archiving was a basic need for many in the Kingma family, according to Henk Nicolai.
He wrote a book on the family’s memory that was cultivated for 250 years. When visiting
Tjeerd Herre Kingma (1915-2000) Nicolai notes: ‘People died, the archive remained.
All those generations turned to dust, but they left their essence in the many boxes and
cupboards he [Tjeerd Herre] had used to store this inheritance.’17

The Kingma business archives have not been handed down completely. Many papers
concerning their trade have been lost. In 1847, part of the papers received, the cash books,
and accounts were recycled to form the base for a new wallpaper in the living room! The
businesses exploited by the firm regularly transmitted data to the main office, but only
those data with relevance for the partners were kept, the rest were destroyed. During the
inventorization of the archives at the State Archives of Friesland in the 1980s, some series
of annexes to registers of purchases and sales were also destroyed.

The Kingma family and business archives (more than 22 metres) are kept in Tresoar, the
merger of State Archives, Provincial Library, and the Frisian Literary Documentation
Centre in Leeuwarden. They have been treated as estate archives (huisarchief, literally
house archives): a combination of archives handed down by the families who lived in the
same house or on the same estate. The term is usually used for archives of castles and noble
homes (see 1.7.2). But in this case, it is also used for the archives of the Kingma family who
worked and lived in Kingmahuis. The house has been sold, but the archives continue to
serve the family memory.

7.4 Mastering Time and Distance

18

Dutch merchants used to trade for their own account until around 1650-1675. They met
17 Nicolai, De Kingma-kroniek, p. 292.
their fellow traders and merchants when a bargain was closed. From the last quarter of the
18 Partly based on Jonker and Sluyterman, At home, pp.
17th century, they started contracting out the work. Instead of the merchant himself,
194-96. See also 10.7. commercial agents, brokers, firm directors, or insurance agents and other specialists met
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their opposite numbers. The merchant could now run his business, whether small or large,
from his office at home. He was only partly involved in the transaction and depended on
written communication. Communication by writing had always been important but
became even more important when the activities of large trading firms extended, and the
size of the firms increased accordingly. Moreover, the owners were no longer trading for
themselves, but in commission for other parties. Beginning in the late 17th century,
contacts between the agent on the one hand and suppliers and customers on the other,
were largely by correspondence.

Around the middle of the 19th century, according to economic historians Joost Jonker and
Keetie Sluyterman, international trade accelerated rapidly. The Industrial Revolution
spread from country to country, and at the same time, new and faster means of transport
and communication were introduced. At the end of the 18th century, a voyage from
Holland to Asia took approximately 212 days; in 1830 this was only 121 days. Shortly
thereafter the fastest ships could make the trip in 85 days. After the opening of the Suez
Canal in 1869, the journey from Amsterdam to Batavia (Jakarta) took only 40 to 50 days.

The telegraph accelerated the exchange of messages, and the first connection between
Europe and Asia was established in 1865. In 1870, on average 35 telegrams were exchanged
with the Dutch East Indies daily. At the turn of the century, the average daily number had
already increased to 270. The reduction of the time lag between sender and receiver,
between seller and buyer, and between the head office in the Netherlands and the agent
overseas, further advanced forward trading. It also gradually changed the nature of the
relations within government, businesses, and even the lives of ordinary people. The
reduction of the time lag between sender and receiver is a form of what Anthony Giddens
calls distanciation of time and space involving modes of power and control.19 The
knowledge that a telephone call (or today’s email) may immediately determine a situation
influences the power relations in decision-making and accountability. Submission of a plan
19 Anthony Giddens, A contemporary critique of
historical materialism, 2nd ed. (Houndmills and
(and waiting for comments in writing) was replaced by a telephone call, thereby changing
London: Macmillan Press, 1995), pp. 90-108. the content of the communication. Indeed, distanciation also influences the content of

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what is communicated. Derrida is right in assuming (as I quoted already in 1.2.4) that ‘the
mutation in technology changes not simply the archiving process, but what is archivable—
that is, the content of what has to be archived is changed by the technology.’ 20

7.5 Trading and Shipping in

the First World War 21

In many countries the First World War (1914-1918) led to an explosive growth of archives,
caused by mobilization, rationing, and war industry. The Netherlands stayed neutral
during the war, but even here the war led to new and more comprehensive archiving
practices. After the outbreak of the war, Dutch trade, shipping, industry, and agriculture
were in great difficulties. The Allied Powers seized Dutch ships and their cargo to prevent
the import of goods from the Netherlands and the Dutch East Indies into Germany and its
allies. The situation changed radically after the foundation of the Netherland Oversea
Trust Company (NOT), based in The Hague. Officially, the NOT was a private company
20 Eric Ketelaar, ‘Tacit narratives. The meanings of
financed and run by a small group of Dutch bankers and shipping companies, but it acted,
archives’, Archival science 1 (2001): 134-35, referring to in fact, as an extension of government. The NOT served as a clearinghouse for overseas
Jacques Derrida, Archive fever, transl. Eric Prenowitz
(Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press,
contraband imports. To that end the NOT concluded agreements with the Allies
1996), p. 17. guaranteeing that all goods consigned to the NOT would not be transited or exported to
21 Based on National Archives, Crisisinstellingen the enemy. The NOT had to get comparable warrants from the buyers of these goods. This
(2.06.079), inv. nrs. 1711, 1729, 1731-33, 1743, 1745,
1749, 1754, 1756A and a summary of M.W.M.M.
entailed closing comprehensive agreements with businesses and thus allowing the NOT to
Gruythuysen, H.A.J. van Schie and A.M. Tempelaars, strictly control all traffic of goods. Satisfied with these controls, the Allies allowed goods
Inventaris van de archieven van crisisinstellingen
in verband met de eerste wereldoorlog, 1914-1926
imported via the NOT a free pass through the North Sea blockade.
(Den Haag: Nationaal Archief, 1993), https://web.
archive.org/web/20190531123423/https://www.
nationaalarchief.nl/onderzoeken/archief/2.06.079,
The genre system of the NOT was very record-intensive. The NOT was ‘running’ on
archived 31 May 2019; Samuël Kruizinga, Overleg­ forms—more than 2,500 different forms were printed. A trader who wanted to import
economie in oorlogstijd. De Nederlandsche Overzee
Trustmaatschappij en de Eerste Wereldoorlog
goods had to submit two forms at the contracts department of the NOT: a request to be
(Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 2012). allowed to consign goods to the NOT and an application for a consent, a certificate
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declaring that the NOT had granted its intermediary for the consignment of goods from
overseas (see Fig. 13.6). In the first few months, the NOT received 3,000 applications every
week. As soon as the Executive Committee of the NOT (Fig. 7.0) had approved the
application, the importer received a contract to be signed. On signing the contract (to be
stored in the NOT archives) the importer received the consent. He sent the certificate on
to the shipmaster who had to hang the black-and-white striped ΝOT cone on the mast,
clearly visible to all.
The importer had to provide a security, such as a bank guarantee or a deposit. Upon
arrival of the goods in a Dutch port the NOT received the bill of lading (cognossement)
for endorsement. Staff of the Department of Cognossementen used the bill of lading and
supporting documents to check whether the goods matched the descriptions in the
contract, the invoice, and the guarantee.

In March 1915 the NOT was authorized to supply certificates of provenance (certificaten
van oorsprong) for those goods for which the NOT had made an agreement with the
English. A separate Department of Inspection tracked down unauthorised transactions
and fraud. This department was staffed by men ‘who can read a merchant’s books as an
ordinary man reads a newspaper or a novel’.

The administrative body of the NOT increased in a short time to more than 900 staff,
working in more than 15 buildings in The Hague. In 1917 the activities diminished after
submarine warfare caused stagnation of the overseas trade. The number of staff decreased
to 673 in July 1918. After the war, the agreements with the Allies were terminated in 1919.
The NOT started preparing its liquidation by setting up an archive and appointing the
former chief of the administrative department as the archivist. Many members of staff
were transferred to the new department, predominantly ‘old people and handicapped for
whom it was difficult to find another job immediately’. A group of 11 to 15 people started to
arrange the archives and 14 to 17 staff, assisted by evening workers, collected various
statistical data which were to be used for the official history of the NOT (it was not until
1935 before the eight volumes of the history were published). Forty-four archives of
departments and committees were transferred from the many offices. At first, they were

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collected in three different buildings, but from 1925 they were held in a large townhouse
on Nassaulaan in The Hague.

The NOT went into liquidation on 1 January 1920. Two days before, the Archives of the
Netherland Oversea Trust Company Foundation (Stichting Archieven der Nederlandse
Overzee Trustmaatschappij) was founded. This foundation had to ensure publication of
the official history and maintenance of the archives. To achieve this, the NOT endowed the
foundation with staff, two houses in The Hague, storage equipment, and a large capital.
When the foundation was dissolved in 1937 it still had five staff. The NOT archives were
very voluminous. They comprised more than 10,500 items, or 646 metres, even after more
than 58,000 kilograms had been destroyed during the years 1920-1937! A destination for
these archives had to be found. They were donated to the State, together with the house at
Nassaulaan 18 where the archives were stored, as compensation. The house came in handy,
as there was no empty space in the General State Archives. One of the conditions of the
donation was that any income from leasing or selling the house would benefit the State
Archives. This arrangement is applicable even today. The NOT fund, administered by the
National Archivist, subsidizes projects and publications of the National Archives and the
State Archives (now merged into regional historical centres).

The house at Nassaulaan 18 was requisitioned in June 1945, following the Liberation,
causing a huddled move to a former school on Bleijenburg opposite the General State
Archives. This building was soon requisitioned for the General Staff of the Army and the
NOT archives had to be stowed away in the corridors. In 1952 the archives (the size of
which had been reduced by appraisal and destruction from 646 to 86 metres) were
trans­ferred to an auxiliary repository in Schaarsbergen, a building that had been provided
to the State Archives the year before. It was a bunker built by the Germans in 1942-1943
and that had served as a command centre for air defence by the Luftwaffe. Upon
completion of the new building of the General State Archives (1979), the NOT archives
returned to The Hague. They were inventoried again between 1989 and 1993, jointly with
those of other temporary agencies active during the First World War and its aftermath.
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7.6 Dutch Paper and Dutch Gin
7.6.0 Land of the Windmills
Foreign visitors reported a thousand, no, two thousand windmills in the area around
Zaandam, on the river Zaan, to the north of Amsterdam, in the 18th century. In reality,
there were far fewer mills (more than 600 around 1725)22, but all these spinning mills made
a visit to the Zaan district a must. Between 1575 and 1875 approximately 1,100 mills were
built. Today around 13 industrial windmills are left, apart from the watermills driven by
wind and used for drainage of the polders (see chapter 5). Various industries used mills in
the 18th century. About 40 percent of the mills along the Zaan were sawmills, 22 percent
were oil mills, nine percent were hull (peeling) mills, and six percent were papermills. 23

22 H. Voorn, De papiermolens in de provincie Noord-

The origin of the sawmill was the invention of the crankshaft to transfer the rotary
Holland (Haarlem: De Papierwereld, 1960); Ron movement of the mill sails to an up-and-down motion of the saw blades. In 1593 Cornelis
Couwenhoven, 1100 Zaanse molens (Wormer:
Stichting Uitgeverij Noord-Holland, 2015).
Cornelisz van Uitgeest was awarded a patent (octrooi) for this invention, and a patent for
23 Herman Kaptein, Nijverheid op windkracht.
an oil mill to press seeds. Many other improvements in the milling business were protected
Energietransitie in Nederland 1500-1800 (Hilversum: by an octrooi from the States of Holland. Their minutes (resoluties) often contain extensive
Verloren, 2017).
descriptions and drawings of the patented invention.24
24 Jan de Vries and Ad van der Woude, The first modern
economy. Success, failure, and perseverance of the
Dutch economy, 1500-1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge
The wood sawyers’ guild in Amsterdam, who sawed by hand, resisted the putting up of
University Press, 1997), pp. 301, 345; Uitvinders sawmills in or near the city. This further encouraged the sawmilling business in the Zaan
in Nederland. Vier eeuwen octrooien (Den Haag:
Nationaal Archief, 2009); H. Bonke et al., Cornelis
region, which was not organized as a guild (on the registration by guilds see 1.3).25 In 1630
Corneliszoon van Uitgeest. Uitvinder aan de basis van there were already 53 sawmills along the Zaan. The Amsterdam wood sawyers felt defeated
de Gouden Eeuw, 2nd ed. (Zutphen: Walburg Pers,
2004).
and their guild was liquidated. Fairly soon after sawmills appeared in the city.
25 D. Aten, ‘Amsterdamse gilden en regenten contra de
Zaanse nijverheid’, in Ondernemers & bestuurders.
The Zaan sawmilling trade was of special importance for the shipbuilding industry in the
Economie en politiek in de Noordelijke Nederlanden area. Around 1650 there were more than 25 shipbuilding yards along the river. Timber was
in de late middeleeuwen en vroegmoderne tijd, ed.
C.M. Lesger and Leo Noordegraaf (Amsterdam:
imported from Germany and auctioned in Zaandam or Amsterdam. This is reflected in the
NEHA, 1999), pp. 61-76. 118 volumes of Zaandam auction books (veilboeken) from 1655-1811.

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Windmills were not only essential for wood milling and shipbuilding. Windmills had
already been used for decades to grind grain into flour for the bakers, but also for making
the popular Dutch jenever. More is to be written about the latter, but first I will focus on
paper manufacturing.

7.6.1 Making Paper

26

This section is about the paper industry; using paper for archiving is dealt with in chapter
11. The technology of papermaking was probably imported by technicians from the
southern Netherlands during the last quarter of the 16th century. Wind papermills were
used in the Zaan region. Elsewhere in the Netherlands (especially in the Veluwe area)
watermills were used. The oldest Zaan papermill was The Goose (De Gans) mill in
Zaandijk (1601).

7.6.1.1 Starting a Papermill

Archiving the paper industry started with a contract of the founders who exploited the
mill in partnership (partenrederij or compagnie). Each had a share in the cost and in the
revenue. The shares could be bequeathed and sold. Since the 15th century, such partner­
ships became common in shipping and trade (see 7.2), and later in large drainage projects
(see 5.3) as well. They were common in capital intensive industries. The partners (called
reders, which in fact is the term for shipowners) were often connected by family relations,
26 Jane de Iongh, Van Gelder Zonen 1784-1934 but also by relations with partners in other businesses. In many family archives the
(Haarlem: Bohn, 1934); B.W. de Vries, De Nederland­se
papiernijverheid in de negentiende eeuw (’s-Graven­
industrial activities are reflected.
hage: Nijhoff, 1957); O. de Wit, ‘Papier’, in Geschiedenis
van de techniek in Nederland. De wording van een
moderne samenleving, 2, ed. H.W. Lintsen et al.
The compagnie had to own enough land to build the mill and the sheds for drying and
(Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 1993), pp. 199-221; packing. To build such a mill some 140,000 to 180,000 square metres (the equivalent of
Bram Bouwens, Op papier gesteld. De geschiedenis
van de Nederlandse papier- en kartonindustrie in de
three football fields) were needed. The company had to acquire a ‘wind letter’ (windbrief),
twintigste eeuw (Amsterdam: Boom, 2004). or letters patent from the sovereign who of old had disposed of water and wind (Fig. 13.5).
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An application for a wind letter triggered a specific social action involving different
participants and genres (see the General Introduction). In Holland, the wind letters were
issued by the Audit Office (Rekenkamer) in The Hague upon the advice of the steward
(rentmeester) of the domains (demesne). Normally the steward would check whether
anyone might be disturbed by the mill. The right of the wind entailed that tall trees and
buildings were not allowed around the mill. The purchaser of the windbrief had to fence in
the mill to protect man and animal. In case of an accident, the miller was liable. A wind­
brief may exist in different versions: in the purchaser’s archives, in the archives of the Audit
Office (both among the petitions and in the register of decisions), and sometimes in the
archives of the local council. The mill owner had to pay an annual lease for the windrecht to
the steward of the domains, who recorded the income in his accounts. As a guarantee for
the payment of the fee (the amount being determined by the size of the mill business) the
mill had to be mortgaged and the mortgage registered by the local magistrate. In Westzaan
the magistrate kept special registers of mortgages held on mills. Elsewhere, mortgages
were registered among the other deeds. The mortgage deed had to be submitted to the
Audit Office. The steward had to be notified of any change of ownership.

Having acquired the contract of partnership, the deeds to the land, the windbrief, and
the deed of mortgage, contracting the building of the mill could start. In the Zaan region
there were dozens of mill builders. Between 1650 and 1700 seven or eight mills were
built annually in the area but mill builders from the Zaan were also active elsewhere in
the Netherlands and abroad. Constructing a mill needed real craftsmanship. As in
shipbuilding, the secrets of the craft were transferred orally. The specification (sometimes
containing as many as 60 clauses), including the contract price, was signed by the mill
builder in the presence of witnesses. A lot of paperwork was therefore involved before
even one sheet of paper had been produced!

Then the equipment had to be ordered: tubs for grinding and screening the pulp, presses,
moulds, and a glue kettle. The inventory (called lading = cargo) would cost approximately
60,000 guilders (in 1817), including the supply of rags—the primary raw material for
making paper. Contracts were signed with traders in rags who were active all over Europe.

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Each mill had dozens of highly skilled workmen working on a contract with the company.
Sorting rags was done by women and children skilled in sorting the various kinds of rags.
In 1801 papermaker Van Gelder employed 23 men, 13 women, nine children between 12
and 18 years old, and 15 children younger than 12. They were paid weekly. The men five
guilders each, the women and the older children two and a half to three and a half guilders,
and the younger children one half to two guilders each.

The mill had to be insured against fire. To this end, the papermakers united in the
Papermakers’ Contract (Papiermakerscontract), a mutual fire insurance company founded
in 1733 to insure 72 mills (not only papermills) with a combined value of 224,200 guilders.
The Contract functioned until 1903. The participants met regularly to decide on the
insurance premium, the general meetings fostering cooperation, and sharing knowledge
concerning innovations in business and technology. However, the concentration of
business (several mills in one family and under one management) meant that only a few
people were cooperating and sharing knowledge. Because these people met frequently,
they had little need to put new ideas and concepts on paper.

The Zaan region counted 42 papermills in 1731, employing several hundreds of workers.
The business was led by the manager (directeur), also known as gaandehouder (i.e. the one
‘who keeps things going’), while the day-to-day management was entrusted to the
foreman. The manager, who often was the most important participant and an experienced
papermaker himself, was mainly responsible for the commercial activities of buying rags
and selling paper to the paper traders in Amsterdam and the Zaan region.

Two or three times a week he went to the Amsterdam Exchange. The directeur kept the
books and accounted annually to the general meeting of shareholders. Shares became
smaller over time due to inheritance. There were shares of 7/72 or even 6/567. Owners of
such small shares had to join forces to allow their representative a vote for a 1/16 or 1/32
part in the shareholders meeting. The managers of the papermills were in regular contact,
not only because of their family ties and religious background (most of them were
Mennonites), but also to promote the common interests of the Zaan paper industry.
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They lobbied the government for, amongst other things, tax benefits, regulation of import,
and export of rags. From time to time the papermakers formed a cartel, just as the paper
traders who occasionally made price agreements.

All these activities, and the taxation and control by government, led to archiving by the
companies, the families of the papermakers, and government. Relatively little of this has
been preserved from the 17th and 18th centuries. This is to change in the 19th century.

Fig. 7.7 ‘Lazaret’: register kept by the paper

factory of Van Gelder of doubtful debts, which
are written off (weggeschreven), late 18th
century. Noord-Hollands Archief, Van Gelder
(457), inv. nr. 185.0

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7.6.1.2 Getting up Steam
Major changes in the paper industry were the result of the introduction of the paper
machine and the steam engine. The paper machine, driven by steam, replaced wind-
driven machinery for the shredding of rags and the grinding of the paper pulp. No longer
were the mills dependent on the wind and the paper production increased accordingly.
This opened new markets and changed technical and operational management.

The introduction of the steam engine was retarded due to safety concerns and the fear of
nuisance or damage to third parties. By two Royal Decrees from 1824 it was laid down that
for the establishment of a factory or workshop a licence from the Provincial Executive was
needed, and that for working with steam power a licence from the minister was needed.
This is an example of societal concerns leading to licensing and archiving. Both licences
were part of genre systems involving different participants and genres,

In 1838 the Van Gelder brothers asked permission from the Executive of the Province
of Noord-Holland to convert their papermill, The Fortune (Het Fortuin), in Zaandijk into
a paper machine factory with steam power. From the reports by the burgomasters of
Zaandijk and Koog aan de Zaan it appeared that at the consultation of neighbours
required by law, objections had been made by the owners of neighbouring papermills.
The neighbours were afraid that soot from the chimney of Het Fortuin would soil the paper
sheets that were drying on their mill sites. Therefore, the licence was granted under the
condition of burning peat instead of coal. The Van Gelder firm complained that this would
reduce the efficiency of the steam engine considerably. To make it even worse, the steam
engine purchased in England was defective and had to be taken out of production in 1844.
Only a small four-horsepower steam engine for the paper machine was in working order.
The shredding of raw materials was done with wind power, as before.

The next Van Gelder generation tried to use steam power again in 1846. The Unity (De
Eendragt) mill in Wormer was converted and fitted with two steam engines for powering
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the paper machine and the grinding tubs.27 The factory flourished and was renovated and
extended between 1851 and 1852.

The demand for paper increased considerably due to cultural factors such as growing
textualization (verschriftelijking) and administration, increasing mail traffic, and an
expanding book and newspaper production. The number of letters and cards sent by mail
increased from five million in 1850 to 120 million in 1900, and to 346 million in 1930.
Paper consumption per capita was around three kilograms in 1850. It rose to ten kilograms
in 1890 and 31.3 kilograms in 1937. Greater demand necessitated further mechanization,
the use of different raw materials (wood and cellulose instead of rags), and expansion of the
business.28 Van Gelder also expanded by trading paper manufactured elsewhere. From
1857 this was done from a warehouse-cum-office in Amsterdam. In 1913 Van Gelder
ranked six in the top 100 (according to the total balance) of Dutch companies.

The increase in business was reflected in the number of factory, technical, and support
staff. Clerks and bookkeepers had taken over the administrative work of the factory
owners. Thirty-two people worked at the office of Van Gelder in Amsterdam by 1919,
including nine in bookkeeping.29 Van Gelder employed 2,750 workers, plus 300 technical
and administrative staff in 1934. The conversion of the family business into a public limited
company (1913) and the foundation by Van Gelder of new branch offices and factories
meant an increase in communication, reporting, and administration.

27 De Iongh, Van Gelder, p. 115; Noord-Hollands

Archief, Van Gelder, inv. nr. 1150.
The increase in administration had other causes as well. Introduction of ‘scientific
28 De Iongh, Van Gelder, pp. 126-41.
management’ and new methods for calculating cost and profit was another. These changes
29 Noord-Hollands Archief, Van Gelder, inv. nr. 1533.
were underpinned by manuals for administrative organization. One of these, a manual of
30 K.G. Simon, Kostprijsberekening en administratieve
1909, contained a model administration for an iron foundry which could only function
fabrieksorganisatie (Rotterdam: Delwel, 1909). efficiently if it had 24 registers and seven card indexes.30 No wonder that within the service
31 J.P. Smits, ‘The size and structure of the Dutch service industries the share of administrative personnel rose from 0.5 percent in 1849 to 3.9 in
sector in international perspective, 1850-1914’,
Economic and social history in the Netherlands 2
1899 and 5.4 in 1909.31 Increasing regulation by government, in response to societal
(1990): 81-89. challenges (see Fig. 0.2), also meant more paperwork. I described earlier how much

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paperwork was involved in setting up a papermill and introducing steam power. Every
change or expansion necessitated new licences according to the decrees of 1824, later
replaced by the Nuisance Act (Hinderwet). This act, along with the Safety Act (Veiligheids­
­wet) of 1897, dealt with the risks a factory could cause; the former with hazards inside,
the latter with risks outside the factory. The steam engines had to be controlled on a
regular basis, and this was supervised by the Steam Equipment Service (Dienst voor het
stoom­wezen). The 1901 Housing Act (Woningwet) required a building permit from the
municipality whenever a new building was to be put up or renovation was needed. All
these acts had their own regime of licences, surveys, reports, and inspections, the effect
of which can be found in various archives.

This was also true for the Labour Act (Arbeidswet) of 1890. This was a milestone in social
legislation. Every business had to keep labour cards (arbeidskaarten) of all juvenile
workers, a labour list showing the times for work and for repose, and a labour register with
the names of all workers. In 1911 a government licence for overtime was made
compulsory. The Industrial Accidents Act (Ongevallenwet) of 1901 regulated compulsory
insurance for the financial consequences of disability through an industrial accident.
Workers who lost income because of other illnesses or disabilities could rely on
compulsory disability insurance, enacted in 1919. For both insurances, the employer had
to pay the premium. Here, too, did societal concerns lead to new mandates (as instruments
of the welfare state) and to new requirements for administration and archiving.

Factory owners could benefit from the counselling and support of their branch association,
the Association of Dutch Paper Factories (Vereeniging van Nederlandsche papierfabrie­
­ken), for the execution of the social legislation. Founded in 1904, its importance grew
especially after the First World War through advocacy, consultation, and counselling about
tax reform, international trade agreements, and social legislation. The paper industry had
known many forms of consultation, cooperation, and cartels. Much of it was informal and
‘within the family’ and, as I already mentioned, did not lead to the creation of substantial
archives. After the Second World War, the Alliance of Paper Industries (Verbond van
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papierindustrieën) was established in 1949; it had a major role in the implementation of
social legislation across the sector.

7.6.1.3 Rationing32
At the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, government was forced to ration
the supply and production of raw materials. For various business sectors State bureaus
(rijksbureaus) were set up. Without a licence from the State Bureau for Paper it was
forbidden to buy, stock, process, sell, or transport the raw materials for paper. After the
Germans had occupied the country in 1940, the ban was extended to the finished product
as well. The State Bureau further prescribed the composition of each kind of paper. It
controlled production, trade, consumption, and prices. The office had 115 staff in 1943
when it merged with the State Bureau for the Printing Industry; after the merger, the staff
increased to 242. A year later the number had grown to 291, including 31 typists, seven
people who worked in the archives, and seven in the mail room. While the staff of the State
Bureau grew, that of the paper industry declined from 6,910 workers in 1940 to 4,166 in
1944, and 3,990 in 1945.

Rationing caused an avalanche of official paper, or, to use the terms of the model of the
archiving context (Fig. 0.2), new societal challenges led to new and more archiving and to
the establishment of new genre systems. In 1943 the pile of circular letters annually sent by
the State Bureau, had grown to more than five centimetres. The paper factories had to fill
in a monthly survey with detailed statistics of the number of staff, the amount of paper
produced and processed, and the amount of raw materials. For each transport (except
between different branches of one business), purchase of raw materials, and price increase
a licence was needed. A great number of inspectors came to verify the factory administra­
32 H. Voorn, Papier in den oorlog (Amsterdam, 1946)
tion. All this resulted in an enormous archive at the State Bureau. Paradoxically, the
(typoscript). Koninklijke Bibliotheek extensive control measures did not prevent the Resistance from obtaining paper for the
PC ALG07Voo06; Bouwens, Op papier; National
Archives, Rijksbureau voor papier (2.06.076.11),
underground press via contacts at the State Bureau and Van Gelder.
introduction and inv. nrs. 1, 32, 35, 193.

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Fig. 7.8 Organization chart of the State Bureau

for Paper, 1943. National Archives, Rijksbureau
voor Papier (2.06.076.11), inv. nr. 35.
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Also paradoxical were the large-scale campaigns to collect waste paper to serve as raw
material for making new paper. In September 1942, a national campaign was started to
stimulate children to collect paper and cardboard and deliver these at school (Fig. 7.9).33

Fig. 7.9 ‘We participate. Do you?’. Poster of the

national campaign to stimulate schoolchildren
to collect waste paper, 1942. National Archives,
Ministerie van Economische Zaken: Persdienst
(2.06.085) inv. nr. 281.

33 National Archives, Rijksbureau oude materialen en

afvalstoffen (2.06.076.10) inv. nr. 34; Ministerie van
Economische Zaken: Persdienst (2.06.085) inv. nr. 281;
Tubantia 2 september 1942.

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By November 1942 people were already obliged to hand in used paper, but that did not
yield enough raw material. In 1943 newspapers carried the warning that keepers of private
and public archives should check carefully which papers they could make available for the
compulsory collection of waste paper—if not, then ‘drastic measures’ (coercion on keepers
of archives) would be taken.34 The danger that waste paper campaigns would lead to the
indiscriminate destruction of important business archives was countered by the Dutch
Economic History Archives (see 7.7), an association that distributed guidelines for a
judicious selection of business archives among 1,500 businesses (1943).

In the first seven months of 1944 various organizations, including State bureaus, the
Military Archives (Weermachtarchief), and the Dutch Labour Front (a Nazi trade union)
handed in many thousands of kilograms of waste paper; the association of employers in the
coal mining industry contributed single-handedly 78,356 kilograms! Exempt from the
requirements of waste paper collection were documents that should be preserved due to
legal requirements or documents to ‘which a certain historical value can be assigned with a
view to the history of the business itself, its location, or the economic history of our
country’. Nevertheless, many archives were lost as a result of the waste paper campaigns.35

34 Arnhemsche Courant 5 maart 1943; De Nieuwe Koerier

Apart from the State Bureau for Paper, there was also a Business Group for Paper and the
8 maart 1943; National Archives, Ministerie van Paper Manufacturing Industry (Bedrijfsgroep Papier en papier verwerkende industrie)
Economische Zaken: Persdienst (2.06.085), inv. nrs.
279-80.
since 1942. It was part of the new corporative structure for business, initiated by the
35 But also in the past: since 1874 the Roman Catholic
Germans but reaching back to former corporative structures that existed since the
association ‘Charity “Waste Paper”’ (Liefdewerk ‘Oud chambers of labour of the 1890s. As Michael Wintle writes, by the time of the Second
Papier’) supported Catholic organizations with the
proceeds of collecting and selling waste paper. The
World War ‘there was a general consensus (which included even most of the entre­
association was dissolved in 1969, but its name lives on preneurial interest) that the country should be run in that consultative consensual way.’36
in the expression ‘liefdewerk oud papier’, referring to
providing unpaid services. See also National Archives,
After the war, this would develop into what is now called the polder model (see 13.3).
Ministerie van Binnenlandse Zaken, afdeling Kunsten
en Wetenschappen (2.04.13), inv. nr. 2513. The Association of Dutch Paper Factories was abolished but resurrected after the
36 Michael Wintle, An economic and social history of the Liberation in 1945. The Business Group existed until the 1950s, just as the State Bureau
Netherlands, 1800-1920. Demographic, economic and
social transition (Cambridge: Cambridge University
for Paper that was to settle the war damage (predominantly because of the seizure of
Press, 2000), p. 278. machinery). Rationing of paper for newspapers lasted until 1950.
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7.6.1.4 Automation
Just like other businesses, Van Gelder mechanized and (from the late 1960s) automated
its bookkeeping, reporting, and archiving (see also chapter 11). Detailed manuals
standardized the exchange of information between the factories and the headquarters.
The joint venture with the American paper business Crown Zellerbach (1961) led to an
exchange of knowledge of industrial accounting, management information systems, and
office automation.37 The cooperation was primarily aimed at the foundation of a new
factory to produce tabulating card paper. IBM was the most important customer for that
kind of paper. However, after a few years punchcard equipment was replaced everywhere
by electronic computers, and thus the demand for punchcards dwindled. Crown Van
Gelder (the name after the merger of 1968) replaced its punchcard-driven IBM 1401 for a
(rented) IBM 360. In 1971 Crown Zellerbach took an interest of 50 percent in Van Gelder.
American managers came to reinforce management. After years of disappointing results,
the business went bankrupt in 1981. In 1983, however, a new start was made. Some of the
ties with the past were continued or revived, for example CVG still purchases the pulp
37 Noord-Hollands Archief, Van Gelder, inv. nrs. 309,
641, 840, 868, 891; Bram Bouwens, ‘Familie Smidt
from a subsidiary in Zaandam which uses the name of the old papermill De Eendragt.
van Gelder’, in Nederlandse ondernemers 1850-
1950. Noord-Holland en Zuid-Holland, ed. Joop
Visser, Matthijs Dicke and Annelies van der Zouwen
7.6.2 Dutch Courage
38
(Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 2013), pp. 122-31.

38 J. van Riemsdijk. Het brandersbedrijf te Schiedam in

7.6.2.1 Malting, Roasting, and Distilling
de 17de en 18de eeuw (Schiedam: Roelants, 1916);
P.J. Dobbelaar, De branderijen in Holland tot het begin
Another old industry where mills play a role was—and is—the production of Dutch gin
der negentiende eeuw (Rotterdam: Nijgh & Van Ditmar, (jenever). In the past, the city of Schiedam had over 30 mills, six of which are left. One of
1930); Coen Kramers, De moutwijnindustrie te
Schiedam (Amsterdam: Lieverlee, 1946); De Vries and
these is The New Palm Tree (De Nieuwe Palmboom), which grinds rye and barley as it
Van der Woude, The first modern economy, pp. 323-24; used to do in former days. The mill is a copy of the Palmboom, which was established by
Keetie E. Sluyterman and Huib H. Vleesenbeek, Three
centuries of De Kuyper. A history of geneva and liqueurs
a company of distillers in 1781 and burned down in 1901. Malt (germinated barley) is
1695-1995 (Schiedam: De Kuyper, 1995); Hans van roasted and made into a mash together with rye flour, water, and yeast. The mash is
der Sloot, Herman Jansen, a spirited maltwine-distiller
1859-1935 (Schiedam: Stichting Musis, 2015);
distilled in pot stills in three cycles producing a malt of 48 percent alcohol. After storage
http://www.jenevermuseum.nl, accessed 2 Dec. 2018. in oak vats for at least a year, the percentage of alcohol is reduced to 40 percent. Malt wine

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or malt liquor, produced by the roaster (brander), is processed by the distiller (stoker), who
continues distilling and adds an elixir of juniper berry and other ingredients, according to a
secret recipe.39 This results in the real Schiedam malt spirit jenever.

Around 1900 manufacturers of jenever began to replace malt wine with pure grain alcohol.
This new kind of jenever was called young (jonge) jenever, the traditional malt liquor
jenever thereby becoming old (oude) jenever. The names jong and oud therefore have
nothing to do with the ageing process, but with a difference in recipe and method of
distilling.

Jenever production began in Schiedam around 1600. There were 12 distilleries at the time.
This was less than in Weesp, the centre of the industry at that point. Schiedam quickly took
over as the main producer. In 1700 there were 30 distilleries in Schiedam, in 1736 124, in
1795 188. Of all these businesses only three survived: Nolet (1691), Wenneker (1693), and
De Kuyper (1695/1752).

Schiedam owed its growth as a jenever distilling town to its favourable location on the
river Maas, facilitating both the import of malt from East Anglia and the export of the final
product. In the 18th century, 85 percent of the jenever was exported, especially to colonies
in the Americas for consumption at the slave plantations. Seventy-five percent of England’s
heavily subsidized malt and barley exports went to Holland.40 De Vries and Van der Woude
write, ‘Jenever, a type of gin, stood out as one of the very few success stories of the
18th-century Dutch economy.’41 The second period of growth lasted from 1850 to the end
of the 19th century. At that time Schiedam had 364 distilleries. These included three
39 Malt distillers (branders) were distinguished from
jenever distillers (distillateurs). Here, I use the term
steam-driven distilleries (the first of which was founded in 1875), with a total production
distiller for both. equal to that of 23 businesses using traditional methods.
40 David Ormrod, The rise of commercial empires (…)
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003),
p. 220.
A licence from the city government was needed to establish a mill on the city rampart. The
41 De Vries and Van der Woude, The first modern
licence included both the grant of a parcel and the right of the wind Schiedam had received
economy, p. 324. from the sovereign (see 7.6.1). Just as with the papermills, the Schiedam barley malt mills
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were exploited by companies, in this case of distillers. The shares in the mill were
marketable. Each of the partners could have his barley ground in the mill according to a
fixed schedule. They also contributed to a fund out of which repairs were paid. Every three
months the bookkeeper gave an account to the general assembly of partners.

The distillers in Schiedam were united in a guild since 1690. Distillers’ widows could join
the guild as well. The guild’s ordinance (gildebrief) regulated the relations between the
members and the workmen. The annual contribution (twelve stuivers, plus one—later
12—stuiver for each pot still) was recorded in the collecting book (gaarboek). The guild
members were obliged to participate in the daily exchange of cereals, malt liquor, and
jenever since 1718. When someone sold outside the Exchange he had to pay a substantial
fine. Sales at the Exchange were recorded in the exchange book (beursboek), kept by the
owner of the tavern nearest to the Exchange. After 1774 this was done by the bookkeeper
of the guild. In 1783 a few distillers addressed the city government because their request to
inspect the exchange book had been refused by the guild. They wrote that the book was
their ‘compass’ needed for calculating prices. They used the opportunity to ask for an
inspection or copy of the municipal by-laws (at the time there were widespread civic
movements claiming access to and publication of privileges and by-laws, see 4.7). The
Schiedam city governors referred them to the dean and captains of the guild. A copy of the
guild’s ordinance could be obtained by paying the secretary of the guild, whereas copies of
the by-laws could be provided by the city clerk at the usual fee.

The distilleries were subjected to a great deal of regulation by government. Societal

challenges were translated in new mandates, leading to new and more archiving and new
genre systems. The States of Holland prohibited distilleries in rural areas because it was
easier to control whether taxes on wines and milling had been paid in the towns. Publicans
and innkeepers had to pay taxes to the tax collector. Undoubtedly, they included the tax in
their charge to the customer. Controlling production was necessary as well. Each distiller
had to report weekly to the tax collector how much he had produced. Furthermore, a
certificate had to be submitted to the tax collector for each bag of flour delivered at the
mill. Distillers, millers, and tax collectors therefore had much administrative work to do.

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They also archived all the documents resulting from regulations issued by the city
government and the guild concerning fire prevention, environmental protection (vapour,
smoke, and stench), registration and insurance of staff, and competition restriction. The
distillers joined a fire insurance contract in 1777 and invited other Schiedam industries to
participate as well in 1782.42

Distilling was prohibited in times of grain scarcity. The States General, at the initiative of
the States of Holland, prohibited distilling and grain milling in 1698. To ensure compliance,
the distillers not only had to take an oath, but they also had to deliver the helmets (covering
domes) of their pot stills to the burgomasters, thereby making distilling impossible.

The distillers of Schiedam regularly consulted with their colleagues in other towns in
Hol­­land. Together they presented a petition to lift the ban on distilling to the States of
Holland and the States General in 1699. They succeeded in September 1700 following
much lobbying and many meetings in the cities, the States of Holland, and the States
General.

Among the personnel of a distillery, the foreman occupied the first place. His salary was
high: eight to ten guilders a week (in 1794-1798). Membership of the ‘workmen’s box’
(founded in 1718), a cooperative insurance for a distillery’s workmen, was compulsory. For
two stuivers a week an employee was entitled to medical treatment and a weekly old-age
pension of one and a half guilders. Three of the four captains of the guild kept the books of
the insurance; they were accountable to the city magistrate. The workmen’s box was ended
in 1838.

7.6.2.2 Taxation
42 Schiedam City Archives, Verzameling handschriften
(326), inv. nr. 244.
As I mentioned before, distilleries were subjected to much regulation, especially regarding
43 Handelingen Tweede Kamer (1914-1915), p. 333, 15
taxes. From the beginning of the 19th century, the excise on spirits was ‘the cork on which
Dec. 1914. the State finances floated’.43 Between 1880 and 1900 the excise on spirits constituted a
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quarter of the total income of the State.44 Distillates were most heavily taxed and
particularly susceptible to fraud.45 Sharp control of raw materials, production process, and
sale were necessary. Under King Louis Napoleon already existing regulations were
extended and tightened (1808). King William I adopted these regulations in 1813 and
extended them further in 1822. Later, in 1862, regulations became even more detailed
when virtually every detail of the production process, the equipment, and the raw
materials was regulated. A manual from 1873 lists more than 200 offences distillers could
commit. This is an example of external societal concerns (namely fiscality) having
consequences for the work processes and on archiving (see Fig. 0.2).

Although compliance with the regulations was mainly controlled by tax inspectors visiting
the distillery, a huge amount of paperwork was involved in the control. The genre system
included people and paper. Upon starting a distillery all equipment had to be specified on
paper. Any addition to or change of pot stills, pipes, or cauldrons had to be reported as
well. All equipment in the distillery had to be measured and calibrated by the tax officers.
The distiller had to announce, well in advance and in writing, when he would take in barley
and malt, how much, when distilling would begin, and when the final product would be
delivered in the presence of a tax officer. Meticulous bookkeeping served to prove how
much spirits had been produced and how much had been delivered at any time. The tax
officers could enter the distillery to measure the contents of every pot still and to check the
bookkeeping and the licences. The tax office kept an account for every distillery, recording
every increase and decrease of raw materials and distilled product. The paperwork
underpinned taxation: the excise was debited at the distiller’s and credited when the
customer had paid the excise.

Most of the specialized forms and registrations kept by distillers and tax authorities over
44 https://www.cbs.nl/-/media/imported/documents/ two centuries were destroyed. Sometimes excise books, measurement (peil) books,
2002/18/index1253.pdf, accessed 2 Dec. 2018.
measurement certificates, transport licences, casks books, or bottles books are still found
45 Tom Pfeil, Van tollenaar tot poortwachter.
Geschiedenis van de douane, de oudste rijksdienst van
in distillers’ archives, which also include the documents used in managing the business and
Nederland (Rotterdam: Trichis, 2012), pp. 195, 202-05. its financial bookkeeping. The excise paperwork can only be reconstructed via other

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papers. A summary of all forms used by the tax authorities printed in 1901 and covering
314 pages, lists more than 30 forms concerning the distilling process and more than 70 for
the assessment and collection of excises.46

7.6.2.3 Associating
Distillers seem to have been tireless participants of meetings (see also chapter 13). During
the ancien regime, there were, of course, the meetings of the guild and of the companies
exploiting the mills. In the 19th and 20th centuries, distillers met in numerous associations
and committees, over and above meeting in the municipal council, church councils, or in
charities. In 1879 the Malt Distillers Association (Branders-Moutwijn Vereeniging) was
established. At the time various ‘yeast contracts’ were made. These were cartels of yeast
producers and traders, joined by groups of distillers. Traders in spent grains (spoeling)
entered into this sort of cartel contracts and formed associations as well.

In 1891 a new malt distillers’ association (Brandersbond) was founded in Schiedam. It

fought the high excises by presenting petitions to Parliament and government, but also via
publications in the press. The Brandersbond succeeded in obtaining a municipal ordinance
(1901) that protected the ‘authentic’ Schiedam jenever made from malt wine, against the
‘new’ jenever made from pure grain alcohol, which many distillers considered to be
inferior. If they accepted quality control by the city, they obtained the right for their
product to bear the seal ‘real Schiedam jenever’.47 Quality control also implied registration
and the obligation to open books and papers for municipal inspectors. The city label was
an addition to the labelling of jenever with a brand name and trademarks, both of which
came into use from the middle of the 19th century.

46 National Archives, Ministerie van Financiën: agenda’s At the end of the 19th century, a Chamber of Labour (Kamer van Arbeid) was introduced
en toegangen op de verbalen (2.08.05.01), inv. nr. 1557.
for various industry sectors. The distilling industry was one of them. These chambers
47 Schiedam City Archives, Gemeentebestuur (346), inv.
nrs. 7742, 7758; Van der Sloot, Herman Jansen, pp.
consisted of employers and representatives of workers and they had to investigate local
105-17. labour conditions and to advise local and national government about labour matters.
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The chambers were the first to institutionalize the ‘polder model’ (see chapter 13). They
were abolished in 1923. As Michael Wintle writes: ‘In spite of their limited success they
were essential as a prototype of the state-sponsored negotiating apparatus which was to
grow into a great corporatist machine between the wars and in the post-war period.’48 By
1933 every business of a certain size had a business council consisting of representatives of
associations of employers and workers who discussed, advised management, and settled
disputes.

During the First World War the Association of Distillers in the Netherlands (Bond van
Distillateurs in Nederland, founded in 1900) decided to ration spirits and malt wine and to
set maximum prices for distilled beverages.49 The United Distillers (De Vereenigde
Distillateurs), a price cartel, was formed in 1926. In the same year the Bond went bankrupt.
The Vereenigde Distillateurs maintained regulations on minimum prices and quota
settlement until rationing was introduced in April 1941.

As mentioned in 7.6.1.2, at the outbreak of the Second World War, different State bureaus
for rationing of raw materials were set up. For the distilling business, this was the Spirits
Section, which from 1940 formed part of the State Bureau for Food Supply in War Time.
48 Wintle, An economic and social history, p. 278.
Implementation of the detailed regulations for allocating distilled beverages to wholesale
49 The following is for the greater part a summary
traders, catering businesses, and liquor stores was carried out by the Rationing Bureau for
of P. Zwaal, Inventaris van het archief van het Distilled Beverages and its successor (1944), the Business Organization Distilled Beverages
Rantsoeneringsbureau voor Gedistilleerde Dranken
(RGD), de Vakorganisatie Gedistilleerde Dranken
(Vakorganisatie Gedistilleerde Dranken, or VGD). This was a component of the new
(VGD), het Productschap voor Gedistilleerde corporatist organization of business inspired by the Germans; it replaced private
Dranken (PGD) en de Commissie Gedistilleerd van
het Productschap Dranken (CG/PD) alsmede van
organizations in business sectors by organizations under public law.
verwante publiek- en privaatrechtelijke organisaties,
1917 (1941–2014) (’s-Gravenhage, 2014), https://web.
archive.org/web/20190116194611/http://peterzwaal.
This business organization under public law was continued after the war. The VGD was
nl/inventaris-van-het-productschap-dranken/, succeeded by the Product Board for Spirits (Productschap voor Gedistilleerde Dranken, or
archived 16 Jan. 2019 An updated version (with a
much shorter introduction) is available at the website
PGD), located in Schiedam. Control by the PGD extended to the entire downstream
of the National Archives https://web.archive.org/ business column, just as had been the case under the VGD, from producers to liquor stores
web/20190531123929/https://www.nationaalarchief.
nl/onderzoeken/archief/2.25.101, archived 31 May
and catering businesses selling spirits to the public. The PGD was authorized to regulate
2019. any aspect of business,and to inspect equipment, stocks and archives.

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Fig. 7.10 Report of violation of the regulations

of the Business Organization Distilled
Beverages (Vakorganisatie Gedistilleerde
Dranken), drawn up by one of its investigating
officers, 1951. National Archives, Rant-
soe­n­erings­bureau/Vakorganisatie/Productschap
Gedistilleerde Dranken (2.25.101), inv. nr. 138.
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Differently from the VGD, the board of the PGD was composed of representatives of both
employers and workers. All product boards under public law were abolished in 2014.

After the war, the Spirits Section became part of the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries, and
Food supply. It was not until 1951 that production and trade of spirits and malt wine were
left free and the Section was abolished. Its archives were destroyed because of the shortage
of waste paper as raw material for the paper industry (see 7.6.1.2)! The archives of many of
the distillers’ associations did not survive either. Nevertheless, in 2009, 230 metres archives
of various private and public organizations in the distilling business were still kept in
Schiedam. After appraisal, 46 metres remained, which were then transferred to the
National Archives.

7.7 Collecting Trade and

Industry Archives 50

50 E.J. Fischer, J.L.J.M. van Gerwen, and J.J. Seegers,

De Vereeniging het Nederlandsch Economisch
In the previous sections I scrutinized archive creators in trade and industry who kept
Historisch Archief, 1914-1989 (Amsterdam: their archives in more or less the original shape. But they are exceptions. Many businesses
NEHA, 1989); R.A.D. Renting, ‘De Vereniging van
archivarissen in Nederland en de ontwikkeling van
did not preserve their archives, but rather relinquished them on purpose, neglected, or
het gemeentelijk archiefwezen’, in Respect voor de destroyed them. It was rather late that historians became aware of the value of business
oude orde, ed. Paul Brood (Hilversum: Stichting
Archiefpublicaties/Verloren, 1991), pp. 55-7; C.O.A.
archives as sources for economic history. Following German examples, the Dutch
Schimmelpenninck van der Oije, ‘Particuliere Economic History Archives Association (Vereeniging Nederlandsch Economisch-
archieven. Kapen, kopen, koesteren?’ in Voor burger
en bestuur, ed. Paul Brood (Hilversum: Stichting
Historisch Archief, or NEHA) was founded in 1914—the first ‘collecting archives’
Archiefpublicaties/Verloren, 1988), pp. 151-9; (‘a repository that collects materials from individuals, families, and organizations other
Jacques van Gerwen and Co Seegers, ‘To promote
and facilitate. The NEHA 1914-2014’, Tijdschrift voor
than the parent organization’51) in the Netherlands. In the first year 196 members joined
sociale en economische geschiedenis 11/2 (2014): 21-44. the association, and by 1930 there were 850 members. This association provided a home
51 Richard Pearce-Moses, A glossary of archival and for endangered archives of businesses and trade unions, and it collected (and published)
records terminology (Chicago: Society of Americvan
archivists, 2005), p. 76; online at https://www2.
important sources for economic history, mainly in the Netherlands and its colonies.
archivists.org/glossary, accessed 14 Jan. 2020. Professor G.W. Kernkamp, professor N.W. Posthumus, the accountant H.G.A. Elink

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Schuurman, The Hague municipal archivist H.E. van Gelder, the Utrecht State and City
Archivist S. Muller Fz. (who was chairman of the Association of Archivists in the
Netherlands), and the Amsterdam merchant banker C.P. van Eeghen formed the first
executive committee. Academia and archives were represented on the advisory board as
well by history professors H. Brugmans and J. Huizinga and the General State Archivist
R. Fruin. The Ministry of Industry and Trade was also represented. Governance in the
NEHA annual members’ meeting and its executive and advisory boards had many
characteristics of the polder model (see chapter 13), especially in the use of a network of
members forming links with science, business (industry, trade, transport, and banking),
and the archival world.

A few months after the foundation, Muller explained in the members’ meeting of the
Association of Archivists in the Netherlands (VAN) that he expected many benefits from
NEHA. Rotterdam city archivist E. Wiersum, on the other hand, opposed centralization of
business archives and believed these should be transferred to the local municipal archives.
Muller, however, considered transfer of business archives to public repositories
fundamentally wrong. In his opinion a public archives repository is not a collecting
institution or a library, but ‘a component of the State’s machinery’ intended for
government archives. Both points of view and, more generally, the acquisition of private
archives, were extensively debated in the annual members’ meetings (see also 1.7.3).
The VAN finally accepted in 1917 that one of the duties of an archivist was to try to acquire
‘private archives relating to the area which he is serving which are historically important
but insufficiently cared for by their owners or being insufficiently accessible for scholarly
research’. The VAN requested NEHA to consult with the local Archives before accepting
a business archive.

Between 1914 and 1935 NEHA acquired 140 archives, most of them through donations.
These were not only business archives but also those of trade unions and of institutions in
the field of economics, as well as numerous smaller collections and loose documents. At
first NEHA was housed in the The Hague municipal archives, but the association moved to
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its own premises in The Hague in 1936. In 1970 it housed over 300 archives, totalling 14
kilometres of shelving. The maintenance costs were heavy and therefore nearly all archives
were transferred to State and municipal archives between 1971 and 1974. NEHA, with its
imposing library, moved to the building of the International Institute of Social History in
Amsterdam in 1989 and the institute took over NEHA’s executive functions. Between 1989
and 1993 the association published a series of catalogues of business archives—both those
still being kept by their creator and those preserved in State and municipal Archives.
The catalogues were the result of a survey to which nearly 1,500 businesses replied.
The response rate in the different sectors was 12 to 13 percent. However, 59 percent of
public utilities and communication businesses and 47 percent of insurance companies
responded, probably a reflection of an early awareness of the value of archives. Only a few
businesses reported that they did not have business archives or that their old archives
were lost by fire.

An inventorization in 1979 revealed that nearly 1,200 business archives were kept in State
and municipal archives repositories. Among these are the 16th-century merchants’
archives of Claes Adriaensz van Adrichem in the National Archives (see 7.1, 7.2, and 7.3.2)
and Daniel van der Meulen in the Leiden City Archives (see 7.1). The archives of the
United East India Company (see chapter 10), the West India Company, and the
Middelburg Commercie Compagnie begin in the 17th century, but most trade archives
date from the 19th and 20th centuries. There are only a few from the 18th century, such
as the papers of a plaster and timber business in IJlst (43 metres between 1757-1969) and
the previously mentioned Kingma archives (see 7.3.3). The archives of the Amsterdam-
based Brants family (Amsterdam City Archives) include the 18th-century business
archives of the iron trade company Quirijn Brants and Son and the linen commerce of
Jan Isaak de Neufville and Company. The archive of the Netherlands Trading Company
(Nederlandsche Handelmaatschappij, NHM), founded in 1824 to restore trade with
the East Indies, begins in the 19th century. NHM developed into a merchant bank, which
ultimately became ABN-AMRO bank. The latter deposited the NHM archives with the
National Archives. Since 2007 the former NHM office in Amsterdam (1926) houses
the Amsterdam City Archives.

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7.8 What to Keep?
NEHA’s main aim was to safeguard endangered business archives. A policy of systematic
acquisition did not exist. The mission of State and municipal archives included acquiring
‘historically important’ private archives, but it did not make explicit what was considered
as such and what not (see also 1.7.3). This began to change in the 1980s. In 1985 the
Minister of Culture laid down some criteria for the acquisition of private archives by public
Archives if they are expected to constitute an addition to government archives because
they:
throw light on parts of society that are not or hardly addressed in government
archives, or because they raise aspects which are vanishing from society.52

Acquisition plans were drafted in the 1990s to facilitate an active acquisition of archives
meeting these criteria. These plans were partly in connection with macroappraisal
developed for government archives: ‘appraisal that assesses the value of records based on
the role of the record creators (…) rather than content’.53 NEHA designed a method for
appraisal especially for business archives (1994) by using the data from its survey of
business archives.54 The authors (Fischer, Van Gerwen, and Reudink) tested the method on
the Dutch textile industry. Based on statistical data of the population working in various
sectors of the textile industry and in different provinces in 1889, 1930, and 1963, the test
focused on the cotton industry in Overijssel. Based on qualitative criteria derived from the
functions of companies and the specific history of the cotton industry, it was determined
that for that province the ideal would be to preserve the archives of 12 different types of
businesses in the four broad categories of single spinners, medium weaving mills, large
52 Bijlagen Tweede Kamer 1984-1985, 19 068, nr. 2, p. 13. weaving mills, and bleaching works/finishing companies. The next step brought the
53 Pearce-Moses, A glossary, p. 237. appraisal from the macro level to the micro level, checking the completeness of archives to
54 Eric Fischer, Jacques van Gerwen and Georg Reudink, see whether the different aspects of corporate operation were reflected accurately in the
The battle of the bulk. A method for macro-selection
of business archives (Amsterdam: Nederlandsch
available archives. Fischer, Van Gerwen, and Reudink listed 15 categories of documents
Economisch-Historisch Archief, 1998). including minutes, annual reports, documents concerning properties, staff, financial
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matters, purchasing, production, and sales. It is only rarely that such an ideal archive has
been preserved. The NEHA test included an assessment of the categories of material
available and dating from the 19th and 20th centuries. These data were plotted on a graph
giving an impression of the completeness of each of the 55 preserved archives. Based on
these graphs the result of the test could be determined; it identified 13 Overijssel textile
industry archives of national importance.

7.9 Conclusion
As Peter Burke writes in A Social history of knowledge, ‘Trade routes were paper routes
and trade flows depended on information flows.’55 The trade routes bridge distance,
information flows bridge time. Archiving trade therefore has to do with bridging space and
time within genre systems in which various participants, each within his or her own set of
genres, are acting together. The business letters exchanged between Claes Adriaensz van
Adrichem and his factor Aper Jansz bridged the distance between Delft and Danzig, while
Claes’ regular bookkeeping bridged time, in his own days, but also stretching to our times.

The merchant’s office (comptoir) is a space where time is arrested in the cupboards, files,
and pigeonholes of people like Johannes Hudde and the Kingma family. The VOC set an
example for Dutch merchants about the use of records to condition and control events,
places, and people from a distance (see 10.5). Although originating in an office, records
could span space and time and perform outside the office and in the future. Specific
documents used in trade (such as the bill of exchange and double entry bookkeeping) are
often conservative; they have not changed very much over the centuries. Some genres
cross the boundaries to other domains, such as the shares in partnerships (partenrederij
or compagnie) in trade and shipping (7.2), milling (7.6.1.1), and draining (5.3). Another
crossover practice is the consultation of neighbours and other interested parties which was
obligatory before a steam engine could be established (7.6.1.2), and which was modelled
on the condition of diking patents (see 5.3) to achieve contentment to landowners and
55 Burke, A social history of knowledge, p. 155. cities.

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Other factors of archivalization influencing archiving trade and industry were the
increasing regulation by government (which itself was a consequence of various societal
concerns, including the desire to protect the environment and the safety and health of
workers), the intense growth of trade since the middle of the 19th century, and the
introduction of ‘scientific management’ and new methods for calculating cost and profit.

Trade and shipping thrive from what the Dutch jurist Grotius termed Mare Liberum (the
Freedom of the Seas). When that freedom is blocked, both paper routes and information
flows are blocked as well. In the First World War this blockade was countered by an
extensive archiving system maintained by the Netherland Oversea Trust Company (7.5).
As in other times of crisis and change, war disrupts normal patterns. This results in an
increase in archive production in the military as well as for civilians, as we have seen in the
example of rationing (7.6.1.2 and 7.6.2.3). Once peace has been resumed, ’normal patterns’
of creation and management of trade and industry archiving return. Beyond the primary
reasons for keeping archives, business archives have a societal research value (7.7).
However, not all archives can be kept forever, so one has to decide what to keep and what
to preserve (7.8).
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A SOCIAL HISTORY OF
DUTCH ARCHIVES Chapter 8

Archiving Monies

—
8.0 Introduction 8.4 Banking
8.1 The Oldest Archival 8.4.1 Banks of Exchange
Document 8.4.2 Merchant Bankers
8.2 Keeping the Books 8.5 Conclusion
8.2.1 Municipal Accounts
8.2.2 Merchants’ Books
8.2.3 The Bookkeeping Mindset
8.2.4 Accounting by the VOC
8.2.5 Double-Entry Bookkeeping by
Government
8.2.6 Accountability Portrayed
8.2.7 Mechanizing and Computerizing
the Books
l Fig. 8.0 Cornelis Brisé, Files of the Treasury 8.3 Taxation
of the city of Amsterdam, 1656. Amsterdam 8.3.1 Taxes, Excises, Duties, and Rates at
Museum, SA 3024. all Levels of Government
ˇ 8.3.2 The Calculating State
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8.0 Introduction
Financial and other accounting records are one of the basic types of records ‘that may be
called constants in record creation’, according to Ernst Posner.1 However, the constancy
of the genre as such should not be regarded as an axiom because the definition of genre
(a pattern of communication that conforms to community norms) implies that the patterns
may change with changing community norms. Therefore, a question in this chapter is:
to what extent did community norms (in the model of the archiving context (Fig. 0.2)
subsumed under societal challenges) affect the continuity of financial record­keeping?
One must consider that archiving monies operates as an intertextual genre system (see the
General Introduction) involving the tax administration and other public authorities,
businesses, banks, and individuals.

The oldest archival document in the Netherlands (dating from 29 CE) is about money (8.1).
It is a wax tablet recording a loan of money. No earlier handwritten Latin text than this one
has been found in northern Europe—it is even older than the tablets found in British
Vindo­lan­da. This tablet not only records the loan but could also be used for payment to
anyone. It is comparable to credit instruments which were developed much later, like bills
of exchange.

Tablets have been used for archiving monies for millennia. The oldest script, from between
3300 and 3100 BCE, was the script by bookkeepers: signs engraved in a clay tablet, ordered
in tables. They created cuneiform records not as a source of history, but to record as a
memory aid and for accounting. These aims continued to guide the keeping of books by
governments, merchants, accountants, and bankers in later times (8.2). A special category
of financial administration concerned ownership and tenure of land, which for a long time
was the most important asset. That administration is dealt with in another chapter (see 6.2).

1 Ernst Posner, Archives in the ancient world

(Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972),
Accounts were drawn up for various audiences—literary, because in the past accounts were
p. 3. audited, that is: heard by the lord of the land (see also 3.1), the States, the city (8.2.1 and

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8.2.5), the village (8.3.1), the trading company (8.2.2 and 8.2.4), etc. Accounting, however,
is more than recording income and expenses, assets and liabilities. Accounting is a cultural
practice reflecting and reinforcing social, political, and economic relationships (8.2.3).2 No
wonder that society, as much as the individual merchant or banker, has an interest in
accounting practices and technologies (see 8.2.8). The gradual recognition of the public
character of accounting is accompanied by public access to accounts.

In a social history of archives, taxation must feature prominently (8.3). Taxation involves
a massive production and management of records. Every citizen and every business are
affected by taxation and the ensuing recordkeeping by both the tax authorities and the
taxpayer. The tax system ‘breathes in tandem with external impulses’, as the editor of a
volume with papers about the history of Dutch taxation beautifully expressed.3 Among
these external impulses are economic and technological factors, but especially social and
political developments which gradually turn a predominantly static society into a more
changeable one.

The Republic of the United Netherlands was fiscally a strongly decentralized state, with a
multitude of systems resulting in a confusing fiscal administration, as De Vries and Van der
Woude write.4 They add that these fiscal regimes have left relatively few records. However,
2 Robert A. Bryer, ‘The late 19th-century revolution in
financial reporting. Accounting for the rise of investor
Dutch archives, especially the provincial and municipal archives, abound with tax records,
or managerial capitalism?’, Accounting, organizations and there is virtually no family archive from the early modern period without many traces
and society 16 (1993): 649; Accounting as social and
institutional practice, ed. Anthony G. Hopwood and
of taxes paid or contested. Section 8.3.1 describes the decentralized collection of taxes,
Peter Miller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, excise, and duties, and their archiving in the Republic. After the foundation of the unitary
1994).
state, the tax system was centralized as well (8.3.2). This happened between 1805 and 1806.
3 Tweehonderd jaar Rijksbelastingen, ed. Henk Vording
(Den Haag: Sdu Uitgevers, 2015), pp. 10, 41.
Implementing the national tax system became the task of a national tax administration.
4 Jan de Vries and Ad Van der Woude, The first modern
Afterwards, national standards directed the assessment, collection and archiving.
economy. Success, failure, and perseverance of the Increasingly, the tax system confronted the citizen with the calculating state which
Dutch economy, 1500–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1997), p. 91.
engages mechanization and computerization to connect the ‘archiving spheres’ of the
5 Rex Arendsen, Eenvoudig belasting heffen, tussen
tax administration and the taxpayer.5
droom en daad (Den Haag: Sdu Uitgevers, 2016), p. 48.
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Merchants everywhere in Europe had an account with the Amsterdam Bank of Exchange
(Wisselbank) which they used for payment of trade transactions and other financial
transactions. The archives of the Bank kept at the Amsterdam City Archives, comprise 550
metres of shelving (8.4.1).

In 8.4.2 I treat archiving by bankers, based on the archives of Hope & Co in Amsterdam,
established in the 1720s. The firm financed trade transactions and brokered loans by
foreign governments (in 1804 Hope & Co co-financed the Louisiana Purchase). They also
loaned money to owners of plantations in the West Indies. However, they continued to be
merchant bankers. That is, they continued trading.

8.1 The Oldest Archival Document

6

The oldest archival document on (or rather, in) Dutch soil dates from 29 CE: a part of a
Roman wax tablet, a writing tablet found in a mound at Tolsum near Franeker (Friesland)
in 1914. It was examined with digital imaging techniques at the University of Oxford in
2009. The wax layer had disappeared, but the letters imprinted with a stylus are vaguely
visible. For a long time, the document was believed to be a deed of the sale of an ox.
Recently, however, it was discovered that the reading of bovem (ox) should be changed into
quem (whom or whomsoever). Instead of concerning an ox, it is about a loan of money
by Carus (or perhaps Andecarus), slave of Iulia (?) Secunda, possibly the wife of a tribune
of the Fifth Legion, and a Batavian soldier acting as a witness. This is interesting because
it points to the Roman legion that, reinforced with Batavian auxiliary troops, quelled the
Frisian rebellion. Tacitus dates this rebellion to the year 28 and writes that the Romans
6 A.K. Bowman and R.S.O. Tomlin, ‘“The Frisian ox
sale”. A writing-tablet from Tolsum’, It Beaken 71
withdrew from Friesland, but this tablet from Tolsum proves that in the year 29 Roman
(2009): 211-36; A.K. Bowman, R.S.O. Tomlin, and and Batavian military were still in the neighbourhood. The oldest archival document in
K.A. Worp, ‘Emptio Bovis Frisica: the “Frisian Ox Sale”
reconsidered’, Journal of Roman studies 99 (2009):
the Netherlands thus gives rise to rewriting a small part of the history of the Roman
156-70; Marjan C. Galestin, ‘Terug naar Tolsum’, occupation. This was evidently never the purpose of making this deed. In fact, almost all
It Beaken 71 (2009): 247-78; W.J. Zwalve, ‘De akte van
Tolsum en het Romeinse recht’, It Beaken 71 (2009):
archival documents made in the past can be used as a historical source although that
237-46. was hardly ever the primary aim of making the document.

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Fig. 8.1 Writing tablet found in Tolsum, 29 CE. Fries Museum.

No earlier handwritten Latin text than this Tabula Tolsummiana has been found in
northern Europe—it is even older than the tablets found in British Vindolanda that date
from the end of the first century CE and older than the Roman tablets found elsewhere in
the Netherlands. At the place of the Roman castellum Fectio (Vechten, province of
Utrecht) a whole archive of around 100 (fragments of ) writing tablets has been found,
probably dating from the first half of the first century. However, since only a few fragments
have been deciphered, archaeologists do not yet know whether these are private archives
of individual soldiers, the archives of the army base, or a combination of both.
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How did the tablet come to Tolsum, some 200 kilometres north of the Roman limes? It is
possible that the tablet originates from the contacts between local people and Roman
soldiers who were camped in nearby Winsum. However, this does not mean that the deed
was drawn up in Friesland. A Roman may have taken the document along, for example
from the military headquarters in Xanten (Germany) or elsewhere in the Roman Empire.
Anyway, the Dutch connection is formed by one of the witnesses, Miunnio, a soldier of
a unit of Batavians (miles Batavorum) probably raised as local militias.

The document is a part of a cautio or chirographum, a deed of loan. The deed stipulates
that the debtor had to reimburse the loan to the creditor ‘or to whomsoever this matter
pertains’ (ad quem ea res pertinet). This made cession of the claim possible. A chiro­
graphum was a bill of exchange that could be traded. It is the oldest example in the
Netherlands of this genre (see 7.1).

The writing tablet from Tolsum is our oldest archival document. However, in archival
literature another document is presented as the oldest one. This is a charter from the
middle of the 10th century, whereby Emperor Otto I donates various rights to his vassal,
Count Ansfried of Huy, including the market, the coinage, and the toll at Kessenich,
Limburg (see 2.1). The Tolsum tablet has been handled since its discovery in 1914 not as an
archival document, but as a museum object. It is kept at the Fries Museum, not at the
regional Frisian archives Tresoar. This distinction between archives and museums (and
between archives and libraries) is a result of the different trajectories of professionalization
in the 19th century (see chapter 12).

7 Manon van der Heijden, ‘Stadsrekeningen, stedelijke

8.2 Keeping the Books
financiën en historisch onderzoek”, NEHA Bulletin 13
8.2.1 Municipal Accounts
7
(1999): 129-66.
8 Peter Horsman, Abuysen ende desordiën.
Archiefvorming en archivering in Dordrecht 1200-1920
(’s-Gravenhage: Stichting archiefpublicaties, 2011),
The backbone of a town’s financial administration is the series of municipal accounts,
p. 172. according to Peter Horsman.8 The oldest municipal accounts in the northern Netherlands

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are those of Dordrecht (1284-1285). They are even older than the oldest ducal accounts
from Gelre (1294-1295). Elsewhere, city accounts start in the 14th century: Deventer 1337,
Venlo 1349, Arnhem 1353, Middelburg 1365, Utrecht 1380, Zutphen 1381, Leiden 1390.
The earliest accounting for income and expenses of the city would have been done orally
before the city council, though sometimes before the citizens assembly (gemeente) as well.
Later the financial administration was included in the city register, such as the oldest
Foliant of Kampen 1318-1350 (see 4.2). Although income and expenses were not yet
systematically recorded, sub-administrations from which the city register derived its data,
can be distinguished. Examples are the administrations of citizen’s fees, fines, excise,
duties, sale and rent of town properties, or expenses for fortifications. Consolidation of
these administrations into one central bookkeeping, such as in Deventer around 1330,
became necessary when the increasing responsibilities of the city government resulted in
new and more expenses which had to be covered by new sources of income. The answer to
the complexity, as Jeroen Benders calls it, of the municipal finances were the consolidated
city accounts, drawn up by special functionaries known as the cameraars or treasurers
(tresoriers).9

An important task of the treasurers was the management of the public works. In Dordrecht
this was the task of one of the two treasurers. However, when Dordrecht found itself in
need of money in 1693, the city government wanted better financial control and
redistributed the tasks of the two treasurers. Now, one kept a record of the income, while
the other recorded the expenses. Apart from their accounts, there was a third account by
the collector of the land tax and other income earmarked for the province.

The town accounts were fed with data from various sources, such as rental registers
9 Jeroen F. Benders, ‘Urban administrative literacy in (see 6.2), registration of citizens (see 1.3), tax assessments, registration of loans, and life
the northeastern Low Countries. A comparison of
Groningen, Kampen, Deventer, and Zutphen, twelfth-
annuities (see below). For Dordrecht, Horsman provided a complete survey of the 15 or
fifteenth centuries’, in Writing and the administration so special accounts from which only the balance ended up in the city accounts. Categories
of medieval towns. Medieval urban literacy I, ed.
Marco Mostert and Anna Adamska (Turnhout:
of income and expenses were booked in different administrations, preventing a complete
Brepols, 2014), pp. 97-121. overview of the financial situation. This was not the main reason for a financial
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administration, which primarily served the accountability of various officers to the city
government. Nevertheless, there are examples where the accounts were used for other
purposes. Around 1489, the Deventer city clerk consulted the old accounts to discover
what the exchange rate of the Brabant mark had been 100 or 150 years before.10

Each of the accountable officers kept his own archives comprising bookkeeping,
quittances, deeds, and other evidence. What such an archive looked like can be seen on a
painting made by Cornelis Brisé in 1656 for the Treasury office in the new City Hall of
Amsterdam (now the Royal Palace, where it still hangs, Fig. 8.0). The painting shows eight
files (liassen) with labels including travels, lawsuits, public works, salaries, and excise. The
painter probably painted existing files. The lias ‘Buying plots’ (Copinge van de Erven,
second row, second from the right) contains a map which is still preserved in the map book
of the Treasury. This map was drawn in 1656 by the city surveyor, Cornelis Danckertsz de
Rij, after the purchase of a strip of land by the city.11

Originally the painting stood on a table, enhancing the deceptive effect, as the bags with
money seem to be laying on a table. Brisé’s painting is a very early example of a trompe
l’oeil. That explains why it was so popular, as alluded to in travel guides of the time.
However, the painting has a deeper meaning as well, a meaning which one discovers
through the verses the poet Vondel dedicated to the painting.12 He referred to the threat of
paper shortage resulting from the embargo on the importation of cheap French paper, but,
as Vondel wrote,

10 J.F. Benders, Bestuursstructuur en schriftcultuur.

Een analyse van de bestuurlijke verschriftelijking in
Do not let yourself be bothered, Amsterdam’s Treasurer stated
Deventer tot het eind van de 15de eeuw (Hilversum: Once Brisé begins to paint, he will provide paper
Verloren, 2004), pp. 226-9.
Look at this scene, what do you see up high?
11 Source: S.A.C. Dudok van Heel, https://web.archive.
org/web/20170808205612/https://www.coret.org/cc/
Papers, act, and letter: or appearance deceives our eye.
res/cornelisbrise.php, archived 8 Aug. 2017.
12 Frans-Willem Korsten, A Dutch republican baroque. Thus, the Treasury did not need to worry about a shortage of paper, because Brisé
Theatricality, dramatization, moment, and event
(Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2017),
provided it. Moreover, according to Frans-Willem Korsten, the painting demonstrates
pp. 24-5. The translation of the verses is by Korsten. the power of paper in shaping reality.

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Peter Horsman has reconstructed which ledgers, journals, and other records may have
been kept by the treasurers of Dordrecht as sources for the city accounts. Cash books
(manualen) and ledgers (blaffaards, see 6.2.2) have not been preserved in Dordrecht.
The Leiden City Archives, however, keep 375 volumes of ledgers covering the years 1623 to
1811 and cash books 1745-1811. Of the bookkeeping of the city of Rotterdam, several
series of ledgers and journals from the 17th century have been preserved. In Amsterdam,
93 volumes of the memoriaal (called rapiamus, meaning ‘let us grasp’, i.e. the income and
expenses) 1570-1663 have been preserved, together with the other books of the double
entry bookkeeping introduced in Amsterdam in 1663 (see 8.2.5).

Structure and layout of town accounts hardly changed between the Middle Ages and the
18th century, which shows the constancy of financial records. The accounts were
systematically structured. Rekenen (counting) and reckoning have the same original
meaning: ordering. Already in the 14th century the accounts of Middelburg begin with the
income under various headings, such as excise, fees, rents, letting out stalls in the pelt halls
and cloth halls. The expenses are also recorded under headings including amenities for
receptions at the city hall, costs of the city wall and gates, peat and firewood, and life
annuities. In Amsterdam these headings were called grossa’s.

The excise taxes (see 8.3) yielded the most important income. The second source of
income were loans, resulting predominantly from selling life annuities and perpetual
annuities (erfrenten). Such a sale was recorded in a deed (rentebrief) handed over to the
creditor. The treasury kept registers of the annual payments due by the city. Archiving of
the annuities embodied continuity. The archive had to be kept and trusted until the
redemp­tion after tens, even hundreds of years. For example, Yale University still receives
13 https://web.archive.org/web/20190330075440/ interest from an annuity that was sold by the Dutch water board Lekdijk Bovendams in
https://news.yale.edu/2015/09/22/living-artifact-
dutch-golden-age-yale-s-367-year-old-water-
1648.13 Yale bought the parchment deed for its collection in 2003 for 23,000 euro. In 1648
bond-still-pays-interest, archived 30 March 2019. the bond cost thousand guilders, at an annual interest that is in today’s money 11.35 euro.
See the document on https://web.archive.org/
web/20190403161543/https://brbl-dl.library.yale.edu/
The interest payments were recorded directly on the bond, while naturally the water
vufind/Record/3435647, archived 3 April 2019. board booked the paid interest as well.
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Apart from the treasury various officials, including the sheriff (schout) and the burgo­
masters, public bodies and charitable institutions also kept their own administration,
from which sometimes the balance was transferred to the general city accounts. The
Amsterdam burgomasters prescribed a common format for the accounts of the
churchwardens and the charitable institutions in 1682 to increase transparency.

8.2.2 Merchants’ Books

In chapter 7 I referred to Jan Impyn, who in 1543 published a Flemish adaptation of
Pacioli’s Tractatus de computis et scripturis (1494).14 His instructions on bookkeeping
were directed mainly to merchants, but also to notaries, renters, farmers, receivers, and all
people who by ‘the kepyng of a fewe bokes thei maie bothe write al their affayres without
confusion, and also at their pleasures easely and lightly fund [find] them’. However, the
examples and models of the ‘Italian’ or double-entry bookkeeping were mainly meant for
merchants. But Impyn wanted his book to be used by schoolmasters ‘that exercise the
practise of Ciffres, to teache children how to kepe bokes of accomptes and rekonnynges’.
Indeed, by the 16th century, teaching at school included bookkeeping, and many
schoolmasters doubled as counting master and accountant, sometimes also as surveyor.
They taught navigation practice as well. Most manuals for bookkeeping from the 16th to
14 P. de Waal, ‘De Engelsche vertaling van Jan Ympyn’s
the 19th century were written by counting masters, beginning with Valentin Mennher
Nieuwe Instructie’, Economisch-historisch jaarboek 18 (Antwerp 1550) and Claes Pietersz (Amsterdam 1576).15
(1934): 1-58; repr. in Selected classics in the history of
bookkeeping, series III, 2 (Osaka: Nihon Shoseki, 1977).
15 Karel Davids, ‘The bookkeeper’s tale. Learning
Not only boys were taught bookkeeping, girls and women also developed financial literacy.
merchant skills in the Northern Netherlands in Foreigners found the role of Dutch women in business remarkable: ‘if the husband be the
the 16th century’, in Education and learning in the
Netherlands, 1400-1600, ed. Koen Goudriaan, Jaap van
merchant, the wife is the book-keeper’, wrote Stephen Monteage in his 1675 bookkeeping
Moolenbroek, and Ad Tervoort (Leiden: Brill. 2004), manual.16 When, in 1668, Sir Josiah Child (later Governor of the East India Company)
pp. 235-52.
enumerated the causes of the ‘prodigious increase of the Netherlanders in their domestick
16 Rebecca Elisabeth Connor, Women, accounting,
and narrative. Keeping books in eighteenth-century
and foreign trade, riches, and multitude of shipping’, one of his 15 arguments was the
England (London/New York: Routledge, 2004), p. 54. education of daughters and sons in Holland who learned ‘to write perfect good hands,

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and to have the full knowledge and use of Arithmetick and Merchants Accompts’ and who
had ‘a strong aptitude, love, and delight’ in commerce. In Holland, women were legally
competent if they were active in their own business. Because Dutch women were ‘as
knowing therein as the men, it doth incourage their Husbands to hold on in their Trades to
their dying days, knowing the capacity of their Wives to get in their Estates, and carry on
their Trades after their Deaths’. 17 Of this high regard for the financial literacy of Dutch
women, Defoe’s Roxana, the fortunate mistress is the fictional translation.18

The oldest Dutch merchant’s book dates from 1460; it was kept by a textile merchant in
Hoorn. The oldest merchant’s book concerning the Baltic Sea trade starts in 1485 and was
kept until 149019 by the Amsterdam partners Reyer Dircsz and his uncle, Symon Reyersz.
From time to time they lived in Danzig. They traded rye, salt, linen, and other goods on the
markets of Amsterdam and Danzig. Their merchant’s book is not a total account of the
company because it does not include the Amsterdam transactions. Moreover, not all
transactions were booked. Often the receipt of an article was recorded but not its sale.
The bookkeeping is therefore rather simple, but it is rare and therefore its publication in
facsimile by the famous 20th-century Dutch economic historian Posthumus is fully
justified. The book (or rather booklet) has been preserved by chance, hidden in the
archives of the Amsterdam Civic Orphanage. We do not know how it came to be there.
17 Joshua Child, Brief observations concerning trade
and interest of money (London: Elizabeth Calvert/
In other government archives later merchant’s books have been included, often because
Henry Mortlock, 1668), https://web.archive.org/ books and papers had to be handed over to the government when someone was declared
web/20181011092033/http://avalon.law.yale.
edu/17th_century/trade.asp, archived 11 Oct. 2018.
bankrupt (see 6.3.1).
Child’s praise reappeared well into the 18th century
in all editions of his A New Discourse of trade.
The core of bookkeeping was the journal or memoriaal. According to Impyn’s instruction
18 D. Christopher Gabbard, ‘The Dutch wives’ good
husbandry. Defoe’s “Roxana” and financial literacy’,
the merchant had to record in the ‘memoriall boke’
18th-century studies, 37. no. 2 (2004): 237-51.
19 N.W. Posthumus, De Oosterse handel te Amsterdam. all maner of thynges that daily doth happen, ether by biynges, sellynges, payments,
Het oudst bewaarde koopmansboek van een
Amsterdamse vennootschap betreffende de handel
receptes, deliuerances of billes, assignacions, wages, laborers, cariage, fraight and so
op de Oostzee 1485-1490 (Leiden: Brill, 1953). furth, and all that belongeth or toucheth to marchandise.20
20 De Waal, ‘De Engelsche vertaling’: 20.
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Bookkeeping thus started with recording ‘things’, which in subsequent books were
rendered into money. Bookkeeping is a technology to describe the real world, even to
consider the record as the world, as the legal maxim states: quod non est in actis, non est
in mundo—what is not kept in records does not exist.

Which functions the various books had and how they were to be named was evidently a
puzzle for the Delft merchant Claes Adriaensz van Adrichem (1538-1607) (see about him
7.2 and 7.3.2). Corrections on the title pages of his registers show that he hesitated over
what to call the books. His journal of sundry income and expenses (1578-1579) was at
first named dagelicxe cladde (daily waste book), later corrected into memoriaelboeck
(memorial). Both these terms appear in the bookkeeping manuals. For the register of
properties, he hesitated between register and blaffert (rental); another book, a ledger of
receipts from lands rented out and annuities (1579-1582) was labelled maenboeck (claims
book), having considered (and rejected) terms like blaffert or ontfangboeck (book of
receipts) or memoriael. This makes clear that for Van Adrichem bookkeeping did not
only concern monies received and spent, but also receivables and claims.

In double-entry bookkeeping, as described by Impyn and many other writers, the

transactions in the memorial are transferred to the journal and from there into the general
ledger (grootboek or schuldboek). In the general ledger each item is entered twice—debited
in one account (on the left side or on a left page), credited in another (on the right). The
journal and the general ledger may be split into various special journals (a cash daybook,
a sales daybook, a purchases daybook) and subsidiary ledgers (accounts payable/receivable
Fig. 8.2 Pieter Serwouter, Title page of Hendrik ledger, inventory ledger). This system of books expands over time; it may encompass (as
Waningen, ’t Recht gebruyck van ’t Italiaens
boeck-houden… (Amsterdam: Marcus Impyn had already advised) the letter book (letters sent), a bankbook, and a ‘month book’
Doornick, 1672), detail. (monthly receivables), amongst others.

21 Oscar Gelderblom, ‘The resolution of commercial

conflicts in Bruges, Antwerp, and Amsterdam, 1250-
By the 17th century not just any bookkeeping, but only a merchant’s account in double-
1650’, in Law and long-term economic change. entry (and reinforced by a solemn oath) had probative value in court.21 The double-entry
A Eurasian perspective, ed. Debin Ma and Jan Luiten
van Zanden (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
system was propagated, taught, adapted, and refined in plenty of bookkeeping manuals
2011), pp. 244-76. that were reprinted, reworked, and translated numerous times. Many manuals pay

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attention to ‘common’, or simple entry, bookkeeping as well. It demanded less of the ability
of the bookkeeper, but provided fewer opportunities for error checking, though apparently
many merchants and other people considered it sufficient.22 Big merchants (like Elisabeth
Coymans in Amsterdam, widow of Jean Deutz and the richest woman in the Golden Age
with a fortune of 1.3 million guilders23), however, employed one or more professional
accountants (boekhouders) to keep their double-entry bookkeeping. The narrative in
Elizabeth’s books is in the first person even after her death on 14 February 1653, but it was
written by her accountant Antonii Martens, who continued keeping the books for her
sons.24

22 Sybil M. Jack, ‘An historical defence of single entry

book-keeping’, Abacus 2.2 (1966): 137-58; Warwick
Funnell and Jeffrey Robertson, ’Capitalist accounting
in 16th century Holland. Hanseatic influences and
the Sombart thesis’, Accounting, auditing &
Fig. 8.3 Journal of Elisabeth Coymans, 22-24 March 1653. Amsterdam City Archives, Deutz (234),
accountability journal 24 (2011): 560-86. inv. nr. 275, detail.
23 Kees Zandvliet, 500. De rijksten van de Republiek.
Rijkdom, geloof, macht & cultuur (Zutphen: Walburg
Pers, 2018).
24 Amsterdam City Archives, Familie Deutz (234),
inv. nrs. 275, 276, 281, 284, 289.
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8.2.3 The Bookkeeping Mindset

Archiving Monies

The ‘bookkeeping mindset’ influenced other genres of recordkeeping as well. The

Amsterdam regent Joan Huydecoper (1595-1661; number 73 on the ranking of the 250
richest people in the Golden Age, who probably commissioned his neighbour Cornelis
Brisé to paint the Treasury, Fig. 8.0) interspersed his account-book with annotations about
the history of his family and his city (see 1.7.1).25 His son Joan (1625-1704) held a more
organized diary, which he started when he was 23 and continued until shortly before his
death.26 In this diary he transcribed daily notes (including a mark for having sex with his
wife, with monthly and annual totals). He copied all outgoing letters and noted the gifts he
received or presented, by whom and to whom. When Huydecoper had helped someone to
find a job he marked this in his diary with a special sign, expecting a service in return.
These registers were, so to speak, his ledger with a credit and debit side—not in the
financial, but in the social sense. Luuc Kooijmans writes:

The daily registers and the copies of letters were the evidence he owed his
descendants of his social administration, the counterpart of his financial
administration. The daily registers also contained elements to make up a moral
balance sheet, weighing virtue against vice.27

Governments and semi-public institutions did not usually apply a double-entry system
but used simple cash books, though a few exceptions will be presented later. The engineer,
25 Utrecht Archives, Huydecoper (67), inv. nr. 30.
architect, and mathematician Simon Stevin, whom I introduced in 5.3, wanted to change
26 Utrecht Archives, Huydecoper (67), inv. nrs. 53-65.
this. He was the tutor of Stadholder Prince Maurice of Nassau (in 1618 Maurice became
27 Luuc Kooijmans, Vriendschap en de kunst van het
Prince of Orange).28 Stevin proposed to set up the bookkeeping of the princely domains
overleven in de zeventiende en achttiende eeuw, 2nd ed. and of the costs of warfare, the latter of which were considered to be extraordinary
(Amsterdam: Bert Bakker, 2016), p. 160.
finances, according to the ‘Italian’ or double-entry system. This would give the Prince, who
28 Jacob Soll, ‘Accounting for government. Holland and
the rise of political economy in 17th-century Europe’,
possessed a considerable fortune29, a better insight into his estate than the usual cash
Journal of interdisciplinary history 40 (2009): 223-24. books of the stewards of the domains. Stevin designed models for the journal and grand
29 Zandvliet, 500: De rijksten, p. 130. ledger in 1603 at the request of the Prince. They are still kept in the archives of the Council

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of the Nassau Demesne (Nassause Domeinraad) in the National Archives. In 1607 Stevin
published his ‘Princely bookkeeping of domains and extraordinary finances in the Italian
style’ (Vorstelicke Bouckhouding op de Italiaensche wijse in Domeine en Finance
Extraordinaire). It contains both an extensive handbook of mercantile bookkeeping, and
instructions for the princely bookkeeping. Whether an Italian bookkeeping has ever been
kept for the Prince remains to be seen.30 Very soon after 1607 Stevin must have reached the
conclusion that the proposed bookkeeping was not suited to the financial administration
of the domains, as he confirms in the introduction to his new system ‘Accounting for
domains using a counter-roll’ (Verrechting van Domeine mette contrerolle), published post­
humously in 1649.Whether that system was effectively used deserves further investigation.
30 J.B. Geijsbeek, Ancient double-entry bookkeeping
(Houston: Scholars Book Company, 1914), pp. 11-
13 and 118 is absolutely wrong in assuming that
8.2.4 Accounting by the VOC
Prince Maurice installed double-entry bookkeeping 31
‘throughout his territory, thus practically putting
municipal government accounting on the double-
entry system’. The bookkeeping of the princely
domains had little or nothing to do with municipal
Precisely at the time Prince Maurice was initiated in bookkeeping by Stevin, the United
bookkeeping. Geijsbeek also writes that Stevin, East India Company (VOC) was reorganizing its bookkeeping. Each of the six chambers of
as a consultant or accountant, installed double-
entry systems in all departments of government,
the VOC (in Amsterdam, Middelburg, Delft, Rotterdam, Enkhuizen, and Hoorn) kept its
in mercantile houses, royal households, and own books. In February 1606 a regular inspection of all bookkeeping was introduced ‘so
municipalities. This is, I believe, meant to show
Stevin’s wide experience in Flanders as a merchant’s
that everything will be accounted on an equal footing and in good order, to the honour and
bookkeeper and as a clerk at the taxation office of security of the Company.’32 In 1608 the VOC appointed the experienced accountant of the
the Bruges viscounty. The plural ‘all departments’,
‘royal households, and municipalities’ suggests more
Amsterdam Chamber, Barend Lampe, as general accountant of the entire company. Every
than can be reconstructed from the sources. month he received a copy of the journal from each chamber. It appeared to be necessary to
31 J.P. de Korte, De jaarlijkse financiële verantwoording improve both the general bookkeeping and the bookkeeping of the chambers. However,
in de VOC, Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie
(Leiden: Nijhoff, 1984); L.D. Westera, ‘Boekhouding
genuine double-entry bookkeeping was not introduced generally, except for capital
en management bij de Verenigde Oostindische accounting (see below). Only the Zeeland Chamber in Middelburg (probably influenced
Compagnie’, Economisch- en sociaal-historisch
jaarboek 55 (1992): 75-104; Jeffrey Robertson and
by the commercial practices of nearby Flanders) used a double-entry system, but only from
Warwick Funnell, ‘The Dutch East-India Company and 1602 to 1607.
accounting for social capital at the dawn of modern
capitalism 1602–1623’, Accounting, organizations and
society 37.5 (2012): 342-60. The accounting system implemented in Asia in 1613–1614 by the general accountant
32 Westera, ‘Boekhouding’, p. 84. Jan Pietersz Coen—who, as a 13-year-old apprentice to a Flemish merchant in Rome, had
 198a | 8 |
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learned double-entry bookkeeping—was based on double-entry bookkeeping. Several
of the Asian establishments used it too, but it was never integrated with the domestic
bookkeeping. Around 1626 the efforts to centralize and standardize bookkeeping were
abandoned. The attempts to improve the financial administration of the Company,
under­taken by mathematician and VOC director Johannes Hudde (see 7.3.1) between
1686 and 1700 with the assistance of three accountants of the Amsterdam Chamber,
did not succeed.33

As Bert Westera writes in his study on the VOC bookkeeping, it is nevertheless clear that
the relatively simple bookkeeping did not prevent efficient management:

Improvement of administrative control, restriction and monitoring costs in the

Netherlands, expansion of the business in Asia, redeeming debts, restraint in
the payment of dividends—no sector escaped the attention of the Lords XVII.34

However, as Westera concludes, ‘bookkeeping played a much more limited role as a

policymaking instrument or means of control than is usual nowadays. With basic, but
rapidly available information they tried to guide the business.’ 35

There was gradually more detailed business information available than the data from the
journals, grand ledgers, and annual balance sheets. Recording of costs for outfitting ships
33 F.S. Gaastra, Bewind en beleid bij de VOC. was done in great detail by each chamber. In 1740 extensive regulations were issued to
De financiële en commerciële politiek van de
bewindhebbers, 1672-1702 (Zutphen: Walburg Pers,
make a comparison between the chambers easier, but the chambers resisted this. Export
1989), pp. 221-36; Jacob Soll, The reckoning. Financial and import of goods to and from Asia were meticulously administered by the accountant-
accountability and the rise and fall of nations (New
York: Basic books, 2014), pp. 82-4
general in Batavia; a copy of his bookkeeping was sent to the Netherlands. Those copies
34 Westera, ‘Boekhouding’, p. 89.
have been destroyed, but in 1862 the books which were left behind in Batavia were sent to
35 Westera, ‘Boekhouding’, p. 100. See also the
the Netherlands. They are kept in the National Archives and have recently been made
concurring opinion of Gaastra, Bewind en beleid bij accessible via a database on the Internet. It concerns all goods shipped during 55 years
de VOC, pp. 245-46 and Femme S. Gaastra, The Dutch
East India Company. Expansion and decline (Zutphen:
of the 18th century—250,000 references to 3,000 different products, with a total value of
Walburg Pers, 2003), pp. 155-59. 328 million Dutch guilders. Merchants in Asia (see 10.6) sometimes kept their books

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according to the double-entry system; however, as an expert wrote at the beginning of the
18th century, knowledge of the system in the East Indies remained weak.36

Another important component of the VOC administration was the personnel and salaries
administration in the pay-ledgers of the ships (scheepssoldijboeken). They show elements
of double-entry bookkeeping (see 1.4.1).

Separate from the accounts for operations and trading, the Amsterdam Chamber used a
supplementary capital bookkeeping. Jeffrey Robertson and Warwick Funnell explain the
capital bookkeeping of the Amsterdam Chamber as follows. It had a subscription register,
a capital journal, and a capital ledger. The VOC shares were registered in the subscription
register or, more precisely, the registration of a subscriber established his legal obligation
to settle the capital sum subscribed for. The few printed VOC ‘shares’ that have been
preserved are in fact receipts for payment of the capital sum of the share (see 13.5 and
Fig. 13.3). The registrations led to entries kept in the capital journal and the capital ledger.

8.2.5 Double-Entry Bookkeeping

by Government
The economic historian Joost Jonker has suggested that the lack of double-entry
bookkeeping by governmental authorities was owing to the fact
36 According to Cornelis Bezuyen, director at Surat
1707-1709, formerly first clerk at the secret writing
office of the Governor-General. Long after his death
that for governments to keep a grand ledger is not aimed at acquiring insight in the
in 1710 appeared his Instructie dienende tot grondige development of its capital, but at monitoring the cash flow, thus to the extent in
onderwijzing in de reken-konst, en het boekhouden
(Amsterdam, 1746), voorrede.
which liabilities have been paid.37
37 Cited by R. Liesker and W. Fritschy, Gewestelijke
financiën ten tijde van de Republiek der Verenigde However, there are two exceptions: the Finance Office of Southern Holland (Financie van
Nederlanden, vol. 4, Holland (1572-1795) (Den Haag:
Instituut voor Nederlandse Geschiedenis, 2004),
Holland) and the city of Amsterdam (aside from double-entry bookkeeping by private
p. 70 and note 278. people who held a public office; see 6.2.3 and 8.2.3).
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According to his instruction of 1625, the accountant of the Finance Office of Southern
Holland had to be thoroughly familiar with ‘Italian bookkeeping’ and he had to be able to
draw up balances and keep accurate and accessible accounts.38 Early in the year 1625 a son
of a member of the Audit Office was put forward as an accountant, but when it turned out
that he had no sense of Italian bookkeeping his appointment was cancelled immediately.
The administration of the Finance Office showed features of double-entry bookkeeping
beginning in 1624.39 The Office kept a journal, a general ledger, and various special journals
and subsidiary ledgers. However, whether a regular balance sheet was drawn up is not
clear.

The Amsterdam Bank of Exchange (Wisselbank), founded in 1609, kept a double-entry

bookkeeping which was expanded with a duplicate bookkeeping (contraboekhouding) in
1683 (see 8.4.1). Amsterdam was the only city to switch to double-entry bookkeeping
when it made the change in 1663.40 At the same time the two municipal poor relief
agencies did the same.41 As a result of the large extension of the city between 1658 and
38 National Archives, Staten van Holland (3.01.04.01),
inv. nr. 1617, fol. 219-26.
1663, affairs at the treasury of the city (also responsible for public works) had increased
39 Liesker and Fritschy, Gewestelijke financiën, p.
considerably and with it the need to improve control. Therefore, an accountant-general
66 assume that the Financie of Holland started was appointed to safeguard accurate bookkeeping in order for efficient assessment of the
double-entry bookkeeping in 1621. They base their
opinion on the Staet van de Provintie van Hollandt
finances and public works of the city to be possible. The new accountant started by
ende Westvrieslandt van de jaeren 1621, 1622, 1623 transferring the entries from the old memorial into a new journal and from there into the
(National Archives, Stadhouderlijke Secretarie
(1.01.50), inv. nr. 732). However, these surveys were
grand ledger. This ledger (665 pages) served for 17 years; at its closure a balance of assets
made in January 1624. They show some features of and liabilities was made up. The bookkeeper made a trial balance that was submitted to the
double-entry bookkeeping, using Arabic numbers, in
contrast to the other surveys in the same file (probably
burgomasters and the treasurers annually. It is likely that the first balance per 31 January
used as source for the Staet) which are in cameral style 1680 and the trial balances were drawn up at the instruction of Johannes Hudde who also
and use Roman numbers.
used his mathematical expertise in his offices of treasurer and burgomaster (see 7.3.1).
40 W.F.H. Oldewelt, ‘De boekhouding van Amsterdam’,
Jaarboek van het Genootschap Amstelodamum 63
He also caused an annual estimate of the income and expenses of the city to be made,
(1971): 11-29. based on the books of the years 1663 to 1679. Furthermore, Hudde was also a director of
41 W.F.H. Oldewelt, Inventaris van de archieven tot 1808 the VOC where, as we have seen (8.2.4), he tried to improve the financial information
van de colleges van regenten over het Oudezijdshuis­
zitten­huis en over het Nieuwezijdshuiszittenhuis …
management between 1686 and 1700.
(Amsterdam: Stadsdrukkerij, 1929), pp. 13-14.

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Together with the ledger that was introduced in 1663, the memorials (175 volumes) and
journals (22 volumes) have also been preserved. Of the special journals only the registers
of salaries (weddeboeken) have been preserved for the whole period between 1664 and
1810. In 1811, under the French occupation, double-entry bookkeeping was replaced by
simple bookkeeping prescribed by the French. However, some municipal agencies (like
the Orphan Chamber and the municipal pawnshop, or Bank van lening) continued the
double-entry bookkeeping they had started at the end of the 18th century.

8.2.6 Accountability Portrayed

42

Amman’s large copper engraving, the Aigentliche Abbildung desz gantzen Gewerbs der
Kauffmanschafft (1585), is an allegory to commerce dedicated to the glory of Antwerp, but
it is also an eulogy in image and text to double-entry bookkeeping.43 One sees merchants
at work on street benches, at the weigh-house, and in offices. Jacob Soll writes that the
image shows ‘a public consciousness that commercial success depended on double entry.
Even more, the woodcut explained how to keep books.’44

These books were the memorial, the journal, and the grand ledger. Each page of the journal
carried the message Laus Deo—Praise to God. Man rendering his account on Earth
Fig. 8.4 Jost Amman, The Aigentliche mirrored the bookkeeping in Heaven, as the 17th-century Dutch statesman and poet Jacob
Abbildung desz gantzen Gewerbs der Cats wrote. Everyone must account for his life on Earth on the Day of Last Judgment, when
Kauffmanschafft (1585), detail. (in the words of Dies Irae) ‘The written book shall be brought, in which all is contained
whereby the world shall be judged.’ Dirck Jacobsz’s portrait of an Amsterdam merchant
42 The following is for the greater part a summary of
and his wife (1541) shows the account book as a symbol of the account the merchant would
Eric Ketelaar, ‘Accountability portrayed. Documents have to give to the judge of the living and the dead (1 Peter 4:5). When a merchant had
on regents’ group portraits in the Dutch Golden Age’,
Archival science 14 (2014): 69-93.
himself pictured with his books, either in an individual portrait or in that of a group, he
43 Basil S. Yamey, Art and accounting (New Haven/
anticipated the day of reckoning, when—in the words of a 17th-century treatise—his
London: Yale University Press, 1989), pp. 115-22. works for the poor and the crippled would be judged.
44 Soll, The reckoning, p. 75.
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This is the background for a remarkable genre of group paintings, developed in Amster­
­dam from the beginning of the 16th century. In 1617 and 1618, Cornelis van der Voort
portrayed the boards of three Amsterdam institutions: Saint Peter’s or Inner Hospital, the
Old People’s Home and the Men’s House of Correction. These and other charitable
institutions were administered by boards of prominent citizens called regenten. They
handled the financial and goods administration that had become increasingly complex
after the Reformation, involving more managerial work. They were volunteers who felt the
need to show that they conducted their tasks in a precise and conscientious way ’going by
the book’. In each of the three portraits, the regents are sitting or standing around a table,
as if in a board meeting. The clerk or the warden has also been portrayed. He is allowed in,
hat in one hand, a letter in the other. Most of the regents have been pictured with a
document in their hands or within reach. On the table are registers, a charter, and other
documents.

In the portrait of the regents of the Old People’s Home (Fig. 8.5) one of the regents is about
to take one of three registers off the shelf. As is clear from the inscription on the edge, these
registers are the Huurboeck, the Loterijboeck 1600 and the Loterijboeck 1614—the registers
of rents, and of the lotteries that were held in 1600 and 1614, respectively. From the
proceeds of the lottery in 1600, a new house for 100 old people had been built. Within a
few years, more working capital was needed, and a second lottery was held, for which
permission was given in 1614. Thus, the registers that were pictured were not randomly
chosen but were expressly shown to the painter with the instruction to portray these
registers that were so important to the home. However, Van der Voort was left free as to
the manner of picturing the registers. This is clear from the rental register (Huurboeck) in
the painting which is not identical with the Huurboeck 1582-1628 preserved in the
archives. On the portrait of the regents of Saint Peter’s Hospital the register shown lying on
the table is not there by accident. From the letters that Van der Voort painted legibly on the
register, it appears to be a rental register of the houses on Nes and Warmoesstraat
belonging to the Hospital.

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Fig. 8.5 Cornelis van der Voort, Regents of the Amsterdam Old People’s Home, 1618.
Amsterdam Museum, SA 7436.

The documents in the paintings are representations of, or references to, actual records
which the regents used in the management of their institutions. According to art historian
Sheila Muller, the paintings created an image of the regents as ‘professionals’ who, because
45 Sheila D. Muller, Charity in the Dutch Republic.
Pictures of rich and poor for charitable institutions
of their wealth (the regents received no remuneration) and social position, could afford to
(Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1985). administer a charity in a Christian and humanist manner.45 What these paintings also
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show is that management was a collegiate business, characteristic of public and private
institutions in the Netherlands (see 13.3).

With his paintings Van der Voort created a model for portraits of groups of regents. On all
but one of the 52 Amsterdam regents group portraits between 1617 and 1756, regents and
lady governors have been depicted with the instruments of governance and administration
on the table. They stand and sit among registers and other archival documents, some of
them identifiable. Van der Voort’s format was followed not only in Amsterdam, but in
Haarlem, Leiden, and elsewhere. The paintings hung in the boardrooms of the charitable
institutions which were open to the public. Visitors could see the paintings that presented
an image of regents as professional administrators, keeping the books of the institution in
the way they kept their own mercantile administration.

8.2.7 Mechanizing and Computerizing

the Books46
Bookkeeping was basically a manual practice. This changed during the 19th century.
With the expansion of markets, the one-man shop and the small family business made way
for big business. Businesses expanded, in size and geographically, necessitating new
instruments of communication and control (see also 7.4). New and higher standards of
administration and reporting were required, while the volume of incoming and outgoing
information was steadily increasing because of industrial expansion. Various new office
techniques for the production, reproduction, and keeping of records and for data
production were widely introduced (see 11.2).

Analogous to old Dutch law, the commercial code (1838) required the merchant to keep a
journal, to keep the letters received, to make a copybook (kopijboek) of outgoing mail, and
46 The following is a summary of Eric Ketelaar,
‘“Control through communication” in a comparative
to make an inventory and balance sheet at the end of each year. Such merchant’s books
perspective’, Archivaria 60 (2006): 71-89. could be used as legal evidence. The law mentioned books of a merchant and that was

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taken literally. Therefore, loose-leaf systems which came into use since the second half of
the 19th century had to look like bound volumes. Opposition against the regulations of the
commercial code concerning the way of administering was encouraged by chambers of
commerce and by businesses selling loose-leaf systems and accounting machines (see
11.2). The Association of Commercial Law (Vereeniging Handelsrecht), founded in 1918,
argued in favour of deleting the regulations altogether. In 1922 the law was changed to read
‘Each merchant is obliged to record his financial position and everything regarding his
business in such a manner that at all times his rights and obligations can be known from
that record.’ The term of retention was set on 30 years for the merchant’s books and the
related papers and ten years for the correspondence. The restriction to bound books was
abolished. Pegboard (or ‘one-write’) systems came into use; posting an item on the card of
a grand ledger account was carbon copied onto the underlying journal sheet, with both
kept into place with pegs. Carbon paper was also used in mechanized systems for
simultaneously recording data in different documents, each with its own function.

In 1926, the Exhibition of Public and Private Business Administration in Amsterdam

(Tentoonstelling op het gebied van de openbare en particuliere bedrijfsadministratie, TOPA
for short) brought together government agencies, municipalities, and some 30 companies
that showed how they had improved their efficiency by better information management.
TOPA is paradigmatic for the strength of the network of Dutch ‘systematizers’ in
information processing, both in business and in government. One of the stands showed
the mechanization at the Amsterdam branch of the Rotterdamsche Bank Vereeniging
(Robaver), the undisputed leader in office mechanization in the 1920s.47 As a Robaver
promotional movie of 1922 made clear, mechanization of the bank’s activities was carried
out with the motto ‘do not let human beings do what machines can do’. This slogan,
however, was ambivalent. By mechanization they hoped to achieve more efficiency on
47 Nachoem M. Wijnberg, Jan van den Ende, and
the one hand and to reduce the dependency on personnel on the other hand. Indeed, the
Onno de Wit, ‘Decision making at different levels of business costs decreased from 8.5 million guilders in 1921 to 5.5 million in 1923, but at the
the organization and the impact of new information
technology. Two cases from the financial sector’,
same time 300 staff, predominantly women, lost their jobs. The introduction by Robaver
Group & organization management 27 (2002): 408-29. of new technologies was accompanied by a radical reorganization of work processes and
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administrative activities and the introduction of new management techniques. In terms of
the model of the archiving context (Fig. 0.2) work processes were reorganized in tandem
with archiving (and technology, which in the model is inextricably included in archiving;
see 11.3). Bookkeeping was extended to the effective processing of financial and
non-financial data. At the TOPA, Robaver exhibited a large diagram showing the flow of
letters and monies moving through the bank (with the archives as its core!), the resulting
accounting operations, and the necessary machinery: punchcard machines (Hollerith,
Powers), printers, writing adding machines, and Elliot-Fisher book typewriters (which
evolved into Elliot-Fisher’s Universal Accounting Machine). The diagram showed the
insight of bank management ‘into the fact that its internal and external products were the
result of the systematic processing of data and information through the whole
organization’.48

Many years later it turned out that mechanization of its bookkeeping had neither
prevented the Rotterdam bank from coming into trouble regarding its liquidity, nor had it
shown that figures had been manipulated and that the bank had bought its own shares and
had secretly sold them. In 1924 the bank had to be sustained with a secret emergency loan
from the Netherlands Central Bank (Nederlandsche Bank).

Mechanization of bookkeeping changed into computerization in the 1960s. An IBM 650

installed in 1957 by the Dutch Land Cultivation Company (Nederlandse Heidemaat­
schap­pij) was the first computer in the Netherlands specifically used for office automation.
Gradually, punchcard departments were transformed into central computing departments
(see also 8.3.2). Legislation lagged behind, as usual. It was not before 2002 that the law
made ‘data storage media’ equivalent to ‘documents’. Rules for keeping administration that
formerly applied to businesses only, are now applicable to anyone who pursues a business
or a professional practice. The retention term for retaining records which are important for
the tax authorities has been reduced to seven years. One may transfer data from one
storage medium to another, provided that the transfer results in a correct and complete
48 Wijnberg, Van den Ende, De Wit, ‘Decision making’,
reproduction of the information and that this information is available and can be made
p. 418. readable throughout the entire retention period within a reasonable time.

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8.3 Taxation
Archiving Monies 49

8.3.1 Taxes, Excises, Duties, and Rates at

all Levels of Government
Of the 24 chapters of the excellent inventory of the city archives of Leiden 1574-1816, the
longest is the one listing the records concerning provincial and national taxes. Elsewhere
in the inventory the excises and duties of the city are dealt with. This dichotomy reflects the
tax system of the Republic, where the introduction of taxes, their assessment, and
collection were decentralized to provincial, district, town, and village levels. At each level
government was resourceful in introducing new taxes leading to new registrations or
adaptation of existing ones.

At the federal level only customs duties were levied, the convooien en licenten, originally
duties for naval protection of merchant ships and licences to trade with the Southern
Netherlands. From 1648, however, convooien en licenten were duties on import and
export, levied on behalf of the States General by the five boards of admiralty.
49 M. ’t Hart, ‘The merits of a financial revolution.
Public finance, 1550–1700’, in A financial history of
the Netherlands, ed. Joost Jonker and Jan Luiten van
Each province had its own fiscal system managed by the provincial executive council and
Zanden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, a fiscal office. The provincial tax revenues were composed of excise taxes, land taxes
1997), pp. 11-36; N.J.P.M. Bos and R.C.J. van Maanen,
Fiscale bronnen.: Structuur en onderzoeks­mogelijk­
(verponding), ‘extraordinary’ taxes on wealth and income, and a whole array of duties and
heden (Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 1993); Bronnen rates.50 In addition, the cities levied their own excises, plus a surcharge on the provincial
betreffende de registratie van onroerend goed in
Middeleeuwen en Ancien Régime. Broncommentaren 4,
taxes, market rates, street and lantern duties, while the water boards levied land taxes for
ed. G.A.M. van Synghel (Den Haag: Instituut voor the upkeep of dikes, mills, and sluices.
Nederlandse geschiedenis, 2001); Wantje Fritschy,
‘The efficiency of taxation in Holland’, in The political
economy of the Dutch Republic, ed. Oscar Gelderblom Indirect taxes are those not levied directly from a person, but rather charged upon the
(Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), pp. 55-84.
production, importation, or consumption of articles of use: excise (the word comes from
50 De Vries and Van der Woude, The first modern
economy, p. 106.
Dutch exsijs or accijs) taxes. The right of the city of Haarlem to levy more than 15 excise
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taxes on beer, wine, grains, cloth, pelt, butter, and other commodities was confirmed as
early as in 1274. Fifty years later the city of Middelburg collected 27 excise taxes on a
variety of consumer goods.51 The excise weighed heavily. The English ambassador in the
Netherlands Sir William Temple wrote in 1673 about the Dutch excise, ‘When in a tavern a
certain dish of fish is eaten with the usual sauce, about 30 several excises are paid.’52

The excise was normally paid by the seller. Collecting indirect taxes was farmed out; in the
province of Holland the 40 separate excise taxes divided into 17 districts produced 680 tax
farms, sold at semi-annual public auctions. The tax farmers, who were generally men of
moderate means and entrepreneurs, speculated on collecting at least the amount they had
paid at auction, preferably more and thus gaining a profit. The tax farmers were allowed to
inspect the premises of the wine and beer sellers and those other businessmen who had to
pay their excises. This inspection included that of their books.53 The tax farmers must have
kept an efficient fiscal administration, but next to nothing has been preserved. In the years
1747 and 1748 people in Groningen, Friesland, and Holland revolted violently against the
tax farmers and this led to the abolishment of tax farming in the greater part of the
country, though not in Zeeland, Gelderland, and Drenthe. The other provincial
governments then started to collect the taxes.

In 1680, 16 excise taxes in Holland were replaced by a tax on wealth and a tax on
employing servants, collected directly from the taxable person according to assessment
lists (kohieren). This was therefore the replacement of an indirect imposition by a direct
one. Such registers of evaluation/assessment described all taxable people and assessed the
51 Wim Derksen, ‘Stedelijke heffingen Middelburg’, in value of the land, house or estate. These taxes were called ‘described means’ (beschreven
Steden en dorpen in last. Historische aspecten van
lokale belastingen en financiën, ed. Tom Pfeil et al.
middelen) and they needed quite extensive recordkeeping. Examples are the land tax
(Amsterdam: NEHA, 1999), pp. 11-39. (verponding) and the various taxes on wealth and income. The verponding registers were
52 William Temple, Observations upon the United often based on older registers, such as the morgenboeken in Rijnland (see 5.1),
Provinces of the Netherlands, 8th ed. (Edinburgh:
G. Hamilton and J. Balfour, 1747), p. 172.
floreenkohieren in Friesland, or the schatregisters in Groningen. In 1584, after the
53 Paul Brood, Belastingheffing in Drenthe, 1600-1822
beginning of the Revolt, new verpondingskohieren were drawn up in Holland. They were
(Meppel: Boom, 1991), p. 112. revised between 1627 and 1632 and kept in use until 1734. The assessment was not

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changed during all those years, but the land tax was frequently increased by an extra levy
to pay for the costs of warfare. Since 1632 the tax amounted to 12.5 percent of the rental
value of houses and 20 percent of the value of lands after the deduction of mill, dike, and
sluice duties. A new taxation was carried out a century later, one on buildings. The
renewed assessment lists came into force in 1734. Since then the tax on buildings was 8.5
percent of the rental value.

The general renewal of the registers in Holland started in 1730. After consultation with
the burgomasters, special commissioners of the States appointed prominent city residents
to do the assessment and registration in the various city quarters. In rural areas the
assessment was done by either sheriff and aldermen (schout en schepenen) or members of
the local council (ambachtsbewaarders), members of the polder board (heemraden), or
polder officers (poldermeesters).
The format of the assessment lists had been designed in advance. The valuator received
printed title pages and sheets from which to make the assessment lists. As had been done
for centuries (see 3.1), the valuator followed a fixed itinerary through a neighbourhood to
register the buildings, their owners and users, and the rent (paid or valued). For each
building, both the old and the new tax were recorded. The assessment registers were made
available for inspection for three months to enable taxpayers to lodge objections. Next,
two clerks of the provincial Finance Office were put to work and had to draw up two
collection registers (gaderboeken), one for the local council on behalf of the tax collectors
and the duplicate for the Finance Office.

Arthur Groen has described how tax collecting worked.54 In Uit­

geest (a village south of Alkmaar that had roughly 2,000 inhabitants
54 Arthur Groen, ‘Verpondingen op het Hollandse
platte­­land. Bron voor de lokale en regionale sociaal-
in the 17th century of whom around 800 were taxable) collection
economische geschiedenis. Het voorbeeld van (garing, or gathering) of the land tax (verponding) was done at the
Uitgeest (1690-1788)’, Historisch Tijdschrift Holland 26
(1996): 63-81. end of the 17th century by six collectors (gaarders or pondvangers).
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Around 1715 the number of inhabitants as well as that of the
collectors had decreased; at the end of the century there were only
three collectors left. Collectors were appointed by the village
council, and since collectors had to be wealthy, it is not surprising
that the council normally chose collectors from among their
number.

To arrive at the right assessment, the gaarders needed data on the

taxable assets. Registering lands and buildings in special ledgers
was, therefore, an important task of the gaarders. If necessary, they
saw to the renewal of these ledgers. Based on the ledgers the
gaarders drew up the annual assessment list (kohier). The collection
took place at sessions organized by the collectors on dates deter­
mined by the village council. The village messenger was instructed
to proclaim the dates throughout the village. When the garing was
finished, the gaarders accounted before the sheriff, aldermen,
burgomasters, and councillors. The gaarders were remunerated by
the council.

In the ledgers the taxable people were registered per street (or, if
living outside Uitgeest, per place of residence), each with his or her
Fig. 8.6 Assessment list (kohier) of the land tax
(verponding) in Uitgeest, 1609-1724. Noord- immovable taxable properties (Fig. 8.6). Location, nature, and
Hollands Archief, Ambachtsbestuur Uitgeest surface of lands were specified. For each item the payable tax was
(1052), inv. nr. 1283.55
registered. Changes were recorded by crossing out or adding data.
55 Transcription on https://web.archive.org/ The ledger was kept in use for a few decades before it was deemed
web/20190531124430/http://www.ouduitgeest.
nl/teksten/inhoud/bronnen_pdf/legger_100ste_ neces­­sary to make a new one. The format of the kohieren was ident­
penning_1690-1724.pdf, archived 31 May 2019. i­cal to that of the ledgers. When for whatever reason someone was

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replaced by the name of a succeeding buyer or heir (see also Fig.
5.2).

Jan Vroon joint account

[formerly] Mr.Maerten Vroon

For his homestead or garden 24 roeden 0.4.10

t’ Jochgel with the small lands 1489 roeden 13.6.2
The house of Dirck Jacobsen Vennen 0.10.0
The homestead 49 roeden 0.8.12
1/2 Begijne land 433,5 roeden 3.17.8
3 farm lands of Cuipper, one of Aris Bruyne
and one of Corn Miese Blaau
______________ ________
[Total] 1864 roeden 16.13.2
[6.5 acre] [16 guilders, 13 stuivers and 2 pennies]

In the province of Utrecht, the ledgers of the land tax (oudschildgeld) of 1539, revised in
1599, continued to be the basis for the assessment until the end of the 18th century.56
A copy of the ledger was submitted to the provincial government, while a duplicate was
56 Arend Pietersma, Ronald Rommes and Wybren stored in the village chest; taxable people had access to the latter. The assessment notices
Verstegen, Lusten en lasten. Gids voor fiscaal-
historisch onderzoek naar inkomen en vermogen in de
that were handed out mentioned the current owner or tenant, as well as the original owner
provincie Utrecht (Utrecht: Utrecht Archives, 2006). in 1599 (see also Fig. 5.2).
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In Holland the land tax was collected by collectors (gaarders) in rural areas and by
receivers (ontvangers) in the 18 principal cities. Amsterdam and Rotterdam had special
treasurers (thesauriers) for the provincial taxes besides the thesaurieren ordinaris who
collected the city taxes. The tax collectors paid the revenues to the provincial Receiver
General. This officer was accountable to the Executive Council. In the southern part of
Holland, the Executive Council had a finance office, the Financie van Holland (see 8.2.5).57
This Finance Office kept a duplicate bookkeeping (contraboekhouding) of the annuities,
bonds, lotteries, duties, and land taxes. Every month the collectors had to report their
income and expenses. The administration at the Finance Office was done by two chief
clerks (commiezen), an accountant (boekhouder), and some ten scriveners (klerken). After
the abolishment of tax farming in 1748, the staff was increased with another ten scriveners,
an accountant, and a chief clerk. Their production was tremendous.

Currently, the archive of the Finance Office of Holland, in the National Archives since
1859, is 81 metres. It could have been much larger, but—as so often—much has been
destroyed, either systematically or by accident. One such accident was a fire at the
Binnenhof in The Hague in 1635 which damaged the archives of the Finance Office.
However, soldiers of the bodyguard of Prince Frederick Henry and his architect Pieter Post
were able to save several books and papers.

Apart from the control by the Finance Office, there was a regular check by auditing
(afhoren) of the accounts of the receivers. These were made in duplicate: one for the
receiver himself (called the rendant, the person rendering the account), the other for the
provincial Audit Office (Rekenkamer). Copies for the rendant have often been preserved in
family archives. However, when tax collection was in the hands of a city, the city
government accounted before the provincial Audit Office and kept the copies for the
rendant in the city archives.

57 National Archives, Financie van Holland (3.01.29),

As mentioned before, the collection of the provincial land tax was a duty of the local
inventory by J. Smit (1947). authorities. This was not without risk for the local officers.

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An example is the village of Ter Aar, not far from Leiden.58 Since
the 1670s Ter Aar had been getting into debt, and the village was
frequently overdue in collecting and paying the land tax. One of
the most important creditors was the Receiver General, Cornelis
van Aerssen. In 1710 Van Aerssen bought the seigniory (heerlijk­
heid) Voshol, including Ter Aar, and began by demanding to see
the financial records. These confirmed his suspicion that the village
was in ‘sheer disorder’. To restore order, the records had to be put
straight. Van Aerssen gave the instruction to make a new ledger, as
the current one was unfit for use due to a decrease in taxable areas
caused by peat dredging (see 5.2). The new book was to provide
more complete and up-to-date information. The new lord of the
seigniory requested to see all accounts since 1694, in order to check
them item by item and, if necessary, correct the data. Van Aerssen
took part of the archives to his home in The Hague to put them in
order. Some registers were rebound, and the old peat book was
replaced by a new one. This shows how much Van Aerssen—an
experienced administrator—valued good recordkeeping as a
prerequisite for good management. Upon termination of all the
58 The following is for the greater part a summary of work, he presented the updated and consolidated registers to the
Arjan van ’t Riet, ‘Sij wilden gereddet sijn, maer sij
wilden wel meester blijven. De ambachtsheer Cornelis village council in 1720. After having reviewed the books, the
van Aerssen en de redding van Ter Aar’, in De cirkel
doorbroken. Met nieuwe ideeën terug naar de bronnen. council expressed its satisfaction and delight, noting that all debts
Opstellen over de Republiek. Aangeboden aan Simon
Groenveld …, ed. Maurits Ebben and Pieter Wagenaar
had been paid and the village had been saved from ruin.
(Leiden: Instituut voor geschiedenis, 2006), pp. 56-70.
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This was in great contrast with Zwammerdam, another village belonging to the seigniory
Voshol, where the council was continuously in difficulties with the lord of the seigniory,
especially about access to the archives.59 Van Aerssen had the archive chest sealed in 1720
so that the members of the local council could not function for a while. And this was not
the last time the Zwammerdam archive chest was a bone of contention.

As I mentioned earlier, opposition arose in large parts of the Republic during 1747 and
1748 against malpractices of the elite, specifically regarding the financial management by
regents (see also 4.7). People demanded means for better control of government, including
publication of tax registers and, more generally, publicity of privileges, ordinances, and
other documents. As inhabitants of Leiden argued: the people are entitled to see the
privileges of their city and state, to understand them, to act accordingly, and, if necessary,
to use them.60 The people of Zwammerdam also asked for more openness, accountability,
and access to the archives. This led to a court case before the Court of Holland in 1748. It
ended in 1760 when the village council pledged it would allow access to the archive chest
and provide copies of documents. A year later a new conflict erupted over access to the
archive chest, which was kept in the village inn. All three keys were in the hands of the
councillors, who took some papers out of the chest to have them copied. The lord of the
seigniory, Cornelis van Aerssen’s son Albrecht, angrily stipulated that only the secretary
was entitled to deliver copies. Van Aerssen furnished the chest with a special lock that
could only be opened by the sheriff.

Archiving at provincial level was always intertwined with archiving on local levels. The tax
offices in the cities collected both the provincial excises and a surcharge for the city. Apart
from excise, land tax, and taxes on wealth and income, there were more levies, usually
collected by the local secretary. At the transfer of real estate, a transfer tax had to be paid
(see 6.1.1). Inheritances were taxed, and since 1695 in Holland and Zeeland, there was a
59 W. van Tuyl, Het ambacht Zwammerdam… tax on marriages and one on burials. Stamp duties (a Dutch invention of 1624, introduced
(Hilversum: Verloren, 1996), pp. 142-4.
in England in 1694) had to be paid for the paper used for petitions and other official
60 Nasporing van de beswaarnissen [...] welke [...] de
burgers [...] der stadt Leyden vermeinen te hebben
documents. This stamped paper was bought from the provincial tax office by the local
(Leiden, 1746). receivers who resold it to notaries, lawyers, secretaries, bailiffs, and the general public.

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But there were even more duties. For most licences one had to pay a fee. These fees often
greatly contributed to the income the city had granted to its charitable institutions. In 1.3
I gave the example of the licences of innkeepers and tobacconists in Amsterdam, the fees of
which were paid to the House of Correction.

Archiving taxes in the Republic stands out not only because of the interconnectedness
between provincial and local tax administration but also because of the continuity and
durability. Administrations were used for a very long time, more or less unchanged, despite
all changes in society. Precisely because of its being local, the Dutch tax system could react
flexibly to new opportunities for taxation, including transforming old taxes into new ones
or increasing or lowering tariffs, all while retaining the often hopelessly obsolete
assessment registers.

Increasingly, more detailed regulations governed the bookkeeping and maintenance of

the various ledgers by the tax collectors. Of this extensive administration little has been
preserved. This is especially the case for the archiving by the collectors in rural areas,
probably because the data aggregated at a higher level were considered more important.
This argument may have applied also to the administration of the excise duties that was
almost totally destroyed. On the other hand, the registers of the land tax, the death duties,
and the taxes on marriages and burials have been preserved fairly well, possibly because
these registers had a value not only for the tax administration but also for private people
who needed evidence of a transaction, a marriage, or a burial.

8.3.2 The Calculating State

61

The tax system designed by Finance Minister Gogel and introduced in 1806 was
61 The following is for the greater part a summary maintained after 1813. The tax burden was not equally distributed, mainly because of the
of Tom Pfeil, Op gelijke voet. De geschiedenis van de
Belastingdienst (Deventer: Kluwer 2009, 2nd. ed.
differences of local taxes and excises levied by the municipalities: the annual tax burden
2013). per capita in 1850 ranged from seven guilders and 90 cents in Noord-Holland to a mere
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90 cents in Limburg.62 Both the land tax and the excises necessitated an immense admini­
stra­tion at national, provincial, and local levels. Citizens and businesses were encumbered
with administrative obligations as well. Collecting the excises on soap, milling, and spirits,
for example, was based on forms and bookkeeping kept by businesses (see 7.6.2.2).
Because of this interconnectedness, the taxation records formed a genre system (see the
General Introduction). Opposition against the excises, as well as against the administrative
workload, resulted in the abolishment of nearly all excises between 1852 and 1885. At the
same time, however, the excise on jenever and other spirits was maintained; it was the
‘milk cow’ of the tax system.63

Assessment of the national land tax necessitated reliable bookkeeping according to

national standards; the various local registrations were insufficient in the new State. Under
Gogel the establishment of a public registration of real property (cadastre) had begun
during 1807 and 1808, but the French occupation had impeded its completion.64 Between
1812 and 1832 the whole country was surveyed and measured. The value of each parcel
(perceel) was assessed as the basis for the land tax. The maps and registers that were made
served the registration of ownership and other rights on real estate properties beginning
in 1838 (see 6.1.2).

Another duty adopted from the French was the licence duty (patentrecht). This was a rate
for the annual licence (patent) to exercise an occupation or business, though farmers were
exempt. 65
62 Michael Wintle, An economic and social history of the
Netherlands, 1800–1920. Demographic, economic and Only after the introduction of the income tax in the years 1892 and 1893, was the patent­
social transition (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2000), p. 161.
recht abolished. Assessment and collection of this business rate were very record intensive.
63 Wintle, An economic and social history, p. 143.
It started with the tax return form, which was delivered at home and had to be filled in and
64 A. Scheffer, ‘Het “Hollandse kadaster”’, Nederlands
returned within eight days. In every municipality a board of assessors, chaired by the
archievenblad 82 (1976): 25-40. burgomaster, checked the returns. The members of this board were appointed for four
65 P.M.M. Klep, A. Lansink and W.F.M. Terwisscha van years. They were also involved in the assessment for the land tax and the so-called personal
Scheltinga, Broncommentaren II. De registers van
patentplichtigen, 1805-1893 (Nijmegen: Vereniging
tax, a property tax based on the number of servants, horses, doors, windows, and
van archivarissen in Nederland, 1985). fireplaces.

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Fig. 8.7 Business licence (patent) for a

coppersmith, 1844. Belasting- en Douane
Museum Rotterdam, 44028.
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The assessors determined the tax class and the amount of tax for all taxable people. This
was registered in the ledger of patent taxable people. After control by the tax supervisor,
this ledger was used as a basis for the tax collector to make his assessment register and the
notices of assessment. Tax payment was recorded on the notice and accounted for in the
journal of the collector. The taxpayer then received the patent, signed by the burgomaster
and the taxpayer. In every workshop, factory, or store a register of workers had to be kept
up to date in case of inspection of the actual size of the business—the size was one of the
factors of the patent tax. In private archives one occasionally finds notices of assessment
and patent tax deeds. Much of the registers of the patent tax have been destroyed, only
a few are kept in municipal archives.

The total assessment in the patent tax, the land tax, and the personal tax determined
the suffrage. In 1848 direct election of members of the Lower House of Parliament, the
Provincial States, and municipal councils was introduced. Data gathered by the tax
collector were the starting point for the electoral roll. Only male adults who paid a certain
amount of tax had the right to vote. Even after extension of the franchise in the 19th
century, tax continued to be the most important criterion for inclusion in the electoral roll.
In 1910, 88 percent of male voters were ‘tax voters’. For the remaining 12 percent the
suffrage was based on wages, renting a house, owning savings, or having passed a
particular exam. It is clear that these ‘markers of suitability and societal prosperity’ were
mainly financial. The evidence required entailed much paperwork for the taxable people
and various institutions. For example, when a man wanted to apply for suffrage based on
his wages or because he was paying rent, he had to submit a declaration form every year.
In 1917 universal suffrage for men was introduced and in 1919 for women as well. The
criteria of suitability and societal prosperity were abolished.

The implementation of the national tax system was the task of the National Tax
Administra­tion (Rijksbelastingdienst), founded in 1805. This internal revenue agency
formed part of the Ministry of Finance and consisted of two departments (dienstvakken):
one for the direct taxes, import and export duties, and excises, the other for the control

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of State domains and registration. Registration, introduced by the French in 1812, meant
official registration of various deeds drawn up by notaries and courts, but also of diplomas
and certificates made in the private sector.

Both departments were hierarchically organized, with functionaries at national,

provincial, and district (arrondissement) levels. Within each district there were controllers
and collectors; at the bottom of the pyramid were the people in the stationnementen, the
field staff who had to assess the flows of goods. Much of the work was done physically on
site by measuring, counting, weighing, and sampling in factories, mills, slaughterhouses,
and ships and by inspection of goods and transport documents. These documents
travelled with the goods from taxable person to the tax office and back. Although control
and assessment were mainly physical activities, a lot of paper was involved as well.
Everything was recorded and reported, and the documents went from the level of the
controller (verificateur) to the next level, that of the collector, who in turn was supervised
by inspectors, whose reports went higher up. Downstream went a cascade of circular
letters, instructions, models, and decisions.

Around 1850 the department of direct taxes comprised 3,500 civil servants, while the
department of domains and registration had 385. Dispersed over the country were
hundreds of collecting offices. By 1825 they numbered nearly 1,200. There was a tax
collector in almost every municipality. In 1833 the number of collectors had decreased to
800, and in 1870 to 544.66 This dense network (even denser than the judicial one, which
comprised 150 local courts, or kantongerechten) made the office of the collector easily
accessible for the taxable people who came to pay taxes in person. It was not until 1871
before payment by money order (postwissel) was made possible.

66 National Archives, Departement van Ontvangsten,

The paperwork at the Tax Administration was voluminous. In 1819 the department of
Verbalen G (2.08.01.07), inv. nr. 1773; Jaarboekje direct taxes used 79 standard forms for the verification of income and expenses only.
voor de ambtenaren der directe belastingen, in- en
uitgaande regten en accijnsen in Nederland 1 (1833)
There was much duplication in archiving between the two departments, and exchange of
and 9 (1841). information between them was difficult. Therefore, an important component of the
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Fig. 8.8 Notice of assessment in the personal

tax, 1894. The assessment is based on (1) rent
value, (2) number of doors and windows, (3)
fireplaces, and (4) furniture. Noord-Hollands
Archief, Van Gelder (457), inv. nr. 1201.

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reorganization proposals of 1927 was the formation of one joint archive to connect the
various officers.67 In 1928 and 1929 Van Gogh and Hijmans (who founded the first Dutch
organization consultancy firm) prepared an ‘archives test’ (archiefproef) twice, but they
were not carried out because of resistance by staff. The proposal for a joint archive was
repeated in 1948. It ultimately led to the formation of one archive for the two departments
at each of the eight regional directorates. However, the dream of one comprehensive
archive for the entire agency (‘the basis for everything’)68 became reality only after the
mechanization and computerization of the Tax Administration (see below).

Much of the information in the archives of the Tax Administration comes from outside.
The file of a tax paper comprises, apart from the tax returns and the assessment,
so-called renseignementen. This term (adopted from the French administrative practice
around 1800) is used for the information obtained about but not from a taxpayer.69 This
information may have been collected by the Tax Administration itself or provided by third
parties. Even newspaper clippings, and nowadays information from the Internet, may
contain relevant data. Moreover, the Tax Administration is entitled to inspect the
bookkeeping of any taxpayer. That authority was introduced in 1914 when the income tax
was implemented. On request, the taxpayer has ‘to provide access to books or other
Fig. 8.9 Louis Raemaekers, documents that may serve as evidence for the tax return of his further statements’. In a
The Tax Administration (De Fiscus), cartoon from 1914 a merchant complains of the Tax Administration (fiscus): ‘With his
De Telegraaf, 15 May1914.
hand in my safe and now also with his nose in my books’.

67 Pfeil, Op gelijke voet, pp. 307, 314-15, 326; National

Archives, Ministerie van Financiën: dossierarchief
Examination of the books—auditing—was essential for the collection of the new sales
(2.08.41), inv. nr. 4419, and Ingenieursbureau Van Gogh tax (1934), the payroll tax (1940), and the dividend tax (1941). These taxes are retention
(2.18.19), inv. nr. 9, dossier 3, inv. nr. 11, dossier 9.
taxes (afdrachtbelastingen), in contrast with the income tax and the capital tax which are
68 ‘De grondslag van alles’, according to P.J.A. Adriani,
quoted by Pfeil, Op gelijke voet, p. 307.
collected upon assessment. Thus, the shopkeeper withholds the sales tax, the employer
69 J. de Zeeuw, Informatiegaring door de fiscus.
withholds the payroll tax, the bank withholds the dividend tax—and they all must pay the
Privacybescherming bij derdenonderzoeken Tax Administration the amount of taxes they have calculated. There are various forms of
(’s-Gravenhage: Registratiekamer, 1998), https://
autoriteitpersoonsgegevens.nl/sites/default/files/
control. To check, for example, whether an employer has remitted the right sum of the
downloads/av/av08.pdf, accessed 18 Nov. 2018. payroll tax, he must keep a record for each employee and permit inspection of the payroll
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administration and other documents which may be relevant. By obliging shopkeepers,
employers, and banks to keep these administrations, the archiving spheres of the Tax
Administration and taxpayer become interconnected, according to tax historian
Arendsen.70

According to the current Tax Act, every taxpayer is bound to keep books and records of his
or her financial position and of all facts pertaining to the business, independent profession,
or occupation according to the requirements of that business, independent profession, or
occupation in such a way that they clearly show, at any moment in time, one’s rights and
obligations, as well as any data which are otherwise of importance to the levying of taxes.
These records must be retained for seven years. Of the records of the Tax Administration,
only policy documents are preserved, while nearly all of the routine records created in the
implementation of the tax legislation are destroyed.

Information about taxpayers (renseignementen) is obtained from businesses, government

agencies, and taxpayers themselves. This information was recorded at first in ledgers, and
since the 1930s in files.71 Today it is mostly in digital form. Banks and pension funds are
required to cooperate in the amassing of information by the Tax Administration. The
taxpayer, however, does not know what information the Tax Administration has collected.
This has a preventive, even panoptical effect (see 4.11); the records exert their power not
by being used, but simply by being there—not unlike the intimidating effect of that early
example of a tax record, the Domesday Book.

Furthermore, the Tax Administration carries out special information-gathering actions,

like the operation ‘foam head’ (schuimkraag) in 1979 and 1980—the control of the books of
70 Arendsen, Eenvoudig belasting heffen, p. 48.
24,000 catering businesses—and operation ‘golden tooth’ (goudtand)—the control of 1,800
71 Verzameling van voorschriften voor de ambtenaren
dental surgeons. Through informatization and linking of databases the opportunities of
der directe belastingen, invoerrechten en accijnzen, collecting information about the taxpayer has increased substantially, as the following
nr. 4625: National Archives, Ministerie van Financiën:
agenda’s en toegangen op de verbalen (2.08.05.01),
graph shows.
inv. nr. 1566.

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Fig. 8.10 Data sources of

the Tax Administration, 2015.
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Mechanization of the Tax Administration started rather late. From the middle of the 1920s
cash registers at the collectors’ offices and counting and bookkeeping machinery in five
‘machine centres’ came into use.72 The introduction of machines was supervised by Van
Gogh and Hijmans. They had designed time studies to test the efficiency of working with
the machines. These were based on the methods of scientific management that Taylor
and others had introduced in the United States. The Tax Administration started using
addressing machines in 1942. They had been in use in business for quite some time already
(see 8.2.7). In 1947 a punchcards centre was established, and in 1954 an IBM 604 was
rented to process these cards. The progress of automation is now a question of years.
A separate department for automation was founded in 1967; it employed more than 2,000
people by 1980. At that time the Tax Administration used more than 650 different
applications to consult and update the various files. Between 1984 and 1993 every tax
officer got his or her own PC. Thus, the ideal of all ‘officers clustered around a joint archive’
was realized. Starting in 1987 the paper tax returns were fed into the computer, and in 1995
people were allowed to submit their income tax return on a floppy disk. The number of
computer applications at the Tax Administration had risen to more than 1,505 in 2015.73
No wonder that the Tax Administration is often the victim of failures of its ICT systems.

Computerization was introduced in the department of domains and registration much

later than at the Tax Administration. Since 2014 the registration of notarial deeds is done
digitally by entering electronic copies into a ‘Central Digital Repertory’ kept by the Royal
Dutch Association of Civil-law Notaries.

In 2015 the Act on electronic exchange of messages with the Tax Administration came
72 National Archives, Ingenieursbureau Van Gogh into force. The aim is to finally digitize the exchange of messages between the Tax
(2.18.19), inv. nr. 9, dossier 2, inv. nr. 10, dossier 2;
Ministerie van Financiën: dossierarchief (2.08.41),
Administration and the citizen. Currently nearly 100 percent of the annual 12 million tax
inv. nr. 4422. returns are submitted digitally. However, downstream traffic is not yet digitized equally, as
73 https://web.archive.org/web/20190428170430/ only 6.9 million people have activated the electronic letter box to receive tax assessments
https://www.rijksoverheid.nl/documenten/
rapporten/2017/10/25/rapport-data-stream-
electronically. Therefore the ‘blue envelope’ in which tax assessments have been sent since
investigation, archived 28 April 2019. 1916, is still used. They will not disappear completely. After much opposition in the media

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and in Parliament, government promised that the blue envelope will not be abolished
totally, and people who make known that they have difficulties with digital communication
may still use paper. In 2017 this applied to 72,000 taxpayers.

To paraphrase Arendsen’s conclusion: the administration concerning taxes has developed

through the ages into the current network of public and private data collections and
archives. Varying administrative-technical opportunities and the societal desirability of
using these, influence the quality, reliability, and usability of the tax archives.74

8.4 Banking
8.4.1 Banks of Exchange
75

In 1609 the City Council of Amsterdam established the Bank of Exchange (Wissel­bank).
It was not an issuing bank. Instead, the Bank exchanged gold, silver, and non-current coins;
sold precious metal to goldsmiths and silversmiths; received money on deposit; and
managed a giro system transferring funds between accounts. All bills of exchange of over
600 guilders (changed to 300 in 1643) had to be paid through the Bank. The number of
accounts reflected the economic trend: a rapid increase from 739 in 1609 to 2,102 in 1661.
74 Arendsen, Eenvoudig belasting heffen, p. 25. Then the number slowed down, but it reached a new peak in 1721 with a total number of
75 J.G. van Dillen, Bronnen tot de geschiedenis der 2,918 account holders. Merchants—including many foreigners—maintained a current
wisselbanken (Amsterdam, Middelburg, Delft,
Rotterdam), (’s-Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff, 1925);
account with the Bank. The record of each account was kept on one or more pages in the
J.G. van Dillen, ‘De Amsterdamsche Wisselbank in de grand ledger. The series of grand ledgers is not complete; it comprises 636 volumes.
zeventiende eeuw’, De Economist 77 (1928): 239-59,
349-73; Pit Dehing and Marjolein ’t Hart, ‘Linking
Initially there were two volumes per year, but from 1683 there were four volumes per year,
the fortunes. Currency and banking, 1550-1800’, in and from 1715 six volumes per year. Indexes, in 285 volumes, provide access to the ledgers.
A financial history of The Netherlands, ed. Marjolein
’t Hart, Joost Jonker and Jan Luiten van Zanden
Ledgers and indexes have been digitized and are available on the Internet.
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp.
45-51; Soll, ‘Accounting for government’; Pit Dehing,
Geld in Amsterdam : wisselbank en wisselkoersen,
Although formally not allowed, the Bank lent money on interest. In the beginning this was
1650-1725 (Hilversum: Verloren, 2012). done for institutions and people like the States of Holland or the Count of East Friesland,
 212a | 8 |
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but later lending was limited to only the United East India Company (VOC) and the
Treasury of the city of Amsterdam. The annual profits of the Bank (from interest and the
surplus of the money exchange) accumulated and were kept as a reserve fund for the city;
in 1685 this fund amounted to more than 2.3 million guilders.

The Bank of Exchange was managed by three commissioners chosen by the City Council,
who controlled the bookkeepers, cashiers, and the assayer. The Bank had its offices and
vaults in the City Hall. Each of the four bookkeepers had a specific task. The first received
the banker’s orders (assignaties or bankbriefjes, modelled after the Venetian assegni in
banco), the printed forms requesting the Bank to pay a sum of money from the debtor’s
account to the creditor’s account. The bookkeeper noted the account number and handed
the order to the second bookkeeper who checked the accounts of debtor and creditor in
the balance book. The next bookkeeper copied everything in the journal—though this was
abolished in 1625—and forwarded the order to his colleague who debited and credited the
accounts in the grand ledger. When a merchant wanted to draw money from his account,
he asked one of the bookkeepers for a printed banker’s order addressed to the cashiers.
However, as the historians of banking Pit Dehing and Marjolein ’t Hart observed, instead
of demanding money from an account in hard cash, it was cheaper to buy a recepis on the
bourse. A recepis, introduced in 1683, was a receipt in bank money under commission
charge which could be prolonged or negotiated at extremely low interest (see 13.5).76

After the Bank in Amsterdam other exchange banks were established in Middelburg
(1616), Delft (1621-1635), and Rotterdam (1635). The Amsterdam Bank got into financial
difficulties around 1790, partly because of the bankruptcy looming over the VOC, whose
main creditor was the Bank of Exchange. This only became known to the public after the
Batavian Revolution in 1795. Trust in the Bank diminished fast—in 1796 there were still
76 A history of European banking, ed. H. van der Wee and
1,543 accounts, in 1811 only 740. In 1820 the Bank was liquidated.
G. Kurgan-van Hentenryk (Antwerp: Mercatorfonds,
2000), p. 215 shows a picture of what is called a
certificate of deposit, but which in fact is a certificate
of forward sale of a share in the West India Company.

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8.4.2 Merchant Bankers

Archiving Monies

In the 18th century the undisputed leader of the trading houses in the Republic was the
company founded by the brothers Archibald and Thomas Hope, known from 1762 as
Hope & Co in Amsterdam (see 7.2). It would remain independent until the merger in 1996
with Mees, a Rotterdam bank established in 1733.77 After 1762 the firm (with a capital of
more than four million guilders) ventured on financing trade transactions and brokering
loans by foreign governments and owners of plantations in the Danish, Dutch, and British
West Indies. Although banking became by far the most important activity of Hope & Co,
they remained merchant bankers. That is, they continued trading in money, grain, colonial
produce, tea, wine—anything that could be sold at a profit, including slaves.78

Both in banking and in trade, reliability and solvency were of the utmost importance.
Hope received hundreds of requests (mainly from abroad) to provide information about
the trustworthiness of businesses, just as Hope itself collected such information in the
Republic and abroad.

The loans brokered by Hope & Co provided foreign governments with money. An example
are the 12 loans brokered on behalf of Sweden between 1767 and 1787 and totalling 14.5
77 The following is for the greater part a summary of
A.M. Bendien and J.C.A. Blom, Archief van de Firma
million guilders. The firm did not provide the money all by itself but brokered between the
Hope & Co. met verwante archiefvormers, Amsterdam lender and the market of investors who bought bonds in the loan (negotiatie).79 Hope & Co
City Archives, finding aid nr. 735; Joost Jonker and
Keetie Sluyterman, At home on the world markets.
worked as ‘banquiers’ as they called themselves and managed the whole affair for a
Dutch international trading companies from the 18th commission of four to seven percent (and two loans made for an exceptional nine and a
century until the present, transl. Diederik van Werven
(The Hague: Sdu Uitgevers, 2000), pp. 119-24; Wim
half percent). Among the securities for the first of these loans to Sweden were 40
Wennekes, Eeuwenoud. De lange levens van zeven promissory notes of 10,000 rix-dollars (rijksdaalders) each. These were to remain in
Nederlandse bedrijven […] (Amsterdam: Rap, 1989).
Hope’s possession until the final payment against the loan had been made. They were put
78 Marten G. Buist, At spes non fracta. Hope & Co.
1770-1815. Merchant bankers and diplomats at work
in a tin box, sealed by John Hope, an Amsterdam notary, and the burgomasters of
(Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974), p. 33. Amsterdam and deposited at the Amsterdam Exchange Bank. On another occasion, the
79 Buist, At spes non fracta, p. 20. Swedish securities were deposited in an iron chest at the Amsterdam notary’s office.
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Plantation owners received loans with their plantation serving as security (Fig. 7.2). The
interest and principal were paid from the products of the plantation sold by the lender,
Hope & Co, or a joint-stock company represented by Hope & Co.

The imminent danger of a French invasion caused the Hopes (who entertained close
relations with the Stadholder’s family) to move to England in 1794. The affairs in Amster­
­dam were entrusted to agents led by Pierre César Labouchere. The Hope heirs withdrew
from the Amsterdam firm in 1813-1814 and transferred their shares to Alexander Baring
in London, a former employee of Hope & Co and Labouchere’s brother in law. Although
none of the partners belonged to the Hope family any longer, continuity was ensured by
marriages and by associations with relatives like Sillem, Borski, and Van Loon.

In 1794 a survey of the archives was made, with a reference to the rooms and boxes.80
The survey was kept until 1812. Marginal notes like ‘sent to Asd’ (Amsterdam) reveal that
the lists were drawn up in London. Lists of destroyed documents were made in 1852,
1875-1876, and 1899. The documents that were destroyed were mainly paid coupons (in
1899 more than 130 chests), redeemed bonds, and similar records. The list of 1875 states
what had to be done with the archives (‘all more or less damaged by leakages, rats, and
mice’): destruction ‘both by tearing at the Koster Bros., as by burning at the iron foundry
The Atlas’.
In 1899 a great number of papers that could be disposed of was collected from the attics
and various ‘book rooms’. Everything from before 1899 went to Van Gelder paper factory
to be pulped. A few series on the list (including grand ledgers and journals) have been
preserved nevertheless.

The archives of Hope & Co were deposited with the Amsterdam City Archives in 1977.
From the inventory (comprising nearly 4,200 items) one can infer the variety of activities of
the bank and the documentary genres resulting from these activities—in the terms of the
80 Amsterdam City Archives, Hope (735), inv.nr. 1768,
model of the archiving context (Fig. 0.2) the ‘what’ and ‘how’ leading to archiving. The
pp. 179-219; inv. nrs. 557, 559. business (‘what’) was broadly merchandise trade, trading bills of exchange, credit lending,

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management of private estates, and administration of securities. The last category includes
the negotiaties and syndicates in which Hope & Co participated. The Hope archives also
comprise many smaller archives of acquired and affiliated businesses.

Bookkeeping forms the core of the Hope archives: 800 items, including balances (127
volumes), grand ledgers 1770-1944 (162 volumes, plus 98 volumes of indexes), and
journals 1770-1935 (139 volumes). As usual, the auxiliary books (memorials, invoice
books, cash books) were destroyed. However, there is much more financial administration
than bookkeeping only, related to the activities mentioned before.

The way in which archiving of correspondence was done by Hope & Co was researched by
Jan Blom, who inventoried the Hope archives.81 It struck him that the way Hope handled
the letters received did not much differ from what one traditionally finds in other
merchants’ archives. Impyn (see 7.1 and 8.2.2) had published an instruction for archiving
letters in the 16th century and later writers followed his example. The influential
18th-century manual La science des négocians et teneurs de livres82 by Matthieu de La Porte
(born around 1660 in Nijmegen to a family of originally French merchants) prescribed
folding each letter received along the length, noting on one of the ends the date and that it
was answered, and on the other end, having dealt with the matter, place, date, and name of
the sender. Every month the letters received from one sender were bundled and put in a
parcel inscribed with the month and the year. At year’s end, the twelve parcels were put in
a bag labelled ‘Letters’ and the year. This bag was shelved at the office.

The letters received were not easily accessible. At Hope & Co the papers could be
81 J.C.A. Blom, ‘Het beheer van de handelscorresponden­ consulted, but only if staff could identify the place where the documents were stored. This,
tie tot circa 1900’, Nederlands archievenblad 92 (1988):
116-27.
as Blom suggests, did not matter very much because for evidential purposes one had
82 The full title is ‘La science des négocians et teneurs
recourse in many cases to the outgoing letters. They were indexed and often referred to a
de livres, ou Instruction générale pour tout ce qui se letter received. Around 1890, however, it seems that nearly all documents received by
pratique dans les comptoirs des négocians, tant pour
les affaires de banque, que pour les marchandises, &
Hope & Co were arranged according to subject; the chronological series and the series
chez les financiers pour les comptes.’ arranged by sender were terminated.
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The outgoing letters were copied into registers. Each copybook (brievenboek) contained an
alphabetical index of addressees. According to the bookkeeping manuals, these copybooks
were part of the bookkeeping (see also 7.1). Apart from copybooks containing the general
correspondence, there were registers of letters to specific relations or concerning a specific
subject, for example Spanish or American loans.

8.5 Conclusion
Financial records are maintained by government, business, and citizen to control income
and expenditure. However, they can also serve to make reality calculable, as tax historian
Rex Arendsen argues.83 This calculable reality is not always the same as the observable
material reality. What counts is a formal administrative reality, recorded in bookkeeping,
assessment lists, collection registers, tax returns, and other financial records. They reflect
a reality as perceived or constructed by the ‘archivers’. What Mary Poovey detected
concerning double-entry bookkeeping holds true for all these financial records: the formal
arithmetic precision of the entries was meant as a guarantee for the accuracy of the
recorded details.84 Therefore people did not bother very much about the accuracy of
assessment registers and bookkeeping, as long as they supported the fiction of congruity
between the material reality and the formal reality (8.2.3, 8.2.4, 8.3.1). In the hands of tax
authorities, businesses, and banks these records support controlling finance and thereby
controlling people. Accounting is a tool for exercising social power within and without
organizations,85 such as in determining franchise based on tax assessment (8.3.2).

83 Arendsen, Eenvoudig belasting heffen, pp. 18-24.

A national tax administration did not exist before 1806. Assessment and collection were
84 Mary Poovey, A history of the modern fact. Problems
of knowledge in the sciences of wealth and society
done by various agents on local and provincial levels. Taxation processes that have to
(Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 1998), underpin the assessment are intensive and extensive information processes. This results in
pp. 30, 64.
vast amounts of paper (and nowadays digital data), a complex web of interrelated genres
85 Anthony G. Hopwood, ‘The archaeology of accounting
systems’, Accounting, organizations and society, 12,
maintained by various actors (genre system). Much of the financial records from the past
no.3 (1987): 213. were destroyed, both by government (8.3) and by private people and businesses (8.4.2).

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Still, we can ascertain that many genres of financial records showed a remarkable
continuity. Memorial, journal, grand ledger, balance, copybook, business letters, bills of
exchange, and shares were created and kept over the centuries show great constancy in
form and usage, although the technologies changed (see chapter 11). The records used for
tax assessment and collection show comparable endurance over time.
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A SOCIAL HISTORY OF
DUTCH ARCHIVES Chapter 9

Archiving
Litigation
—
9.0 Introduction
9.1 ‘Administering Justice in
the Name and on Behalf of
the High Government’
9.2 Court Archives
9.3 The Court’s Memory
9.4 Judicial Archives after 1811
9.5 Notaries
9.6 Notarial Records
9.7 Less Paper: Sampling
Judicial Records and
Digitizing the Judicial
Process
l Fig. 9.0 The Court of Friesland: Johan van den 9.8 Conclusion
Sande, Rerum in Suprema Frisiorum Curia
Iudicatarum libri V (Leovardiae: Jan Jansen de
Fries, 1635).
ˇ
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9.0 Introduction
Archiving Litigation 1

The judicial organization in the Netherlands in the Middle Ages and early modern times
had many forms. Different historically grown systems existed not only for different
provinces but also for different locations, as National Archivist Maarten van Boven
writes.2 One of his predecessors, Robert Fruin, lectured at the Archives School in the
1920s on the history of the judicial organization before 1795. He reworked his lectures into
an article (1934), that I used when I taught the same subject at the Archives School half
a century later. Van Boven summarizes:

Fruin assumed that one general model existed in most provinces at the end of the
18th century. At the local level there were aldermen’s courts (schepenbanken), often
consisting of a sheriff (schout) as chairman and aldermen (schepenen) who decided
civil and petty criminal cases. In a larger area there were the courts of bailiff (baljuw)
and vassals (leenmannen), who administered justice in criminal cases and in certain
1 I thank Constant Barbas for improving the English
civil cases. They also acted as courts of appeal for decisions of local courts. Finally,
legal terminology in sections 9.0 through 9.2. there were the provincial courts. These were formed in Burgundian times and they
2 Maarten W. van Boven, De rechterlijke instellingen decided on behalf of the sovereign. These courts heard appeals from decisions of the
ter discussie. De geschiedenis van de wetgeving op
de rechterlijke organisatie in de periode 1795-1811.
lower courts. They also played a central role in criminal matters in several provinces
Een wetenschappelijke proeve op het gebied van and functioned as forum privilegiatum.3 This model applied exactly to Holland, but
de rechtsgeleerdheid (Nijmegen: Gerard Noodt
Instituut, 1990), p. 5. He adds: ‘With the result that any
also fitted the other provinces, although the composition and denomination of
coarsening and generalizing summary sketch has to judicial bodies and officers might differ.
be incomplete, even for one province, and especially
for the lower judicial colleges and therefore cannot
present an entirely reliable picture.’ Apart from the judiciary described in this model, there were numerous special courts of
Nevertheless, Van Boven provides in some 30 pages
a remarkable and as yet unrivalled exposé of the
law which are not treated in this chapter. Examples are the water boards (5.1), the tax law
juridical organization before 1811. tribunals, the military courts, and the university courts.4 The guilds and the Churches
3 Noblemen, officers of the sovereign, widows, orphans, exercised jurisdiction, as did the benches of commons (markegerichten, see 5.6). Separate
etc. were entitled to use the Court as first instance
(EK).
from the local courts, but still accountable to them, were the orphan chambers (see 6.2.5)
4 Van Boven, De rechterlijke instellingen, pp. 37-38,
and others including the chambers for insurance and maritime cases, insolvencies (see
118-19. the Prologue and 6.3.1), and matrimonial affairs (see the Prologue).

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Both civil and criminal cases proceeded for the greater part in writing. What was the
documentary outcome of the procedural acta of the parties and the judges? What was the
relationship between work processes and archiving (see the model of the archiving
context, Fig. 0.2)? I try to answer these questions regarding civil judicature by following
the stages of a civil case dealt with by the Court of Holland in the 18th century (9.1).
Section 9.2 shows archiving by the provincial courts of Holland (with Zeeland), Friesland,
Utrecht, and Gelderland.

Other provincial courts were the Council of Brabant in The Hague (established 1591)
and the Council of Flanders in Middelburg (established 1599) that administered justice in
the ’Generality Lands’ (Generaliteitslanden). These territories (Staats-Brabant, Staats-
Flanders, Westerwolde, and parts of Limburg) were acquired in the war with Spain. The
Etstoel of Drenthe was replaced by a Court of Justice in 1791. The provincial court of
Groningen, the Chamber of Captains (Hoofdmannenkamer), became the High Chamber
of Justice (Hoge Justitiekamer) in 1749. The highest court in Overijssel was the Clearing
(Klaring). The Supreme Council (Hoge Raad) of Holland and Zeeland was established in
1581 as a court of appeal for both these provinces.

Under the auspices of the Society for Publication of the Sources of Dutch Legal History
(Stichting tot uitgaaf der bronnen van het oud-vaderlands recht), guides on the
organization of the courts and the procedure in civil cases were published since 2000.

The extensive archiving by the courts raises the question: how did judges, attorneys, and
litigants use these archives (9.3)? The same question arises for contemporary researchers,
of course (9.4).

French judiciary and legislation were introduced in 1811. Previously, the present province
of Limburg, a few enclaves in Brabant, and Zeelandic Flanders had already been united
with France (1794-1795). What happened to the judicial archives and how did the State
Archives and municipal archives acquire them (9.4)?
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Besides judicature there were many forms of non-judicial administration of justice in the
Republic. Neighbourhood committees, for example, fined people and settled disputes and
fights among neighbours. Very rarely this was recorded in the neighbourhood book. The
most important institutions for non-judicial settlement of (legal) disputes were the
notaries; how did they perform this function and what was the archival outcome (9.5)?

The same questions (what, who, how, outcome; see Fig. 0.2) concern other notarial
functions. People went to the notary mainly to have a notarial document made such as a
testament, a premarital agreement, a transfer of title to a house (6.2.1), or an estate
inventory (6.2.4). Charter contracts, IOUs, and insurance policies were also drafted by a
notary. How did this work, what happened with the notarial archives, and who had access
to these archives (9.6)?

Given the paper-intensive character of judicature, it is not surprising that an urgent need is
felt to reduce the paper mountain. What strategies and practices are used to meet this
challenge (9.7)?

9.1 ‘Administering Justice in

the Name and on Behalf of the
5 Based on F.C.J. Ketelaar, ‘De procesgang bij het Hof
High Government’
van Holland, Zeeland en West Friesland, in Verslag en
bijdragen rijks archiefschool 1969-1970 (Utrecht: rijks
By the 16th century the following stages could generally be distinguished in civil cases:
archiefschool, 1971), pp. 33-64 and Joannes van der summons, claim, response, further statements of claim and of response, formal
Linden, Institutes of the laws of Holland, transl.
J Henry (London: J. and W.T. Clarke et al., 1828), book
submission of documents, and judgment. Archiving happened in each phase, both by the
III; National Archives, Hof van Holland (3.03.01.01), court and by the litigants, as the following case will show.5
inv. nrs. 10371-72. See also M.-Ch. Le Bailly, Procesgids
Hof van Holland, Zeeland en West-Friesland. De
hoofdlijnen van het procederen in civiele zaken voor Prelude and Summons
het Hof van Holland, Zeeland en West-Friesland, zowel
in eerste instantie als in hoger beroep (Hilversum:
On 2 September 1716 the local court at Woudrichem orders Lambert Michielsz
Verloren, 2008). Donckersloot, responding to the claim by Cornelis Jansz Nederveen, to pay one and a half

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guilders per year for maintenance and education of the child of Cornelis’ daughter
Cornelia that Lambert has fathered. At the bottom of the registered judgment is a note
stating that Lambert’s procureur (an attorney dealing with court formalities) filed an
appeal at the Court of Holland in The Hague (hereafter the Court).

Zeger Thierens and Abraham van Neck, Lambert’s solicitor (advocaat) and procureur
respectively, file a petition (rekest) at the Court on 9 September, attaching a copy of the
local sentence. Every day, except Saturday and Sunday, two judges and a secretary of the
Court meet in the ‘rekest chamber’ to receive and decide petitions. The secretary annotates
the petition with ‘he may petition’ (fiat ut petitur). The petition then is the basis for the
writ (mandement) (Fig. 9.1a and b) that one of the clerks must write. This writ is an
authorization by the Court for a bailiff to formally give notice to the respondent. But before
the writ can be implemented, Donckersloot has to deposit 40 guilders. This sum is
returned if the sentence is reversed, but if it is confirmed, the deposit is forfeited. The
deposit is recorded on the mandement and in a special register of the accounting system of
the Court.

The mandement with the Court’s seal is now ready for collection; the petition remains in
the archives. Lambert’s procureur looks for a bailiff (deurwaarder) who can formally
notify Nederveen, and commissions Martinus Mekern in Gorinchem. Armed with his
staff of office Mekern goes to Nederveen’s house and leaves a copy of the writ, with a short
notice of the formal notification thereof and of the day appointed for the hearing. The
bailiff then goes to Woudrichem town hall to notify the local court that, if so desired, it may
accompany the defendant to court. Mekern drafts an account (Fig. 9.1c) that is annexed to
the mandement and has to be delivered to Donckersloot’s procureur. The latter must show
both documents during the hearing in court.

Claim
The case must now be presented at the cause-list or docket session. The plaintiff ’s
procureur submits a note to the registry with the data of the case. A clerk transcribes these
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Archiving Litigation Fig. 9.1 a and b Writ (mandement) by the Court of Holland, Zeeland, and West-Friesland,
9 September 1716. The seal of the Court is lost. National Archives, Hof van Holland (3.03.01.01),
inv. nr. 10371.

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in the cause-list (rol): no longer a real scroll (though in the 17th century the cause-lists at
the Court of Gelre were still scrolls of parchment), but a few folio sheets of paper folded
into a quire, listing the cases to be heard on a particular day. Every Monday the procureurs
assemble in the ‘rol chamber’, where a deputy registrar in the presence of two judges calls
the cases one by one. The procureurs react when their case is announced, and their
reactions are noted in the cause-list.

On the day of the hearing, 6 October, when the case of Donckersloot versus Nederveen is
called, procureur Van Neck rises and dictates to the secretary: Van Neck presents claim
and concludes ‘as in writing’. He submits the written claim that solicitor Thierens has
drafted (elsewhere this is called a libel, from libellus or booklet) to the secretary, and hands
a copy to Nederveen’s procureur. The latter, Van Brakel, dictates: Van Brakel prays day,
meaning that he wants to be allowed 14 days for consultation. The claim is registered by
the Court in the register of filed papers (dingtalen). The secretary issues an official report
(proces-verbaal) of having submitted the claim to the procureur. Van Neck must file that
report at a later stage.

Response, Further Statements of Claim and of Response

In the rol session 14 days later, Van Brakel files his response (conclusie van antwoord).
The case has now been completely presented (voldongen) as the basis for further
preparatory steps. Because the conflict concerns facts (and not legal issues) the procureurs
propose to handle the case in writing only, waiving oral pleadings. The Court’s decision on
that proposal is recorded in another proces-verbaal. In further sessions both procureurs
exchange their claim and response substantiated extensively in the documents exchanged.
Van Neck also files a written replication (repliek), whereupon Van Brakel by way of
rejoinder ‘persists’ in his defence. These acts are recorded in the minutes (proces-verbaal).

Fig. 9.1 c Confirmation (relaas) by the bailiff Submission of Documents

of the formal notification to the defendant,
19 September 1716. National Archives, In the next session, on 25 November, it is decided to ‘deliver deeds and muniments’
Hof van Holland (3.03.01.01), inv. nr. 10371. (te dienen van acten en munimenten). That is, each of the litigants must deliver at the
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registry his linen bag with documents (proceszak), provided with a calendar (inventaris).
Van Brakel furnishes his file (again recorded in a proces-verbaal), but Van Neck fails to
appear. After waiting for some time, Van Brakel finally causes the Court to issue an order
on 25 January 1717 which will be formally notified to Van Neck by a bailiff. If Van Neck
does not comply, the Court will decide on the basis of the documents available. This
threat is not carried out, as Van Neck’s default is counteracted by Van Brakel adding on
17 February a new document (a witness statement) to his file. On 19 March Van Neck
finally submits his bag. Later, more witness statements are added to the file. The two
parties exchange copies of their files. Then the claimant submits a brief (advertissement
van rechten) of some 20 pages containing all the legal arguments. Only the Court receives
a copy; the brief is not disclosed to the other party.

Now all papers of the case furnished to the Court are transferred from the ‘furnishing
chamber’ (furneerkamer) to the ‘working stock’ of files on 15 October 1717. In December,
President of the Court Adriaan Pieter de Hinojosa requests the papers, and on 17 January
1718 he passes them onto Judge Gerard Thierens (no direct relative of the solicitor), whom
he has appointed as reporter in the case. The registry keeps track of the movement of the
files by registering each transfer in two registers, one on the names of rapporteurs, the
other on the names of procureurs. The reporting judge studies the papers at home
(therefore, upon the death of a judge, the Court immediately sends staff to the house of
the deceased to retrieve the Court papers).

Judgment
After some time, the rapporteur reports in a meeting to the full Court. The registrar
notes the opinions of the judges (many judges keep notes themselves) on a piece of paper.
These are his personal notes and they are not meant for the archives. After deliberation,
the sentence is decided according to the plurality. The draft sentence is registered in the
Fig. 9.2 Litigation bag (proceszak). so-called quaetclappen. A rough draft was referred to in Dutch as a quaetclap, a pun
National Archives, Grafelijkheidsrekenkamer because the verb quaetclappen meant to slander or to gossip. It appears from the
(3.01.27.01), inv. nr. 916. administration at the registry that the case was declared finalized (afgedaan) on 11 March

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1718. However, the first clerk at the registry still has to make a final draft of the judgment.
This is then checked and finally decided by the Court. The judgment ‘Administering Justice
in the Name and on Behalf of the High Government’ is registered and read aloud in a
rol session on 1 April 1718. The whole judgment is not read, but only the dictum, the actual
ruling. Donckersloot’s appeal against the judgment of the local court at Woudrichem
is rejected and he is ordered to pay the expenses of the lawsuit. The Court assesses these
costs at 118 guilders and seven stuivers, based on the detailed invoices submitted by
Nederveen’s solicitor and procureur; the Court keeps a separate register of these invoices.
The procureurs receive a copy of the dictum, the procureur of Nederveen also receives the
whole extended judgment (geëxtendeerde sententie). In this document the dictum is
preceded by an extensive exposé of the arguments of the litigants based on the documents
they submitted. However, it does not contain a motivation of the decision. The extended
judgment, with the seal of the Court, provides the winner with the basis for enforcement
of the judgment.

Completion
The bags are returned to the furneer chamber; this is noted in a separate register. There is
a cupboard in the chamber with pigeonholes, one for every procureur. The bags must be
retrieved by the procureurs, but this is often neglected, as in the case of Donckersloot
versus Nederveen. They were left behind at the Court (see 6.2.5 for a comparable practice
regarding estate papers submitted to the Orphan Chamber). In the National Archives
around 2,800 of these bags are preserved. In the second half of the 19th century the
collection was reordered. The bags are ranked in order of the name of one of the litigants
and not (as they were originally) of the names of the procureurs of the plaintiffs.

They are files created by the litigants, not by the Court. Of course, the last document in
these files is neither the dictum nor the extended judgment, but the brief (advertissement
Fig. 9.3 Judgment (dictum), 1 April 1718. van rechten). Copies of most of the documents in the files were submitted to the Court and
The date at the bottom of 11 March 1718 refers
to the minutes (quaetclap). National Archives, they may therefore be found in the archives of the Court (see Table 9.1). But instead of the
Hof van Holland (3.03.01.01), inv. nr. 1228. registry taking care of the retrieval of the documents to be used in drafting the judgment, it
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was much easier to order the litigants to provide the bags with their files. However, anyone
who now wants to consult a judgment must search the archives of the Court and not the
documents from the bags. The judgment and other papers may also have been preserved
in the personal archives of the winner (or sometimes the other party).

Fig. 9.4 Empty litigation bags in the archives of the Court of Holland and Zeeland, kept separately
from their original contents. National Archives, Hof van Holland (3.03.01.01), inv. nr. 14026.

The lawsuit between Donckersloot and Nederveen led to a paper mountain of documents
both with the litigants and at the Court (see Table 9.1). The same is true for the other high

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courts in the Netherlands that all followed roughly the same procedure in civil cases,
predominantly based on documents. There were special practices, and here follow some
examples. At the Supreme Council of Holland and Zeeland (court of appeal from
judgments by the Court of Holland and Zeeland) no bags with files have been preserved.
The Council kept decisions (resoluties) leading to judgments that reveal the opinions of
judges. This is extraordinary because nearly everywhere the deliberations of the judges
were kept secret.

If one wanted to file an appeal in Friesland, that person needed a notification from the
tribunal to the Court. These were called apostelen. The word comes from apostils; an
apostil (from the Latin apostilla, or note) is a note (confirming a decision), in most cases
in the margin of a document but in some cases written on a separate sheet of paper (see
also 3.2).6 At the Court of Friesland procureurs had to submit to the registry all the
documents they had exchanged. There the documents were transcribed by engrossers
(grossanten) and their transcripts were collated by the attorneys. Judges at the Court of
Friesland voted in the chamber in writing; the messenger collected the notes in a little box
that he handed to the president who subsequently announced the contents of the notes.
As in Holland the registrar drafted the dictum, according to the majority of votes, in the
quaclappen (the equivalent of the quaetclappen in Holland).

6 B.S. Hempenius-van Dijk, Procesgids Hof van

Friesland. De hoofdlijnen van het procederen in civiele
zaken voor het Hof van Friesland zowel in eerste
instantie als in appel (Hilversum: Verloren, 2004).
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Table 9.1 Stages in the lawsuit Donckersloot versus Nederveen at the Court of Holland,
with their presence in available archives, 1716-1718.

In the In the In the

Donckersloot Nederveen Court
bag bag archives
2 September 1716 Sentence local court at x
Woudrichem
Appeal to the Court of
Holland
Power of attorney by x
Donckersloot for Van Neck
Power of attorney by x
Nederveen for Van Brakel
9 September 1716 Petition for a writ of summons x
9 September 1716 Writ of summons x
Written confirmation of x
formal notification of the writ
6 October 1716 Hearing (rol) x
Claim
Papers filed (dingtalen) x
Statement of claim x
(acte judicieel van eis)
Response
21 October 1716 Hearing (rol) x
Statement of response (acte x
judicieel van antwoord)
Specification of the basis for x
the claim (eis met middelen)

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Specification of the basis for x
the response (antwoord met
middelen)
13 November 1716 Hearing (rol) x
Answer and specification of its x
basis (repliek met middelen)
20 November 1716 Hearing (rol) x
Rejoinder specifying its basis x
(dupliek met middelen)
Submission of files (dienen
van acten en munimenten;
furneren der stukken)
25 November 1716 Hearing (rol) x
Record of submission of x
documents (acte van gediend)
Inventory x
Witness statements x
28 January 1717 Notification requiring x
submission of documents
(insinuatie om te dienen)
Additional calendar x
Witness statements and x
interrogations

19 March 1717 Hearing (rol) x

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Inventory x
Brief (advertissement van x
rechten) Donckersloot
Brief (advertissement van x
rechten) Nederveen
Report
15 October 1717 Register of files transferred x
from the furneer chamber
to the Court
19 October 1717 Declaration of costs x
December 1717 Notebook of bags requested x
from the registry to be
provided to the judges
designated by the President
10 January 1718 Register of assigned cases x
(gedistribueerde processen)
Judgment
11 March 1718 Minutes (quaetclap) x
29 March 1718 Assessment of costs x
1 April 1718 Judgment (dictum) *) **) x
Extended judgment **) x
5 August 1718 Register of terminated cases x
*) Would have been kept in the private archives
(getermineerde processen)
of Donckersloot. when bags are returned to
**) Would have been kept in the private archives the furneer chamber
of Nederveen.

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9.2 Court Archives
In the 15th century the Court of Holland, Zeeland, and West-Friesland (this was the official
title, Court of Holland and Zeeland for short) originated from the Count’s council which
had both governing and judicial tasks. The first legally trained president was appointed in
1445. A registrar (griffier) was assigned to keep the judicial registers that were transferred
from the Count’s chancery. At the registry the day-to-day administration was kept, while
papers not needed for current business were stored in various spaces at the Binnenhof in
The Hague. Inventories indicating the location of all registers, books, muniments, and
papers since 1428 were drawn up in 1619, 1701, and 1725. Since the middle of the 19th
century the archives of the Court of Holland and Zeeland are kept in the National Archives
(see below), one of the largest and most completely preserved archives, comprising 593
metres. Inventorization of documents started in 1899 and at intervals occupied a few
generations of archivists. Finally, the inventory was completed in 2008. The following
paragraph is adapted from the extensive introduction to the inventory.7

The backbone of the archives (11,798 items) are the memorialen since 1428 (the older
memorialen from 1376 are part of the archives of the Count’s council, see 3.1). Over time
other series were branched off, for example the registers of judgments and the registers of
filed papers (dingtalen) in 1447. Out of the latter other series originated. This was not only
the result of organizational and political reforms but also of increasing professionalism and
7 M.C. Le Bailly, P.J.M. van den Heuvel, J.A.M.Y. Bos-
Rops, R. Huijbrecht, J. de Vreugd and B.M. de Vries,
more bureaucracy. Registers of the attorney-general (1467), quaetclappen (1480), and case
Inventaris van het archief van het Hof van Holland, lists (presentatieboeken, 1484) developed from them. In the 16th century new series were
1428-1811 (Den Haag: Nationaal Archief, 2008),
https://web.archive.org/web/20190906073458/
created, including the registers of acknowledged acts (residentieboeken, 1517), official
https://www.nationaalarchief.nl/onderzoeken/ letters (missiven, 1557), and petitions (rekesten,1588) and later registers of decisions
archief/3.03.01.01?activeTab=index& searchTerm
3.03.01.01, archived 6 Sept. 2019.
(resolutieboeken, 1602), reports (verbalen, 1630), and advices to the States of Holland and
Zie ook M.J. van Gent and M.-Ch. Le Bailly, Gids other authorities (1647).
voor de landsheerlijke archieven van Gelre, Holland,
Zeeland en het Sticht (Den Haag: Instituut voor
Nederlandse Geschiedenis, 2003).
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Much of the archives of the Court of Friesland (founded in 1515) was lost; of the registers
of civil judgments from the 16th century only three volumes have been preserved. Of the
series quaclappen (comprising the dicta, started in 1527) all papers from 1620 to 1765
are missing. The registry of the Court of Friesland made files of the documents submitted
by litigants, adding the judgment to the file (unlike the practice elsewhere where the
documents submitted to the court were transcribed into registers, as at the Court of
Holland). The files that were preserved date mainly from the 18th century.

When Charles V became sovereign of Utrecht, the Duchy of Gelderland, and of the
annexed county of Zutphen, he established two courts: the Court of Utrecht in 1530 and
the Court of Gelre and Zutphen in 1544. Sentences by these courts (and by the courts in
Brabant, Friesland, Groningen, and Drenthe) were a final judgment (arrest), meaning that
appeal was not allowed. This was in contrast to Holland and Zeeland where the Supreme
Council was the highest court of appeal.

However, outside Holland and Zeeland, a revision of the judgment of the Court could
be requested from the States. These appointed revisors were often judges from other
provincial courts (in Groningen revision was commissioned to another court). The
revision, according to the practice in Utrecht, was done ex iisdem actis and was therefore
based on the documents of the lawsuit before the court.8 Therefore, the litigation bags
of the former instance were geëvangeliseerd and sealed. By this term (derived from French
judicial procedure where an evangile was the note accompanying a file when sent to
another court) one designated the formal closing of the bags. In case of revision,
evangeliseren was done by one of the judges and the registrar in the presence of the
litigants. The revisors studied the documents, discussed the case in a few meetings, and
drafted a judgment (dictum). The dictum was included and motivated in a recueil
8 J.M. Milo and E.G.D. van Dongen, Hof van Utrecht.
addressed to the Delegated States (Gedeputeerde Staten) which decided accordingly.
Hoofdlijnen van het procederen in civiele zaken The dictum (without the motivation!) could subsequently be included in an extended
(Hilversum: Verloren, 2018), paragraph 5.8; Utrecht
Archives, Hof van Utrecht (239-1), inv. nrs. 342-a-1,
judgment provided with the grand seal of the States.
357.

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The provincial court of Gelre (Gelderland) and Zutphen was founded in 1544, but it began
forming regular series as late as in the final decades of the 16th century. The registers of
judgments start in 1561 and the books of pleadings in which the registrar kept a record of
the acts of litigants (including the pleadings) begins in 1576, while the oldest civil case list
(rol) dates from 1635.

When Gelre joined the Revolt in 1579, the quarter of Roermond stayed loyal to the
Spanish King and became part of the Southern Netherlands as Spanish Gelre. A second
Court of Gelre was established in Roermond, while in nearby Venlo (administered by the
States General) the Court of Upper Gelre existed from 1717 to 1795. The archives of the
Roermond Court became subject of a real archives war in the 19th century. The
‘Roermond Archives Issue’ (Roermondse archiefkwestie) arose in 1899 when central
government ordered the transfer of the Roermond archives to the State Archives in the
provincial capital of Maastricht. The municipal council of Roermond resisted vehemently.
Neither judicial interventions nor appeal to Parliament and the Queen helped Roermond
in its endeavours to keep the archives. When the Queen and her mother visited the
province in 1895, they ignored Roermond—as a punishment? It was only in 1901 that
Roermond and the State settled the issue and the archives were transferred to Maastricht.

9.3 The Court’s Memory

What purpose was served by the archives of the Court of Holland and Zeeland? Various
components of the archives served various purposes in various times. The memorialen—
as the term indicates—primarily served organizational memory, just as the registers of
resoluties, the series of letters, and the verbalen (recording acts in the presence of judges
delegated by the Court). Eighteenth-century historians like Wagenaar, Kluit, and
9 Marie-Charlotte Le Bailly, Recht voor de raad. De Riemer made use of the memorialen. The Court registered privileges, and sometimes
Rechtspraak voor het Hof van Holland, Zeeland en
West-Friesland in het midden van de vijftiende eeuw
copies of these were furnished upon payment of a fee.9 Transcripts and extracts were
(Hilversum: Verloren, 2001), pp. 111-53. delivered from other registers as well, for example to a former litigant who wanted to have
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a (new) copy of the judgment passed in his case. In the 16th century the charge would have
been three stuivers (roughly the daily wage of an unskilled labourer), unless the document
was very extensive, in which case the Court determined the fee. The memorialen, the
registers of filed papers (dingtalen), and the registers of judgments were provided with
various indexes in the 17th and 18th centuries—an indication of the need for efficient
access by the staff of the registry and perhaps by the judges as well.

Nevertheless, time and again there were complaints about the arrangement and
accessibility of the archives. Often, for example, the Council (Raad) of Brabant (the court
of appeal for Staats-Brabant) tried to counteract the disorder in the archives by new
regulations and repeated assignments to committees of judges of the Council to order the
archives.10 In 1702 a lending register was established in which judges had to note which
registers, charters, or papers they had borrowed.11 Remarkable is the frequency with which
a register of resolutions was borrowed. They were used as reference books to gain a better
insight in the law-making process and the judicature of the Council.

In 1721 it became necessary to restore order in the Council’s furneer chamber.

The motivation to do this was typical: because many cases could not be found, the Council
remained ignorant about the past and this might harm its prerogatives and privileges
considerably.12 A committee was appointed to clear the disorder which had ‘crept in’.
All documents had to be arranged by year and by case and noted in a register. Furthermore,
10 Franca W.M. de Koning-Klaassen, ‘De bibliotheek van
de Staatse Raad van Brabant’, in De Staatse Raad van
it was ordained that immediately after the death of a judge or a registrar the papers in his
Brabant en Landen van Overmaze in tweede termijn, house had to be claimed. Comparable regulations existed elsewhere, for example in
ed. Th.E.A. Bosman, J.P.A. Coopmans and
B.C.M. Jacobs (Assen/Maastricht: Van Gorcum,
Holland (see the preceding section) and Utrecht (see Figs 9.5a and b). Part of the archives
1989), pp. 66-67; E.J.M.F.C Broers and B.C.M. Jacobs, of the Court of Utrecht are still arranged by the name of the judge in whose house the
Procesgids Staatse Raad van Brabant (Hilversum:
Verloren, 2000).
documents were collected after his death.
11 Brabants Historisch Informatie Centrum, Raad
van Brabant (19), inv. nr. 1102. See also the section In spite of its efforts, the Council of Brabant did not succeed in managing its archives more
‘Resoluties’ in the introduction to the inventory by
W.M. Lindemann (1984).
efficiently during the 18th century. This came to light painfully when the Council of State
12 Brabants Historisch Informatie Centrum, Raad van
requested certain documents from the Council of Brabant in 1794—they could not be
Brabant (19), inv. nr. 14, p. 461. found.

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Fig. 9.5a and b A large part of the archives of the

Court of Utrecht are still arranged according
to the names of judges who had kept Court
papers at home. Before the Utrecht State
Archives moved to a new building in 1968
this arrangement was clearly visible in the
repository. 5a: Photo by Rijksarchief Utrecht,
circa 1968. Collection of the author.
5b: watercolour by Otto H. Kuyck, 1968.
Utrecht Archives, Prentverzameling, nr. 33108.
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Did the judges make use of the archives? They seldom referred to precedents—not in their
judgments anyway. They adhered to the rule in Roman law that obliged the judge to
sentence not according to precedents, but to follow the law (non exemplis, sed legibus).13
However, it appears from private notes taken by judges that they did take former decisions
into account. Even so, they relied on their private notes rather than on the archives in the
registry for their jurisprudence. Quite often solicitors and procureurs referred to earlier
judgments. Their sources were collections of jurisprudence either published or preserved
as a manuscript by lawyers since the 16th century.

It is understandable that procureur Johannes Jacobus van Reenen was pleased when it
appeared that the President of the Court of Holland Adriaan Pieter de Hinojosa had
bequeathed him with 42 volumes of annotata et collecta kept since 1697 until his death in
1741.14 Unfortunately, the government seized the papers because it suspected that some
papers belonged to the registry. Van Reenen addressed the States of Holland in 1742. They
ordered the inventorization of the papers and wanted them to be divided between private
notes and official documents. The States were particularly concerned about the secrecy of
the documents of the Court. The committee for judicial affairs of the States advised the
Court to see to it that judges should carefully handle their notes and copies from the
registry. The Court agreed but submitted an extensive memorandum concerning the
secrecy of judicial matters. It stated as a first principle that members of any council had to
have access to the secretariat or registry to gain knowledge of legal affairs in past and
present or to discover something new. But not everything could be public. Records of the
13 Willem Zwalve and Corjo Jansen, Publiciteit van opinions of judges, the decisions, or correspondence with the States had to be kept secret.
jurisprudentie (Deventer: Kluwer, 2013); Wouter
Druwé, Transregional normativity in learned legal
Equally all internal affairs of a council, such as the organization and the finances of the
practice. Loans and credit in consilia and decisiones registry and the correspondence with the magistrate of The Hague, should remain
in the northern and southern Low Countries (c.1500-
1680), PhD thesis (Leuven, 2018).
confidential. Public access was considered to be indecent and, moreover, it was believed
14 L. van Poelgeest, ‘Mr. Johan van Bleiswijk en zijn
the public would not benefit.
“Observationes Tumultuariae”’, Tijdschrift voor
rechtsgeschiedenis 117 (1987): 117-22; National
Archives, Stadhouderlijke Secretarie (1.01.50), inv. nr.
On the other hand, secrecy should not impede judges driven by interest in the law to make
707. notes on cases heard by the Court and generally on matters of history, government, and

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law. In so far as the collection of De Hinojosa was restricted to these matters, the Court saw
no objection. However, as the memorandum continued, transcribing entire registers and
copying all documents in a case would be beyond the office of a judge. Above all, judges
should continue their studies and scholarly publications provided these did not harm the
respect for the Court or the honour of families and individuals.

All this was to no avail: the States of Holland kept all papers of De Hinojosa. Later they
were transferred to the Stadholder and shelved in the Stadholder’s library that was to
become the Royal (National) Library in the 19th century, where they are still preserved.

9.4 Judicial Archives after 1811

The Netherlands was annexed by France in different phases between 1795 and 1810 (see
3.0). When the French judicial organization was introduced (1811), the old judicial
archives at local and provincial levels were confiscated by the State. They had to be sealed
and transferred to the newly established courts. Just as in 1802 (see 4.9.1) administrative
documents had to be separated from the judicial papers. The former had to be transferred
to the prefect or returned to the local councils, the latter were to remain at the courts
because of their interest ‘to the service of justice and the well-being of the inhabitants’. The
value of archives for historical research was not even mentioned.

In Friesland a third category of documents was distinguished: documents ‘which indeed

are of no value for the present, but that eventually might be of some benefit for the
judiciary in cases of rare occurrence’. These documents were stored in the attic of the
Leeuwarden house of correction. In 1817 the judicial archives that were still kept by the
burgomasters in Friesland were transferred to the Chancery (Kanselarij; until 1811 the seat
of the Court of Friesland), and in 1824 from there to the former hall of the States, which
had become the seat of the Court. Cupboards for storing the archives were not installed
until 1835. Only then was it possible to order and inventory the archives. On this occasion
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‘a mass of loose papers, partly in good order, partly decayed’ was torn up and sold as waste
paper. Judges and archives moved to the newly built ‘Palace of Justice’ in 1850. In 1897 the
archives went back to the Kanselarij, which had been restored to house the State Archives
and the provincial library. This was fairly late: already in 1879, a Royal Decree had ordered
the transfer to the State Archives of the judicial archives up to 1811.

The National Archivist Bakhuizen van den Brink (see 3.6.2) and his deputy (and successor)
Laurens Ph. C. van den Bergh had repeatedly requested transfer of these ‘treasures’ in the
1850s. A.J. Enschedé (since 1857 city archivist of Haarlem) insisted in 1874 on measures
for the preservation of the old judicial archives.15 He reported on the conditions of the
archives: rats had eaten their way through the archives to make their nests, the archives
from 1470 to 1680 had disappeared, and the state of more recent archives was just as
dismal. Enschedé joked: ‘The former papers have been put temporarily under the
supervision of Chief Inspector H.O.U.S.E. Rat and the deputy nibblers Mouse, Louse, Van
der Worm, Snail, Fly, Slater, and Chimney Sweep, who have all been provided with free
lodging, fire, and light as well.’ After some discussion, the Minister of the Interior
(responsible for the State Archives) and the Minister of Justice agreed that it would be
advisable to transfer the judicial archives from before 1811 to archival repositories.
However, government had to create space first. The State built new and up-to-date State
Archives repositories (the first two in Arnhem in 1879 and ’s-Hertogenbosch in 1880) and
adapted existing buildings (see 3.6.3).

The decree of 1879 provided the possibility to deposit old judicial archives with a
15 F.C.J. Ketelaar, ‘Haarlem. Bakermat van de Vereniging
municipality. Enschedé and his colleague Muller in Utrecht had insisted on this possibility,
van Archivarissen in Nederland’, in Hart voor which only met the rightful wish of municipalities halfway. They wanted the return of their
Haarlem. Liber amicorum voor Jaap Temminck, ed.
Hans Brokken, Florence Koorn and Ab van der Steur
judicial archives that had been confiscated in 1811. For a long time Enschedé even made a
(Haarlem: Schuyt, 1996), pp. 255-61. stand against the transfer of the Haarlem archives to the State. Muller wrote in 1893 that to
16 S. Muller, ‘Inleiding’, in R. Fruin, Catalogus van de tear the judicial archives from the administrative archives was against the newly acquired
archieven der collegiën, die vóór 1811 binnen de
tegenwoordige provincie Utrecht rechterlijke functiën
insight ‘that each archive is an inviolable whole by itself ’.16 That insight was indeed new. It
uitgeoefend hebben (Utrecht: Breijer, 1893), p. xxxii. was lively discussed in the Association of Archivists in the Netherlands (founded in 1891)

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and it was to be canonized in 1898 in the Manual by Muller, Feith, and Fruin (see 12.4).
However, since the State possessed the judicial archives of towns and villages, Muller did
not think it desirable to return them to the local councils because of the risk of neglect.
Therefore, the State made conditions for depositing: a professional municipal archivist,
an appropriate repository, and extensive access by the public. By 1910, 16 of the 31
municipalities that had an archivist of their own were keeping the judicial archives from
before 1811 as a deposit from the State. Since the Archives Act of 1995, the deposit may be
transformed into ownership, thus reversing the confiscation of 1811.

That judicial archives might be sources for all sorts of historical research was recognized
rather late. In 1854 deputy rijksarchivaris Van den Bergh believed that scholars of legal
history (of which he was one) would be the most frequent users of the old judicial archives.
However, he did not rule out others, ‘even’ historians. This limited view also became
apparent in 1868 when Parliament argued in favour of public access to the judicial archives
‘in the interest of practising the history of our judiciary’. Research in these archives in the
19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries was mainly concerned with the functioning
of the judiciary as an institution and the application of old Dutch law. However, judicial
archives are a source of knowledge for many other aspects of society, as archivists and
researchers discovered only gradually. This has at least two reasons—and they are not only
true for judicial archives.

Firstly, the insufficient findability of judgments and the other chronological series
discussed before. If there were indexes, they were on names and not on subjects. This
situation gradually improved in the late 1990s through the automation of indexing of some
judicial archives (the indexing in the 1970s of the Leiden criminal sentences 1533-1811,
computerized in the 1990s, was an early example).

A second reason is that it is methodologically nearly impossible, as legal historian Chris

Coppens warned
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to learn for sure from courts’ archives about the political, social, cultural, economic,
and mentality history with any certainty, if that knowledge is not supplemented by
a cross-check or a double cross-check from other sources, and even then it often
remains to guess at the accuracy of the juridical information. The juridical material is
too teleological to do so, aiming too much at achieving a particular goal, realizing a
particular interest to allow a conclusion other than that of one or more hypotheses.17

Even if one studies a single case or a few cases, instead of following developments
diachronically, one will realize that judicial archives offer a view of daily life in the past, but
that this view is filtered and coloured, according to historical anthropologist Florike
Egmond:

In the first place because the judicial context—that is legal norms and rules—often
has modelled both the form and the content of these texts. Secondly, because of the
simple fact that all textual representations of a so-called historical reality in this type
of sources are always part of the presentation of a standpoint of one of the parties
concerned. For that very reason, judicial archives do not provide a neutral and
factual representation of a historical reality—if such a thing exists at all.18

Actually, this holds true for all archives (and might therefore have been mentioned in every
chapter). ‘Even when straight from the dusty archive,’ writes Alan Munslow, ‘the evidence
always pre-exists within narrative structures and is freighted with cultural meanings—who
put the archive together, why, and what did they include or exclude?’19 Therefore, as I wrote
in the General Introduction, when using archives, one has to know the why, who, what,
and how in order to assess which reality may be reflected in the archives. One must look
17 Chris Coppens, ‘Is echtgescheiden ook echt geschied?’, through the record to its contextual history to discover the human being that acted as
Pro memorie 4 (2002): 371.
‘archiver’, bringing one as close as possible to the writer of the document, close to his or her
18 Florike Egmond, ‘Eer in het geding in het 16e-eeuwse
Holland’, Pro memorie 4 (2002): 294.
norms and beliefs.
19 Alan Munslow, Deconstructing history, 2nd. ed
(London/New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 7.

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9.5 Notaries
Recently Aries van Meeteren broke new ground by including notaries in his research on
conflict settlement in Leiden in the 17th century.20 However, the notary was not only
involved in the non-judicial settlement of legal disputes. People went to the notary to have,
for example, a testament made or a premarital agreement, a transfer of ownership of a
house (6.2.1), or an estate inventory (6.2.4). Contracts, IOUs, and insurance policies were
also drawn up by a notary. For drafting a deed, the Rotterdam notary Schadee charged
almost two guilders in 1733; he charged three guilders for handing out two authentic
copies (grossen), plus three more guilders for the witnesses and the stamp duty.21 Each of
the two parties paid half.

Notaries have existed in the Netherlands since the 13th century. At first, they were
working for the bishop’s judiciary only, but more and more they provided a service for civil
parties as well. Their deeds (akten) were authentic documents endowed with public
credibility constituting full proof in a lawsuit. As a 17th-century manual states: the notary’s
office is ‘a general service that renders in writing various cases and actions by people in
such a way that it constitutes complete evidence and eternal remembrance of what has
Fig. 9.6 A notary in his office, attributed to happened and was done’. 22
Job Berckheyde, 1672. Collection art dealer
Richard Green, London.
In the 16th century the notary’s office was regulated by ordinances of the sovereign Charles
20 Aries van Meeteren, Op hoop van akkoord. Instrumen­
V, and later by the States. Additional regulations were issued by provincial courts and
teel forumgebruik bij geschilbeslechting in Leiden in de cities. However, form and content of the notarial deeds were mainly determined by
zeventiende eeuw (Hilversum: Verloren, 2006).
notarial manuals. In the 17th and 18th centuries the much used manual Practyk Notariael
21 H.K. de Raaf and H.M.A. Schadee, Tweehonderd
jaar notariaat en zeezaken. Gedenkschrift van het
by Gerard van Wassenaer included more than 160 exemplars of deeds, with an extensive
kantoor der notarissen Schadee en hunner associé’s, explanation. These models formed a standard from which most notaries did not dare to
Rotterdam 1724-1924 (Rotterdam: Koninklijke Boek-
en Lichtdrukkerij, 1924), pp. 47-8.
deviate. Peril in deviation (Fig. 9.7) is the warning to secretaries and notaries expressed in
22 Simon van Leeuwen, Notarius publicus… (Dordrecht:
Roemer Visscher’s emblem, although the primary message is to follow the truth in a
Abraham Andriessz, 1657), p.1. straightforward way (rectilinearly) and not to deviate to either side.
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Many researchers have been misled by the formulas in a deed, taking them for a represen­
tation of reality. For example, in a testament the testator is invariably described as ‘having
a healthy body and being sound in his five senses, memory, and mind’, but this does not
say anything about the real situation. Even today notarial deeds include archaic flourishes
which can only be understood in a historical context, like: ‘to tolerate or to endure’
(te gehengen of te gedogen), ‘attached by natural or artificial means’ (aard- en nagelvast),
‘as a heap, not measured and just as it is [in whatever condition]’ (bij de hoop, zonder maat
en voetstoots).

Before 1811 a notary had to pass an exam at the provincial court and had to get a licence
from the government. Nevertheless, he was not a government functionary. In the eastern
and north-eastern parts of the Republic there were hardly any notaries. In those areas the
local magistrate drew up the testaments, deeds of transfer of property, debt instruments,
and similar documents.

The notary could contribute in settling a conflict by drawing up an attestation, a

notification (insinuatie), an interrogation, or a deed of reconciliation. An attestation was
a deposition by witnesses, often used in a lawsuit but, as Van Meeteren found, primarily
meant as a warning to keep the conflict out of court and to prevent a lengthy and costly
lawsuit. Anyone who found witnesses willing to make an attestation that eventually could
be repeated under oath had a strong position and could force the other party (if he or she
was not able to disprove the attestation) to compliance or indemnity or a lawsuit.

By an insinuatie a party was admonished to keep a commitment. The deed often included
a protestation, holding the other party responsible for all costs, damages and interests, as in
the following example.

Fig. 9.7 Peril in deviation. Emblem by Roemer

Visscher, Sinnepoppen (Amsterdam: W. Jansz,
1614), p. 117.

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‘Today, 23 February 1654, I, Adriaen Lock, notary public, and the

witnesses mentioned below, upon the request of Mr. Diego
d’Andrada, a Portuguese merchant here, transported myself near
and next to the person of Mr. Rembrandt van Rijn, painter, and
notified and announced to him the following:

The aforementioned claimant asserts that some time ago he asked

you, the respondent, to paint a portrait of a certain young girl, for
which he gave you an advance of 75 guilders, the remainder being
payable upon completion of the painting.

And because the claimant is of the opinion that the aforementioned

painting or portrait shows no resemblance at all to the appearance
or face [image of the head] of the aforementioned young girl, and
because the same young girl will be departing at the first opportunity
to Hamburg, therefore the claimant advises through me, the
notary, his request that you are to alter and retouch the aforemen­
tioned painting or portrait, before the departure of the mentioned
young girl, and so that it will be her proper likeness,

and that, in case you fail to do so, he, the claimant, will have you to
keep the aforementioned painting, as it is no use to him, but
requests you, the respondent, to reimburse the amount paid in
advance, protesting that he had given you sufficient warning
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beforehand, and furthermore will claim from you all the costs,
damages and interests due, which he already has incurred and
suffered, and will yet have, do, and suffer, and will recover from you
and your possessions, as much as he, the claimant, believes to be
reasonable.

All this having been read to the respondent in its entirety, he stated
that he would not touch the piece of painting again nor finish it
unless the claimant pays him the balance due or guarantees full
payment by giving a security.

And that after he has finished the painting, he will leave it to the
judgment of the board of the St. Lucas’ Guild whether the painting
is a likeness of the girl or not. And if they decide that there is no
resemblance, he will change it. And if the claimant should still be
displeased, he will then finish the painting at some time, and
whenever he has an auction of his painting[s], he will include it in
the sale.

All sincerely done in Amsterdam, in the presence of Jan Hebdon

and Arnoud Raard, as witnesses.

(signed) J. Hebdon
Arnout Raard
23 Translation by W.L. Strauss and M. van der Meulen,
which I testify on request
The Rembrandt documents (New York: Abaris Books,
1979), nr. 1654/4; document/remdoc/e1661, accessed A. Lock, notary public.’ 23
2 Dec. 2018.

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As in this example, an insinuatie usually records what the geinsinueerde has answered.
Such responses are also recorded in interrogations that included the answers to questions
that had been given to the notary. Only rarely do these contain the exact words as spoken
by the interrogated party; they are words noted down by the notary. When the parties
composed, this could be recorded in a deed of reconciliation.

All these documentary genres are preserved in the notarial archives. In the sample taken
by Van Meeteren from four Leiden notarial archives from 1664 to 1668, 709 deeds
concerned semi-judicial matters, including 615 attestaties (12.5 percent of all deeds).
Around 1650 in the cities of Utrecht and Amersfoort half of all notarial deeds pertained to
judicial or semi-judicial matters. A century later the number of procuraties and attestaties
of notaries in Amersfoort had decreased to 12 percent, but the percentage of contracts had
increased enormously to 51.5.24 This points to a shift in the notarial practice which may
have been the result of a societal trend to regulate more in contracts and to be less inclined
to resort to judicial settlement. This is a factor of archivalization (see the General
Introduction). Another trend was that marriage became commodified in the 17th century.
This expressed itself in increasing regulation of the financial aspects of marriage in detailed
deeds of a prenuptial agreement.25

9.6 Notarial Records

Notarial attestations and insinuaties catch a glimpse of daily life in the past, but all the
24 W.B. Heins, ‘Het Utrechtse notariaat in de zeventiende
en achttiende eeuw’, Jaarboek Oud-Utrecht (1981):
deeds form a unique source for research in a variety of domains. Users of these records
224-43. may benefit from insight in the notarial work processes (see also 9.5) and the archiving of
25 Annette de Vries, Ingelijst werk. De verbeelding van notarial records. The notary wrote the drafts (minuten) of deeds (akten) either in a protocol
arbeid en beroep in de vroegmoderne Nederlanden
(Zwolle: Waanders, 2004), p. 76; Donald Haks,
or he bound the loose minutes to form a codex. The minute was signed by the notary,
Huwelijk en gezin in Holland in de 17de en 18de eeuw. witnesses, and the parties. The latter received an engrossed copy (grosse), thus named
Processtukken en moralisten over aspecten van het laat
17de- en 18de-eeuwse gezinsleven, 2nd ed. (Utrecht:
because of the larger letters. If the grosse got lost, an interested party could get a new copy
Hes, 1985), p. 137. of the minute kept by the notary.
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Fig. 9.8a and b Minute (minuut) of a will, first page and conclusion, 1778. Brabants Historisch
Informatie Centrum, Notarissen in Grave (7128), inv. nr. 102.

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Fig. 9.8c and d Engrossed copy (grosse) of a will, first page and conclusion, 1778.
Brabants Historisch Informatie Centrum, Notarissen in Grave (7128), inv. nr. 113.

The notary preserved his registers or bequeathed them to his heirs or successors, as
we have seen in the case of Jan van Hout (4.4). In 1606, however, the States of Utrecht
ordained that the protocols of deceased notaries should be transferred to the City Hall of
Utrecht or (regarding notaries outside the city) to the provincial court. If a relative
conti­­nued the notary’s practice, he could receive the registers on loan. Anyone could
get access to the registers and get extracts upon payment. Half of the fee was for the
custo­­dian (the secretary of the local court or the registrar of the Court of Utrecht), and
26 A.I. Bosma, Repertorium van notarissen residerende
in Amsterdam, Amstelland, ambachtsheerlijkheden
the other half was for the heirs of the notary. Comparable ordinances were in force in
en geannexeerde gemeenten, 1524-1810 (1998), Amster­­dam (1656), the Generality Lands (Generaliteitslanden) (1665), and
https://assets.amsterdam.nl/publish/pages/753536/
repertoriumnotarissen1998_5.pdf, accessed 2 Dec.
Holland (1670).26
2018.
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To find testaments and other deeds more easily the notary had to provide the protocol
with an alphabetical index, according to an Amsterdam ordinance. In 1672 a fire broke
out in the notarial repository in the Amsterdam City Hall. When the fire had been
extinguished, a team of ten people started drying and ordering the registers. As to the most
damaged minutes it was decided after about a year ‘to help them out of this world in the
most convenient way’. Part was thrown into the river IJ, and the remainder was incinerated.
The less damaged records were kept, but they were no longer accessible. Only recently
were 901 items (entire protocols or parts) that were only lightly damaged made accessible.
However, 852 items cannot be used because of their scorched condition. It is hoped that
special digitization techniques may make the scorched deeds accessible.

In 2017 the ‘Archive of the Amsterdam Notaries 1578-1915’ (30,000 volumes, covering
3.5 kilometres in length) was included in UNESCO’s ‘Memory of the World’ register.
The City Archives want to make this archive fully available online within ten years. Every
day 15,000 scans are made; students and ‘the crowd’ are stimulated to collaborate with the
indexing. As per 1 February 2019 5,953,339 pages had been scanned, while 687 people
were participating in the indexing.27 Previously (since 1953), students and volunteers
already produced two million index cards containing information regarding the contents
of the deeds. However, this index covers but eight percent of the archives.

In 1811, after the annexation by France, the French legislation concerning notaries was
introduced. The French system did not know central preservation of protocols but
assumed that the successor of a deceased notary would take over the protocols. French
legislation was replaced in 1842 by an act that declared the protocols to be State property.
At each district court (rechtbank) a repository was established for notarial protocols.
Old archives from before 1811 kept at town halls and courts were transferred to the new
repositories, as were all protocols that were more than 30 years old. According to the act of
1842, only immediately interested parties, their heirs, and successors in title were entitled
to consult the notarial archives. Access for historical research was not possible. There were
27 https://web.archive.org/web/20190518020239/http://
www.alleamsterdamseakten.nl/overhetproject/,
various unsuccessful attempts to change this. One of these was a petition to government in
archived 18 May 2019). 1885 from both the Historical Society and a group of 31 archivists. Among the signatories

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were the ten men who were to found the Association of Archivists in the Netherlands six
years later (see 12.4). Finally, the act on notaries was changed in 1904, prescribing that all
notarial archives from before 1811 should be transferred to the State Archives where they
would be accessible to everyone. In 1919 the limit moved up to 1842. Municipalities could
receive notarial archives on deposit (just as the judicial archives, see 9.4) on condition of
having a certificated archivist and a repository approved by the Provincial Executive.
Nowadays the transfer period of notarial protocols to an archival repository (where they
are accessible to the public) is not 20 years, as for other public records, but
75 years (and 100 years for testaments).

9.7 Less Paper: Sampling Judicial

Records and Digitizing the
Judicial Process 28

Given the paper-intensive character of judicature, it is no wonder that the urge to reduce
the paper mountain is felt particularly in this domain. In principle there are three ways of
reducing the volume of records: destruction (after appraisal), transfer to other media
needing less space than paper, and upstream digitization of work processes.

As early as 1878 a circular letter from the Ministry of Justice allowed the judiciary to
destroy papers concerning criminal cases after 40 years, except for documents that might
have a permanent value from a scholarly point of view. This vague criterion was replaced in
28 https://www.nationaalarchief.nl/sites/default/
1936 when a schedule for the disposition of papers regarding criminal cases was issued.
files/field-file/selectielijsten/driehoeksverslag_ The schedule was applicable in all five courts of appeal (gerechtshoven), 19 district courts
rechterlijkemacht_2011_versie_terinzage.
pdf, accessed 2 Dec. 2018; National Archives,
(arrondissementsrechtbanken), and 62 sub-district or local courts (kantongerechten).
Rijksarchiefdienst, afdeling Rijksarchiefinspectie, Initially the Ministry wanted to exempt from destruction ‘files of the most important
archiefblok 60 (2.14.10), inv. nr. 123; Ministerie van
Onderwijs, Kunsten en Wetenschappen, afdeling
criminal cases’, but after intervention by National Archivist Roelof Bijlsma the exemption
Kunsten en Wetenschappen (2.14.45), inv. nr. 628. was extended to include all files of cases in which a prison sentence of a year or longer had
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been required by the prosecution or sentenced by the court. According to Bijlsma, these
files would allow sufficient possibility for research by historians as well as criminologists.
Appraisal of records in other cases than criminal ones, was not regulated but left to the
discretion of the National Archivist. He gave permission mainly for the destruction of
administrative records that concerned the finances of the judiciary.

In 1975 the Archives Council (established in 1968) considered introducing a new policy for
appraisal of juridical archives.29 The Council adopted sampling (later called the museum
approach): in each of the five jurisdictions of courts of appeal, the archives from before
1985 of only one local court were to be preserved in its entirety, while only the core data of
the other local courts would be kept. The museum approach was abandoned in 1999 when
another sampling mode was introduced for all courts (except for the Supreme Council):
from each year just one file for each of the various punishable acts would be preserved.
Also exempted from destruction should be records ‘judged to be of special political,
cultural, societal, or scientific interest’. The choice, underpinned by central guidelines, was
left to the archivists of the district courts. At the same time a comparable sampling method
was introduced for civil cases.

Since 2002, primarily those records which allow reconstruction of a court case are
preserved: the judgment and the summons or petition which started the lawsuit. The
registrations (and thus the core data of each case) are always preserved. The other papers
are destroyed, with two exceptions. Once in a decade (or every five years for criminal
cases) one file for each type of case is preserved integrally. Secondly, exempted from
destruction are files that are of extreme value either from a historical point of view or for
the citizen seeking justice and evidence. This indeed is a rather elastic criterion. The
examples mentioned are files of cases that cause a lot of commotion in society, files of cases
that were of great influence on jurisprudence and formed a precedent, or files containing
genealogical records. At each district court a special committee is instructed to elaborate
the criteria for exemption and to supervise the implementation of the appraisal. These
committees consist of archivists, representatives of the judiciary and the prosecution, and
29 Frits Hoorweg, ‘Een inhaaloperatie’, Pro memorie 4
(2002): 437-47.
historians.

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Another way of reducing the volume of archives is substitution: transferring records to
a medium which takes up less space and subsequently destroying the originals. As part
of the PIVOT project of the State Archives (see 11.2.3), an experiment with substitution
of judicial archives with microfilms was carried out between 1991 and 1995. At a cost of
1.75 million guilders, 848 metres of archives were filmed. One of the conclusions of the
experiment was that substitution filming is relatively expensive and only cost-effective if
the stocks are very large, of a great uniformity, and in good shape.

A more promising strategy focuses on solutions upstream (bij de bron). By redesigning

work processes, and particularly by using digital documents as much as possible, the
physical volume of archives can be restrained drastically. This, however, is not the primary
aim of the Judicial Documentation Service (Justid) nor of the introduction of digital
procedures in civil and criminal cases. Justid (founded in 2006) is the agency of the
Ministry of Justice that provides information services to all partners in the ‘chain of
criminal law’ (strafrechtketen), such as police, prosecution, judiciary, or probation. Justid
also manages the common services for exchange and archiving of digital files of the
judicature.

Digitization of procedural law is being introduced in phases. Since 2014 simple criminal
cases are managed digitally, resulting in around three million digital documents annually.30
Digital litigation in asylum and insolvency cases has been introduced, and in pilot projects
at two district courts civil cases are handled digitally. Whether digitization of litigation will
influence the appraisal of records is to be seen. Although a digital archive will require less
space, guaranteeing its long-term integrity, durability, and accessibility will not be cheap.
The costs of digital preservation may necessitate reducing the volume of the terabytes and
therefore not diminish the need for appraisal (see 11.2.3).

30 https://www.rechtspraak.nl/
SiteCollectionDocuments/2018-01-09-
voortgangsrapportage-kei.pdf, accessed 31 May 2019.
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9.8 Conclusion
Litigation is primarily exchanging and assessing documents, hence the narrow relation­
ship between judicial work processes and archiving. Each of the phases of a civil lawsuit
leads to a written outcome, from the petition for a writ of summons to the judgment, and
everything in between (9.1, 9.2). The Dutch term for a lawsuit is proces, and indeed the
proces documents are process bound, steering the process and the activities of participants
acting together in this genre system (see the General Introduction) in which ‘each
partici­­pant makes a recognizable act or move in some recognizable genre, which then
may be followed by a certain range of appropriate generic responses by others’.31 The
documentary outcome can be found in the archives of tribunals and courts, as well as in
those of the parties in a lawsuit. In both categories of archives much has been destroyed
(9.7). What is striking is that in premodern time judges and attorneys made little use of the
archives of the registry (9.3), probably because precedents had less influence than in
modern times.

Juridical archives are important sources for research in a variety of domains (9.4). The
researcher, however, must be aware of the fact that archives do not present a neutral
reflection or representation of a historical reality. In the judicial and notarial archives, one
hears the voice of the authorities. Even when parties are quoted in interrogations and
attestations, these were recorded by a clerk, a judge, or a notary who may have translated
the colloquial statements into legalese (9.5, 9.6, see also the final paragraph of 9.4).
Notaries were important intermediaries, not only in the non-judicial settlement of (legal)
disputes but mainly in drawing up and preserving the authentic outcome of legal acts at
the request of parties (9.5). Quite early government realized that notarial records (9.6) had
to be safely transferred through time so that interested parties could rely on what they or
their predecessors had done in the past.
31 Charles Bazerman, ‘Systems of genres and the
enactment of social intentions’, in Genre and the
new rhetoric, ed. Aviva Freedman and Peter Medway
Modern judicial archives are subject to destruction, to substitution by another medium, or
(London: Taylor & Francis, 1994), p. 97. to digitization because of digitization of the primary work process (9.7). These processes

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(all involving a form of appraisal, that is, assigning value) are paradigmatic for selection,
substitution, and digitization in other domains than the judicature.
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PAGE CHAPTER ARCHIVING PEOPLE

A SOCIAL HISTORY OF
DUTCH ARCHIVES Chapter 10

Archiving the
East Indies
—
10.0 Introduction
10.1 Exploring for Trade
10.2 Making VOC Knowledge
Available
10.3 Mediating Tasman’s Journals
10.4 Pewter Records
10.5 The VOC Archives
10.6 A VOC Merchant’s Archive
l Fig. 10.0 Jan de Baen, The directors (and 10.7 Colonial Affairs
standing, the bookkeeper) of the Hoorn 10.8 Conclusion
Chamber Chamber of the VOC, 1682,
Westfries Museum, Hoorn.
On the table symbols of the riches of the VOC:
the Banckboek (recording the current account
of the Chamber with the Amsterdam Exchange
Bank) and a map of Cochin (now Kochi, India),
where the VOC had a monopoly in pepper and
cinnamon.
ˇ
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Archiving the East Indies
10.0 Introduction
The Dutch explored, traded, warred, and colonized in various continents around the globe.
In this chapter I will treat archiving the East Indies only, restricting myself further by
leaving out the archiving within the Castle of Batavia (now Jakarta), for example. Much of
my research and writing since I became affiliated to Monash University in Melbourne
dealt with the Dutch-Australian connections, in particular the Dutch explorations of the
coasts of Australia and New Zealand. This laid the basis for one third of this chapter.1

In 1602 the States General granted a charter to the United East India Company (Verenigde
Oostindische Compagnie, VOC).2 The VOC obtained the monopoly of all navigation and
trade in Asia. It was a trading company, but it was authorized to enter into treaties with
princes and rulers in the name of the States General, to appoint governors, keep armed
forces, keep the establishments in good order, and ensure enforcement of justice.

The shareholders raised a capital of 6.4 million guilders.3 The average dividend (until 1645
often paid in nutmeg, pepper, or cloves) amounted to 19 to 21 percent per annum. During
the Fourth Anglo-Dutch War (1780-1784) the Company incurred serious financial
1 Sections 10.1-10.5 are largely a reworking of Eric
Ketelaar, ‘Exploration of the archived world. From
problems that it could not overcome. The debts increased in ten years (1780-1790) from 22
De Vlamingh’s Plate to digital realities’, Archives and million to 91 million guilders. Moreover, the VOC lost its establishments in India, Ceylon
manuscripts 36, no. 2 (2008) 13-33; idem, ‘Mapping for
memory’, Queensland History journal 22 (2013): 26-
(now Sri Lanka), the Cape of Good Hope, and the East Indies that were captured by the
39; idem, ‘Travels into and out of the record’, Archives. English (a total value of 11 million guilders). The Batavian Republic nationalized the
The Journal of the British Records Association 39/127
(2013): 17-29.
bankrupt estate of the VOC in 1796 and in 1800 the curtain fell. The VOC was liquidated,
2 Femme S. Gaastra, The Dutch East India Company.
and the State took over all assets and the debt of 219 million guilders (one third of the total
Expansion and decline, trans. Peter Daniels (Zutphen: national debt!).
Walburg Pers, 2003).
3 On the VOC shares and the stockmarket see 13.5 and
J.G. van Dillen, Het oudste aandeelhoudersregister van
The history of the VOC and its influence in Asia and the Netherlands has been and is still
de Kamer Amsterdam der Oost-Indische Compagnie fascinating researchers with different interests, not least in post-colonial historiography.
(’s-Gravenhage: Nijhoff, 1958); Lodewijk Petram,
The world’s first stock exchange, trans. Lynne Richards
The archiving by the VOC has been treated in various studies and from different
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2014). viewpoints as well. Earlier (1.4) I treated the personnel administration of the VOC,

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Archiving the East Indies
which in its time was quite unique. Equally unique were the VOC shares, to be discussed
in 13.5. Accounting by the VOC was dealt with in 8.2.4.

In this chapter I first follow the VOC skippers and merchants who had to find new
seafaring routes and territories and had to map them (10.1). Exploration was the work
process reflected in the archiving. After exploration (and conquest!) came trading. In
contrast to the English East India Company, that always concentrated on the direct traffic
between England and Asia, the VOC developed a network of intra-Asian trade routes. For
instance, in Indonesia spices were bought with Indian textiles, and Indian textiles were
bought with Ceylonese cinnamon and Japanese copper, the copper was bought with raw
silk from Bengal.

In all its work processes, the VOC was dependent on information concerning seafaring
routes, countries, people, and goods. That information had to be kept secret from
competitors. Even so, VOC maps and journals found their way abroad or into private
hands and much became public knowledge (10.2). To understand those maps and journals
fully, insight is necessary in their creation, but also in their transmission and mediation to
the present day. This is illustrated with Abel Tasman’s journal of 1642-1643 (10.3).

Long before Tasman sailed south of Australia, VOC skippers had charted the west coast.
4 M.A.P. Meilink-Roelofsz, ‘Hoe rationeel was
de organisatie van de Verenigde Oostindische
Australia’s oldest written record of European exploration is a pewter plate left on the
Compagnie?’, Economisch- en sociaal-historisch western shore by a VOC shipmaster in 1616 (10.4).
jaarboek 44 (1982): 180; Nico Vriend, Het
informatiesysteem en –netwerk van de Verenigde
Oostindische Compagnie. Master’s thesis Universiteit The VOC is a perfect example of what Bruno Latour has described as ‘centres of
Leiden, 2011, https://openaccess.leidenuniv.nl/
handle/1887/18501, accessed 27 Nov. 2018.
calculation’ (10.5). Such a centre conditions and controls events, places, and people from a
See a summary of the thesis: Nico Vriend, distance. The nodes in the VOC’s information network stretching from South East Asia to
‘“An unbelievable amount of paper”. The information
system and network of the Dutch East India Company’,
Amsterdam were the trading posts, led by a director or senior merchant in association
in Colonial legacy in South East Asia. The Dutch with the council of the establishment (a single-headed authority did not exist anywhere in
archives. Jaarboek 11 Stichting Archiefpublicaties,
ed. Charles Jeurgens et al. (’s-Gravenhage: Stichting
the VOC).4 I will trace the archiving practices and the informational relations in the
Archiefpublicaties, 2012), pp. 67-95. network of one of the directors, Wollebrant Geleynssen de Jongh (1594-1674) (10.6).
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Just as the VOC, its successor, the Dutch State (as it was formed after the Batavian
Revolution of 1795) was, as any colonial state, an ‘information-hungry machine’.5 That
machine was controlled by the Ministry of Colonial Affairs. Section 10.7 deals with its
archiving between 1814 and the 1950s and discusses what became of the colonial archives
after the independence of Indonesia in 1945.

10.1 Exploring for Trade

The rationale of the VOC was trading and making a profit by buying and selling gold, silver,
tin, iron, lead, copper, textiles, nutmegs, cloves, and pepper. Exploring foreign lands was
primarily done to discover faster and safer sailing routes and to find new possibilities for
trading—for making money.

The first expedition to explore new trading potentials was the voyage of the Dove
(Duyfken), which sailed from Java on 18 November 1605.6 The crew did not notice the
opening we now call Torres Strait, believing that they were still sailing along the New
5 Ann L. Stoler, ‘Colonial archives and the arts of Guinea coast while, in fact, they had encountered the Queensland coast, on the west side
governance’, Archival science 2 (2002): 100.
of Cape York Peninsula at the Pennefather River. Commanding the ship were captain
6 Jan Ernst Heeres, The part borne by the Dutch in the
discovery of Australia, 1606-1765 (London: Luzac,
Willem Jansz and the supercargo (the chief merchant) Jan Lodewijksz van Rosingeyn.
1899), https://web.archive.org/web/20181008134634/ They recorded the journey in the logbook of the ship, in charts, and in their report to the
http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks05/0501231h.html,
archived 8 Oct. 2018); Günter Schilder, Australia
directors of the VOC in Amsterdam and their representative in the East Indies. These
unveiled. The share of the Dutch navigators in the records have not survived but left references in later reports and sailing instructions.
discovery of Australia (Amsterdam: Theatrum
Orbis Terrarum, 1976); Peter Sigmond and Lous
The cartographer of the VOC in Amsterdam drew the discoveries of the Duyfken on his
H. Zuiderbaan, Dutch discoveries of Australia. maps.
Shipwrecks, treasures, and early voyages off the west
coast (Adelaide: Rigby, 1979).
7 F.C. Wieder, Tasman’s kaart van zijn Australische
In 1623 another VOC skipper, Jan Carstensz, sailed with the Pera along the Queensland
ontdekkingen 1644 ‘de Bonaparte-kaart’ … coast. He evidently had a copy of the report of the Duyfken on board. As late as 1644, when
(’s-Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff, 1942); F.C. Wieder,
Monumenta cartographica, vol. 5 (The Hague: Nijhoff,
Abel Tasman received his instructions to explore the South-land, they contained
1933), p. 177. references to the Duyfken expedition of 1605-1606 and the chart made of that voyage.7

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Tasman charted the whole of the Gulf of Carpentaria and the remainder of the northeast
coast of what is now Australia’s Northern Territory. No journal of this expedition has
survived. However, there are some maps which are clearly based on Tasman’s records. One
of these is the so-called Bonaparte map in the Mitchell Library in Sydney, both in its
8 B.J. Slot, Abel Tasman and the discovery of New
original form and reproduced in marble on the floor of the entrance hall. Recent research
Zealand (Amsterdam: Otto Cramwinckel, 1992), suggests that the Bonaparte map was compiled in Batavia under the direction of Isaac
p. 96; Paul Brunton, ‘Abel Janszoon Tasman—
Australian voyages, missing journals and perplexing
Gilsemans, the merchant travelling with Tasman, and completed before early 1647.8 It is a
charts’, Paper presented at a conference organised by copy of ‘one of the most famous and most beautiful maps ever executed by a Dutch
the Australian National Maritime Museum in Sydney
and Fremantle, May 2006; Grahame Anderson,
cartographer’.9
The merchant of the Zeehaen. Isaac Gilsemans and the
voyages of Abel Tasman (Wellington, Te Papa Press,

9
2001).
Schilder, Australia unveiled, pp. 148, 354, echoing
10.2 Making VOC Knowledge
Wieder, Tasman’s kaart, p. 62. Phyllis Mander-
Jones, The Tasman map of 1644. Historical note and
description of the manuscript map in the Mitchell
Available 10

Library, Sydney (Sydney: Trustees of the Public Library

of New South Wales, 1948).
Each of the 8,000 ships which in the 17th and 18th centuries went out and returned for the
10 Slot, Abel Tasman, p. 96; C.J. Zandvliet, Mapping for
money. Maps, plans and topographic paintings and
VOC was a record-creating entity in itself (see also 7.3.2).11 Around 1790 the ship’s box kept in
their role in Dutch overseas expansion during the the shipmaster’s cabin contained more than 80 instructions and regulations issued by the
16th and 17th centuries (Amsterdam: Batavian Lion
International, 1998, 2nd ed. 2002); Peter Burke,
board of directors, known as the Lords XVII (Heren XVII). The captain, the three steersmen,
A social history of knowledge. From Gutenberg to the supercargo, and the surgeon all kept a journal. Most skippers also held an archive of copies
Diderot (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000), pp. 157-58.
of their journals of earlier voyages, sometimes even from other skippers. Charts and drawings
11 C.A. Davids, Zeewezen en wetenschap. De wetenschap
en de ontwikkeling van de navigatietechniek in Neder­
were made. Propositions to the ship’s council were recorded, its meetings minuted. Letters
land tussen 1585 en 1815 (Amsterdam: De Bataafsche were written, testaments and inventories were drawn up, sentences meted out and registered,
Leeuw, 1986), pp. 299-300; J.R. Bruijn, Observaties
onderweg (Leiden, 2003); Herman Ketting, Leven,
bookkeepers and assistants kept the cargo book, the muster roll, and the ship’s pay-ledger up
werk en rebellie aan boord van Oost-Indiëvaarders to date (see 1.4). The crew and the passengers were participants of a genre system (see the
(1595-±1650) (Amsterdam: Aksant, 2002), pp. 101-03;
Jaap R. Bruijn, Schippers van de VOC in de achttiende
General Introduction), acting together but each within his or her own set of genres.
eeuw aan de wal en op zee (Amsterdam: De Bataafsche Everything was transformed into what Bruno Latour calls ‘a flat surface of paper that can be
Leeuw, 2008), pp. 176-77.
archived, pinned on a wall and combined with others’.12 This echoes the inscription on the
12 Bruno Latour, Science in action. How to follow
scientists and engineers through society (Cambridge
general map of the Dutch discoveries in Australia, dating from around 1666, which reads:
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), p. 227. ‘Here are projected on a flat surface (…) all the sailing routes, and newly found lands, observed
 237a | 10 |
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Archiving the East Indies
and sailed (…) under the direction and command of Commander Abel Janssen Tasman ( …).’
For more information, the map referred to Tasman’s journal.13

But how could people get access to Tasman’s journal of his exploration of Tasmania, the
west coast of New Zealand, and the Fiji and Tonga islands in 1642-1643? As journals and
maps were part of the knowledge base of the VOC, they formed part of the VOC’s assets,
to be kept secret. However, directors, for instance, had copies of journals and maps made
for private use.14 Of the journal of Abel Tasman’s voyage only private copies exist: one in
the National Archives of the Netherlands, another (‘a very faulty one’15) in the British
13 F.C. Wieder, Monumenta cartographica, vol. 4
(The Hague: Nijhoff, 1932), p. 138 and plate 95.
Library (acquired in the 18th century by Joseph Banks, one of Cook’s captains), and a third
14 B.J. Slot, ‘Other archives of VOC institutions
one in the Mitchell Library in the State Library of New South Wales in Sydney. The latter
and officials’, in M.A.P. Meilink-Roelofsz et al., was made for Salomon Sweers, a member of the Council of the Indies. VOC director
De archieven van de Verenigde Oostindische
Compagnie. The Archives of the Dutch East India
Nicolaes Witsen must have had access to Tasman’s journal as well; in his book on Tartary
Company (1602-1795) (’s-Gravenhage: Sdu uitgeverij and neighbouring regions he quotes extensively from the journal and reproduces some of
Koninginnegracht, 1992),p. 78, https://web.
archive.org/web/20190531115715/https://www.
the illustrations made by the supercargo Isaac Gilsemans, a skilled draughtsman.
nationaalarchief.nl/sites/default/files/afbeeldingen/
toegangen/NL-HaNA_1.04.02_introduction-VOC.
pdf, archived 31 May 2019.
When Witsen’s publication reached the public in 1705 it was not the first time they heard
15 According to G.C. Woide, who translated the journal
of Tasman’s expedition in the 1640s. Maps had already been published showing the
for Sir Joseph Banks in 1776: original draft in Turnbull cartographic outcome of Tasman’s voyage. The official VOC mapmaker—between 1633
Library, Wellington, New Zealand, MS-2119, fair draft
in British Library, Add. Ms. 8947.
and 1705 always a member of the Blaeu family—used the charts and logbooks of the VOC
16 Zandvliet, Mapping for money; C.J. Zandvliet, ‘VOC
captains and steersmen to correct maps and seamen’s guides for use during subsequent
maps and drawings’, in Meilink-Roelofsz, De archieven voyages.16 On arrival of a ship from the East Indies, the mapmaker was the first to see the
van de Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie, pp. 83-99.
logbooks. He had to transfer the logs and maps to the VOC headquarters. But the Blaeu
17 Often referred to as ‘the Secret Atlas of the VOC’; this
term was invented in the early 20th century by Wieder,
family also used this information in their private business, selling hand-drawn and
Tasman’s kaart, p. 100. engraved maps on the open market. It is therefore no wonder that the cartographic data
18 Erlend P.J.M. de Groot, De Atlas Blaeu-Van der Hem. from Tasman’s voyage in 1642-1643 were included in two of Blaeu’s world maps and a
De verzamelde wereld van een 17de-eeuwse liefhebber
(’t Goy-Houten: HES & De Graaf Publishers, 2001);
Blaeu globe between 1645 and 1648. The maps made during Tasman’s voyage (together
The Atlas Blaeu-van der Hem of the Austrian National with maps of earlier discoveries of the north coast of Australia) were copied around 1670
Library, ed. Günter Schilder, Bernard Aikema, and
Peter van der Krogt, 8 vols. (’t Goy-Houten: HES &
together with other VOC maps17 and ended up in the collection of the 17th-century
De Graaf Publishers, 1996-2011). Amsterdam lawyer Laurens van der Hem (now in the National Library in Vienna).18

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Like Van der Hem, wealthy merchants started to collect maps and curiosities from abroad
to have the world, so to say, in their hands—and below their feet! In the large Burgerzaal
(the heart of the City Hall of Amsterdam built in 1656) a world map and a celestial
hemisphere were inlaid in the floor in marble and copper. By going through the hall, the
Amsterdam burghers were literally walking on heaven and earth.19 The world map on the
floor was drawn from Blaeu’s world map of 1648 which showed Tasman’s charting of
Tasmania. The French savant Melchisédech Thévenot asserted to have drawn his map of
Australia20 (published in 1663) from the example on the floor of the Amsterdam City Hall.
From the Thévenot map the 18th-century English map engraver Bowen drew A Complete
Map of the Southern Continent survey’d by Capt. Abel Tasman & depicted by order of the
19 Schilder, Australia unveiled, pp. 374-77. In 1746 the
maps were replaced by new ones, which now also
East India Company in Holland in the Stadt House at Amsterdam (1744). By then Tasman’s
showed New Zealand. travels had become public knowledge, not only through the maps, but also because
20 In fact, it was an almost exact copy of another Blaeu abstracts and adaptations of Tasman’s journal and related material had been published.21
map (1659), included in the huge atlas (now in Berlin)
presented to the Great Elector Friedrich Wilhelm by
his friend, the Dutch general and connoisseur John
Maurice, Prince of Nassau-Siegen: Australia in maps.
Great maps in Australia’s history from the National
10.3 Mediating Tasman’s Journals
Library’s collection, ed. John Clark (Canberra: National
Library of Australia, 2007), p. 32; Schilder, Australia
unveiled, p. 402; Kees Zandvliet, ‘Golden opportunities
A journal or any other document speaks not out of itself, it speaks in dialogue with the
in geopolitics. Cartography and the Dutch East India reader/viewer, who may be outside the visible text, but never outside its invisible narrative.
Company during the lifetime of Abel Tasman’, in
Terra Australis. The furthest shore, ed. William Eisler
This is especially true for a journal like Tasman’s.
and Bernard Smith (Sydney: International Cultural
Corporation of Australia, 1988), p. 80.
We do not have the original ship’s log, kept up to date day after day, but ‘a consecutive
21 Heeres, Abel Janszoon Tasman’s journal, pp. 81-7;
Schilder, Australia unveiled, pp. 139-57; Slot, Abel
narrative, which was most likely digested from the regular ship’s journal in the course of
Tasman, pp. 96-100. the voyage’.22 After Tasman’s arrival in Batavia, he must have edited the logbook of his ship,
22 Heeres, Abel Janszoon Tasman’s journal, p. 61. Heemskerck, inserting extracts from the proceedings (resoluties) of the ships’ council
23 On 22 December 1643 the Governor-General in (which had been registered separately in three copies) and adding the illustrations made on
Batavia sent a short report to the Heren XVII in
Amsterdam announcing that the journals of Tasman
board of the other ship, Zeehaen. The final version was written by two VOC clerks, then
and Visscher would be sent later: National Archives, checked by Tasman and signed by him. This account was sent to Amsterdam, with five
VOC (1.04.02), inv. nr. 1142, fol. 7verso-8, 92-93,
published (with translation) by Heeres, Abel Janszoon
more copies, in December 1643, more than five months after Tasman’s return to Batavia.23
Tasman’s journal, p. 144. Tasman, in editing the journal, must have considered its reception by the VOC directors.
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Fig. 10.1 Journal of Abel Tasman, 1642-1643,

first page. National Archives, Aanwinsten 1e
afd. ARA (1.11.01.01), inv.nr. 121.

24 Slot, Abel Tasman, pp. 64-5; Anderson, The merchant Evidence of Tasman’s editing (some would say falsification) is the change he made in the
of the Zeehaen, p. 100.
chart of New Zealand, effacing the entrance to what now is Cook Strait.24 Like any other
25 The legalistic organization, ed. Sim B. Sitkin and
Robert J. Bies (Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications,
record, it was ‘designed—implicitly or explicitly—to produce an effect in some kind of
1994), p. 53. audience, which itself actively uses records to interpret events’.25

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Fig. 10.2 Journal of Abel Tasman, 1642-1643, last page.

National Archives, Aanwinsten 1e afd. ARA (1.11.01.01), inv.nr. 121.
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I mentioned the three copies of Tasman’s journal: the one in the Mitchell Library, the
Banks’ copy in the British Library, and the copy in the National Archives of the
Netherlands in The Hague. The latter, signed by Tasman himself, contains numerous
charts, outlines of the coasts, and illustrations, most of which are missing from the copy in
the Mitchell Library. That one, the so-called Huydecoper copy, has many more details in
latitude and longitude calculations. Moreover, it contains the first accurate mapping of the
entrance of Cook Street. The Tasman journal, acquired by the National Archives in 1867, is
considered not to be one of the six originals that were sent from Batavia to the Amsterdam
VOC office in December 1643. Therefore, puristic archivists do not consider it to be part of
the VOC archives.

Today, Tasman’s journal is mediated in various ways by archivists and manuscript curators.
The Tasman journal in the State Library in Sydney has been digitized and is available on
the website of the State Library. The catalogue entry is very detailed, providing much
contextual information (and a link to an English translation of the journal) which may
assist the reader in his or her use of the journal in any of its versions.26 The catalogue entry
mentions the existence of the copy in The Hague, but does not provide a link to either the
National Archives or to the 1898 edition by Heeres containing an English translation
(which has been digitized for Gutenberg Australia and put on the web) and a facsimile of
the Dutch original in The Hague. The catalogue entries for the original journal and the
edition by Heeres are not cross-referenced.

Looking for ‘Tasman’ on the English version of the website of the National Archives of the
Netherlands yields a list of 26 archives. The last one is cryptically labelled (1.11.01.01
Aanwinsten Eerste Afdeling) and appears to include a link to the digitized Tasman journal
26 http://acms.sl.nsw.gov.au/item/itemDetailPaged.
aspx?itemID=423571, accessed 7 March 2019.
and the page-by-page transcription made by a researcher.27 The website does not contain
27 https://web.archive.org/web/20190909095631/
any contextual information relating to the journal, nor to any of the other versions and
https://www.nationaalarchief.nl/onderzoeken/ translations. The description in the VOC inventory on the website of the National
archief/1.11.01.01/inventaris?inventarisnr=1
21&activeTab=gahetnascan&afbeelding=NL-
Archives does not link to the digital scans elsewhere on that website.
HaNA_1.11.01.01_121_0001, archived 9 Sept. 2019.

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10.4 Pewter Records

Archiving the East Indies 28

In 1616 Dirck Hartog, shipmaster of the Unity (Eendracht), was the first European to set
foot on the shore of Western Australia, near today’s Perth. He left a pewter plate on the
shore nailed to a pole with the date of his arrival and departure and the names of the
supercargo (the chief merchant), the shipmaster, the under-merchant, and the upper-
steersman (first mate).

28 J.P. Sigmond, ‘Two pewter plates’, in In het kielzog.

Maritiem-historische studies aangeboden aan Jaap R.
Bruijn bij zijn vertrek als hoogleraar zeegeschiedenis
aan de Universiteit Leiden, ed. Leo Akveld et al.
(Amsterdam: De Bataafse Leeuw, 2003), pp. 245-56;
Peter Sigmond, ‘Cultural heritage on a piece of pewter’,
in Dutch Connections 2006. 400 Years of Australian-
Dutch maritime links 1606-2006 (Perth: Australian
National Maritime Museum, 2006), pp. 72-85;
Ketelaar, ‘Exploration of the archived world’; Wendy
van Duivenvoorde, ‘Dirk Hartog was here! His 1616
inscription plate and Dutch ship communications’, in
A Touch of Dutch. Maritime, military, migration and
mercantile connections on the Western Third 1616-
Fig. 10.3a Pewter plate left by VOC shipmaster Fig. 10.3b Transcription of the Hartog plate.
2016, ed. Nonja Peters (Subiaco, Western Australia: Dirck Hartog on the shore of Western Australia Australian National Maritime Museum,
Carina Hoang Communications, 2016), pp. 14-37. in 1616. Rijksmuseum NG-NM-825. Sydney.
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In 1697 the plate was discovered by Willem de Vlamingh’s steersman and sent to VOC
headquarters in Amsterdam. This plate, together with other VOC artefacts, became State
property in 1799 and is now in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. De Vlamingh replaced the
Hartog plate with a new pewter plate, recording both Hartog’s and his own landing. On his
voyage De Vlamingh had left wooden tablets recording his arrival on Saint Paul Island and
on Amsterdam Island. Peter Sigmond of the Rijksmuseum looks upon these as letters, as
messages for the first reader to come ashore and—once read—becoming more or less
meaningless. But on Hartog Island, De Vlamingh did not use wood, but pewter, the same
material Hartog had used earlier. De Vlamingh’s plate, with his inscription and the text of
his predecessor, may be interpreted as a letter, but it can also be seen as a memorial tablet
meant to remain as a monument in honour of Hartog. The Hartog plate and the Vlamingh
one are ‘at first sight, identical objects but because of their contexts and contents they are
very different in meaning and significance,’ Sigmond concludes.

In 1818 the De Vlamingh plate of 1697 was taken to Paris by a French expedition and
29 J.C.M. Pennings, ‘Origin and administration of the finally, in 1947, presented to the government of Australia and transferred to the Western
VOC archives’, in Meilink-Roelofsz, De archieven
van de Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie, pp. 30-
Australia Museum. It is the country’s oldest written record of European exploration. Older
46, and B.J. Slot, M.C.J.C. van Hoof and F. Lequin, yet is the 1616 Hartog plate, of which the museum displays a replica of the original in
‘Notes on the Use of the VOC Archives’, ibidem,
pp. 47-69. Available at https://web.archive.org/
Amsterdam. The replica is a gift from the Dutch government (1966). However, supposing
web/20190423121814/http://www.tanap.net/ the internationally agreed rules for solving archival claims were to be applied, one may
content/voc/history/history_managevoc.htm,
archived 23 April 2019 and https://web.archive.org/
wonder if the original Hartog plate should not be returned to its provenance, the territory
web/20190530102116/http://www.tanap.net/content/ where the record was created. In any case, the Hartog plate is a joint heritage (see 10.7)
voc/archnl/archnl_intro.htm, archived 30 May 2019;
Meilink-Roelofsz, ‘Hoe rationeel was de organisatie
shared by the Dutch and the Australians.
van de Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie?’, ;
J. Gawronski, De equipagie van de Hollandia en

10.5 The VOC Archives

de Amsterdam. VOC-bedrijvigheid in 18de-eeuws 29
Amsterdam (Amsterdam: De Bataafsche Leeuw, 1996);
Adrien Delmas, ‘From travelling to history. An outline
of the VOC writing system during the 17th century’,
in Written culture in a colonial context. Africa and the The VOC was managed by the Lords XVII (Heren XVII), a federal board of directors
Americas, 1500-1900, ed. Adrien Delmas and Nigel
Penn (Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press,
representing the six Chambers in Amsterdam, Middelburg, Delft, Rotterdam, Enkhuizen,
2013), pp. 95-122. and Hoorn (see Fig. 10.0).

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They decided on the sale of the goods from Asia, the number of ships and men to be sent,
the nature and quantity of the cargo, the appointment of the Governors-General and
governors, and the composition of the Council in Batavia. The accounts had to be
examined and approved. The General Letter (Generale Missive), a survey of the economic
and political situation in Asia, made up in Batavia from the reports from offices in the
different regions, had to be discussed. All these activities resulted in an extensive
administration and, consequently, in a large number of records, both in the Netherlands
and the VOC offices at the Cape and in Asia.

The VOC instructed its captains to keep a careful record or daily journal so

that we may get full information of all your doings and experiences, and the
Company obtain due and perfect knowledge of the situation and natural features
of these regions, in return for the heavy expenses to which she is put by this
expedition.30

The captains also had to furnish ‘fresh material for the correction of the charts now in use,
and perhaps also of the courses to be kept’.31 Drawings, journals, maps, and charts were
essential tools for the VOC, both for the skippers and the directors. Each ship was supplied
with four sets (for the captain, upper-steersman, under-steersman, and the third mate) of
30 to 50 parchment maps, with globes and navigation instructions, totalling around 200 to
300 guilders per ship. Over 4,700 ships were equipped by the VOC during its existence. It
is estimated that the VOC mapmakers drew around 70,000 parchment maps between 1602
and 1753 (when printed maps were introduced). Many maps were destroyed by the VOC
because they were obsolete. Sometimes a parchment map was re-used, for example as a
book cover.32 After each journey logs and maps had to be delivered at East India House in
30 Heeres, The part borne by the Dutch, p. 20.
Amsterdam. There, in the navigation room, all the maps for the ships were inventoried,
31 Heeres, The part borne by the Dutch, p. 74.
updated, and kept ready for another journey. Furthermore, large maps and globes
32 Ruud Paesi, ‘Op perkament getekend. Productie en
omvang van het hydrografische bedrijf van de VOC’,
decorated the committee rooms of the directors to facilitate decision-making. The ships’
Caert Thresoor 29, no.1 (2010): 1-8. logs and the maps that formed part of the reports from Asia were kept in the records room.
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The maps and other records were a tool for knowledge management, enlarging and
enhancing the knowledge base of the Company. This knowledge base was one of the VOC
assets, to be kept secret from competitors, especially the British and the French. However,
VOC records found their way abroad or into private hands, and foreign agents acquired
valuable information, profiting from the open information society that was the Dutch
Republic.33

In 10.0 I called the VOC a ‘centre of calculation’. This concept was proposed by Bruno
Latour, who argued that long-distance operations are made possible by somehow ‘bringing
home’ events, places, and people by making them mobile while keeping them stable
(allowing to move them to and fro without deforming them) and making them
combinable. Latour uses the term ‘immutable and combinable mobiles’, which can ‘be
cumulated, aggregated, or shuffled like a pack of cards’.34 The centres of calculation
condense the incoming primary information into secondary, which is then aggregated to
new information of the third order and so forth: a never-ending ‘cascade of the fourth, fifth
and nth order inscription’.35 Each aggregation adds value and provides new insight.

Latour’s point is proven by the VOC. The information which the VOC mapmaker distilled
from the logs and charts enabled the Company to do more than was possible on board the
ships. In their turn, the draughtsmen on board could observe more (and from a different
perspective) than the indigenous people on the coast. Aggregation of information is
33 Clé Lesger, The rise of the Amsterdam market and characteristic for the VOC; the trading posts in different places all over Asia sent their
information exchange. Merchants, commercial
expansion and change in the spatial economy of the
reports and copies of correspondence to Batavia, where they were copied into a register of
Low Countries, c.1550-1630 (Aldershot: Ashgate, incoming letters but also recapitulated and summarized in one single Generale Missive,
2006); Harold J. Cook, Matters of exchange.
Commerce, medicine, and science in the Dutch Golden
the annual general letter, an aggregation of the second order, reporting on everything the
Age (New Haven/London: Yale University Press, VOC was interested in, using a fixed classification.36 In Amsterdam these reports were
2007), pp. 58-69.
integra­ted into the ‘Letters and papers received’ (Overgekomen brieven en papieren): many
34 Latour, Science in action, p. 223.
volumes for one year, totalling 2,942 volumes between 1614 and 1794. Through combining
35 Latour, Science in action, p. 234.
those letters and papers, both copies and originals, and by using an established classifi­­ca­
36 https://web.archive.org/web/20161028025451/http://
resources.huygens.knaw.nl/vocgeneralemissiven/
tion and several indexes, the information was reformatted, recontextualized, and aggre­
index_html_en, archived 28 Oct. 2016. gated. This enormous archive constituted the basis for knowledge, control, and power.

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The secretary (advocaat) of the VOC was responsible for the archives. He held office in
East India House in Amsterdam. Assisted by two deputies, he prepared the meeting of the
Amsterdam directors and the meeting of the Heren XVII, he wrote the proceedings,
managed the correspondence, and kept the archives which were stored partly at East India
House and partly in the warehouse at the VOC shipyard. Some dozens of clerks worked in
the VOC writing office (schrijfcomptoir).

The proceedings (resoluties) were the outcome of collegiate decision-making and, just as
in other collegiate bodies (see 3.2), they formed the backbone of the archives (see 13.4).
The resoluties of the Heren XVII were made in draft (minuut) from which a fair copy was
written. All people present signed this at the end of the meeting. Each chamber received a
copy. The resoluties were made accessible by marginalia and realia.37 Marginalia were the
short notes in the margin characterizing the contents of each resolutie. Marginating
(marginaleren) was the usual way of making resoluties accessible throughout the Republic
(see Fig. 3.3). In the VOC a marginalist copied the marginalia in chronological order to
make a table of contents that was bound in front of the resoluties book.

The increasing number of resoluties in the 18th century necessitated a new finding aid.
This was known as the realia, an alphabetical index of subjects with a short description
of the resoluties regarding each subject. Other realia were also made from the
outgoing letter books of the Heren XVII. Not all resoluties were made accessible by
realia: the realist made a selection. The keywords remained more or less the same over
time. The Zeeland and Amsterdam Chambers (who shared the presidency) made
indexes on the resoluties of the Heren XVII for their own use, but they lent them for
comparison and copying.

In 1737 the Zeeland Chamber appointed Thomas Cunningham as librarian-archivist

(bibliothecaris-chartermeester) and instructed him (Fig. 10.4) to make ‘a so-called
37 Vriend, Het informatiesysteem; Vriend,
index’—apparently the index was not yet widely known—on all minutes of the
‘“An unbelievable amount of paper”’. Heren XVII (at least as from 1700) and to keep this index up to date.
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Fig. 10.4 Instruction for the librarian-archivist

(bibliothecaris-chartermeester) of the
Zeeland Chamber of the VOC, 1737. National
Archives, Radermacher (1.10.69), inv. nr. 354.

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Fig. 10.5 Inventory of the archives of the

Zeeland Chamber of the VOC made
by librarian-archivist (bibliothecaris-
chartermeester) Thomas Cunningham, 1737.
National Archives, Radermacher (1.10.69),
inv. nr. 354.
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On 22 January 1743, the first two volumes covering the years 1602 to 1742, were handed
to the directors of the Zeeland Chamber. They are still in the archives, with the successive
volumes until 1796. In this repertory the resoluties are set out alphabetically according to
the initial letter of each subject. The resoluties are listed chronologically under each letter.

Cunningham checked the contents of the two muniment rooms shortly after his
appointment. For this, he used two existing catalogues in which the books and papers were
described under alphabetically ordered headings: deeds (acten) under A, letters (brieven)
under B, etc. The items under each heading were numbered. Heading B, for example,
comprised around 700 items. At the time of Cunningham’s check only 65 items were
missing. In the inventory he made (Fig. 10.5), he noted that the journals of Ceylon
1686-1687 and Colombo 1685-1686 had been sent to the Amsterdam Chamber in
1688—apparently, they had never been returned.

The Zeeland Chamber was fairly late in appointing an archivist when Cunningham joined
in 1737. In 1695 the Amsterdam Chamber established a muniment room (charterkamer)
because ‘the books and papers, received from Asia from time to time, have already grown
to such a quantity, which will but increase in the years to come’.38 In 1699 the function of
bibliothecarius was created.39 His task was ‘to supervise the charters and papers of the
Company and to keep them in good order and register them satisfactorily’. Pieter van Rijn
was appointed, although he already had the function of a bookkeeper. His deputy as an
archivist was Pieter Weseman, who continued his work as a clerk. Both received an extra
salary of 200 guilders and 50 guilders respectively, on top of the salary for their main
function. The measures taken in 1695 and 1699 were possibly related to the assignment
given in 1693 to VOC advocaat Pieter van Dam to describe the ‘constitution, governance,
and trade’ of the VOC in a comprehensive way. Van Dam had to do much research in the
archives. After the death of Pieter van Rijn in 1726 it took 16 years for a new archivist to be
appointed, an indication that the archives did not have high priority at the time.
38 Pennings, ‘Origin’, p. 33.
39 National Archives, VOC (1.04.02), inv. nr. 245, 6 July
The chests with letters and papers that arrived with the ships from the Indies had to be
1699. brought to East India House as quickly as possible. When the chests were opened at the

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Zeeland Chamber, the archivist had to be present, according to his instruction.40 He had
to order the documents and had them bound and stored in the cupboards in the room
adjacent to the meeting room of the directors. The archivist had to keep an inventory of
all documents.

The Generale Missive formed part of the annual batch of papers sent home to be read and
summarized by the Hague Committee (Haags Besogne). This committee of 14 members
had to read all the papers that had arrived from the East. They had to draft the reply that
was to be sent by the Heren XVII to the Indies. Over a course of seven to ten weeks, the
Besogne met in The Hague, in the permanent lodging of the VOC on Bleijenburg. Every
day (except Wednesday afternoon, Saturday afternoon, and Sunday) work continued from
9 to 12 p.m. and from 3.30 to 5.30 p.m.41

Reading the letters and reports was difficult when they were not much to the point or when
they were poorly structured or badly written. In such cases the gentlemen of the Besogne
could only

run through it without reading distinctly (…) particularly because of the uselessly
small letters etc. which, in combination with the awkward way of writing (…)
seem to be used continuously to pull the wool over our eyes in order so that it
would take a lot of effort for us to read much, but not comprehend it all.42

40 National Archives, Radermacher (1.10.69), inv. nr. 354. The Amsterdam Chamber arranged the Overgekomen brieven en papieren chronologically
41 National Archives, Radermacher (1.10.69), inv. nr. 50. at first, then according to their nature and, finally, geographically. The Zeeland Chamber,
42 Vriend, Het informatiesysteem, p. 85 quoting a letter however, arranged the documents differently: first the letters from the Governor-General
from the Heren XVII of 10 September 1738: National
Archives, VOC (1.04.02), inv. nr. 329.
and Council and then the papers from each of the various offices in geographical order.
43 Louisa Balk and Frans van Dijk, Inventaris van het
The Zeeland arrangement seems to have been more in agreement with the system by
archief van de gouverneur-generaal en raden van which the documents were created. The division of tasks in both the Council of the Indies
Indië (Hoge Regering) van de Verenigde Oostindische
Compagnie en taakopvolgers, 1612-1812 (Jakarta:
in Batavia and in the Haags Besogne was based on a division of the correspondence
Arsip Nasional Republik Indonesia, 2002) p. 26. according to the various offices.43
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Fig. 10.6 The flow of documents in the VOC network 1737-1750, from Nico Vriend,
Het informatiesysteem en –netwerk van de Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie. Master’s thesis
Universiteit Leiden, 2011.

The Overgekomen brieven en papieren received in 1687, for example, consist of 13 volumes.
Three were volumes of Batavia’s letter-book of incoming documents (Batavia’s ingekomen
brievenboek) and the other ten volumes were reports and other documents: two
containing the Generale missive and reports on the conduct of business in Asia, especially
in Batavia; four volumes from Bengal and Coromandel (these had been sent directly to the
Republic, not via Batavia); two on Ceylon and Banda; one on Ambon, Makassar, Timor,
and Malacca (now Melaka, Malaysia); and one (sent overland via Basra, modern-day Iraq,
and Aleppo, modern-day Syria) from Malabar and Surat (India) and Persia (now Iran).

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Moreover, there were another two volumes with letters and papers sent directly from Cape
of Good Hope, and copies of the resoluties and letters sent by the Governor-General and
Council in Batavia. In the 18th century, papers from China also went directly to the
Republic. The number of volumes of Overgekomen brieven en papieren rose to more than
20, 30, or even 40 volumes annually in the 18th century.

What is left of the immense VOC archives, created between 1602 and its dissolution in
1800? The bulk was destroyed in the early 19th century (see 3.6.1). What we have in the
Netherlands, in the National Archives, are some 1,300 metres, including nearly 3,000
volumes of incoming documents from Asia to the Amsterdam Chamber and another 2,991
volumes of the pay-ledgers from the 18th century.
44 Michael Karabinos in a conversation with the author
proposed this term for records that are, strictly
speaking, not created by the VOC but that could not VOC records and ‘VOC-adjacent’ records44 can, however, also be found in Jakarta, Cape
have been created without the VOC, for example the
records of the churches in the VOC establishments.
Town, Chennai (Madras), Colombo, Kuala Lumpur, London (records from Malacca), and
45 In the annexe to the application for Memory
Paris (several hundred VOC maps), totalling 2.5 kilometres (3.2 kilometres if one counts
of the World status https://web.archive.org/ all archives from the Dutch period).45 These records often fill the gaps in the Dutch
web/20190531131521/http://www.unesco.org/new/
fileadmin/MULTIMEDIA/HQ/CI/CI/pdf/mow/
archives. The instructions for Willem de Vlamingh, for example, cannot be found in the
nomination_forms/netherlands+voc+archives.pdf, Netherlands, but fortunately a copy has been preserved in the VOC archives in Cape
archived 31 May 2019, the numbers are: Cape Town
325 metres, Colombo 310, Chennai 64, Jakarta 1,800,
Town.46 The records kept in the Netherlands, on the other hand, form a unique source for
total: 2,499 metres. According to The archives of the the study of the history of the countries in the large area navigated and controlled by the
Dutch East India Company (VOC) and the local
institutions in Batavia (Jakarta) (Brill: Leiden and
VOC: they often contain information that cannot be found in the countries concerned.
Boston, 2007), p. 177 the VOC holdings in Jakarta are The VOC archives are a joint heritage. The concept of joint heritage was developed by the
2,500 metres and 450 metres in Cape Town.
International Council on Archives and accepted by the General Conference of UNESCO
46 Schilder, Voyage to the Great South Land, p. 73,
endnote 1.
in 1978 as one of the basic principles which should guide the solution of conflicting
47 Hervé Bastien, ‘Reference dossier on archival
archival claims.47 The concept of joint heritage is advisable where archives
claims’, Janus. Special issue: Proceedings of the
twentynineth,thirtieth and thirty-first International
Conference of the Round Table on Archives (1998),
form part of the national heritages of two or more States but cannot be divided
pp. 209-68, available on https://web.archive.org/ without destroying its juridical, administrative, and historical value (…). The
web/20180611143959/https://www.ica.org/en/
reference-dossier-archival-claims, archived 11 June
practical result of the application of this concept is that the archives group is left
2018. physically intact in one of the countries concerned, where it is treated as part of
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the national archival heritage, with all the responsibilities with respect to security
and handling implied thereby for the State acting as owner and custodian of that
heritage. The States sharing this joint heritage should then be given rights equal to
those of the custodial State.48

UNESCO has registered the VOC archives as Memory of the World, on a joint nomination
by five countries. A large project is underway to preserve all the VOC archives in the
world, to connect and to describe all components of the VOC archives in a detailed ‘super
inventory’ accessible on the Internet. Moreover, the National Archives of the Netherlands,
within the framework of the government’s Shared Cultural Heritage Programme, supports
training of professionals and digitization projects in countries where the VOC or its sister
the West India Company (WIC) were active: Australia, Brasil, India, Indonesia, Japan,
South Africa, Sri Lanka, Surinam, and the United States.

10.6 A VOC Merchant’s Archive

49

In the back office of the Alkmaar City Archives stands a large cedar chest. Oral tradition
has identified it as the archive chest of Wollebrant Geleynssen de Jongh (1594-1674), kept
during his more than 35 years as an employee of the VOC. However, since the lockplate
shows the coat of arms of the Wildeman family, it is unlikely that the chest was actually
Geleynssen’s. Nevertheless, we know that Geleynssen owned a large archive, probably
stored in the ‘Indian’ chest mentioned in the inventory drawn up after his death. In the late
19th century the archive was transferred to the city archives from the main church, the
Grote Kerk, where the archive had been preserved since 1824. In that year the estate of
Geleynssen was divided, according to Geleynssen’s will that had instituted an entail
48 Bastien, ‘Reference dossier’; Displaced archives, ed. (fideicommis) for 150 years. Geleynssen’s papers had been part of the entail and therefore
James Lowry (London/New York: Routledge, 2017).
they were scrupulously preserved by the executors together with the records of their
49 H.W. van Santen, VOC-dienaar in India. Geleynssen
de Jongh in het land van de Groot-Mogol (Franeker:
trusteeship. In 1824 the 26 heirs (including the Church) proposed to the executive of
Van Wijnen, 2001). the city to join the papers with the city archives as a memorial to Geleynssen.50 As it took

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another 75 years for Alkmaar to appoint a city archivist, in the meantime the archive was
entrusted to the sexton of the Grote Kerk.

In 1912 Geleynssen’s archives were divided. The archives created by Geleynssen in the
service of the VOC were lent to the National Archives, while his personal papers and the
administration of the executors remained in the Alkmaar City Archives. Geleynssen’s
archives offer a unique insight into the administration of the VOC establishments in the
17th century. As the introduction to the inventory of the VOC archives states, private
archives of officials, like Geleynssen, often present a picture that is only incompletely
reflected in the archives of the VOC and its establishments. Moreover, they show ‘that a
much greater and more varied correspondence was carried on than appears from the
documents in the official VOC archives’.51
Geleynssen started his career as an assistant merchant in Banda, part of modern-day
Indonesia. Having risen to the rank of merchant, he moved to Halmaheira in the Moluccas
(Maluku Islands). After a leave of absence in Holland, he was chief factor in Broothsia
(Bharuch) on the west coast of India (subordinated to the directorate of Surat) for seven
years. After a second period of leave, he held various positions in Batavia, Borneo, India,
and Persia, including those of member of the Council of the Indies and director of
commerce in Persia, where he resided in Gamron (today’s Bandar-Abbas, Iran). In 1648 he
left the Indies as commandeur of the return fleet of 12 ships. He returned to his native
town of Alkmaar, where he lived as a bachelor of independent means until his death in
1674, leaving an entailed estate of 70,000 guilders.

The inventory of his estate mentions the gold medal bestowed on him by the Heren XVII,
his portrait, and the painting of the return fleet at Batavia (all three now in the Municipal
Museum of Alkmaar). On the portrait (1674) Geleynssen is accompanied by two black
servants, one holding a ceremonial parasol (pajong), the other his master’s cape, hat, and
sabre. Black servants appear in many 17th- and 18th-century Dutch portraits, often
50 Alkmaar City Archives, Geleynssen, inv. nrs. 100, 115. fictitious and not depicting a real person. However, the portrait should remind us that the
51 Slot, ‘Other archives’, p. 78. Dutch in the greater Indies took over pre-existing systems of slavery and slave trade.
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The VOC, unlike the West India Company, did not trade in enslaved people as a
commodity but bought them to work in the mines, on plantations, or on the shipyards in
Batavia. The majority were domestic servants. In Batavia, half of the population in the
1670s were enslaved people, originating from the west coast of India, Ceylon, Madagascar,
Bali, Makassar, and other places.52

Archiving and accounting were indispensable for the VOC. At each post, a number of
bookkeepers and clerks were employed, and the merchants and assistant merchants kept
records too, controlled by the senior merchant. The books had to be sent to Batavia by
ship, though sometimes directly from India or Persia over land to Amsterdam. To
minimize the risk of loss at sea, the books had to be copied three or four times and sent by
three or four different ships (see also 1.4.1). Correspondence, reports, and price lists were
also copied before sending them abroad. In Batavia, these documents were copied and
discussed in the Council of the Indies, which led to reports and letters that were sent
back to the establishments. As explained before, the documents received and sent were
recapitulated and summarized in one single ‘general letter’ (Generale Missive) with
numerous annexes, both copies and originals. In Amsterdam and Middelburg these
annexes to the Generale Missive were integrated into the ‘Letters and papers received’
(Overgekomen brieven en papieren). Because those papers were ordered by establishment
(the eastern islands of Indonesia first, then the east coast of Asia, Siam, China, Japan,
followed by Malacca, Sumatra, India, Persia), one can make a virtual reconstruction of the
archives of any establishment.53 The major restriction is that such a reconstruction only
includes documents that were sent either with the ‘Letters and papers received’ or directly
52 Markus Vink, ‘“The world’s oldest trade”. Dutch
slavery and slave trade in the Indian ocean in the 17th
to the chambers in Holland and Zeeland. Many records were never sent abroad and were
century’, Journal of world history, 14, no.2 (June 2003): destroyed or left behind or taken along by repatriating VOC personnel, like Wollebrant
131-77. On the archiving practices involving enslaved
people in Batavia: H.E. Niemeijer, Batavia. Een
Geleynssen de Jongh. By comparing Geleynssen’s archives with the reconstructions of the
koloniale samenleving in de zeventiende eeuw (Balans: archives of the posts where he served the VOC, one gets a fairly correct picture of what the
Amsterdam, 2005), pp. 50-64.
management of a VOC establishment in Asia entailed in terms of archiving.
53 See the reconstructions on https://web.archive.org/
web/20190423121805/http://databases.tanap.net/
vocrecords/, archived 6 June 2019.

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Fig. 10.7 Instruction for Wollebrant Geleynssen

de Jongh from Governor-General Ant(h)onio
van Diemen, 1640. National Archives,
Geleynssen (1.10.30), inv. nr. 138A.
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In Geleynssen’s commission as director of Persia, signed by Governor-General Ant(h)onio
van Diemen, he was instructed to take over from his predecessor ‘all Company’s books,
accounts, privileges and other papers concerning the state of the Company’. Thus, the
inventory made on 20 April 1641 (copies of which are in Geleynssen’s archives and in the
VOC archives)54 lists the official privileges from the Persian rulers (commandamenten),
contracts and treaties (capitulaties), letters, bonds, and other documents. In the margin is
indicated whether the records are kept at the head office in Gamron or in the subordinate
post in Spahan (Isfahan). The archives also included some ‘useless papers’ (ondienstige
pampieren), three sets of trading books (negotieboeken), and two sets of factory books
(logieboeken), being the administration by Adriaen van Ostende and his predecessors Jan
Leendertsz van der Grift and Nicolaes Overschie. These books were still in the archives
when Geleynssen left Persia in 1643. Overschie’s tenure (1633-1638) had been severely
criticized by the Governor-General and had become the subject of a trial. Van der Grift
had died in 1640 leaving his papers in total confusion (geheel ongereddert) and apparently
Van Ostende had not succeeded in ordering them; therefore, Geleynssen had been
commissioned to cautiously check the accounts of Van der Grift.

Apart from these old books, Geleynssen transferred his own administration to his
successor. However, Geleynssen kept copies of his bookkeeping together with some
supporting registers and documents. Several are originals, others are copies. An example
is the receipt of a jewel Geleynssen had entrusted in 1640 to his colleague at Surat and
that he kept among his papers, while two copies of the receipt ended up in Amsterdam
among the ‘Letters and papers received’.55
He also took with him a handful of invoices and bills of lading (cognossementen) and most
of his correspondence, either originals or copied into several letter books. Some books
are clearly copies for Geleynssen’s private use (there are several books carrying his initials
54 National Archives, VOC (1.04.02), inv. nr. 1135, p. 727;
Geleynssen (1.10.30), inv. nr. 140A.
stamped in gold). So, for example, there are two registers of merchandise privately kept
55 National Archives, Geleynssen (1.10.30), inv. nr. 249;
by Geleynssen before, during, and after his employment in Gamron from 1640 to 1643.
VOC (1.04.02), inv. nr. 1135, pp. 703 and 771. The same applies to a copy of his journal (dagregister) which covers not only his time at
56 National Archives, Geleynssen (1.10.30), inv. nr. 142. Gamron, but also his journey back to Batavia 1643-1644.56

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He also kept, of course, his commission and the extensive instructions given by the
Governor-General in Council. Moreover, his archives contain various documents that will
have belonged to the archives of one of his predecessors Adam Westerwoldt (who had died
in Persia in 1639).

All this copying and private archiving—his ‘methodical urge for preservation’
(methodische bewaarzucht) as it has been called by his biographer57—may have been to
collect information that might be useful both for Geleynssen at other posts and in the
event that his administration would be challenged by his superiors who were especially
concerned about the faulty management by some of Geleynssen’s predecessors in India
and Persia. To minimize the risk of embezzlement, the bookkeeping in Gamron was
divided over three people. Geleynssen had been instructed to keep the memorial himself,
while the second merchant at Gamron was to keep the journal, and the third one the grand
ledger. However, they did not write the record with their own hand, but employed clerks
who did the book­­­keeping under their supervision (in 8.2.2 I referred to Elisabeth Coymans,
the widow of Jean Deutz—her books were written by her bookkeeper, but the narrative in
the books is in the first person). In fact, Geleynssen’s own hand is very rare in the records.
Even his personal letters to his family in Holland were often written by a clerk, though
probably he dictated what the clerks (many of them indigenous people) wrote. Sometimes
a VOC official complained about all the writing and copying:‘I loathe the sight of a pen’.58
57 Van Santen, VOC-dienaar, p. 29.
All book­keeping, reporting, and archiving were considered to be essential tools, and it had
58 Frank Lequin. Het personeel van de Verenigde Oost-
Indische Compagnie in Azië in de achttiende eeuw,
consequences for society in Asia, and probably also in patria. As VOC specialist Remco
meer in het bijzonder in de vestiging Bengalen, 2nd Raben remarks:
ed. (Alphen aan den Rijn: Canaletto/Repro-Holland,
2005), p. 154, citing Titsingh in 1790.
59 Remco Raben, Batavia and Colombo. The ethnic
A society in which every brick finds its way into the ledgers of the Company, where
and spatial order of two colonial cities, PhD thesis the life of every slave is represented by a sum in the books, and where every soul
Leiden, 1996, pp. 161-62, https://web.archive.org/
web/20190531131728/https://www.academia.
should be deployed to allow the Company machine to run efficiently and
edu/715645/Batavia_and_Colombo._The_ economically, is a tense society.59
Ethnic_and_Spatial_Order_of_Two_Colonial_
Cities_1600-1800_Ph.D._thesis_Leiden_1996,
archived 31 May 2019.
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The genre system maintained at a VOC establishment (and forming part of the global
VOC genre system) included people and paper acting together:

• Each merchant had to keep a journal, one of them being the main factory’s journal
(dagregister) recording ‘the most notable things in the country of residence’.
• Decisions by the chief factor and his council were recorded in resoluties.
• The letters, reports, and instructions received from and sent to the Netherlands,
Batavia and establishments.
• Agreements with foreign rulers (like the commandamenten and capitulaties
mentioned earlier) which were kept separate.
• Judicial documents of the Council of Justice in Batavia formed separate series of
petitions, sentences, and resoluties.
• All personnel were registered in the muster rolls.
• Trade documents including bills, price lists, and ‘demands’ (eisen), being requests
to ship specific goods.
• Of course, there was the substantial bookkeeping, such as memorials, journals,
and grand ledgers.
• Among the documents concerning ships and equipage were the books of
expenses, bills of lading, and ship’s journals.

There are only a few more or less complete archives of a trading post (factorij) left. Some
portions are preserved in the Tamil Nadu State Archives in Chennai, India, and in the
National Archives of Sri Lanka in Colombo. In the 1860s the archives of the factories in
Japan (Hirado, Deshima, 1609-1842, some 1,600 items) and in China (Canton, now
Guangzhou, 1742-1826, 386 items) were sent from Batavia to the Dutch National
Archives. Some of the gaps in the Japan factorij archives were filled by documents created
or received by the Governor-General and Council—an infringement of the principle of
provenance that was not corrected when the archives were inventoried in the 1960s.

248b kader

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10.7 Colonial Affairs

Archiving the East Indies 60

In 1796 the newly created Batavian Republic took over all assets and liabilities of the
VOC. Most of the establishments in Asia had fallen into British hands in 1795, with Java
following in 1811. After the Napoleonic wars, England returned most of these
establishments in Asia to the Kingdom of the Netherlands. In 1814 the Ministry of
Colonial Affairs was established. Its task was restricted, in the first place because the
authority in the East Indies was limited mainly to the islands of Java and Madura, and
because trade with Asia was the domain of the Netherlands Trading Company
(Nederlandsche Handelmaatschappij, NHM), founded in 1824 at the initiative of King
William I.

The constitutions of 1840 and 1848 involved Parliament with colonial policy; government
submitted the colonial budget and a colonial report annually to Parliament. In the 1860s
governmental involvement with the East Indies increased. Between 1864 and 1866 both
the Ministry and the General Secretariat in Batavia were reorganized, mirroring each
other. Not only governance in the mother country and the East but also the archives
systems were mirrors of each other. This happened outside the public sector as well. For
60 Rob Kramer and A.M. Tempelaars, Inventaris van het example, Billiton, a Dutch company mining in the Indies, set up a filing system for their
archief van de Algemene Secretarie (1816) 1819-1942
[…] (Jakarta : Arsip Nasional Republik Indonesia,
Netherlands East Indies’ office which was a mirror of the system of their headquarters in
1990); F.J.M. Otten, Gids voor de archieven van de The Hague.
ministeries en de hoge colleges van staat, 1813-1940
(Den Haag: Instituut voor Nederlandse Geschiedenis,
2004), http://resources.huygens.knaw.nl/retroboeken/ The Hague, as well as Batavia, used the verbaal system prescribed in 1823 (see 3.4). While
archiefgids_overheid/, accessed 14 Jan. 2020;
Bob de Graaff, ‘Kalm temidden van woedende golven’.
most ministries changed their records management in due time, the Ministry of Colonial
Het ministerie van Koloniën en zijn taakomgeving, Affairs and the Governor-General’s administration in the Indies (as in other matters much
1912-1940 (Den Haag: Sdu Uitgevers, 1997);
Charles Jeurgens, ‘Networks of information:
stricter and more categorical than the mother country) obeyed to the letter and kept the
The Dutch East Indies’, in Exploring the Dutch Empire. verbaal system until 1953.
Agents, networks and institutions, 1600-2000, ed.
Jos J.L. Gommans and Cátia Antunes (Bloomsbury
Academic: London, 2015), pp. 95-130.
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The weekly ‘mail reports of interesting occurrences’ (mailrapporten van wetenswaardige
bijzonderheden) remained outside the verbaal. They were introduced in 1869 to improve
the supply of information to the Minister of Colonial Affairs.61 Not only the contents of
the information were improved, but the logistics were upgraded as well. A few months
later in the same year, the Suez Canal was opened, shortening (see 7.4) the time lag
between sending and receiving letters between the Netherlands and the Dutch East Indies
from 80 days to 40 or 50 days. Archivist Frank Otten describes the mailrapport as a list of
summaries of messages, often with extensive annexes. Thus, the mail reports remind one
of the Generale Missiven and the ‘Incoming letters and papers’ in the times of the VOC.
Among the annexes to the mail reports were the statements of transfer (memories van
overgave), introduced in 1849, but going back to the reports used by the VOC. The
memorie van overgave was the report of a resigning Dutch regional government official
meant to inform his successor about the economic, social, and political state of affairs in
the district.

Within the official correspondence was a distinction between public and secret docu­
ments, each with special rules on access and archiving. Aside from all this, the Minister
and the Governor-General exchanged secret ‘private’ letters. These were not strictly
private nor informal, but less formal than the official secret letters. They were not meant
for the successor in office but were considered the private property of the correspondents.
This threefold division (public, secret, and private letters) had been adapted from the
diplomatic practice by civil and military officials, such as the Stadholders and the greffiers
and clerks of the States.62

The public archives of the Ministry of Colonial Affairs were kept by the General Secretariat
61 W.R. Hugenholtz, ‘An East Indian serial.
Mailrapporten (1869-1940)’, Itinerario 4, no. 2 (1980):
(Algemene Secretarie), while the secret and private documents were handled by the
71-4; Jeurgens, ‘Networks’. Minister’s cabinet. The General Secretariat had a staff of 20 to 25 people, generally of a very
62 G. de Bruin, Geheimhouding en verraad. De low rank. It was a ‘transit station’ (doorloopstationnetje) for newcomers. However, as in
geheimhouding van staatszaken ten tijde van de
Republiek (1600-1750) (’s-Gravenhage: SDU, 1991),
other ministries, the clerks who kept the index to the verbaal (see below) and who were
pp. 319-23. thus thoroughly familiar with the archives, were relatively well paid.

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The Ministry of Colonial Affairs was notorious for its cumbersome and precedent-focused
handling of affairs. The first step in dealing with an issue was requesting the earlier
documents in the case (the retroacta) or in a comparable case from the archives;
the archivist had to retrieve the papers from the chronological verbaal with the help of
the index and other finding aids.

Fig. 10.8 Annual volume of verbalen in the archive of the Ministry of Colonies, 1815-1899.
From Charles Jeurgens, ‘Networks of information: The Dutch East Indies’, in Exploring the Dutch
Empire. Agents, networks and institutions, 1600-2000, ed. Jos J.L. Gommans and Cátia Antunes
(Bloomsbury Academic: London, 2015), pp. 95-130.

The index to the verbaal listed under each heading (subject or task) summaries of
documents with a reference to the chronological file. Indexes (klappers) on names of
people and places provided access to the index and thereby to the verbaal (see Fig. 3.9).
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The headings reflected the world view of the civil service.63 For example, the heading
‘colonization’ included emigration, coolies, and the factory inspectorate (landverhuizing,
koelies, arbeidsinspectie). Slavery and piracy were in the same rubric. ‘Worship’ was
divided into ‘Non-Muslims’ and ‘Muslims and pilgrimage’. Such categorization reinforced
what I have called the duality of the archive (see the General Introduction): shaped by
people and shaping people. The anthropologist and historian Ann Stoler looked for
information on the relations between white children and their indigenous nursemaids in
the archives of the Ministry of Colonial Affairs.64 She found it in numerous reports
(classified secret) concerning the political situation in the Netherlands Indies.65 At the
time, government officials believed the colonial order to be threatened by what they
labelled the ‘danger’ of contact between white children and their nursemaids. Thus, the
archivers (the record creating civil servants and the colonial archivists) labelled and
shaped contents and context of the archival documents, while at the same time labelling
and shaping the relationship between children and their nursemaids. To understand the
archive, one must decode its various aspects. This requires, in Stoler’s forcible expression,
reading ‘along the archival grain’, accepting even unethical, forbidden, illegal, evil, or
irrational recordkeeping.

The Dutch venture into full-blown empire-building began with the war with Aceh
(1873-1903) and the conquest (and plunder) of Lombok (1894), as Adrian Vickers writes.66
Gradually other territories came under Dutch governance that stretched over the whole
63 M.G.H.A. de Graaff, Gids voor onderzoek in het archief
van het ministerie van Koloniën in beheer bij het
archipelago around 1910, and in 1920 western New Guinea was added to the Dutch East
Nationaal Archief 1814-1951 (Den Haag 2015) p. 16, Indies. The expansion of the colonial dominion led to a growth of bureaucracy, in Batavia
https://web.archive.org/web/20190531131835/http://
www.heindegraaff.nl/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/
as well as in The Hague. The Ministry of Colonial Affairs expanded from 52 civil servants
10-Gids-Kolonien.pdf, archived 31 May 2019. in 1887 to 140 in 1910. By that time, it was the largest ministry, bigger than either Finance
64 Ann L. Stoler, Carnal knowledge and imperial power. and War, with their 106 and 111 staff members, respectively. To this number of civil
Race and the intimate in colonial rule (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2002), pp. 112-39.
servants, one must add the number of scriveners (schrijvers). In the 1920s there were 61
65 Stoler, ‘Colonial archives’: 108.
scriveners and 12 typists in the Ministry of Colonial Affairs, who did not form part of the
66 Adrian Vickers, A history of modern Indonesia
civil service.
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 10.

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In 1945 the Republik Indonesia was proclaimed, but only in 1949 did the Netherlands
recognize Indonesian sovereignty. The Dutch selected a large amount of archive material
which was shipped in 48 chests to the Netherlands in 1951 and 1952. They included not
only secret archives (such as those of the intelligence service), but also archives captured
from Indonesian politicians such as Soekarno (the first president of Indonesia) and private
people between 1945 and 1949. Still, a substantial quantity remained, including the
archives of the General Secretariat. For example, the archives of the General Secretariat
kept in the Arsip Nasional (National Archives of Indonesia) in Jakarta comprise 5,600
metres, while the Netherlands keep 52 metres.
After some hesitation, the Netherlands accepted the internationally adopted principle that
archives created by administrations responsible solely for the affairs of a given
non-sovereign political entity (such as the Dutch Governor-General’s administration)
form part of the heritage of the successor to that political entity concerned (in this case
Indonesia), and not of the state (The Netherlands) which was exercising sovereignty at the
time the archives were created. Some Dutch officials and politicians hesitated, but not so
archivists such as National Archivist Ton Ribberink. He actively fought for the return to
Indonesia of its archival heritage. Ribberink was supported by his Indonesian colleague
Soemartini, who had been trained at the Dutch Archives School in 1968-1969. In 1970
Indonesia and the Netherlands concluded an archival agreement which, apart from
promising bilateral assistance in training archivists and inventorying archives in The
Hague and in Jakarta, also provided for the return of the so-called Djogdja documents.
These were Indonesian records seized by the Dutch military intelligence service between
1947 and 1949 in Yogyakarta, then the capital of the Republic.

67 When Surinam, another Dutch colony, became Together with other intelligence records, these documents were shipped to the Nether­
independent in 1975, the archives of the Dutch
Governor (1951-1975) and other colonial archives
lands in 1949, leaving port four days before the transfer of sovereignty. In the Netherlands,
were transferred to the Netherlands. Shipments of the documents were entrusted to different ministries and sometimes mixed up with other
archives from Surinam had occurred since the 1920s.
All archives were returned to the Republic of Surinam
collections. Therefore, it took a considerable effort to identify the Djogdja documents
in 2017 after everything had been restored and which were returned in the 1970s.67 Even so (as Michael Karabinos’ assiduous research has
digitized (more than 5.5 million scans).
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Fig. 10.9 Dutch military questioning an

Indonesian official, probably the resident
of Buitenzorg (Bogor) who was accused of
burning documents, 1948. National Archives,
Dienst Legercontacten Indonesië (2.24.04.03),
inv. nr. 119-5-5.

Fig. 10.10 Nefis routing slip attached to a

poster seized on the market in Ardja (Arjasari),
1947. National Archives, Netherland Forces
Intelligence Service (2.10.62), inv.nr. 5458.
Photo Ding Ren.

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recently brought to light), many records seized from Indonesian public and private archive
creators are hidden in the intelligence archives and other fonds in the National Archives in
The Hague.68

Most of the Indonesian documents in the Dutch National Archives are public (openbaar),
meaning that they are available for consultation as a result of legal authorization. But many
are not accessible (toegankelijk); that is, being under intellectual control by arrangement
and description in such a way that a user can effectively consult the archives. Accessibility
has five aspects: archives should be findable (through appropriate finding aids), available,
perceivable, intelligible (can, for example, the user understands the Dutch palaeography
and language), and contextualizable—can one reconstruct the context in which the
archives were generated, used, and managed.69 The seized documents belong to Indonesia.
They are not (as the VOC archives) a joint heritage shared by the two countries. To restore
Indonesia’s archival heritage all seized documents should be returned, but also made
toegankelijk.

10.8 Conclusion
68 Michael J. Karabinos, The shadow continuum.
Testing the records continuum model through the
The archiving systems and practices presented in this chapter were all related to the Dutch
Djogdja Documenten and the migrated archives. PhD precolonial and colonial endeavours in Asia, New Holland (Australia), and New Zealand.
thesis Leiden University, 2015, http://hdl.handle.
net/1887/33293, accessed 29 Nov. 2018; Michael
The Dutch East India Company (VOC) was, in Bruno Latour’s terms, a centre of
Karabinos, ‘Indonesian national revolution records in calculation where incoming and outgoing information was combined, reordered, and
the National Archives of the Netherlands’, in Displaced
archives, ed. James Lowry (London/New York:
aggregated, with each aggregation adding value. Archiving is mainly aggregating, bringing
Routledge, 2017), pp. 60-73. parts into a coherent whole: a document into a file, files into a series, series forming a fonds,
69 Geert-Jan van Bussel, ‘The theoretical framework for different fonds brought together in one repository or conceptualized as a joint archival
the “Archive-As-Is”. An organization oriented view
on archives. Part II. An exploration of the “Archive-
heritage.
As-Is” framework’, in Archives in liquid times, ed.
Frans Smit, Arnoud Glaudemans, and Rienk Jonker
(’s-Gravenhage: Stichting Archiefpublicaties, 2017),
Other forms of aggregation are the constant updating of the VOC’s charts and maps on
pp. 55-6. the basis of new information brought to Amsterdam, or marginating chronologically
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Archiving the East Indies
recorded proceedings and creating an index out of these marginal notes. Assembling
maps, journals, price lists, letters, and reports (such as in the VOC’s Generale Missive) is a
way of aggregating information as well. Such an assemblage may be a continuum, each
time—as if it were seen through a kaleidoscope—offering a different view of the parts and
the whole. Both the individual documents and their aggregations are intertextually linked
in a genre system, these links providing yet another meaning to the archive. Examples in
this chapter are the VOC ships as record creating entities, the archives of each VOC
establishment, the cascading of records in the knowledge system of the VOC, the linkage
between the VOC archives and the archives of individual VOC officials, and the reading
‘along the archival grain’ of colonial archives. The intertextuality of the records at different
places and times was enhanced by the constant copying and by the mirroring of the
archives in the colony and those in patria.

Only rarely were indigenous archiving practices in the East adopted by the Dutch, one of
the exceptions being the tombo’s (land registers) in Ceylon, which went back to the
registration of land rights by the Sinhalese kings, subsequently adapted by the Portuguese
and perfected by the Dutch.

Another issue raised in this chapter is secrecy. In the VOC, captains, map makers,
directors, and other officials were obliged to keep the knowledge system secret. However,
much information from the system came into private hands, even on the market. In the
archives of the Ministry of Colonial Affairs a distinction was made between secret and
non-secret documents. Separate from these was the ‘private’ correspondence with the
Governor-General in Batavia. Who decided on labelling information secret, and why?70

70 These questions are currently being investigated at The VOC archives are a joint heritage, shared by the Netherlands and other countries.
the University of Amsterdam in a project ‘Hide and
Leak. Secrecy and Openness in Overseas Companies
The concept of joint heritage also applies to the archives of the Ministry of Colonial Affairs
in the Dutch Golden Age’, https://web.archive.org/ in The Hague and the archives of the Dutch colonial administration in Indonesia. However,
web/20190531131933/https://www.uva.nl/profiel/n/
e/d.h.vannetten/d.h.vannetten.html, archived 31 May
Indonesian archives seized by the Dutch and mixed with state archives in the Netherlands
2019. are ‘displaced archives’. They should be returned, and made accessible to the public.

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253a | 11 |
PAGE CHAPTER ARCHIVING PEOPLE

A SOCIAL HISTORY OF
DUTCH ARCHIVES Chapter 11

Archiving
Technologies
—
11.0 Introduction
11.1 Before 1800
11.1.1 Making and Using
11.1.1.1 Material
11.1.1.2 Language and Script
11.1.1.3 Form
11.1.2 Arranging
11.1.3 Preserving
11.2 Since 1800
11.2.0 Introduction
11.2.1 Making and Using
11.2.1.1 Material
11.2.1.2 Script, Sound, and Images
11.2.1.3 Form
l Fig. 11.0 Marinus van Reymerswale,
The lawyer’s office, 1545. New Orleans 11.2.2 Arranging
Museum of Art. 11.2.3 Preserving
ˇ 11.3 Conclusion
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11.0 Introduction
Practices of archiving are carried out by people, but people are not the sole agents in
archiving. Archiving people need extensions of their mind and body: intellectual devices
like methods, skills, and scripts plus material tools like equipment, implements, and
machines. These ‘intellectual technologies’ (to use Bruno Latour’s phrase1) do not only
include ‘programmes’ and conventions for making, using, arranging, and preserving (or
destroying) archives, but also encompass artefacts like parchment and quills, paper, boxes,
furniture, card indexes, and computers.2 They are ‘not the mere infrastructure of practice;
they help constitute practice itself and are also shaped by the way people use them’.3 These
technologies are ‘talking objects’. Their voice should be heard when one recaptures a social
practice from the immediate or even further past. This entails what Peter Burke called an
archaeology of archives, which reveals the materiality of archiving.4

We have to realize that for a long time the written word was regarded merely as a support
for a memory trained in processing oral information. A document and its seal were
considered to be memory-retaining objects (see 2.1). Only gradually from the 9th century
onwards did documents become records, providing evidence of events and transactions
(see 2.1 and 3.1). The 12th century settled the change ‘from memory to written record’
(the title of Michael Clanchy’s classic book) in a large part of Europe. This did not mean the
1 Bruno Latour, Reassembling the social. An introduction
disappearance of orality, however. Even after the dissemination of writing, people were
to actor-network-theory (Oxford: Oxford University used to hearing and seeing a symbolic ritual of traditional gestures, stylized formulas, and
Press, 2005), p. 76.
objects, as at the visitation of the dikes (which happened orally well into the 16th century,
2 On digital materiality see Eric Ketelaar, ‘Archiving
technologies’, Comma (2016/1-2): 25-34.
see 5.1) or at the promulgation of ordinances as described in 6.6.1. Even today, oral
3 Clare Humphries and Aaron C. T. Smith, ‘Talking
promulgation of an Act of Parliament is presumed at the beginning of each act in which
objects. Towards a postsocial research framework for the King addresses ‘all who shall see or hear these’.
exploring object narratives’, Organization 21 (2014):
477–94.
4 Peter Burke, ‘Commentary’, Archival science 7 (2007):
392.

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11.1 Before 1800
11.1.1 Making and Using

11.1.1.1 Material
There are only a few documents in the Netherlands from Roman times, and they are
bronze diplomas and wax tablets (1.1 and 8.1). Even rarer are rune inscriptions on bone,
stone, and wood. A dozen or so of these inscriptions, dating from between the early 6th
and the end of the 9th century, have been found in the northern part of the country.
Writing tablets continued to be used in the Middle Ages and even (see the Prologue) in
premodern times. In scriptoria and chanceries the text on a wax tablet often served as a
draft, the fair copy being made on parchment. Examining the parchment may reveal the
value of the document, as calf skin (vellum) was used for the most important documents.
Sheepskin was less expensive and had the advantage that erasures were more easily
detectable than on vellum. Parchment documents were sealed with wax seals. The
material, shape, and colour of the seal and the way the seal was attached had specific
meanings. For example, papal edicts were always sealed with a leaden seal, attached with
either a silk string if it was a licence or with a hemp string for a mandate or commission.

Next to wax tablets and parchment, wooden tallies (kerfstokken) were used, though
perhaps not by the millions, as in medieval and early modern England. Tallies of wood on
which the sum to be paid was indicated by notches were accepted as evidence, particularly
for debts accrued in the marketplace and in the inn.

Parchment used in medieval chanceries was gradually replaced by paper. Paper was made
in Spain since the 12th century and in Italy since the 13th century. The paper used for
Fig. 11.1 Tally (kerfstok), 1649. Gelders Archief, making the cartulary in the chancery of the Count of Holland in 1299 (see 3.1) must have
Hof van Gelre (0124), inv. nr. 5253. been imported from Italy. It is one of the oldest paper records in the Netherlands.
255a | 11 |
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Eef Dijkhof has the idea that for some time during the 13th and 14th century, people
connected with the Count of Holland ‘experimented with this novel writing material. It
looks as if, in the end, the use of paper fell short of their expectations because after a few
years the clerks revert to parchment for accounts and registers.’5 For the city register of
Kampen (1316) Italian paper was used, but in nearby Deventer the earliest accounts (from
1337) are on parchment, although paper was used as well. One sheet of the roll for
enrolment (1249-1387) of members of the Deventer merchants’ guild is made of paper
(1334-1337), all the others are parchment membranes.6 In 1339 the city paid pro quaternis
papireis and some slips of paper (possibly from this lot) have been preserved, folded in the
accounts from 1349-1350. Since the 1360s the Deventer city clerk used paper regularly;
parchment continued to be used for books of ordinances and other records of special
value. It is striking that in Deventer the consolidated general account continued to be
written on parchment until 1680, while the special accounts consolidated into the general
account, were made of paper. Parchment records were often recycled and used as a cover
or reinforcement of the spine of a codex.7 Even in 18th-century registers one finds
fragments of recycled parchment documents.

5 Eef Dijkhof, ‘Bewaren of weggooien; afschrijven of

In the end, paper almost superseded parchment as a material for administrative purposes.
verplaatsen. Het papieren cartularium van de graven It was easier to handle than parchment and it was cheaper as well. This must have been an
van Holland en Zeeland en de politieke en ambtelijke
zorg voor het grafelijke archief in 1299’, Bulletin de
important consideration with an ever-increasing administration. Parchment was still used
la Commission royale d’histoire. Académie royale de though, not only for nautical charts for the VOC (see 10.5), but also for treaties, nobility
Belgique 176.2 (2010): 361-80.
patents, doctoral diplomas, and writs, among others. They were written with a quill pen or
6 J.F. Benders, Bestuursstructuur en schriftcultuur.
Een analyse van de bestuurlijke verschriftelijking in
a reed pen.
Deventer tot het eind van de 15de eeuw (Hilversum:
Verloren, 2004), appendix 8.
Archives, however, do not consist of manuscript documents only. The printing press
7 Perkament in stukken. Teruggevonden middeleeuwse
handschriftfragmenten, ed. Bart Jaski, Marco Mostert,
came to be used for the formation of archives early. Printed forms were filled in by hand.
and Kaj van Vliet (Hilversum: Verloren, 2018). Examples are the 15th and early 16th-century indulgencies (aflaatbrieven),8 leprosy
8 https://web.archive.org/web/20190531132033/ attestations (Fig. 1.5), poortercelen and licences mentioned in chapter 1.3 (Fig. 1.4), letters
https://www.nationaalarchief.nl/beleven/onderwijs/
bronnenbox/weg-met-je-zonden-1500, archived 31
of debt of VOC sailors (1.4.1), the receipts for payment of shares in the VOC (8.2.4 and
May 2019. 13.5), notices of tax assessment and bills of lading (Fig. 11.2).

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Fig. 11.2 Bill of lading (cognossement), 1690. National Archives, Hof van Holland (3.03.01.01),
inv. nr. 10370.

Print was also used for distributing copies of resolutions (see 3.3), ordinances, and official
announcements.9 Beginning at the end of the 18th century, government used printed
9 Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen, schedules to gather and structure information (see 3.4).
The bookshop of the world. Making and trading books
in the Dutch Golden Age (Newhaven/London:
Yale University Press, 2019), ch. 8. Often we find three-dimensional objects among paper records as evidence in a court file
10 See F.C.J. Ketelaar, Voorwerp van archiefwetenschap (Fig. 11.3), as a token in an orphan’s file (see the General Introduction), or as a sample
[…] (Alphen aan den Rijn: Bohn Stafleu Van Loghum,
1993), repr. in Spreken is goud. Oraties en colleges
attached to a business record, such as pieces of textile, coffee beans, or tin nuggets to be
van hoogleraren…en de archivistiek. Jaarboek 2008 manufactured. The objects (as I argued in the General Introduction) only make sense in
Stichting Archiefpublicaties, ed. Hans Waalwijk
and Jorien Weterings (’s-Gravenhage: Stichting
the context of the recorded transaction. These objects are often considered as mere
Archiefpublicaties, 2009), pp. 107-22. annexes to a record, but objects may be seen as records themselves.10
 256a | 11 |
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Fig. 11.3 Court files (proceszakken), Court of

Holland. National Archives, Hof van Holland
(3.03.01.01), inv. nr. 14026.

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11.1.1.2 Language and Script
Apart from the rune inscriptions, documents from the Roman period were in Latin.
Glimpses of the early Dutch vernacular are found not only in those rune inscriptions, but
also in a parchment list from 900 of kirica endi kiricland (church and church land) near the
Zuiderzee, belonging to the Abbey of Werden, and in a 10th-century book of psalms. In
Latin charters we encounter Dutch place names. In the 12th century registries on the
European continent switched from Latin to the vernacular. The oldest charter in Dutch
issued in the county of Holland and Zeeland is the city privilege for Middelburg from 1254.
However, local ordinances of that city were drawn up in Dutch as early as the end of the
12th century. In the following years, the number of documents in Dutch gradually
increases, as medievalist Jan Burgers concludes on the basis of a large-scale investigation of
the archive production in Holland and Zeeland in the 13th century.11 In the final two
decades of the 13th century the number of official documents in the vernacular explodes.
In the 1280s more than half of all documents are in Dutch, in the 1290s more than three
quarters.

At first Latin and Dutch (and French) are used side by side. Latin is eventually superseded
nearly totally by Dutch, as at the clerks’ office of the city of Dordrecht at the end of the 13th
century. Still, Latin continued to be used in foreign affairs. The States General received
letters from foreign courts in Latin, French, German, Japanese, and the Ottoman language.
For their translation, official translators (including professors at Leiden University) were
employed who also translated the replies.

In the development of pragmatic literacy, script plays an important role.12 Scriveners were
11 J.W.J. Burgers, ‘De invoering van het Nederlands in de
dertiende-eeuwse documentaire bronnen in Holland
expensive and the growth of administrative documents necessitated acceleration of the
en Zeeland’, Tijdschrift voor Nederlandse taal-en production and consequently an increase of the writing speed. To that end an easier script
letterkunde 112 (1996): 129-46.
had to be developed. The ‘Gothic’ minuscule or littera textualis, which was mainly used for
12 P.J. Horsman, Th.J. Poelstra, and J.P. Sigmond,
Schriftspiegel. Nederlandse paleografische teksten van
writing books, was replaced by a cursive script, the littera cursiva from the 13th century
de 13de tot de 18de eeuw (Zutphen: Terra, 1984). onwards. This script was developed in various versions, including a hybrid of cursiva and
 257a | 11 |
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textualis, that was called bastarda. In the eastern part of the Netherlands a German
cursive script (Kurrente) was used. In the 16th century the humanistic script emerged. It
drew upon the Carolingian minuscule and was used in a cursive version as well. From the
beginning of the 17th century writing masters taught different scripts. Merchants and
other people ‘in haste’ would write an easy cursive script, while lawyers, diplomats, and
other officials would alternate between a cursive and a more formal script, often using the
former for the draft and the latter for the outgoing letter.

Increasing the writing speed was also possible by using stenography. In England,
stenography, or characterie or brachygraphy, was used since the end of the 16th century.
Some of the English manuals must have been known in Holland. In 1673 Johan Reyner, an
Englishman living in Rotterdam, received a patent from the States of Holland for teaching
and publishing the stenography (kortschrift) he claimed to have invented (but in fact had
adapted from English sources). It seems that stenography was mainly used to write down
sermons and university lectures.

Cryptology was used in public and private correspondence and journals. Already in the
16th century William of Orange used a cipher in his letters. By the 17th century coding,
decoding, and decryption of correspondence with Dutch diplomats and others was
routinely done by clerks of the States General and by officials at the Stadholder’s court.
Encrypted letters from and to foreign diplomats were regularly but secretly intercepted
Fig. 11.4 Silver medal on the interception and decrypted. A notorious case in 1684 was the interception of a letter from the French
and publication of documents exchanged
between the French ambassador and the city ambassador D’Avaux concerning his dealings with the Amsterdam city council which was
of Amsterdam, 1684. Private collection. intercepted, decrypted (possibly by Sir Constantijn Huygens), and used by Stadholder
William III in his accusation of high treason committed by Amsterdam regents. Pending
13 Karl de Leeuw, Cryptology and statecraft in the the investigations, the papers found in the quarters in The Hague of the Amsterdam
Dutch Republic (thesis University of Amsterdam,
2000), pp. 21-2; Gerard van Loon, Beschryving
delegates to the States of Holland and the States General were sealed up. A silver medal
der Nederlandsche historipenningen […] vol. 3 was struck to celebrate (or mock) the affair. It shows the intercepted D’Avaux letter and
(’s-Gravenhage: Christiaan van Lom etc., 1728),
pp. 307-8; Amsterdam City Archives, Burgemeesters
some of the Amsterdam documents hanging on a clothes line.13
(5028), inv. nr. 498.

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11.1.1.3 Form
What Clanchy stated about England in the 12th century applies to the Netherlands for the
beginning of the 14th century: it was ‘the period when many forms of business documents
“took shape”, shapes they would retain into the 16th century and beyond’.14 By ‘form’,
current Dutch archival terminology understands both the physical shape of a document
(external form: uiterlijke vorm) and the style, the way in which the formal characteristics
and the contents of a document have been arranged (editorial form: redactionele vorm).
Often the term for the external form has been extended metaphorically to an editorial
form. For instance, a list of cases coming before a court is still called a rol in Dutch (see 9.1),
even though it is no longer a scroll (at the Court of Gelre the 17th century case-lists were
still scrolls of parchment membranes).

I will discuss editorial form first. From the very beginning of the spread of literacy, scribes
used formulas and exemplars. Letter writing was practised at school, guided by Erasmus’
manual De conscribendis epistolis (1522). Later, printed manuals provided clerks with
exemplars of various documents. In the Prologue I referred to The Parrot, a famous 17th
century legal formulary. In those days the Dutch Secretary by Daniel Mostart, city clerk of
Amsterdam, was also very popular. In the 18th century the various editions of The
Amsterdam Secretary and The Perfect Secretary, both containing plenty of models for
requests, petitions, and other official documents, were in great demand.15
14 M.T. Clanchy, From memory to written record.
England, 1066-1307, 3rd ed. (Chichester: Wiley- Every chancery maintained its own formulars, dozens of which have been preserved in
Blackwell, 2013), p. 137.
government archives and among the private papers of clerks, regents, and officials. We
15 Daniël Mostaert, Nederduytse secretaris oft
zendbrieffschryver (Amstelredam: Dirk Pietersz, 1635);
know several formulars that were used in the episcopal chancery from the 15th and 16th
Amsterdamsche secretarije bestaende in alderhande centuries, including the Diversorium, formulae et presentaciones temporis Davidis episcopi
formulieren … (Amsterdam: J.H. Boom, 1664); Le
nouveau et parfait secrétaire en hollandois et francois
Traiectensis (1450-1496). Formulars were important in a society where politics and
(Amsterdam: Ratelband and Uytwerf, 1732; from the jurisdictions adhered to (and were often obsessed by) precedent and formality (see also
second edition on: De nieuwe volmaakte Hollandsche
en Fransche secretaris [...] (Amsterdam: Van Gerrevink
9.5). Moreover, the editorial form of a document (whether a request, proposition, or
and Ratelband, 1747). petition) determined the way of treating and archiving the document—not only by the
258a | 11 |
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States General and other bodies, but more generally. Letters, receipts, accounts, rentals,
and wills were handled and classified according to form and only secondarily by content.
Take for example Rembrandt’s petition for cessio bonorum (cession of estate), mentioned
in the Prologue.16

16 National Archives, Hoge Raad van Holland en Zeeland

(3.03.02), inv. nr. 60, 8 August 1656, available on http://
proxy.handle.net/10648/76aeb313-d7f0-73c9-06ad-
375ed7a3928e; http://remdoc.huygens.knaw.nl/#/
document/remdoc/e4704; http://remdoc.huygens.
knaw.nl/#/document/remdoc/e12732, all accessed 2
Fig. 11.5 Rembrandt’s petition for cessio bonorum. National Archives,
Dec. 2018. Hoge Raad van Holland en Zeeland (3.03.02), inv. nr. 60, 8 August 1656.

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The text followed the model presented in The Parrot. It was written on the upper third of a
folio sheet, as all petitions for cessio bonorum were, and it started with the address in large
script ‘To the High Administration’ (Aen de Hooghe Overicheijt). These conventional forms
made it clear at first sight to the chancery that the document contained a petition for cessio
bonorum and nothing else. In the margin the Supreme Council’s clerk Iman Cau noted the
court’s disposition:

Fiat [to be sent for] advice to burgomasters and magistrates of Amsterdam. Enacted
by the Supreme Council of Holland, this 14 July 1656 [signed] Iman Cau.

Upon receipt of the advice from Amsterdam, the clerk wrote another apostil
(see 3.2 and 3.3):

Having seen the reply, fiat [granted] writ of cessio with transfer of the jurisdiction to
the magistrate of Amsterdam. Enacted by the Supreme Council of Holland, this 8
August 1656 [signed] Iman Cau.

Thus, the petition had been changed into an instruction to the chancery to send the
petition for advice to Amsterdam and subsequently into a record of the decision of the
Supreme Council’s decision and an instruction to the chancery to prepare the writ
(mandement, see 9.1) of cessio.

Thus, a document could move through stages, each leading to a metamorphosis of the
document before reaching a definitive form. In the margin of a citizen’s petition the
decision to send it for advice to another body would be recorded, in Rembrandt’s case the
burgomasters and magistrates of Amsterdam. But in case of a request to the States for a
patent, it would be sent for advice to the Audit Office. The document with the apostil by
the Audit Office would be returned to the States’ registry. There they would edit the
petition into a minute from which the fair copy of the patent would be made. In some
processes the petition with the apostil(s) would be returned to the petitioner, with the
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final decision written in the margin. The decision might include the order to the treasury
to pay the petitioner, or the receipt might be recorded in an apostil. In the case of the latter,
the petition, having become a receipt, would be archived at the treasury. In the former case
the petition, having become a final draft (minuut), would be kept by the registry.

Special formulars gave instructions as to the proper way of addressing authorities. When a
petition or a letter was not properly addressed, it would be either returned to the sender or
left unanswered. The archives of the States General contain 11 title books, listing the
ceremonious forms of address of each authority in the country and abroad with whom the
High and Mighty Lords (Hoog Mogende Heren) corresponded.

There were epistolary conventions on the amount of space between the opening and the
body of the text (e.g. when addressing a high authority one third of the page should be left
blank) and the way of folding, among others.17

The physical shape of parchment documents (external form) was to some extent
dependent on the size and shape of the sheep’s or calf ’s skin. Large membranes were more
expensive than small ones. The higher the authority issuing the charter or the more
important the matter, the larger the sheet of parchment would be. Parchment sheets
stitched together would form rolls (rotuli), but this form was used much less often than in,
for example, England.

The book (codex) form was first used for cartularies, but by the 14th century it was also
used for recording other administrative and legal matters (see 3.1 and 4.2). The oldest
codices were made by gathering together in a binding quires (gatherings) or single
documents that had been written (see 4.3). Later, office books were made consisting of
blank pages or pages with pre-printed headings or forms to be filled in. In Dutch archival
17 James Daybell, The material letter in early modern terminology the former is called a band (binding), while the latter is a deel (volume) or
England. Manuscript letters and the culture and
practices of letter-writing, 1512-1635 (Houndmills:
protocol.
Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).

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The exterior of a codex may already disclose something of its function. A book with a
limp parchment binding of which the extended back cover encloses the fore-edge (and
fastened with a hook or lace) was clearly meant to be taken along, for example on a tour
of inspection.18 A narrow book with a width of less than half its height (e.g. 125 x 310
millimetres) was mainly used for accounts and other financial operations (Fig. 11.6).
According to the instruction by Jan Impyn from 1543-1547 (see 7.1), the merchant had to
keep, apart from the grand ledger (‘the great boke’) and supporting books, ‘a little long
boke to write in the charges of houshold’, a ‘square boke’ for the copies of letters, and
another long book to record all small expenses of merchandise.

Sometimes the binding or the fore-edge of a codex was painted or otherwise adorned to
facilitate locating it on a shelf (Fig. 11.7). We know of several hairy (ruyghe) registers
showing the hair on the cow’s skin used for binding the codex.19 The first dozen registers
of the Audit Office of the demesne of Holland (Grafelijkheidsrekenkamer) in The Hague,
beginning in 1445, are: the red register A, the first yellow register, the green register, the
pale spotted register, the black spotted register, the white hairy register, the white register
with the red rose, the register with the red lion, and so on.

Fig. 11.6 Marinus van Reymerswale, The tax

collector and the counter bookkeeper, c. 1533.
Muzeum Narodowe, Warsaw.

18 Erik Kwakkel, Books before print (Croydon: Arc

Humanities Press, 2018), pp. 22-3, 143-4.
19 Kwakkel, Books before print, pp. 77-8; http://proxy. Fig. 11.7 Grand ledger of the Amsterdam Civic Orphanage, c. 1630.
handle.net/10648/63645dda-ad74-99fd-81d3- Amsterdam City Archives, Burgerweeshuis (367.A), inv. nr. 192.
82de2bf10c00, accessed 10 Sept. 2019.
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Since the 16th century most single administrative documents on paper were written on
the first page of a folded folio sheet. Informal letters would be written on a quarto sheet.20
Of course, other paper formats were used as well, including informal notes on a small piece
of paper (kattebel, a corruption of cartable, derived from Italian cartabello), notes sent by
pigeons from and into a besieged city, or smuggled hidden in the stick or the boots of a
messenger, as Sir Constantijn Huygens did in the 1630s with his notes from the battlefield
20 Theo H.P.M. Thomassen, ‘Introductie’, in Archieven
van Nederlandse gezanten en consuls tot 1813, vol. 1,
to Princess Amalia, wife of the Stadholder.21
ed. J.C.M. Pennings and Theo H.P.M. Thomassen
(Den Haag: Algemeen rijksarchief, 1994), p. 54;
Daybell, The material letter, 100-1.
An important genre of documents was (and is) maps. Owners of landed estates
21 For example: Constantijn Huygens to Amalia van
commissioned surveyors to map their properties, often resulting in atlases (kaartboeken)
Solms, 18 juli 1635, Koninklijke Verzamelingen, showing all the properties of a single owner. The production and use of maps in dredging
Amalia van Solms, inv. nr. A14a-XIII-18c-1;
https://web.archive.org/web/20160107155857/
and draining is dealt with in 5.2, 5.3, and 5.5. Mapping was an important element of the
http://resources.huygens.knaw.nl/ enclosure of common land (5.6), and mapping is and was essential in the cadastral and land
briefwisselingconstantijnhuygens/brief/nr/1172,
archived 7 Jan. 2016 ; Judith Pollmann, Memory in
register administration (6.1.2). Finally, maps were part of the knowledge system of the
early modern Europe. 1500-1800 (Oxford: Oxford Dutch East India Company (chapter 10, especially 10.5).
University Press, 2017), p. 107.
22 Heather Wolfe and Peter Stallybrass, ‘The material
culture of record-keeping in early modern England’, in
Not all records in premodern times were on parchment or paper. In the Prologue I referred
Archives & information in the early modern world, ed. to Rembrandt’s guild token (1634) and in chapter 10.4 to the pewter records left on the
Liesbeth Corens, Kate Peters and Alexandra Walsham
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 179-99.
western Australian coast by Hartog and De Vlamingh (1616, 1679).
23 Markus Friedrich, ‘How to make an archival inventory
in early modern Europe. Carrying documents, gluing
11.1.2 Arranging
paper and transforming archival chaos into well- 22
ordered knowledge’, Manuscript cultures 10 (2017):
162-63.
24 Terry Eastwood, ‘Putting the parts of the whole Epistemic organization of archives rested upon spatial organization: physically moving and
together. Systematic arrangement of archives’,
Archivaria 50 (2000): 93-116; Jennifer Meehan,
placing archival documents in boxes, bags, cupboards with pigeonholes, putting them on
‘Making the leap from parts to whole. Evidence and files (see the next section), or using tools and objects like slips of paper for labelling and
inference in archival arrangement and description’,
American archivist 72 (2009): 72-90; Frank Upward,
enfolding documents and needles and thread to tie documents together.23 Such physical
Barbara Reed, Gillian Oliver, and Joanne Evans, operations are aggregation processes, bringing parts into a coherent whole.24 Registers,
Recordkeeping informatics for a networked age
(Melbourne: Monash University Publishing, 2018),
indexes, and other intellectual tools have the same purpose.
pp. 8, 13.

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Common practice among merchants and secretaries was to arrange documents in
chronological order, making bundles and storing these (see 7.1). Keeping a chronological
order at the top level, the documents could subsequently be arranged according to
correspondent or subject matter; in both cases pigeonholes or boxes were used (see 7.3.1
and 8.4.2 for examples). In chanceries the chronological bundles would be either put on
files or bound and then arranged in series (see 4.3).

Marking the spines of the volumes with the dates or numbers and/or letters (for example
A-Z, AA-ZZ, AAA-ZZZ) facilitated findability. New physical as well as intellectual
technologies that improved the accessibility of archives came into use: tabs (markers fixed
to the fore-edge of a codex, in Dutch klavieren), foliation, page headings, marginating (see
10.5), and alphabetical tables. All, as Randolph Head argues, little tools of knowledge
developed by scholastic erudition and introduced into chanceries.25

Fig. 11.8a Archive chest of the Collatie

fraternity (Brethren of the Common Life)
in Gouda, containing chip boxes for storing
the documents. The contents of each box Fig. 11.8b Box from the archive chest of the Collatie fraternity
are described on the lid. Regional Archives (Brethren of the Common Life) in Gouda.
Midden-Holland, Gouda.

Boxes, bags, and pigeonholes were marked as well, and a geographical order was often
used reflecting the order in a cartulary (see 2.1). When a resolutie system (see 3.2) was
25 Randolph Head, Making archives in early modern
Europe. Proof, information and political recordkeeping,
used, the documents were arranged according to the date on which they were read in the
1400-1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, meeting (lectum), tabled (exhibitum), or issued (datum).
2019), pp. 60-71.
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For a general overview, inventories had to be made. More often than not they were merely
stocktaking, consisting only of a summing up of the series and their storage place. As
Randolph Head argues, these ‘architectural clues’ were essential. An inventory to the
papers of the States General from 1677, used by archivists well into the 20th century, is an
instance. It was an

Index or Inventory of the books, papers, documents and muniments stored in

the two rooms above the gallery, also in the passage under the roof, and the little attic
above the pavilion from which one goes from the assembly room of their High and
Mighty Lords to the assembly of Holland.26

And one of the descriptions in this inventory explains that certain registers could be found
‘in the first room above the gallery, in a case upon which is posted the letter E’. The
inventory, however, did more than just refer to physical spaces. It reflected the order of the
loketkast (Fig. 3.6) of the States General (containing pigeonholes for the documents
concerning the Republic’s domestic and foreign interests) so that the inventory
represented ‘the order of the larger world that both the documents and the inventory
pertained to’, in the words Randolph Head uses to define the ‘ideal-topographic
classification’ originally proposed by Peter Rück.27

Other advanced administrations developed their own classifications and subject-based

inventories. An early example was the late 16th-century arrangement by Jan van Hout,
who developed a classification in which one may recognize the topical categorizing of
knowledge by humanists such as Rudolph Agricola and Erasmus (see 4.4). Another
example is the arrangement by the Rotterdam city advocate Isaac van Hoornbeek (1704),
who replaced the arrangement by form of the documents by one according to the subject
of municipal government (see 4.5). Van Hoornbeek did not copy an existing library
26 Head, Making archives, p. 146; National Archives,
classification but invented a classification as a representation of the work processes of the
Staten-Generaal (1.01.02), inv. nr. 12673. city government. So, too, did the Fagels, the greffiers of the States General from 1670 to
27 Head, Making archives, p. 193. 1795 (see 3.3).

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11.1.3 Preserving
Archiving Technologies 28

Institutions and people had different options for preserving their records: they could use
sacks, boxes, chests, and cupboards, placed either in specially designated areas or in any
suitable place. When in documents before 1800 a cas or casse is mentioned, it may refer to
a box, a chest, a coffer, or (especially after 1550) a cupboard.

Linen sacks were specially used for the storage of records (Figs. 9.6 and 11.3). Attorneys
and notaries used to hang the sacks on the wall of their office. Boxes were mostly chip
boxes, oval or rectangular in shape (Fig. 11.8a and 8b); starting in the 19th century they
were made of cardboard.

In 1428 Haarlem had boxes made for the municipal privileges. They were stored in the city
chest in the vestry of St Bavo’s Church (where it can still be seen). A few years later the
boxes were replaced by four oak drawers that were filled with some 300 charters in the
course of time.

The use of a chest (box, coffer, cabinet, or shrine—from the Latin scrinium—in the south
of the Netherlands often comme) for the storage of records, money, and other valuables
was widely spread. In 1372 the Lady of Voorne had ‘a wooden coffer with iron mounting
containing many Walloon letters’. The arca (chest) of the Utrecht Cathedral chapter
(Fig. 11.10) could only be opened with four keys, as is stated in a book of law dating from
28 Wolfe and Stallybrass, ‘The material culture’, pp. 199-
1342. The arca was placed in the treasury, the thesaurarius having the key to the room.
208.
29 Cornelis Dekker, Kerkelijke archieven. Rede Accounts have been preserved of other Utrecht chapters from the 14th century, from
uitgesproken bij de aanvaarding van het ambt van
buitengewoon hoogleraar in de archiefwetenschap
which we can reconstruct the usual procedure. 29 Two notaries and witnesses, together
alsmede de paleografie van de 14e tot en met de 17e with the key holders go to the treasury, which is opened by the thesaurarius. When they
eeuw aan de Universiteit van Amsterdam op 18 mei
1981 (s.l., 1981), repr. in Nederlands archievenblad
have entered the room and the door has been locked behind them, the chest is opened and
85 (1981): 137. the cartulary with the text to be copied is taken out. The notaries transcribe the text there
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and then. When they are ready, the cartulary is replaced, and the chest is locked. The
company leaves the room which has been unlocked by the thesaurarius.

Comparable procedures for the opening of an archive that needed the cooperation of
several officials (see 4.1) occurred in other places as well.30 In 1422 the city of Nijmegen
ordered to manufacture ‘a schreyne in which one will store our privileges in the city kyst’.
The chest (kist) was placed in the sacristy of Saint Stephen’s Church. The church would
have been chosen because it was a holy place, and because it was fire-proof. In 1560 a
block, a cupboard with 12 drawers, was made and placed in the church as well. The chest
(and the room where it stood) were called the city’s archivum in 1647. In Leiden, too, the
city chest stood in the church until 1512, when it was moved to the City Hall. It had eight
locks and each of the eight aldermen had a key. When the chest had to be opened and one
of the aldermen was not present, his lock was cut off and replaced at his expense. To attend
the opening of the chest the city council (vroedschap) was also invited. This college of
former magistrates represented the citizenry; their participation in the ritual of opening
the chest may be regarded as an expression of the polder model (see chapter 13.3). In other
places we also see that the community (gemeente) had the keys to the town chest literally in
its hands. The Nijmegen Saint Nicolas’ guild had one of the keys to the city chest, while in
Roermond the ‘Six Men’ (Zesmannen, a college of six artisans which controlled taxation
Fig. 11.9 Charter cupboard of the city and the city’s expenses) possessed one of the three keys to the city chest. In Dordrecht all
Amsterdam, 15th century. Amsterdam City of six keys to the city chest were in the hands of the guilds since the 15th century (see 4.1 and
Archives. Figs. 4.1a and 1b).

30 Van blok vol rechten tot arsenaal vol wetenswaardig­heden

The city of Amsterdam had a special charter chest (or cupboard) made in the 15th century
(Nijmegen: Gemeentearchief, 1979); (Fig. 11.9).31 The chest (locked with three keys) contained 45 drawers, each provided with a
J.C. Overvoorde and J.W. Verburgt, Archief der secretarie
van de stad Leiden, 1253-1575. Inventaris
number and a label specifying the contents. The charters had been transcribed in the
en regesten (Leiden: J.J. Groen en zoon, 1937), p. xxii. register of privileges at the secretariat of the city, with marginal references to the drawer
31 De merkwaardigste stukken uit de oudste archieven van containing the original. The chest was kept in the Old Church, in a space five metres above
Amsterdam […] (Amsterdam: Pieper & Ipenbuur, 1821),
pp. 2-48; A.P.J. Miltenburg, Naar de gesteldheid dier
the floor, thus ensuring that the important documents were kept, as the Dutch would say,
tyden [...] (Hilversum: Verloren, 1991), pp. 43-45. ‘high and dry’.

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The space was called ‘the iron chapel’ because it was closed with an iron door, with two
locks, protecting a heavy wooden bolted door. The iron chapel was opened very rarely, but
that changed in the 18th century. The city’s historian Jan Wagenaar was granted access in
1761.

The Royal Institute of Sciences (Koninklijk Instituut van Wetenschappen), founded by King
Louis Napoleon in 1808, appointed a committee to inspect the iron chapel and the
contents of the charter chest. It published an extensive report in 1821, including facsimiles
of charters (including the oldest privilege of 1275). The first thing the city archivarius
Scheltema did when he was appointed in 1848 was to make an inventory of the documents
in the iron chapel. That inventory described the documents in chronological order (see
11.2.2). Scheltema considered this to be more efficient than reconstructing the original
arrangement following the labels on the drawers. The charter chest was moved to the City
Archives in 1892; it is now on permanent display there in the exhibition area.

Storage in an archive chest (Fig. 11.8) remained usual for governing bodies and private
people (see chapter 5 on the polder chest and the commons’ chest, 8.3.1 on the struggle for
access to the village chest, 7.3.1 and 10.6 on merchants’ archive chests), even in our time.

Apart from chests, special cupboards were used as well. The oldest dated archives
cupboard in the Netherlands is from 1550. Such a cupboard was an armoire (see 7.3.1).
The term armarium was, as we have seen, also used for ‘the archive’. Archives cupboards
contained drawers, lockers, or pigeonholes (loketten) (see 3.2). The doors of such a
loketkast could be locked, and sometimes there were lockers within the cupboard. The
cupboard could also be built into a wall, like the one in the house of VOC director Johan
Adriaan van de Perre in Middelburg (built in 1765 and today serving as the home of the
Zeeuws Archief). (Fig. 11.11). From Van de Perre’s archives one can reconstruct what the
Fig. 11.10 Archives cupboard, 16th century, pigeonholes contained. Van de Perre kept a voluminous correspondence, including letters
from the archives room of Saint Martin’s
Cathedral chapter in Utrecht (see also Fig. 2.1). and reports to the Stadholder while he was his representative in the Zeeland States; 23
Rijksmuseum BK-NM-125. boxes of these are preserved in the Royal Archives.
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Fig. 11.11 Built-in loketkast in the Van de Perre house (1765) in Middelburg (nowadays Zeeuws
Archief). Photo Rijksdienst voor het Cultureel Erfgoed.

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Storing of documents in appropriate containers, chests, and cupboards, placed in a church
or another place (for example a repository like the ‘iron office’ of Rijnland, see 4.4), was
judged to be sufficient to keep them safe. The need for conservation or restoration of
documents is very seldom mentioned. Copying and binding documents received more
attention. The widow C.A. Vieweg was commissioned by the village of Tilburg in 1786 not
only to print 500 copies of the fire regulations, but also for rebinding 43 registers which had
lost their covers. For this conservation work (and for supplying six new protocols for
Tilburg and Goirle communities) she received 131 guilders and 17 stuivers.32

Archives affected by moisture or other causes were aired and dried (see 4.4 and 9.6), but
old papers were often so damaged and made illegible by bad storage, fire, mice, or rats, that
they were simply destroyed. In the General Introduction I suggested that decisions to
destroy archives are—just as decisions to keep archives—influenced by economic, cultural,
and other external factors. Archivalization is joined by ‘counter-archivalization’. In the
preceding chapters many examples were given of destruction of documents (see 3.6.1, 4.5,
6.2.5, 6.3.1). In most cases it was lack of space in offices and repositories that stimulated
decisions to get rid of archives. Arguments revealing a policy of appraisal (what to keep,
what to destroy) were rare; disposable documents were either judged to be of no use after
having served their administrative purpose or too damaged to be usable.

Probably the first time that an appraisal policy was implemented consciously was in the
years between 1798 and 1803 in what is now the province of Limburg.33 There the French
archives acts of 1794 and 1796 were in force since the annexation by France. These acts
proclaimed free access to the State archives and ordained the establishment of a publicly
accessible archival repository in the capital of each department. They also regulated the
32 Ronald Peeters, ‘Zeldzame boekjes over Tilburg uit
de 18e eeuw’, Tilburg 1, no.1 (1983): 21.
selection of archives of institutions whose assets had been confiscated by the State.
33 J.M. Lemmens, ‘Archiefselectie in de Franse tijd.
To manage these assets, the titles and the administration of the past 30 years were needed.
Het “bureau du triage des titres et papiers” in They had to be selected from the archives. Papers of interest for the judicature, for history,
het departement van de Nedermaas 1798-1803’,
Publications de la Société historique et archéologique
or the development of the arts also had to be selected. From the last category, according to
dans le Limbourg 142 (2006), pp. 253-86. the instruction of departmental commissioners for the appraisal (les préposés au triage)
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of 1798, all papal bulls, princely decisions, peace treaties, charters, and cartularies had to
be sent to Paris. The remainder could be destroyed, that is, auctioned as waste paper.
The instruction sent from Paris contained an extensive enumeration of what was to be
destroyed and what should be preserved. Jac Lemmens has recently investigated how
much of the archives of each of the more than 70 religious institutions and 36 judicial
bodies in Limburg were destroyed. Of the extensive archives of the Maastricht chapters of
Our Lady and Saint Servatius, for example, more than three quarters were judged to be of
no value. They could therefore be destroyed. A part (bulls, royal charters, cartularies) was
sent in 14 packets to Paris. There the documents can still be found in the National Library.

The commissioners did not catch everything, however. Warned by what had happened in
France, many religious institutions and many families had brought their archives to a place
of safety; the chapter of Our Lady also sent many to be hidden in safety. Moreover, the
appraisers did not finish their job. They did not get around to appraising the archives of
around 115 judicial institutions. Altogether, Lemmens concludes that the confiscation and
destruction of archives in Limburg were restrained. The commissioners executed their
task scrupulously and intelligently. They abided by their instruction which ordered them
to find a balance (un juste milieu) between barbaric vandalism which strives to destroy
everything, to the detriment of the Republic, and a minute mania (manie minutieuse) to
preserve everything.

11.2 Since 1800

34 This section is to a large extent a summary of
11.2.0 Introduction
Eric Ketelaar, ‘“Control through communication” 34
in a comparative perspective’, Archivaria 60 (2006):
71-89. See also JoAnne Yates, Control through
communication. The rise of system in American
management (Baltimore/ London: The Johns Hopkins
From the middle of the 19th century increasing industrial activity, trade expansion, and
University Press, 1989); Onno de Wit, Jan van den enlargement of the scope of operations of banks and insurance companies with its
Ende, Johan Schot, and Ellen van Oost, ‘Innovation
junctions. Office technologies in the Netherlands,
attendant larger scale of activity led to what James Beniger has described as a control
1880-1980’, Technology and culture 43 (2002): 50-72. revolution in which information and communication systems were drastically reorganized

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(see also 8.2.7). Formalization, specialization, and depersonalization pulverize the
organiza­­tional memory, a memory once shared. That is why a new organizational memory
had to be created in the form of an easily accessible archive, manuals, rules, and
procedures. The expansion could concern the structure of the organizational memory, but
also its geographical spread.

Department stores and banks had their branches. A company such as mining company
Billiton, with several subsidiaries in the Netherlands Indies, felt the need for a central
archive including records regarding management matters of these subsidiaries.
Innovation in office management often started in the public sector, before being taken over
by private enterprise. Hollerith’s punchcards were first used by governmental census
bureaus, both in the US and in the Netherlands (1916), before insurance and railroad
companies discovered them.

Fig. 11.12 Hollerith punchcard. From R.G. ter Haak, Kantoormachines en administratieve
systemen […] (Amsterdam: H.J. Paris, 1927), p. 308.
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When Hendrikus Colijn became managing director of the Bataafsche Petroleum
Maatschappij (an operating company of Royal Dutch and Shell) in 1914, he introduced
methods for information processing with which he had been familiar as a civil servant in
the Dutch East Indies and as a cabinet minister. Such transfer of innovation between
public and private sectors was stimulated by the osmosis of public and private interests,
actions, and management systems.

By 1897 it was possible for Dutch municipalities to own utility companies and to make a
profit by selling gas, electricity, or telephony. Many new companies came on stream and
even private concessions changed hands. The Dutch State owned one of the railroad
companies since 1860. State owned inter-urban telephony followed (1897), as did coal
mining (1901). For an enterprising government the classical methods of organizing
information, accounting, and controlling were not adequate enough. The solution was
thought to be Taylorian scientific management. Municipal and state companies proudly
showed their innovations in information management at national exhibitions. The first
one was organized in 1896 by the Dutch Association for Municipal Interests, a second one
in 1906 by the Dutch Association of Municipal Civil Servants. At the 1906 exhibition,
typewriters were the main attraction. The importer of the Hammond typewriter
advertised that the cities of Amsterdam and Rotterdam had already bought 18 typewriters.
The city of ’s-Hertogenbosch had eight Adler typing machines. Twelve other municipali­
ties possessed the more expensive Oliver typewriter; Utrecht even had two of these.

To support the management of a company, new genres of communication and new

tech­­nolo­gies were invented. As in the US, Dutch railroads were leading-edge where
inno­­vation of recordkeeping was concerned. JoAnne Yates points to the physical char­
acteristics of railway companies and their consequences for management and communi­
cation. To attune activities that are coupled in time and distance, specific management
instruments are needed. Oral instruction is not sufficient to encourage safe working
practices and, moreover, it is not possible because of the long distances. Other transport
companies and multinationals, such as the Royal Packet Navigation Co. (Koninklijke
Paketvaart Maatschappij), Billiton, and Royal Dutch/Shell, were to experience this as well.

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11.2.1 Making and Using

Archiving Technologies

11.2.1.1 Material
Traditional wooden tallies were still in use in the 19th century at the bakers and butchers.
The last time a Dutch court had to decide on the admissibility of tallies was in 1860.35

Even today parchment continues to be used for very special documents. The deed of
abdication by Queen Beatrix (2013) (Fig. 11.13), for example, was written on parchment,
just as the abdication documents of her mother (1980) and grandmother (1948). The text
was written by a calligrapher and then screen-printed on vellum. To sign the deed, the
Queen, the new King, and the witnesses were each given a Parker fountain pen. The
charter was the last one to be sealed with the Queen’s grand seal; her son King Willem-
Alexander uses his own seal.

As I explained in 7.6.1.2, the demand for paper strongly increased after the 1850s, partly
owing to the growth in written documents and increasing postal traffic. The demand could
be met by using wood pulp as a raw material for paper making, a cheaper alternative to
rags, which were in short supply and therefore more expensive. The durability of paper was
considered to be rather limited, and therefore the ministries were advised regularly
between 1848 and 1879 to use hand-made paper only.36 A Paper Decree containing
standards for different types of paper was in force between 1925 to 1977. The Minister of
the Interior prescribed municipalities in 1928 which documents had to be written on
quality paper. Civic registers of births, marriages, and deaths had to be made of ‘registry
paper’ of the highest quality (Normal 1). The second-best paper (Normal 2) was to be used
for the archive copy of ordinances and minutes (with annexes) of the municipal council,
the executive, and committees. The cards of the population register had to be made of a
35 Magazijn van handelsregt 9 (1867): 38-39.
special type of cardboard. All other documents could be written on paper Normal 3.
36 Herman Kaptein, Nijverheid op windkracht.
Energietransitie in Nederland 1500-1800 (Hilversum:
Records appraised for destruction could be on paper of an even lower quality. The Paper
Verloren, 2017), p. 411. Decree was revoked in 1977 and setting quality standards was left to the market.
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Fig. 11.13 Deed of abdication of Queen Beatrix,

2013. National Archives, Kabinet der Koningin:
Verbaalarchief (2.02.30), inv. nr. 19196A.

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The Archives Act of 1962 prescribed public authorities to keep their archives in good
condition and properly arranged. The new Archives Act and the Archives Decree of 1995
took one step further by obliging public authorities to ensure that their records (insofar not
selected for destruction) show no sign of ‘significant deterioration’ after at least 100 years.
Further regulations included quality requirements such as those for paper, writing and
printing materials, and photographs. Records must be transferred to another medium if
they are threatened either with loss of information or with illegibility. These can be the
result of ageing of materials, obsolescence of media, or the software used to make digital
documents legible and usable (see 11.2.1.3).

The use of pre-printed documents increased substantially beginning in the French

period. Cadastral ledgers and other registers were printed with blank spaces to be filled in
(Fig. 6.5b). Thereby standardization and consistency at different levels of government was
achieved. An important instrument was the Municipal Act of 1851, which reorganized
municipal administration uniformly throughout the country and opened new possibilities
for standardization through printed forms (see below 11.2.1.3).

No longer is paper the main substrate. The digital age in Dutch archiving began in 1991
with a report by the Court of Audit (Algemene Rekenkamer) on machine-readable data
(machine-leesbare gegevensbestanden, or MLG).37 The report led to various projects
initiated by the National Archives and the municipal archives of Amsterdam, The Hague,
Rotterdam, and Utrecht, resulting in the report Beyond the paper era. A policy for a digital
memory of our society (Het papieren tijdperk voorbij. Beleid voor een digitaal geheugen van
37 For the history of the archivists’ involvement with
digital records see Hans Hofman, ‘Een wereld van
onze samenleving, 1995). This was followed by a programme ‘Digital Longevity’ (Digitale
verschil? Van MLG’s naar duurzame toegankelijkheid’, Duurzaamheid) of the State Archives agency and the Ministry of the Interior. The new
in Preservering. Stappen zetten in een nieuw vakgebied,
ed. Margriet van Gorsel et al. (’s-Gravenhage: Stichting
Archives Act of 1995 acknowledges its applicability to paper and digital records. However,
Archiefpublicaties, 2018), pp. 18-35. a record is no longer a tangible document or file in a logical and partly physical context
38 Eric Ketelaar, ‘Writing on archiving machines’, in Sign that can be arranged and described, used, and preserved as in the paper world. The object
here! Handwriting in the age of new media, ed. Sonja
Neef, José van Dijck and Eric Ketelaar (Amsterdam:
is the archive-process rather than the archive-product.38
Amsterdam University Press, 2006), p. 190.
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Digital documents do not have their content, structure, and form in or on a physical
medium. They are embedded in a digital representation that serves as a generator for
various ways in which the document can be made visible. Digital documents are potential
documents, coming into existence only by virtue of software that understands how to
access and display them. The software sooner or later becomes obsolete, necessitating
‘refreshing’ the documents through migration or other techniques. Moreover, a digital
document may contain links to other documents; it is variable and changeable, fluid and
unstable. The document resides in the cloud or in a third-party back-up service, out of
control of its creator(s). Thus, ensuring access to digital documents through time is an
enormous challenge.

Government authorities are obliged to adhere to the Archive Regulation of 2009 (based
on the Archives Act) which includes many standards for materials, media, quality of
information, and archival storerooms. The requirements apply to all records that are to
be stored permanently and that qualify for transfer to the National Archives or other
repositories. The Regulation prescribes:

Digital archive records must be stored in a fully documented file format that can be
validated and that is compliant with an open standard no later than at the time of
transfer, unless this cannot reasonably be asked from the custodian. In that case the
administrator of the depository designated for transfer will be consulted about an
alternative file format.39

Conversion, migration, or emulation of digital records is prescribed whenever, as a result

of changes in (or obsolescence of ) operating or application software, there is a fair chance
that the accessible and orderly condition of the records can no longer be guaranteed.

39 https://www.nationaalarchief.nl/sites/default/files/
11.2.1.2 Script, Sound, and Images
field-file/National%20Archives%20of%20the%20
Netherlands%20preferred%20and%20acceptable%20
Quill pens were popular well into the 19th century, but they were gradually replaced by
formats.pdf, accessed 1 Dec. 2018. crown pens. American and British fountain pens were imported by the late 1870s, but it

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took 30 to 40 years before they were in general use. In the meantime, the typewriter
made its appearance in the Netherlands. The first (of an unknown make) was on show in
The Hague in 1875. The Remington typewriter was imported in 1883, and other makes
followed rapidly (see 11.2.0). We know that before 1900 only four Dutch ministries
(Justice, Interior, War, and Commerce) used typewriters—only occasionally in the 1880s
and early 1890s, increasingly after 1899. With the typewriter, women entered public
administration, not as civil servants, but as paid workers. Around 1900 the price of a
typewriter equalled a quarter of the annual salary of an experienced male clerk in a
ministry. Female typists were cheaper. This is one of the causes of the so-called
feminization of office work; the number of female clerks rose from 410 in 1899 to 36,825
in 1920 (24 percent of all office clerks).

The typewriter was followed by a host of other office machines. Recording images and
sound was introduced. In the new office of life insurance company Utrecht (1902) a special
room was made to photograph documents, probably with a German Kontophot. It was
only in 1921 that the central bank (Nederlandsche Bank) ordered such a machine. Much
earlier, photography was used in government agencies such as the Labour Inspectorate
(for recording working conditions in factories) and the Waterways and Public Works
Service (Rijkswaterstaat), which was obliged to make photographs of the construction of
important waterways structures in 1869.

In offices other machines followed, including dictating machines. At the 1911 Inter­
natio­nal Exhibition of Modern Office Equipment and Administration in Amsterdam,
the Edison Business Phonograph (1904) was demonstrated. Other brands that came onto
the Dutch market before the First World War were the German Parlograph and the
French Roneophone. A film produced by the Rotterdam Bank (Rotterdamsche
Bankvereeniging or Robaver) in 1922 (see 8.2.7) shows how a voice text recorded on a
dictaphone is printed out by an automatic typewriter, thus executing Edison’s advertising
slogan ‘from brain to type’.
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The Robaver film made propaganda for the modern office, and in particular for the
mechani­­­zation at Robaver, but even before this film moving images had been employed for
propaganda. In 1917 Willy Mullens made the film ‘Holland Neutral’ (also known as the
‘army and navy film’). It was commissioned by government to ‘show the Dutch people (…)
and those abroad that our defence can bear any comparison with foreign forces’. This was
the first company film, the second being Mullens’ film ‘Glass Industry in Leerdam’
released in 1918.

Fig. 11.14 Mechanization at the The Hague

Public Works, showing 18 different office
machines encircling dozens of administrative
processes, 1926. From Tentoonstelling op
het gebied van de openbare en particuliere
bedrijfsadministratie T.O.P.A., vol. 3
(Purmerend: Muusses, 1926), pp. 80-81.

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A catalogue from 1927 lists 20 different types of office machinery, including machines for
addressing, calculating, writing checks, duplicating, dictating, printing, tabulating, and
time recording. All these technologies for writing were used together, more or less in tune
with each other (see Fig. 11.14). Mechanization of the office was followed by computer­
ization in the 1960s. Firstly (see 8.2.7) for bookkeeping, financial services, and statistics;
later (particularly after the introduction of IBM’s personal computer in 1981) for word
processing.

In Dutch a typewriter is called a schrijfmachine: a writing machine. The modern writing

machines are computers, mobile phones, and tablets. They all follow certain conventions
of the typewriter era, for example the layout of the keyboard, such as the use of ‘cc’ for a
carbon copy or the icon for filing being a vertical file. Script is no longer different from
print, except for applications imitating handwriting. Such pseudo-handwriting can be
reproduced from the device’s memory, but only because the impressions on the keyboard
or on the screen have been translated by software into bits, which the machine can ‘read’,
store, retrieve, and re-translate into handwriting. The immediacy of writing on a screen is
an illusion, as is its corporeality.40

11.2.1.3 Form
Many of the premodern epistolary conventions endured well into the 19th century,41
albeit influenced by French-inspired administrative practices that were introduced in the
years between 1795 and 1813 (see 3.4). One of the French innovations was the printed
letterhead, adorned by patriotic symbols and the phrase ‘Equality, Liberty, and Fraternity’.
40 Ketelaar, ‘Writing on archiving machines’.
French official letters also indicated the division, bureau, and the registry number.
41 Willemijn Ruberg, Conventional correspondence.
Government departments continued this way of referencing well into the 20th century.
Epistolary culture of the Dutch elite, 1770-1850, transl. The French practice augmented the use of standardized printed registers, tables, and other
by Maria Sherwood-Smith (Leiden: Brill, 2011).
document types to be filled in by the administration as well as the citizen for, amongst
42 Lisa Gitelman, Paper knowledge. Toward a media
history of documents (Durham/London, Duke
other uses, civic registration, conscription, cadastre, and taxation. Some printers were
University Press, 2014), pp. 21-52. specialized in printing these blank forms, called job printing (smoutwerk).42
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In 1882 Nicolaas Samsom, municipal clerk of Alphen aan den Rijn, established a printing
and publishing business of ‘reliably composed models on durable paper’: printed letters,
announcements, registers, returns, and other imprimés with fixed data which the
municipal officers only had to supplement. Every month Samsom distributed a checklist
(being an order form as well!) of all acts each municipality had to execute in that month
and the appropriate imprimés. ‘Samsom Forms and Filing Systems’ still exists. They make
more than 300 different forms for government and business, and various filing systems
which, according to their website, make it easier ‘to streamline your information
management’. However, this is one side of the matter. Government and other bureau­
cracies use the printed (nowadays digital) form to be filled in by the citizen or client as a
powerful instrument of surveillance and control. These forms, according to media
historian Lisa Gitelman, help to determine the self in relation to authority.

With the introduction of scientific management in the beginning of the 20th century, new
forms of managing information appear. The memo is born. The reader must be able to
quickly scan the text, which therefore is produced in standardized forms, graphs and
diagrams, organization charts, and flow charts. The Eerste Nederlandsche Verzekering­
maatschap­­pij, an insurance firm, invented a system of ‘moving letters’: forms indicating in
a flow chart all actions to be taken regarding one insurance policy and all documents to be
checked. These forms moved through the office from department to department, from
desk to desk.

A major change in the physical form of documents was the introduction of letter press
copying. The letter press (kopieerpers) for making facsimile copies of letters was already
known in the 18th century (George Washington received one from Holland in 1782), but it
is only in the middle of the 19th century that the letter press is commonly used. Letter
books (containing handwritten transcripts of letters) and letter press books could be used
simultaneously in an office, as is shown in the case of Fijenoord shipyard in Rotterdam.
From 1855 they used press books for labour-intensive work such as budgets and quotes,
next to handwritten copybooks. All books have a chronological order. Series are made

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when books are split off. The mechanical engineering division had a copybook of its own
and there were separate copybooks for special clients like the Ministry of Colonial Affairs
and the Ministry of Naval Affairs. Thus, the company circumvented a disadvantage of the
bound record system: the fact that only one person at a time could use a volume.

The introduction of the typewriter since the 1880s did not immediately lead to the
abolition of the letter press book. For some time, handwritten copies and typewritten ones
are found in one and the same letter press book. But the chronological order in these books
was like a straitjacket; it severely restricted their use. Outgoing letters could not be traced
quickly for one thing. The need to make files necessitated the reproduction of copies that
had been bound into a book. One of the answers was the mechanization of the letter press
book method by the roller copying press. Carbon copies offered even more possibilities.
The carbon copy and the ribbon copy were made at the same time, cutting out the need to
copy a letter at a later stage. Carbon paper had been used for a long time already (in 1806
Ralph Wedgwood patented his Stylographic writing machine), but its use became
widespread only after the introduction of the typewriter.

In the 1920s the Elliott-Fisher book typewriter was imported into the Netherlands. It typed
on a page of a bound ledger that lay flat when opened. Book typewriters were also used to
type letters while simultaneously printing carbon copies in a bound copybook.

The mechanization of the office (see 8.2.7 and 8.3.2) led to changes in the form of docu­­
ments, not so much of the final outgoing document, but mainly in the preparatory phases.
Office machinery used punchcards and tapes, dictating, addressing, tabulating, and other
technologies for writing to produce output which largely had the form of the traditional
documents. This changed when mechanization was succeeded by computer­ization,
especially after the introduction of the personal computer (PC), the personal digital
Fig. 11.15 Elliot-Fisher book typewriter. assistant (PDA), and other mobile devices. An email, text message, or a tweet have another
From R.G. ter Haak, Kantoormachines en
administratieve systemen […] (Amsterdam: form than a letter or memo on paper. This is true for the editorial form (see 11.1.1.3) as well
H.J. Paris, 1927), p. 100. as for the ‘physical’ form. In a digital environment the traditional notion of the physicality
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of a document is replaced by a new sense of materiality, both of the file format (PDF, EML,
WAV, SQL, etc.) and the hardware and software that created the document.43

11.2.2 Arranging
Large-scale (re)arrangement of archives at the local level was the result of the separation of
executive and judicial powers according to the 1798 constitution (see 4.9.1). Archives were
split up. Moreover, lack of space in town halls, court houses, and offices was often
remedied by abandoning old archives to attics, basements, and other unsuitable places
with little or no concern about maintaining the old archive structures. Maps form a
category where disturbance of the original context often leads to a serious loss of meaning.
A famous example is the map of the three Schie rivers from 1512 (in the National Archives)
on which (contrary to the real situation) the Delfshaven Schie is drawn as a robust
straight-lined canal and the Rotterdam Schie as a tiny meandering stream (Fig. 11.16).

Fig. 11.16 Map of the three Schie rivers, 1512.

National Archives, 4.AANW., inv. nr. 686.

43 Ketelaar, ‘Archiving technologies’.

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By reconstructing the original context of the map, we become aware of the fact that the
map was submitted by the city of Delft in a lawsuit against Rotterdam. Only then can we
ascertain its true meaning: Delft’s interest was to present the Delfshaven Schie as a more
spacious fairway than the Rotterdam Schie. Just as this map, hundreds of maps in Dutch
archives have become separated from their original context, not only because of neglect or
insecure storage conditions, but also because archivists assumed that it would be good
practice to keep maps as individual items separate from the textual archives.

However, there were instances in the 19th century where archivers showed an understan­
ding of the historically determined order of archives (which later would be called respect
des fonds), for example in the arrangement of the archives of the Utrecht Chapters (see
2.2). These and other historical archives were entrusted to members of the emerging
profession of archivist in the first half of the 19th century.44 They were rooted in the
legal-antiquarian tradition of publishing historical documents in so-called charter books
and city histories. In these publications, documents were presented in a chronological
order, and archivists therefore started to arrange the charters from the various collections
in their care in strictly chronological order. That way of arranging archives came under
attack from a new generation of archivists since the 1870s as being ‘non-scientific’. Their
methodology was to be codified in the Manual for the arrangement and description of
archives, published by the Association of Archivists in the Netherlands in 1898 (see 12.4).

For filing loose papers, the traditional liassering (see 3.2) was gradually replaced by putting
documents in a file cover (binder). The Shannon arch file held papers onto a board which
was stored horizontally, with the holes at the top of the documents.
Fig. 11.17 Shannon arch file, from around 1892
marketed in the Netherlands as ‘Shannon This inspired a German, Louis Leitz, to make his Leitz Ordner, an arch file, standing
Registrator’, Tilburgse Courant 5 March 1893. vertically as a book, with the holes in the left-hand margin of the documents. In 1896 Leitz
invented the lever at the outer side of the arches, and in 1904 he produced the first punch.
44 Peter Horsman, Eric Ketelaar and Theo Thomassen,
‘New respect for the old order. The context of the
As early as the 1880s, the Leitz and the Soennecken Stehordners were imported into the
Dutch Manual’, American archivist 66 (2003): 249-70. Netherlands.
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From around 1889 the American Library Bureau, led by Melvil Dewey, succeeded in
selling its index system methods, designed for library catalogues, to insurance companies
and other firms. As in the US, insurance companies in the Netherlands were the first to use
index systems on a large scale. Since 1900 the journal Handelsstudie published numerous
case studies of the use of card indexes in trade and industry in the Netherlands, as well as in
the Netherlands East Indies. Government agencies followed somewhat later (see 1.2.4 and
6.2.1). Most of these early 19th-century card index systems were imported from England
and Germany.

Elaborating on its index cards system, the Library Bureau designed the vertical file (1893),
replacing flat files that used to be stored horizontally in cabinets. Largely inspired by
Dewey, Johan Zaalberg innovated filing in the Netherlands in the early 20th century (see
4.10). Zaalberg’s filing system used what we would now call software and hardware: the
instructions, the Universal Decimal Classification, card indexes, cupboards, and filing
devices.45 They were all marketed since 1909 in the Netherlands and the Netherlands East
Indies by a joint venture of Zaalberg and Blikman and Sartorius, a firm of importers and
manufacturers of office equipment. In 1907 the firm had already introduced the Fortuna
card index and vertical filing system, the first system of this sort made in the Netherlands.

More ‘software’ in the form of guidelines and rules were to follow. For example, in 1949 the
Minister of the Interior promulgated general rules for the management of municipal
archives since 1813. They included extensive guidelines (based on the 1898 Manual) for
ordering archives and a schema for municipal archives since 1813. The rules ended by
reminding the reader of section 361 of the criminal code. That section currently states:

A civil servant or any other person charged, either on a permanent or temporary

basis with any public duties, who intentionally misappropriates, destroys, damages,
45 Charles van den Heuvel, ‘The decimal office. or renders unusable any things intended to serve the competent authorities as
Authority as a science in the Netherlands in the first
decades of the twentieth century’, Library trends 62
evidence or proof, or instruments, documents, or registers which have been
(2013): 329-45. entrusted to him by virtue of his office, or allows another person to dispose of,

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destroy, or damage such or to render such unusable or assists that other person in
such act as an accomplice, shall be liable to a term of imprisonment not exceeding
four years and six months or a fine of the fifth category.

However, apart from threatening with punishment and regulating the quality of paper,
more is needed to preserve archives.

11.2.3 Preserving
Storing archives in chests, boxes, and cupboards remained a customary practice even in
our times. Pigeonholes in cupboards and writing desks are still popular for filing papers. In
the second half of the 19th century box files, shaped like the copybooks and letter press
books, came into use. The American Amberg firm introduced cabinets for horizontally
filing and the firm of Stolzenberg (Germany) manufactured similar cabinets for the
European market (see 4.10). Later, filing cabinets (made of wood or steel) with drawers for
storing file covers vertically became the standard.

The first purpose-built archival repository was the State Archives in Arnhem (Gelderland)
(1879), followed by the State Archives in Groningen (1882) and Noord-Brabant (1883), the
City Archives of Leiden (1893) and Rotterdam (1899), the State Archives in Drenthe
(1901), and the National Archives in The Hague (1903; see also 3.6.3).46

To a large extent these buildings followed a common model: separation of repository and
administrative and public space, iron racks, and grid floors (see Fig. 11.18b). The building
for the State and City Archives in Groningen in 1921 (replacing the one of 1882) was the
first to have concrete floors. It was only in the 1960s that new State Archives were built in
46 https://web.archive.org/web/20190504022807/https:// Arnhem and Middelburg, replacing the buildings that were severely damaged in the
ilibrariana.wordpress.com/2015/01/03/nederlandse-
archiefgebouwen-in-verleden-en-heden/, archived 4
Second World War.
May 2019.
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Fig. 11.18b Plan of the first floor of the Rijksarchief in The Hague.
To the left is the search room (leeszaal) (see Fig. 3.11).

Fig. 11.18a The repository of the National

Archives (Rijksarchief) in The Hague, built in
1899. Drawing by Jan de Quack, 1900.
In 1902 the office building of the Rijksarchief
was built in front of the repository.
Fig. 11.19 State Archives in Arnhem:
to the right the repository of 1879; to
the left the building of 1967 that was
in use until 2013. Gelders Archief.

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In 1929 the Archives Act of 1918 was amended to oblige municipalities and water boards
to have their plans concerning furnishing their repositories approved by the Provincial
Executive. However, these regulations only applied to storage of records after their transfer
to an archival repository (archiefbewaarplaats). It was not until 1995 that the Archives Act
provided the possibility to impose quality requirements to storage areas (archiefruimten)
intended or designated for the storage of records pending their transfer (or destruction).

At an early date some Dutch archivists realized the importance of preserving films as
historical sources. The Hague city archivist H.E. van Gelder, General State Archivist R.
Fruin, and amateur historian D.S. van Zuiden founded the Association Dutch Central Film
Archive (Vereeniging Nederlandsch Centraal Filmarchief, NCF) in 1919.47 The film archive
soon acquired a variety of films, such as the film ‘Sunbeam’ (Zonnestraal, which was part
fiction, part documentary) commissioned by the union of diamond cutters. The NCF also
acquired some of the oldest Dutch films (1900-1902): the arrival of Paul Kruger in
Amsterdam, the wedding of Queen Wilhelmina, the opening of the States General by the
Queen, and eight more. Filmmaker Mullens (who became advisor to the NCF) donated
dozens of ‘city movies’ which he produced on behalf of municipalities. Van Gelder and
Fruin preferred the negatives over positive film, as being the most original sources. The
Association was dissolved in 1933, but the collection of nearly 800 titles remained in the
General State Archives. In 1952 the collection was taken over by the Netherlands Film
Museum (now known as Eye).

Archiving sound was the mission of the Algemeen Nederlandsch Archief voor Taal en
47 https://web.archive.org/web/20190418071733/
andere Uitingsbewegingen (after the Second World War it was renamed into Image and
https://www.eyefilm.nl/en/collection/film-history/ Sound Archives, Beeld- en Klankarchief), founded in 1938 at the initiative of Posthumus,
article/the-dutch-central-film-archive, archived 18
April 2019.
director of the International Institute of Social History (see 1.7.3 and 7.7).48 The Archives
48 Bert Hogenkamp, ‘”Van groot belang voor de
collected gramophone records, films, and photographs recording bodily motion, in
wetenschap van den mensch”. Het Algemeen particular speech. This collection, together with the film and sound archives of the public
Nederlandsch Archief voor Taal en andere
Uitingsbewegingen […]’, Jaarboek Stichting Film en
broadcasting companies and the audio-visual collection of the Netherlands Government
wetenschap—Audiovisueel archief 4 (1994): 7-39. Information Service, finally went to the Netherlands Audio-visual Archives (1997),
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currently known as Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision (Nederlands Instituut
voor Beeld en Geluid).49 Since the 1950s municipal archives also collected audio-visual
materials. Since the 1990s there are regional audio-visual archives, often linked to the
regional historical centre in the provincial capital.

The professionalization of the archivist (see chapter 12) brought greater interest in
conservation and restoration of archives in its wake. Archivists had to invent methods for
storing and restoring documents (including maps). Chemicals for treatment of charters,
maps, and other records were tested (sometimes with disastrous effects only visible many
years later). However, much was left to the skills of bookbinders and photographers
employed by a few archival institutions. In the late 1960s bookbinders were trained to
become professional archives restorers.

At its foundation in 1969, the Association of Restorers of Ancient Archives had 42

members, half of them working in municipal archives. New methods, techniques, and
equipment (for example for leaf casting, deacidification, and preservation of maps and
charters) were either adopted from abroad or developed by members of the association.
They could rely on the Central Research Laboratory for Objects of Art and Science in
49 For the kaleidoscopic (pre)history of Beeld en Amsterdam, founded by the State in 1963. The laboratory merged in 1997 to form the
Geluid see Piet van Wijk, ‘Een kwestie van kiezen.
Acquisitie en selectie van de nationale audiovisuele
Institute Collection Netherlands (ICN). The Association promoted education and training
collectie’, Tijdschrift voor mediageschiedenis 3 (2) of restorers, and the first specialization course in archive restoration was given in 1969. In
(2000): 7-34; Mieke Lauwers and Bert Hogenkamp,
‘Van emancipatie tot professionalisering. De
1978 a full-time higher vocational education of restorers started, which was supplemented
ontwikkelingen in de audiovisuele archivering after a few years with a specialized education for restorers of books and papers.
sinds 1997’, Audiovisueel. Van emancipatie
tot professionalisering, ed. Mieke Lauwers and
Bert Hogenkamp (’s-Gravenhage: Stichting The restorers became true professionals in their field, and the archivists realized they
archiefpublicaties, 2006), pp.11-22.
had not paid enough attention to issues of conservation and restoration. This changed,
50 Liv Tubeeckx, Charterberging. Een toekomst voor het
verleden. Master’s thesis Hogeschool Antwerpen,
resulting in renewed interest in the storage of charters and maps in the late 1960s and
2004, https://web.archive.org/web/20190531132243/ 1970s, for example. Utrecht State Archivist M.P. van Buytenen invented a method for
https://www.scriptiebank.be/sites/default/files/
e5b9f786f1ba0856b5e2f507a9b5c5c4.pdf, archived 31
storing charters vertically in hanging polyester envelopes (Fig. 11.20); other archivists
May 2019. favoured horizontal storage of charters and maps in specially made shallow drawers with
a polyester or polycarbonate bottom.50

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In the 1970s the deterioration of paper caused alarm. Experts from libraries and archives
discovered that the acidity of paper (especially paper produced in the 1870s and between
1940 and 1950) and unsuitable environmental storage conditions are major causes for the
decay of paper documents, but even more damage is the result of inappropriate or too
frequent handling of documents. Some records were worn away, having been handled too
often (literally ‘read to pieces’, stuk gelezen) by users. To prevent further damage, the most
heavily used documents were taken out of circulation and replaced by copies (xerox,
photographs, microfilms, and later digitized copies). These were generally provided to
users in self-service. This led to a strong decrease of the number of documents consulted in
the search rooms in the 1980s. That number is further decreasing because of digitization
and the Internet. In the City Archives of Rotterdam, for example, the number of on-site
consultations decreased from 10,863 in 2007 to 8,300 in 2017, whereas the number of
visits to the website in the same period increased from 348,679 to 709,882.

In 1989, the National Library and the National Archives founded the Coordinating Office
for national preservation policy (Coördinatiepunt Nationaal Conserveringsbeleid, CNC)
to enable country-wide communication and policymaking regarding conservation of
information on paper. Among other things, CNC did research on deacidification and leaf
casting and stimulated repackaging programmes to substitute the acid boxes and folders in
which archives had been kept traditionally. Together with a commercial paper merchant,
the Amsterdam City Archives developed an ‘acid-free’ archival box (1982) which can be
assembled without using corrosive fasteners; this ‘Amsterdam box’ is now generally used
in the Netherlands.

Many of the conservation projects were part of a more general effort to improve the
preservation of the cultural heritage in museums, archives, and libraries. In the so-called
national Delta Plan Cultural Conservation (named after the Delta Works, a gigantic
Fig. 11.20 Vertical storage of charters in project consisting of a series of construction works to defend the south-western part of the
polyester envelopes, Van Buytenen method.
Photo Utrecht Archives (Rijksarchief Utrecht), country against the sea), the government subsidized many projects with tens of millions of
1985. guilders between 1990 and 1998. The Delta Plan also included the improvement of
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buildings and climate control systems, development of quality requirements for packing,
and other materials and research.

Since 2005 the National Library and the National Archives collaborate in the national
conservation programme Metamorfoze. The programme started in 1997 for libraries but
was later extended to archives. Financed by the Ministry of Culture, Metamorfoze is
funding the conservation and digitization of collections of national importance. When
applying for funding, the archival institution has to demonstrate that the collection
belongs to the top ten priorities for conservation and digitization, and it must submit a
conservation plan for the totality of its collections.

For the preservation of digital records, the National Archives developed an e-depot. This
is a ‘combination of equipment, software, procedures, methods, knowledge and skills to
ensure the ingest, management, preservation and provision of digital objects and metadata
in the long term’.51 This e-depot primarily holds digital-born records, but digitized records
are taken in as well. As of December 2018, all regional historical centres in the provincial
capitals (see 3.6.3) are connected to the e-depot of the National Archives. Elsewhere
municipal archives are developing their own e-depot or beginning to share e-depot
facilities.

One might think that in the digital age appraisal of records (what to keep, what to destroy)
is no longer necessary because of the unlimited storage capacity and searchability of
digital media. That is, however, a myth. Permanent storage and permanent access require
enormous resources: buildings, staff, power, constant upgrading, and migration of
software and hardware, to name just a few. Every terabyte less as a result of appraisal is a
saving in the annually recurring costs. In fact, the appraisal process already begins with
51 https://www.nationaalarchief.nl/sites/default/files/
field-file/National%20Archives%20of%20the%20
the design of the recordkeeping system—the moment one determines which documents
Netherlands%20preferred%20and%20acceptable%20 are captured, that is, accepted by the system, and thus becoming records. Moreover,
formats.pdf, accessed 1 Dec. 2018. Ingest is the
technical term for accessioning of data files, their
digital records cannot be left on the shelves for years, waiting to be appraised. Therefore,
verification, and preparation for archival storage. one must decide at the front-end which records have to be kept in the system, and which

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records can be disposed of later, either through destruction or by transferring them to
another system. ‘Archiving by design’ implies that the sustainability of the information
from the work processes is taken into account in the design of information systems.
Organizational and societal requirements also play a role in assessing the function and
value of records for accountability, evidence, and memory. This applies to digital as well
as to paper records.

In the 19th century lack of space was the most important incentive to destroy documents
that were no longer considered to be of administrative value. Thus, masses of VOC
archives and other documents were sold off as waste paper or destroyed (see 3.6.1 and
10.5). However, in some cases the value of archives as a historical source was explicitly
considered. When in 1841 the Minister of the Interior was authorized by the King to
dispose of papers that had no administrative importance, National Archivist De Jonge
intervened. He offered to advise on their value for the national history.52 One of the
institutions that may have accepted De Jonge’s advice was the Court of Audit (Algemene
Rekenkamer). In 1846 it drew up an extensive list of papers to be disposed of immediately
or in the near future. In making the list the Court explicitly took into account the value of
the papers, not only for the financial history and for the national treasury, but for the
individual citizen who might have a claim as well.

The Association of Archivists (see chapter 12) petitioned the government in 1905. It was
concerned that, especially in small municipalities, appraisal would not be carried out
carefully, and that archives abandoned in the attic would be disposed of as useless rubbish.
As an instrument for a careful selection the Association drafted a list of documents that
could be disposed of, and their terms of preservation. With some amendments the
Minister of the Interior adopted the list in 1908 and distributed copies among the
municipalities. The Archives Act of 1918 instructed provinces, municipalities, and water
boards to use such an appraisal schedule; in 1929 the instruction was extended to
52 H.J. van Meerendonk, Handleiding voor selektie en
vernietiging van archiefbescheiden (’s-Gravenhage:
ministries and agencies of the central government. The system of appraisal schedules
Stichting Archief Publikaties, 1985). decided on by the minister still exists. The minister must consider not only the three
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interests acknowledged in 1846 (historical research, serving government, and ensuring
citizen’s rights) but also and more generally the value of archives as cultural heritage.

For a long time, archivists and records managers have been discussing the question of how
to determine the value of archives. Society at large was involved in that discussion only
recently. That discussion became particularly fierce in the 1990’s when the National
Archives introduced macroappraisal instead of file-by-file appraisal of records of the
central government. In the so-called PIVOT methodology, government functions rather
than the resulting records were appraised, resulting in retention schedules listing functions
instead of categories of records.53 General appraisal criteria were: to keep records resulting
from preparation, determination, and evaluation of government policies and accounting
for such policies, (re) structuring of policy bodies, and the main lines of implementation of
policies. Historians criticized the PIVOT methodology and criteria, arguing that they
neglect the informational value of records (especially operational files) and that they are
too government-centred. To meet the criticism, the National Archives involved the Royal
Netherlands Historical Society in the process of drafting schedules and commissioned
historical analyses of contemporary Dutch society to balance the analysis of government
functions. Such a societal analysis is the basis of the current selection policy, developed in
the beginning of the 21st century, after the PIVOT project was terminated. Nowadays,
the connection between records management and primary work processes (a weak point
of PIVOT) is taken into account much more seriously in appraisal, as are risk
management and the impact of values and issues in contemporary society on
governmental recordkeeping. The functional macroappraisal of PIVOT led to a more
meticulous selection than before, but turned out to be very labour intensive. Therefore,
53 R.C. Hol and A.G.de Vries, ‘Pivot down under.
one of the principal aims of PIVOT (acceleration of the selection of central government
A report’, Archives and manuscripts 26 (1998): records created between 1945 and 1975) was not achieved. A less intensive procedure
79-101; Agnes E.M. Jonker, ‘Macroappraisal in the
Netherlands. The first ten years, 1991–2001, and
was followed between 2006 and 2008, and 75 kilometres of shelving were processed with
beyond’, Archival science 5 (2005): 203–18. PIVOT the result that 17 percent could be transferred to the State Archives, and the rest be
was the acronym of the Project Invoering Verkorting
Overbrengings Termijn (Project to Implement the
destroyed.
Reduction of the Transfer Period).

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11.3 Conclusion
People use archiving technologies for making and using, arranging, preserving, and
Societal selecting archives. These technologies not only influence the material, the language, the
Challenges script, the form, the arrangement, and preservation of the documents created and
archived, they also influence the content. This is especially apparent when technologies
change. An example is the change from handwriting, via typewriting and other mechanical
Mandate processes, to digital word processing (either on a PC or laptop or mobile device). When
WHY
one texts a message on a mobile phone, form and content of the message will be different
from a message sent by e-mail or a message conveyed in a handwritten or a typewritten
People Business
WHO WHAT letter. The difference is due to the technology in a complex interplay with social and
cultural norms governing what and how to text. In Derrida’s words (already quoted in 1.2.4
Work
Processes
and 7.4) ‘the mutation in technology changes not simply the archiving process, but what is
HOW archivable—that is, the content of what has to be archived is changed by the technology’.54
But not only archiving is dependent on technology; technology influences the other
elements in the model of the archiving context, and all the entities are within technology’s
Archiving ring (Fig. 11.21).

The arrow to and from ‘technology’ pointing to both ends, represents the duality of
technology. As Wanda Orlikowski argues, ‘technology is physically constructed by actors
Technology working in a given social context, and technology is socially constructed by actors through
the different meanings they attach to it and the various features they emphasize and use.’55
Fig. 11.21 Model of the archiving context People in a particular social context (embracing all entities within the ring of the model)
including technology.
are influenced by technology, and on the other hand technology is socially constructed
54 Jacques Derrida, Archive fever, transl. Eric Prenowitz
through people using it. For example, the first typewriters were designed to be used by
(Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 1996), court reporters, but very soon other people discovered and employed the machine for
p. 17.
other uses. More recent examples are text messaging and the world wide web technology,
55 Wanda J. Orlikowski, ‘The duality of technology.
Rethinking the concept of technology in organizations’,
both developed for particular uses and with particular features, but eventually enacted
Organization science 3 (1992): 406. and adapted by people in ways the designers could not have foreseen.
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The rationalization, mechanization, and subsequent computerization of office work
demanded and facilitated standardization of input and output. The memo, the layout of
the typewriter’s keyboard, the number of columns on a punchcard, and the textual
interfaces of early computing, all affected the content of what must be archived.
The content of a document has a meaning, but the technology used has a meaning (or
several meanings) as well. The use of either sheepskin or vellum, the way the seal is
attached to a charter, the editorial form of a document, or the quality of the paper, all have
a meaning. That meaning may or may not be compatible with the original intent of the
writer. Often the latter is obscured by the former, as when people, instead of writing freely,
adhere to epistolary conventions or use formulas or when they are forced to just fill in
a standard form. The materiality of documents is also important; the little holes in
documents, for example, indicate that they were filed together on a string, thus revealing
a connection which at first sight was not recognized. The intellectual and physical
arrangement of documents tells something about the ideas of archiving people with
respect to governance (in the city, the country, business, the family) and the categorizing of
knowledge. Even the boxes and chests serving as storage for records may serve as sources
of information themselves. Different keys in several hands to open a chest point to
a distribution of power.

Archiving technologies in the hands of archiving people construct the archive. This is
especially true with respect to appraising what has continuing value and should be kept
and what is useless and may be destroyed. The archive after appraisal is not the same as
56 Ketelaar, ‘Archiving technologies’; Eric Ketelaar,
the archive before appraisal. By using these technologies, people archive and are being
A dualidade do arquivar’, in Information and memory, archived. That is what I call the duality of the archive.56 Or, to borrow from Anthony
ed. Ricardo Pimenta, transl. Janaynne Carvalho
do Amaral (Rio de Janeiro: Instituto Brasileiro
Giddens’ duality of structure: structural (or structuring) properties of archiving
de Informação em Ciência e Tecnologia, 2019) technologies are produced and reproduced in what people do; they are the medium and
(forthcoming).
the outcome of activities of actors.57
57 Anthony Giddens, The constitution of society. Outline
of the theory of structuration (Cambridge: Polity Press,
1984), p. 191.

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Contact
T +31 (0)70 82 00 371
E info@docfactory.nl
W www.docfactory.nl
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A SOCIAL HISTORY OF
DUTCH ARCHIVES Chapter 12

Archiving
Professionals
—
12.0 Introduction
12.1 Archivers and Archivists
12.2 Enters the Archivarius
12.3 Scientific Archiving
12.4 The Association of Archivists
in the Netherlands
12.5 The Archives Act of 1918
12.6 New Archives and New
Professionals
12.7 Hercules at the Crossroads
12.8 Conclusion

l Fig. 12.0 Draft of section 1 of the Manual for

the arrangement and description of archives,
1898. National Archives, Koninklijke Vereniging
van Archivarissen in Nederland (2.19.021),
inv. nr. 287.

ˇ
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12.0 Introduction
In the preceding chapters we have encountered archiving people. I consider them all to
be archivers acting in practices of creation, classification, filing, arrangement, appraisal,
use and abuse, selection, and destruction of archives. In what way did archivists differ from
the other archivers? This question raises another question: what was or is a professional
archivist? How did the archival profession in the Netherlands develop?1

A profession is, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, ‘an occupation in which a
professed knowledge of some subject, field, or science is applied; a vocation or career,
especially one that involves prolonged training and a formal qualification’. Sociologist
Albert Mok2 distinguishes four partly overlapping phases in professionalization: differen­
tiation, specialization, institutionalization, and legitimization. By differentiation a certain
activity is branched off from the whole of the division of labour (12.1). Professionals
develop expert knowledge and skills providing them with a monopoly in a given domain
(12.2 and 12.3). Fixed structures and patterns arise, such as special training, jargon, work
1 Archivaris, professie, professional, professionaliteit, methods, learning, and skills. Institutionalization protects the individual professional and
professionalisering, ed. Erika Hokke and Thijs Laeven
(’s-Gravenhage: Stichting Archiefpublicaties, 2010),
ensures continuity of the professional practice. Professional associations play a major role
https://kvan.courant.nu/periodicals/JB/2010, accessed in institutionalization (12.4). A fourth process in the development of a profession is its
2 Dec. 2018.
legitimization by society and the share of the profession in the division of labour (12.5).
2 Quoted by Erika Hokke, ‘‘‘Er is een arbeidsverdeeling
gekomen”. De ontwikkeling van het beroep archivaris
A job may be called a profession if these four criteria have been met. Where the Dutch
in de 19e en 20e eeuw’, in Archivaris, professie, archival profession is concerned, these processes were accomplished in 1918-1919.3
professional, professionaliteit, professionalisering,
ed. Erika Hokke and Thijs Laeven (’s-Gravenhage:
A profession is not static, however. It adapts itself to changing circumstances in society
Stichting Archiefpublicaties, 2010), pp. 21-38 https:// (12.6 and 12.7).
kvan.courant.nu/periodicals/JB/2010, accessed 12
Dec. 2018.
3 See also Theo Thomassen, ‘Archivists between
knowledge and power—on the independence and
autonomy of archival science and the archival
profession’, Arhivski vjesnik 42 (2000): 149-67,
https://hrcak.srce.hr/file/16227, accessed 2 Dec. 2018.

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12.1 Archivers and Archivists
Archivers participating in the production and mediation of the archive (see the General
Introduction) are record subjects, authors, clerks, registrars, antiquarians, record
managers, keepers, systematizers, genealogists and other users, and, finally, archivists:

record subjects authors clerks antiquarians

foundling Maria merchants Claes Adriaensz Jan van Hout (4.3) Ubbo Emmius
(General Introduction) van Adrichem (7.1) and and
and VOC sailor Isaac and Wollebrant Geleynssen Steven Dassevael (3.4) Jan Wagenaar (4.7)
Jijskoot (1.4.1) de Jongh (10.6)

record managers keepers systematizers genealogists and other users

Johan Zaalberg (4.10) Gerrit Dedel (2.2) Simon Stevin (5.3 and 8.2.3) F.S. Knipscheer (1.2.2),
and and ‘charter clerk’ Jean René and Gerard Schaep (1.7.1) and
Petrus Noordenbos (3.5) Gericot (4.5) Van Gogh and Hijmans (8.3.2) survivors of the Holocaust (6.4)

archivists

Hendrik van Wijn (3.6.1); R.C. Bakhuizen van den Brink (3.6.2);
Samuel Muller, Johan Feith, and Robert Fruin (7.7)

What about Gerard Alewijnsz, head of the chancery of the Counts of Holland (3.1), who
is praised as the progenitor of all Dutch archivists? Or Jan van Hout, not only city clerk of
Leiden, but regarded as the first archivist of Leiden (4.4)? Shouldn’t they be in the same
category as the archivists Van Wijn, Bakhuizen van den Brink, Muller, Feith, and Fruin?
Or in any other category?
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Since the Middle Ages, individuals have been charged with the keeping of charters and
other documents created and received by the institution they worked for. This was not the
main task for these clerks, registrars, and heads of chancery. Although they developed
expertise in keeping archives, there was no question of differentiation and specialization
in archives management. They did not get their identity from archiving but from their
knowledge and skills as clerks. They did their work in a professional way even though there
was no archivists’ profession, no institutionalization, or societal legitimization. This does
not prevent us from considering Gerard Alewijnsz, Jan van Hout, and all the others who
made order out of chaos in the archives before the 19th century, as forerunners of the
profession.

12.2 Enters the Archivarius

In the 18th century and in the first decades of the 19th century, various institutions began
to call the person keeping the archives chartermeester (see 10.5), archivist, or archivarius,
which suggests a certain specialization. In 1802, Hendrik van Wijn became the first
archivarius of the Batavian Republic (see 3.6.1, Fig. 3.10). His remit was restricted to
inspecting and cataloguing the most important documents up to 1648. In 1814, Van Wijn’s
assignment was broadened and included centralizing the archives of the Republic up to
1795 at the Binnenhof in The Hague. However, only after the regulation of public access to
government archives (1829) can one speak of Archives (with a capital A): an institution,
independent (and detached!) from the records creating administration, managing archival
documents with a view to research by people other than the staff of the records creating
agency. As described in 4.8, the Leeuwarden City Archives (established in 1838) were the
first Archives to meet these criteria at local level. Leeuwarden was followed by other towns
and most of the provinces in the 1840s. Managing these Archives was mostly a part-time
job for one man, most of them being antiquarians and historians with an academic degree
in the humanities or the law. They were recognized to be in a different league by their
fellow antiquarians and historians who worked with them in local and provincial
associations.

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After 1829 the average archivarius occupied himself primarily with collecting and
publishing documents. Charter books and other publications were substitutes for access
to the archives.4 To prepare these publications, they inventoried archives focusing on
compiling a chronological register: a calendar of all documents (mostly charters) in
chronological order in a repository. Isaac Nijhoff, provincial archivist of Gelderland from
1817 until his death in 1863, developed a model for such a chronological register. However,
his model was applied by only a few of his colleagues. One of them was Pieter Scheltema,
the archivist of Amsterdam and the province of Noord-Holland (see 11.1.3). That does not
alter the fact that Nijhoff was the first Dutch archivist to propagate standardization of
archival methods, a first step in the institutionalization of the profession.

4 Peter Horsman, Eric Ketelaar, and Theo Thomassen,

‘Introduction to the 2003 Reissue’, in S. Muller,
J.A. Feith and R. Fruin, Manual for the arrangement
12.3 Scientific Archiving
and description of archives. Translation of the second
edition by Arthur H. Leavitt, with new introductions… The liberal bourgeoisie that came into power in 1848 wanted transparency and organic
(Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 2003), pp.
V-XXXIIII; repr. as ‘New respect for the old order.
coherence of governance. These were the pillars of the reorganization of the archival
The context of the Dutch Manual’, American archivist system under Bakhuizen van den Brink in the 1850s (see 3.6.2). Bakhuizen stimulated the
66 (2003): 249-270. See also Eric Ketelaar, ‘S. Muller,
J.A. Feith, and R. Fruin’, in Encyclopedia of archival
development of local and provincial Archives by giving archival documents out of the
writers, 1515-2015, ed. Luciana Duranti and Patricia Rijksarchief on a large scale. These were mostly duplicates, but there were also original
C. Franks (Lanham etc.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019),
pp. 411-13.
records that thus returned into ‘the very centre of the facts and events to which they are
5 R. Fruin, De gestie van dr. R.C. Bakhuizen van den
related’ and where they would ‘have the most advantageous influence practising specific
Brink als archivaris des rijks 1854-1865 hoofdzakelijk and local history’.5 Public access and consultability were the conditions he always imposed.
uit zijne ambtelijke correspondentie toegelicht
(Algemeene Landsdrukerij: ’s-Gravenhage, 1926),
Besides, Bakhuizen’s policy only concerned archives from before 1813.6
pp. 129, 211.
6 Fruin, De gestie, p. 158. Thus, in the 1860s, collecting and describing archives and providing access to the public
7 The following is a summary of Eric Ketelaar, ‘Muller, to archives from before 1813 were acknowledged to be the particular domain of archivists.
Feith and Fruin’, Archives et bibliothèques de Belgique
/Archief- en bibliotheekwezen in België 57 (1986):
There had been attempts to form a body of common expert knowledge, but there was no
255-68, and Eric Ketelaar, ‘Archival theory and the question of institutionalization and legitimization. That changed from the 1870s, at first
Dutch Manual’, Archivaria 41 (1996): 31-40; both repr.
in Eric Ketelaar, The archival image. Collected essays
slowly, but rapidly since the 1890s.7
(Hilversum: Verloren, 1997), pp. 43-65.
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In 1874, 26-year-old Samuel Muller Fz. (son of Frederik, to distinguish him from his
cousin, the historian Samuel Muller Hzn.) started his career as City Archivist of Utrecht
(from 1879 he was State Archivist in the province of Utrecht as well). To prepare himself
for the job, he had attended a few lectures at the Paris École des Chartes in 1873. As Muller
remembered later, ‘the professor who taught the organization of archives never tired of
preaching the respect des fonds.’ During a few months in 1874 and 1875 Muller had an
assistant, jonkheer Theodoor van Riemsdijk, who moved to Zwolle in 1875 to become City
Archivist; from there he went to Arnhem in 1877 as State Aarchivist in the province of
Gelderland (see 4.9.2). Van Riemsdijk and Muller both had to discover how to arrange the
archives (most of them dating back from before 1800) that lay piled up in the repositories.
They were each active in a field as yet unknown to them, each keeping in close touch with
the other, exchanging views and experiences by correspondence and in meetings. They
started by developing an archival theory: an analysis of ideas about what archives are, their
essential characteristics, and their common properties. They rejected a subject-based or
chronological arrangement of archives as being not scientific (wetenschappelijk). One may
assume that ‘scientific’ was understood to be ‘the application of scientific methods in fields
of study previously considered open only to theories based on subjective, historical, or
undemonstrable abstract criteria’ (Oxford English Dictionary). However, in this context
the term must be understood as according to the theory, principles (like the principle of
the respect des fonds), and methods which constitute a specific domain, specific for
archivistics. They agreed on a definition of an archive:

An archive is the whole of the written documents, drawings, and printed matter,
received or sent by the administrative body of a community or one of the
community’s officials ex officio, in so far as these documents are intended to remain
in their custody.

This definition was to be adopted by the Association of Archivists in the Netherlands

(Vereeniging van archivarissen in Nederland, VAN) in 1893, but in the Manual it would be
amended (see 4.9.2; on Fig. 12.0, the amendments are in Muller’s handwriting).

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A friend and patron of Muller and Van Riemsdijk was jonkheer Victor de Stuers, since
1875 head of the department for Arts and Sciences within the Ministry of the Interior
(see 3.6.3). He completely reorganized the archival system. The repositories in the
provincial capitals were gradually taken over by the State. In his instruction for State
archivists, De Stuers prescribed a ‘scientific’ inventorization according to a plan which had
to be approved by the Minister. The only State archivists who understood what he meant
by ‘scientific inventorization’ were Muller and Van Riemsdijk. Both opposed the then
prevailing opinion that there were no firm principles for the arrangement and description
of archives because each fonds is different. Instead, Van Riemsdijk and Muller were
convinced that generally applicable rules for the arrangement and description of archives
were necessary. Before those rules could be implemented, further steps in the process of
institutionalization of the profession were necessary.

Fig. 12.1 Samuel Muller Fz. (1848-1922), by

Jan Veth, 1895. Utrecht Archives, 31747.
Fig. 12.2 Jonkheer Theodoor van Riemsdijk
(1849-1923), by Philip Alexius de László, 1909.
National Archives.
Fig. 12.3 Jonkheer Victor de Stuers (1843-1916),
by Hendrik Johannes Haverman, 1896.

In 1887 Van Riemsdijk became General State Archivist. Three years later he convened
the first annual conference for all State archivists. The municipal archivists felt left out,
although they had met occasionally at the Historical Association (Historisch Genootschap)
or the Society of Dutch Literature (Maatschappij van Nederlandsche Letterkunde).
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The first time the archivists came together for a professional cause was in 1885, when 31
of them, mainly municipal archivists, led by A.J. Enschedé, the City Archivist of Haarlem,
signed a petition to government requesting the transfer of the old notarial archives and
their access (see 9.6).8

12.4 The Association of Archivists

in the Netherlands 9

Five years later, five young archivists (all in their thirties) met to discuss the foundation of
a national professional association. They were the city archivists of Amsterdam and Leiden
(De Roever and Dozy) joined by three colleagues from the State Archives in Groningen
(Feith), Drenthe (Gratama), and Noord-Brabant (Bondam). These three men were friends
and former students at the University of Groningen. The five invited the ‘grand old man’
Enschedé (Haarlem) to join their initiative. In a letter to 40 colleagues, the initiators wrote
that they would like to meet to discuss matters of common interest such as the system of
arrangement, neglect of private archives, the use of archives by the public, and regulation
by law of the position of the city archivist.10 They proposed to form an association of heads
8 See Eric Ketelaar, ‘Haarlem. Bakermat van de of Archives and ‘scientific’ archivists (archivarissen en wetenschappelijke archiefambte­
Vereniging van Archivarissen in Nederland’, in Hart
voor Haarlem. Liber amicorum voor Jaap Temminck,
naren) at Dutch State, provincial, and municipal Archives. Such an association could
ed. Hans Brokken, Florence Koorn and Ab van der promote proper archiving, reinforce the mutual friendly relations, and lobby for a general
Steur (Schuyt: Haarlem, 1996), pp. 255-61.
regulation of the archives sector (archiefwezen).
9 Respect voor de oude orde. Honderd jaar Vereniging
van archivarissen in Nederland, ed. Paul Brood
(Hilversum: Stichting archiefpublicaties/Verloren, Thirty-two archivists came to a meeting in Haarlem on 17 June 1891, when the Association
1991); Erika Hokke, ‘Not a dilletante, but a
professional’, in Values in transition. Perspectives
of Archivists in the Netherlands (VAN) was founded. Its constitution stated promoting the
on the past, present and future of the archival interests of the Netherlands archives sector as its mission. The six initiators were
profession, ed. Hildo van Engen (The Hague: Stichting
Archiefpublicaties, 2017), pp. 13-28.
appointed to be the first executive committee. Within two years the VAN had 38 members;
10 National Archives, Vereniging van archivarissen in
among them were 18 of the 22 municipal archivists, the keeper of the Royal Archives, and
Nederland (2.19.021), inv. nrs. 1, 5, 10. 19 of the 22 archivists employed by the 12 State Archives. A proposal in 1892 from

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librarians at the Royal Library and the university libraries to establish a joint association
(with two sections), was rejected as being not only against the VAN’s constitution, but also
‘incompatible with the goal and the essential nature of our association’.

In the annual meetings of the Association in 1893 and 1894, and in the Association’s
journal Nederlandsch Archievenblad, Gratama, Muller and his pupil Fruin, and others
discussed principles and practices of arranging and describing archives. In 1895 the VAN
commissioned Muller, Feith, and Fruin to write a manual, taking into account both
the discussions in the VAN and the ministerial directive, issued in 1897 as an outcome of
discussions in the meetings of the State archivists and containing rules on arranging
archives in a State archives repository.

Fig. 12.4 The first issue of Nederlandsch Fig. 12.5 Johan Adriaan Feith (1858-1913), by F.H. Bach, 1904. Groningen Archives.
Archievenblad. In 1905 Feith was ennobled with the title jonkheer.
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As Peter Horsman, Theo Thomassen, and I wrote, the pioneering contribution of the
Manual for the arrangement and description of archives of 1898.

lies in defining the archival fonds, in the formulation of the connection between
the archive and the functions of those who create it, and in making archivists aware
that the boundaries and structure of an archive need to be respected and that the
components of which an archive consists can only be comprehended within their
original context. (…) Taken separately, these ideas were not really new in 1898, nor
innovative. (…) What was new and innovative was the combination of these ideas,
the integrated application of them to historical records. This signified such an
advance in archival science that these ideas were able to spread throughout the
world.11

The Manual did not offer an archivistics theory, but a methodology, developed according
to a phenomenological approach that is scholarly justified.12 The methodology was
formulated in 100 rules, which, according to Muller, Feith, and Fruin, might be deviated
from if well-motivated, the motivation to be subjected to a discussion by colleagues.
In practice, however, the rules were seen as inviolable dogmas and what was meant to be
an instrument became a bible for archivists; the methodology became a doctrine.
The Manual itself writes about (section 24) ‘the requirements of the new archival doctrine’
(archiefleer). In the French edition of 1910 this was translated as ‘the requirements of the
new archival science’. But a doctrine is not science. A doctrine does not permit another
vision; it is fundamentalist, not critical; it stimulates exegesis, but it does not encourage
Fig. 12.6 Robert Fruin (1857-1935), c. 1896. free independent research. Yet the doctrine had a role in the process of the
National Archives, Collectie Fruin (2.21.222),
inv. nr. 253. professionalization of the archivist. And that role the Dutch Manual certainly has had,
not only in the Netherlands, but also in many other places around the world, as is shown
11 Horsman, Ketelaar, and Thomassen, ‘New respect’:
by the many translations, even until today. Codification, normalization, and regulation of
258. the archival practice are important for the professionalization of archivists, literally when
12 This paragraph is taken from Eric Ketelaar, ‘The future they are being trained or ‘disciplined’, the archival discipline being a branch of learning.
contained in time past. Archival science in the 21st
century’, Journal of the Japan Society for archival
The discipline or professionalization has more aspects; a specific professional language,
science 1 (2004): 20-35. a specific training, a specific ethical code, and many more elements.

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During the first ten years of the VAN, its membership was for men only. In 1901 the first
woman was admitted: dr Hermine Moquette, deputy City Archivist of Rotterdam.

A year before, the VAN had refused to admit miss Rinskje Visscher, City Archivist of
Leeuwarden, not because of her gender, but because the archivaresse (the female form of
archivaris was in 1900 introduced into the Dutch language by the secretary of the VAN)
was a subordinate of the city clerk, a situation the VAN considered to be incompatible with
the professional independence of the archivist. Miss Visscher became a member of the
VAN in 1909. More women followed, but in the first 20 years their number was very small:
six, two of whom were working at the National Archives. The others worked at municipal
archives. In 1946 only 17 women had joined the VAN, among them the city archivists of
Haarlem and Zutphen.

Fig. 12.7 Hermine Moquette (1869-1945).

Fig. 12.8 Members of the VAN at the annual

meeting on 2 July 1913 standing in front of
the State Archives (formerly the butchers’ hall)
in Haarlem. The only woman is Miss Catharina
Bruining, deputy City Archivist of Alkmaar.
On her right side Gonnet (State Archivist in
Noord-Holland), Fruin (General State
Archivist), and Muller (City and State Archivist
in Utrecht and president of the VAN). From
Nederlandsch Archievenblad 48 (1949-1941):
128.
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The foundation of the VAN (1891), its journal (1893), and the Manual (1898) were decisive
steps in the process of institutionalization, with its own professional association, its own
work methods, professional knowledge and know-how, and its own jargon.

The VAN was the first professional association of archivists in the whole world. It was
considered ‘the model of a modern archival special and professional association’, as the
chairman of the German Verein deutscher Archivare and initiator of the section of
professional archival associations (SPA) of the International Council on Archives (ICA)
wrote in 1976. Since SPA’s foundation, the VAN has always been represented on the board
of the section. Dutch archivists played a significant role at the first international congress
on archives, in 1910 in Brussels (when the Dutch version of the principle of provenance
was adopted as an international standard) and in the ICA since its foundation in 1948.
Dutch is one of the languages of the ICA’s glossaries published in 1964 and 1984 (see 13.1).

12.5 The Archives Act of 1918

One more step, however, had to be taken: the establishment of a specific professional
education for archivists. Between 1896 and 1910 the requirements for a wetenschappelijk
archivaris were discussed in the VAN and in the meetings of the State archivists.
Wetenschappelijk (scientific) must be understood in this context to mean acting as a
professional according to the principles (like the principle of provenance), the theory, and
the methodology accepted within the profession. The main conclusion (based on a report
by Muller, Feith, and Fruin) was that archivists with a PhD in law or history had to pass a
special exam in ‘essentially archival subjects’: archiveconomie (arrangement and
description of archives), diplomatics, palaeography, and chronology. This conclusion was
codified in a Royal Decree in 1919 as part of the implementation of the Archives Act of
1918. The Act prescribed that at least one professional archivist should be attached to each
State repository and that, when a municipality or water board wanted to appoint an
archivist, he or she should be a professional one. Alternatively, municipalities and water
boards could also decide to entrust their old archives to their clerk.

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The Decree of 1919 established two classes of professional archivists: first-class archivists
holding a PhD in law or humanities and second-class archivists without a PhD. Archivists
in either class had to pass an exam and complete a secondment of one year (first class) or
six months (second class). The Decree required 21 towns to nominate a person with a
first-class diploma if they wanted to appoint a municipal archivist. All State archivists had
to have a first-class diploma.

An Archiefschool attached to the National Archives was set up as a training institute,

with General State Archivist Fruin as director and chairman of the board of examiners.
The school started in January 1920, with three students for the first-class exam, 13 future
second-class archivists and nine non-degree seeking attendees. The Archiefschool was
‘temporarily’ closed in 1924 due to budget cuts. The regulations for exams and
appointments of first-class and second-class archivists remained in force, but students
had to prepare themselves for the exam relying on tutoring by trained archivists.

Fig. 12.9 Jonkheer W.G. Feith and L. Kruijff passed the exam at the Archiefschool, the newspaper
De Tijd announced, 8 July 1920. Wolter Gocko Feith (1889-1924) was the son of Johan Adriaan
Feith (1858-1913, Fig. 12.5), whose father and grandfather had been provincial archivists in
Groningen. Although there are more examples of sons and daughters of an archivist choosing
the profession of their father or mother, the Feith line of four generations since 1832 is
exceptional.
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Following the Archives Act, the VAN changed its constitution in 1920 to restrict member­
ship (with some exceptions) to first-class and second-class archivists. The amended
constitution also broadened the mission (promoting the interests of the Netherlands
archives sector) with ‘and of the civil servants (ambtenaren) working in that sector’. Strictly
speaking, this excluded professionals who had to work as volontair, i.e. without salary,
because there were so few posts available. Within the VAN two sections of civil servants
working at State archives and municipal archives were set up to promote the material
interests (such as salaries and job classification) and to keep contact with trade unions.
The two sections merged in 1961 into one association that continued the trade union
activities until 1975. In 1974 a new association of heads of local archives was founded, the
National Council of Municipal and Regional Archivists (Landelijke Kring van gemeente-
en streekarchivarissen, see 4.8).

12.6 New Archives and New

Professionals
The institutionalization of the profession by determining the requirements for education
and professional skills (1918-1919) went hand in hand with the legitimation of the
profession by society, expressed in the Archives Act of 1918. The act, by focusing on public
archives created since 1813, limited the archival profession to managing the ‘historical’
archives, just as the Manual of 1898 had only very limited applicability to ‘modern’
archives. However, the care of the records of the municipalities and water boards was
subjected to inspection by first-class archivists, either the State archivist in the province or
his deputy, or a provincial inspector appointed by the Provincial Executive. Through the
inspection, archivists were to some extent involved in the management of ‘new’ archives.
This was also true for appraisal. Destruction of State records was only allowed after
consultation with the General State Archivist or the State archivist in the province where
the State agency was located. Nevertheless, management of current and semi-current
records was outside the scope of the professional archivist, and the clerks and other

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people involved in the management of these records were considered not to belong to
the archival profession.

Only a few archivists were interested in ‘new’ archives. This led to clashes; for example in
1907 when the Association adopted a motion (drafted by Fruin) declaring the case filing
system with decimal classification, propagated by Zaalberg (see 4.10), to contravene with
the ‘organic nature’ of archives. In 1915 Muller repented and even endorsed the filing
system of Zaalberg’s Registratuurbureau. Fruin, however, continued to be against the new
filing system and warned Muller not to meddle with the new archives. Nevertheless, five
years later the VAN accepted extensive guidelines for case filing systems, including the
recommendation to involve an archivist in setting up the filing system and to consult him
or her about the transfer of files to the Archives.

Meanwhile, the profession of records manager was developing. From German practice
Zaalberg introduced the term registrator for a records manager. The term was broadly used
since around 1915. On 24 December 1924, 47 registratoren were present at a meeting for
the foundation of the Study Club for Municipal Documentation (Studieclub voor gemeen­
te­lijke documentatie).13 The Studieclub was closely affiliated with the Registratuur­bureau.

13 Johan Joor, Niet de instructie, doch het inzicht bouwt

een goed archief. Tachtig jaar overheidsdocumentatie
en administratieve organisatie. De geschiedenis van de
Vereniging voor Documentaire Informatievoorziening
en Administratieve Organisatie (SOD) en haar voor­
gangers, Studiekring voor Overheidsdocumentatie
(S.O.D.) en Studieclub voor Gemeentelijke Documenta­
tie (S.G.D.) (1931-2011) (Den Haag: Sdu Uitgevers, Fig. 12.10 The Registratuurbureau and the Studieclub voor gemeentelijke documentatie
2011). published a joint newsletter since 1936.
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Its focus was the municipal administrative organization, but in the late 1930s membership
was broadened to include registratoren at provincial and State agencies.

In 1939 the Studieclub started a training course for municipal records management.
In this course teaching the subject of ‘old archives’ was entrusted to the city archivist of
The Hague. Another archivist (at the provincial inspectorate of Noord-Brabant) was a
member of the board of examiners. The first certificates were issued in 1940.

12.7 Hercules at the Crossroads

Around 1919 the professionalization of the Dutch archivist was achieved, as Erika Hokke
in her study of the professionalization concludes. However, the involvement of the
archivist in records management continued to be an issue, debated in the 1930s and, after
the war, in the 1950s. At the diamond jubilee of the VAN in 1951, the General State
Archivist jonkheer Dirk Graswinckel delivered an address ‘Hercules at the crossroads’ in
which he asked his fellow archivists which road they would take: the trodden path leading
to the joy of being immersed in the old archives or the other, leading to the virtue of dealing
with the modern archives. He believed that both roads should be taken because only then
could the archives sector keep up with society.

Graswinckel’s lecture had been drafted by his assistant at the National Archives, Jaap van
der Gouw. Van der Gouw (who was to become General State Archivist in 1966), together
with Carel Bloemen, had started a training course both for the unofficial diploma
business archivist and for the State diploma of second-class archivist. This dual course was
supported by the executive of the VAN. Having passed the exam, business archivists
could be admitted as members of the VAN, by special consent of the members’ meeting.
Fig. 12.11 Jonkheer Dirk P.M. Graswinckel, The private training courses of Bloemen and Van der Gouw existed for only a few years.
General State Archivist 1946-1953. Painting by At the initiative of General State Archivist Hardenberg, the State archiefschool was
Bob Bruyn, 1953, detail. National Archives. re-established in 1955. The school was limited to training for the exams for first-class and

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second-class archivists; training of business archivists was provided by courses sponsored
by the Dutch Association of Business Archivists.

The change of direction of the professional archivist which Graswinckel initiated found
supporters and opponents, both within the VAN and among records managers. The new
Archives Act that came into force on 1 May 1968 brought registrator and archivist closer
because of the reduced period of transfer of modern records (50 years, and in 1995
shortened to 20 years) and the new role given to town archivists to inspect records
management in their municipalities. Nevertheless, the two professions remained separate,
as were their associations, education, and certification.

Professional differentiation and specialization continued to preoccupy Dutch archivists in

the 20th century and continue to do so today. Within and outside the VAN (since its
centenary in 1991, Royal Association of Archivists in the Netherlands, KVAN) the
question of ‘what or who is an archivist’ was raised time and again—explicitly when
discussing changes in education and training or debating ethical issues, implicitly when
discussing, for example, the archivist’s involvement in private archives, audio-visual
archives, collecting ephemera, ICT, or social media. These discussions resulted in changes
in education, legislation, and the societal role and identity of the archivist.

In 2007 the Association of Archival Institutions (Branchevereniging Archiefinstellingen

in Nederland, BRAIN) was founded. BRAIN provides services to institutions which keep
archives and related collections as part of the publicly accessible cultural heritage. While
the KVAN focuses on the individual professional, BRAIN promotes the interests of the
institutions and their management. KVAN and BRAIN jointly look after the interests of
the Dutch archives sector, stimulate and support collaboration in the sector, and further
the expertise of archive professionals. A merger has been discussed, but many archivists
believe that the professional autonomy is guarded better by the KVAN than by BRAIN,
whose members are dependent on their political masters. However, in 2018 a personal
union of the two executives was established to align policies and practices of the two
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associations. KVAN, BRAIN, and the National Archives jointly manage the Knowledge
Network Information and Archives (Kennisnetwerk Informatie en Archief, KIA), where
archivists, records managers, and other professionals exchange information and
collaborate, both virtually and face to face.

12.8 Conclusion
Beginning in the late 19th century, the Dutch archival profession was formed in stages:
differentiation, specialization, institutionalization, and legitimization. In 1918-1919 this
process was concluded. Legally established requirements for educating archivists were in
place and there was a professional association for archivists with a State diploma. Since
those days the profession has redefined itself time and again, adapting to a society that is
changed by cultural, political, and technological challenges.

Erika Hokke closes her essay on professionalization by suggesting that the dilemma as
identified by Graswinckel in his ‘Hercules at the crossroads’ (12.7) is not about choosing
either old or new archives, or either a governmental or a cultural function of the archivist
(and one may add: either a paper-based or a digital endeavour). The real question, Hokke
writes, is ‘whether archivists want to renew or rather leave everything as it is’.14

14 Hokke, ‘Er is een arbeidsverdeeling gekomen’, p. 38.

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A SOCIAL HISTORY OF
DUTCH ARCHIVES Chapter 13

The Dutchness
of Dutch Archives
—
13.0 Introduction
13.1 Typically Dutch
13.2 Inspiration from Abroad
13.3 Conditioning Factors
13.4 Archiving in the Polder
Model
13.5 VOC Shares
13.6 Draining the Polder
13.7 Trading and Rationing
during the First World War
13.8 Comparative Archival
History
l Fig. 13.0 The magistrate of The Hague
deliberating the rebuilding of the
Sebastiaansdoelen with the officers of
the St. Sebastian militia, by Jan van Ravesteyn,
1636. Haags Historisch Museum.

ˇ
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13.0 Introduction
As Jacques Derrida proposed ‘Let us not begin at the beginning, nor even at the archive.
But rather at the word ‘archive’—and with the archive of so familiar a word.’1 The Dutch
archief in the original Dutch version of the Manual for the arrangement and description of
archives (1898, see 12.4) was rendered in English as ‘archival collection’ because the
translator Arthur Leavitt argued (in a footnote to section 1) that the singular ‘archive’ had
not come into general use in the English language.2 The Oxford English Dictionary still
prefers the plural ‘archives’, notwithstanding the fact that in the past 20 years the singular
‘archive’ has been adopted widely—not so much among archivists, but by scholars in the
humanities and social sciences and not least by contributors to the Internet. However, the
two glossaries compiled under the aegis of the International Council on Archives (1964
and 1984) recognized ‘archive’ in English as synonym for ‘archives’.

The Dutchness of Dutch art was the title of a lecture by art historian Christopher Brown,
delivered in 2002 at the Amsterdam Centre for Golden Age Studies.3 Brown’s questions
were ‘To what degree does Dutch art of the Golden Age differ both in style and subject-
matter from that produced in Western Europe at the same time? And if it does differ, why
1 Jacques Derrida, Archive fever, transl. Eric Prenowitz
does it differ?’ Analogous questions, while extending the time frame beyond the Dutch
(Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, Golden Age, can be asked of Dutch archiving as it has been presented in the previous
1996), p. 1.
chapters: what is the Dutchness of Dutch Archives?
2 Peter Horsman, Eric Ketelaar, and Theo Thomassen,
‘Introduction to the 2003 Reissue’, in S. Muller,
J.A. Feith and R. Fruin, Manual for the arrangement
and description of archives. Translation of the second
edition by Arthur H. Leavitt, with new introductions…
13.1 Typically Dutch
(Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 2003),
pp. xxix-xxx; repr. as ‘New respect for the old order.
The context of the Dutch Manual’, American archivist
The Dutch Manual of 1898 was, according to the Italian translators (1908), not written
66 (2003): 267-68. solely for the Netherlands, but for all countries (‘per tutti i paesi’). The Italian edition was
3 Christopher Brown, The Dutchness of Dutch art a translation of the German edition (1905). The translation into another language and
(Amsterdam: Amsterdams Centrum voor de studie
van de Gouden Eeuw, Universiteit van Amsterdam,
into another archival tradition led to many, especially terminological, questions, with
2002). which the German translator Hans Kaiser and the authors of the Manual struggled.

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Terms that were particularly problematic were those that did not exist in German, for
example blaffaard, charter, and dossier.4 Many of these terms remained untranslated, for
others adequate translations were very difficult to find. And what was to be done with the
examples drawn from Dutch archive history, should these not be replaced with German
examples? Not at all, was the opinion of Wilhelm Wiegand in his foreword to the German
edition, in which he defends the fact that the book was based on Dutch conditions,
Dutch government structures, and Dutch archival history.

This has led many foreign readers of the Manual (in any of the eight translations) to believe
that the Manual was a typically Dutch product:

The idiosyncrasies of Dutch institutional history had left their stamp on the sheer
volume, the structure, and the composition of the archives of the ancien régime; on
the organization and the management of the historical archives; on the application
of diplomatics; and on the development of methods of arranging and describing.
Archives were scattered after the upheavals during the years 1795 to 1813, but they
were not divided, mixed, or destroyed to any great extent. As a result, the principle
of respect for the original structure of the archive was much easier to put into
operation than elsewhere. This also meant that the central question of archival
science—how can one evaluate and use an archive from various perspectives
without losing the form, the structure, and the context as the framework for
interpretation? —could also be given a typically Dutch response.5

4 In the English edition of the Manual Leavitt explained

Acknowledging a typically Dutch approach to fundamental questions of archivistics is not
blaffaard as: lists of tithes and other revenues from the the same as identifying a typically Dutch way of archiving in the broad sense as used in this
land (see chapter 6.2.2). Dossier was kept untranslated
in the English edition as well, whereas file would have
book. Of course, a complete answer to the question of the Dutchness of Dutch archives
been a good equivalent, but Leavitt used ‘file’ as a can be given only when Dutch archiving is discussed in a comparative framework. I will
translation of the Dutch lias.
return to comparative archival history at the end of this chapter (13.8), but first let me try
5 Horsman, Ketelaar, and Thomassen, ‘Introduction’,
p. xxxii; Horsman, Ketelaar, and Thomassen, ‘New
to give some examples which may lend themselves to a discussion in a comparative
respect’: 270. framework.
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13.2 Inspiration from Abroad
Various Dutch archiving practices are known to have been imported from abroad or
inspired by foreign examples. In section 3.1 I referred to the chancery of the Count of
Holland which, in the 14th century, started to transcribe copies of documents received and
sent, probably following the example of the chancery of Hainaut, of the papal chancery or
those of the French and German kings.

Another example of the adoption and adaptation of non-indigenous practices is the

practice of enfiling or forming liassen—literally by putting documents on a string (filium,
see 3.2). Such files are not typically Dutch, one encounters files (or the little holes the string
left in a document) in England, the Southern Netherlands, and Italy as well.6 This way of
filing was mentioned by Pacioli in his manual for merchants as early as 1494 (see 7.1) and
was presumably imported elsewhere in Europe by Italian merchants who had branch
offices and agents in different parts of Europe. However, investigating terminologies only
is not enough; sometimes the term will not refer to documents on a string (or spike), but
(as in French and Belgian archival terminology) to any bundle of documents tied together
by a string or a tape.7

6 Heather Wolfe and Peter Stallybrass, ‘The material

At the beginning of the 20th century, Johan Zaalberg (see 4.10) designed his filing system
culture of record-keeping in early modern England’, in following the example of the case filing system (Sachaktenregistratur) that had been used
Archives & information in the early modern world, ed.
Liesbeth Corens, Kate Peters and Alexandra Walsham
in Germany since the 18th century. However, Zaalberg augmented the system by using
(Proceedings of the British Academy, 212) (Oxford: the Universal Decimal Classification (UDC) for arranging the files. The UDC had been
Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 179-208; Elsevier’s
Lexicon of archive terminology (Amsterdam etc.:
developed in Belgium by Otlet and Lafontaine primarily as a bibliographic tool, but Otlet
Elsevier Publishing Company, 1964), nr. 6. was convinced that the UDC could be used for documentation administrative (the French
7 In the French edition of the Manual by Muller, Feith, term Otlet used for what the Germans called Registraturwesen) as well. Otlet envisaged
and Fruin (1910) the translators remark in a footnote
to section 86: ‘Although the term ‘filiasse’ has fallen
a filing system, to which two card indexes provided access, one in the alphabetic order
into disuse, we think that French archivists would of the headings and the other in the order of the UDC. Zaalberg’s innovation went further
do well to make use of it to translate the Dutch word
‘lias’, which the French term ‘liasse’ renders only
because he labelled the files themselves with the UDC codes and arranged them
imperfectly.’ accordingly.

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Notwithstanding its foreign roots, the Zaalberg system may be considered to be essentially
Dutch. In the 1950s, the Dutch records manager Johan Pieterse was head of the registry
and archives of UNESCO. There, and at the European High Administration for Coal and
Steel, one of the predecessors of the European Union, he introduced the Dutch
UDC-based filing system.8 The archives of the European Commission were arranged per
directorate according to a UDC-based filing plan. This order is maintained at the EU
8 Jean-Marie Palayret, ‘Quelle filiation historique pour
Historical Archives in Florence, notwithstanding the fact that some archivists believe that
les archives historiques de l’Union européenne’, it obscures to some extent a holistic view of the organization that produced the archives.
Gazette des archives 192 (2001) : 69-70.
9 This section is mainly taken from Eric Ketelaar,

13.3 Conditioning Factors

‘Prolegomena to a social history of Dutch archives’, 9
in A usable collection. Essays in honour of Jaap
Kloosterman on collecting social history, ed. Aad
Blok, Jan Lucassen, and Huub Sanders (Amsterdam:
Amsterdam University Press, 2014), pp. 40-55, Recently, the Australian archivist Michael Piggott proposed searching for the ‘conditioning
https://web.archive.org/web/20190218001929/
https://pure.uva.nl/ws/files/2181409/156667_
factors’ shaping the patterns of record creation, demise, preservation, management, and
ketelaar_prolegomena.pdf, archived 18 Feb. 2019. multiple uses in Australia.10 As a major ‘conditioning factor’ in Dutch society (past and
10 Michael Piggott, Archives and societal provenance. present) I propose its particular mode of consensual governance, the polder model.
Australian essays (Oxford, etc.: Chandos Publishing,
2012).
The polder model (an expression coined in the 1990s) is described in a recent book by
11 Maarten Prak and Jan Luiten van Zanden, Nederland
historians Maarten Prak and Jan Luiten van Zanden as a manner of living together in
en het poldermodel (Amsterdam: Bert Bakker, 2013), which different societal groups always join forces and political decision-making leaves
p. 12.
room for mutual concessions and modifications resulting from negotiations among these
12 In the reading room of the National Library of
the Netherlands, subsection 53 (within division
groups.11 On Wikipedia it is called ‘consensus decision-making’ and described with
5 ‘The Republic’) is labeled ‘consultation culture’ phrases like ‘a pragmatic recognition of pluriformity’ and ‘cooperation despite
(overlegcultuur); it is divided into categories such as
government, urbanization, economy, church and
differences.’12Willem Frijhoff and Marijke Spies, in their analysis of 17th-century Dutch
religion. ‘discussion culture’, argued that the essence of social culture in the 17th century was ‘the
13 Willem Frijhoff and Marijke Spies, 1650. Hard-won fundamental obligation and often eagerness as well to participate in discussion, to take
unity, transl. Myra Heerspink Scholz (Assen: Royal
Van Gorcum, 2004), p. 221.
note of another person’s opinion before making a decision; and the need to weigh all the
14 Helmer J. Helmers, ‘Popular participation and public
pros and cons, from whatever quarter they might come, when forming opinions in every
debate’, in The Cambridge companion to the Dutch area of life and culture.’13 Helmer Helmers has recently warned against overemphasizing
Golden Age, ed. Helmer J. Helmers and Geert
H. Janssen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
the social harmony in the discussion culture, since public debate in the Republic was
2018), p. 145. often accompanied by bigotry, violence, and repression.14 Still, one can follow Prak and
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Van Zanden, who label Dutch society as one that through structured conversation—
through discussions, eventually followed by a vote—endeavours to find answers to societal
challenges.

Fig. 13.1 Gouvernement des États des Sept

Provinces Unies, by Henry Abraham Chatelain,
1721 (?). Museum Van Gijn, Dordrecht.
See also Figs. 3.4 and 3.5.

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In different shapes this has always been a characteristic of Dutch society since the Middle
Ages.15 It has made the Netherlands into a vergaderland,16 a country of vergaderen
(meaning originally gathering, later also: meeting). People come together in councils,
boards, and committees, either in public or behind the scenes, to reach a compromise by
persuading, governing through more or less ritualized meetings, the minutes of which are
carefully drawn up and reported to the body’s constituents. In the Republic of the United
Netherlands (1581-1796/1798) this happened in a federal polity in which real differences
in power were embedded in and covered by the formal equality of the participants in the
decision-making process. The Dutch pragmatic consensus was achieved in ‘a process in
which communal action depended not on a simple majority vote but on a common
consent achieved by negotiation and cooperation.’17

Consensus could be enforced, as was the case in drainage projects. The letters patent
(see 5.3) imposed the dikers to provide contentement of landowners and cities, which was
often achieved as a compromise (see below).

Boards and committees of regenten governed the Dutch Republic at national, regional,
and local levels. They also controlled the Dutch East and West India Companies, the
universities, charitable institutions, and more. Commanders of the army and the navy had
to comply with the instructions of the deputies of the States General and the provincial
States who participated in each war campaign. The trading posts of the United East India
15 Dennis Bos, Maurits Ebben, and Henk te Velde (eds.), Company (VOC) were led by a director or senior merchant, together with the council of
Harmonie in Holland. Het poldermodel van 1500 tot
nu (Amsterdam: Bert Bakker, 2008).
the establishment; a single-headed authority did not exist anywhere in the VOC. Even on
16 Wilbert van Vree, Meetings, manners and civilization.
board a VOC ship (see 7.3.2 and 10.2) the captain had to consult the ships’ council,
The development of modern meeting behavior, transl. whose members were seated (and cast their vote) according to rank. The Reformed
Kathleen Bell (London etc.: Leicester University Press,
1999).
Church was governed by a synod, and each parish had a church council. Many of these
17 Jeffrey Robertson and Warwick Funnell, ‘The Dutch
councils, boards, and committees continued their work even during the reign of King
East-India Company and accounting for social Louis Napoleon (1806-1810), during the occupation by the French (1810-1813), and
capital at the dawn of modern capitalism 1602-1623’,
Accounting, organizations and society 37, no.5 (2012):
after the establishment of the Kingdom of The Netherlands in 1814-1815.
347.
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Of course, the unitary constitution of 1798 brought a centralized national government
with it, but that did not mark an end to the ‘meeting regime’ or habitus of discussing,
deliberating, and collegiate decision-making. In 1848 a new constitution granted more
power to Parliament and more autonomy to provincial and local assemblies and executive
committees. From the 1870s trade unions, political parties, social movements, and
religious organizations became more and more important. From the 1890s the developing
welfare state brought employers, workers, and the state together in corporatist
arrangements (see 7.6.2.3). Corporatism appealed to social liberals, Protestants, Catholics,
and socialists alike, each relating it to a different socio-political world view and embracing
its accompanying consultative consensual practices.18 These practices also characterized
the specifically Dutch denominational segregation, known as ‘pillarization’ (verzuiling).
Until the 1960s the Netherlands were divided up in a Catholic, a Protestant, a socialist, and
a neutral (liberal) segment, the zuilen (pillars). Each zuil had its own trade unions, schools,
mass media, hospitals, sports clubs, and consumers’ associations. They all gathered in
their own circle, deliberating, controlling, and making extensive minutes of their council
and board meetings.

Verzuiling no longer dominates Dutch life, but Dutch people still show a ‘seemingly
insatiable need in the workplace to hold meetings, including meetings whose purpose is to
schedule further meetings.’19 And not only in the workplace; vergaderen is the lifeblood of
every civic, cultural, political, or religious organization in the Netherlands—and often also
abroad where immigrated Dutch people make their new fatherland into another
vergaderland.

18 Michael Wintle, An economic and social history of the

13.4 Archiving in the Polder Model
Netherlands, 1800–1920. Demographic, economic and
social transition (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2000), p. 278.
Dutch archiving systems reflect governance according to the Dutch consensual polder
19 Russell Shorto, Amsterdam. A history of the world’s
model. For centuries the backbone of these systems were the resoluties, decisions taken in a
most liberal city (London: Little, Brown, 2013), p. 15. meeting (see 3.2, 3.3, and 10.5). Decision-making by councils and boards and minuting

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their proceedings are not Dutch inventions. However, in complexity, the Dutch system
surpassed any of the Kollegialsysteme in Germany and Austria.20 Moreover, these
Germanic systems lack the Dutch trait of ritualized consensus and reaching compromise.

The Manual by Muller, Feith, and Fruin stated that the volumes with resoluties usually
are the main series of an archive, constituting, together with the protocols and accounts,
‘the skeleton of the archive’.21 In his foreword to the German edition of the Manual,
Wilhelm Wiegand acknowledged that the collegial decision-making habits of the Republic
of the United Netherlands did not exist in the same form in Germany, and that therefore it
had taken him some time before the significance of the resoluties had become apparent.

In the resolutie system incoming and outgoing letters were arranged as annexes to the
resoluties, forming one or more series. The resoluties were made accessible through
indexes which referred to the resoluties and thereby to the annexes. In the course of time
there have been different variants and innovations, but up to the present day the emphasis
in archiving has been on collegiate decision-making, reflected in the acta or proceedings
(handelingen or notulen).22 Two stipulations are necessary. Even before the first
constitution of 1798 introduced ministers (agenten) as heads of departments, there were
officials who acted not as a member of a board or committee, but individually, for example
20 Michael Hochedlinger, Aktenkunde. Urkunden- und
the Stadholder, diplomats, and commissioners. Even so, their archiving resembled in many
Aktenlehre der Neuzeit (Wien/ München: Böhlau ways the resolutie system. Secondly, apart from the resolutie system and the verbaal
Verlag/Oldenbourg Verlag, 2009), p. 56
system, there were other ways of arranging and aggregating documents which continued
21 Paragraph 20 as amended by Muller, Feith and Fruin
in 1905. See Horsman, Ketelaar, and Thomassen,
to be used and adapted into the 21st century: arrangement under subject headings
‘Introduction’, p. xxx; Horsman, Ketelaar, and (rubrieken) as in pigeonholes, or as subject files (as in the Zaalberg system). In these
Thomassen, ‘New respect’: 268.
systems, however, generally a link or reference to a resolutie (or minutes of a meeting,
22 My letter of appointment and the notice of my
resignation are formally extracts from the register
a decision, or a decree) was maintained.
of proceedings of the board of the University of
Amsterdam, although such a register is no longer used.
An archiving system still practiced widely in Dutch vergaderland is the ‘meeting agenda
23 H.A.J. van Schie, Registratuur van de Nederlandse
overheidsadministratie in de negentiende eeuw
system’ (vergaderagendastelsel).23 In this system the minutes and decisions do not form the
(’s-Gravenhage: Rijksarchiefschool, 1992), pp. 32-34. backbone (as in the resolutie system) but are annexes to the agenda of the next meeting,
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together with other documents that are to be brought forward for consideration at the
meeting. Even today, people assume that no business can be done in a meeting before the
formal adoption of the agenda and the minutes of the previous meeting have been agreed
(and before coffee has been served to mark the start of the meeting). The minutes and
other documents are ordered per item on the agenda and kept together for each meeting.
Indexes of names and subjects refer to the date of a meeting and to the appropriate point
on the meeting agenda. There may be two chronological series of documents referring to
the agenda, one of the minutes, another of the documents, drafts, and reports received and
sent which have been discussed (or taken note of ) at the meetings.

Fig. 13.2 Document marks used in the meeting agenda system (vergaderagendastelsel)
of the Conference (Convent) of State Archivists since the 1980s. National Archives,
Algemeen Rijksarchief, Tweede Afdeling (2.14.04), inv. nr. 263.

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The meeting agenda system became popular by the end of the 19th century, once
mechanical copying made it easy to copy the meeting documents and distribute the copies
among the members of the meeting. It is used by all sorts of public and private committees,
councils, and boards. Each member keeps his or her meeting documents. The secretary of
the committee keeps the primary chronological series of agendas, minutes, and meeting
documents, as well as the originals of letters received and sent, which may be formed into
files. Sometimes meeting documents kept at a secretariat are destroyed because their
content is preserved in the originals, but this makes it difficult to reconstruct the decision-
making process because the bond between agenda, meeting, and meeting documents has
been destroyed. The set of documents of a member may be destroyed if the secretary’s
archives are kept. Sometimes it is preserved due to the value of the annotations the
committee member has made on the documents.

Even though the meeting agenda system may be found elsewhere in the world, it is so
ingrained in the Dutch meeting culture as to warrant the characterization of a typically
Dutch archiving practice.

13.5 VOC Shares

To identify other typically Dutch archiving practices one should obviously look for
typically Dutch institutions. The United East India Company (VOC), founded in 1602, was
the first company in history to sell shares to the public.24 The VOC had to invent a system
to archive the buying and selling of shares, or rather to adapt the way other joint ventures
in shipping, trading, drainage, or milling (see 7.2, 7.6.1, 7.6.2, and 8.2.4) had registered their
participants. The VOC was a merger of six smaller trading companies (voorcompagnieën),
24 On the VOC shares and the sharemarket see
J.G. van Dillen, Het oudste aandeelhoudersregister van
but the main difference between these partnerships and the VOC was that participants in
de Kamer Amsterdam der Oost-Indische Compagnie the VOC registered their shares not with any of the participants, but with the company as
(’s-Gravenhage: Nijhoff, 1958); Lodewijk Petram,
The world’s first stock exchange, transl. Lynne Richards
such, and not for just one journey, but for a period of ten years. The VOC started to register
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2014). the participants: one register in each of the six cities that had participated in the trade with
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the Indies before 1602. Each participant (the term shareholder was not used) registered his
or her (there were a small number of women taking a share in the company) promise to pay
a specific sum into the stock. Upon payment of that sum or part thereof, the shareholder
received a pre-printed quittance (recepis). For example, in 1602 Pieter Harmensz, city
messenger (stadsbode) for the city of Enkhuizen, took a share (called an actie) in the VOC
of 150 guilders, to be paid in instalments. In 1606 he paid the last instalment, for which he
was issued a final quittance (Fig. 13.3).

These Dutch quittances were not share certificates that could be sold.25 When a
shareholder wanted to sell his share (or part thereof ), he had to appear before the VOC
Chamber which originally had registered the participation. The pre-printed deed of
transfer had to be signed by the seller and one or two directors of the VOC. The chief
accountant of the VOC would enter the sale in the register of transfers. In the grand ledger
of shareholders each had a current account, with entries of the debts and claims which
resulted from changes in a shareholder’s portfolio. Forward selling was practiced as well:
promising to sell and buy a share at some date in the future for a fixed price. This was laid
down in a formal contract (Fig. 13.4). Forward selling was not new; it had been practiced
for a long time in the grain trade, from which the indentured (see 7.3.2) form of the
contract may have been adopted. Pre-printed forms for a forward contract could be
bought at booksellers like Dirk Schouten (after his death in 1718 his widow continued the
business), conveniently located on the Dam very near the Exchange.
25 John P. Shelton, ‘The first printed share certificate.
An important link in financial history’, Business history
review 39 (1965): 391-402; Oscar Gelderblom and Another quintessentially Dutch derivate was the negotiable certificate of deposit (recepis)
Joost Jonker, ‘Amsterdam as the cradle of modern
futures and options trading, 1550-1650’, in The origins
introduced by the Amsterdam Exchange Bank in 1683 (see 8.4.1). When one deposited
of value. The financial innovations that created modern coins, gold, or silver with the bank, one received a receipt for the equivalent in bank money.
capital markets, ed. William N. Goetzmann and
K. Geert Rouwenhorst (Oxford: Oxford University
This recepis could be traded, either as a whole or in parts. Recepissen, according to
Press, 2005), pp. 189-205; Petram, The world’s first Pit Dehing, were very popular, especially with foreign merchants, not only because they
stock exchange.
enabled depositing precious metals temporarily at low cost, but also because one could
26 Pit Dehing, Geld in Amsterdam. Wisselbank en
wisselkoersen, 1650-1725 (Hilversum: Verloren, 2012),
speculate with a recepis at relatively low risk.26
p. 271.

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Fig. 13.3 Quittance for Pieter Harmensz issued

by the Enkhuizen Chamber of the VOC, 1606.
Westfries Archief, Oud archief stad Enkhuizen
(0120), inv. nr. 1587a. This is the oldest of the
five quittances which are preserved world-wide.
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Fig. 13.4 Draft forward contract between

Willem Muijlman and Philips de Baccher,
2 September 1644. National Archives,
Hof van Holland (3.03.01.01), inv. nr. 10270.
Upon concluding the contract, the sheet
would be cut into two indentures.

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The governance of the VOC followed the ‘meeting regime’ described earlier. The company
was managed by a federal board of directors representing the six chambers, while each
chamber had its own board of directors (see 10.5 and Fig. 10.0). One of the regular points
on the agenda was a discussion of the annual Generale Missive and the directors’ reply to
be sent to the Governor-General and his council in Batavia. This was prepared by the
Hague Committee (Haags Besogne), consisting of 14 members who met for seven to ten
weeks daily for eight hours. Their work was strictly regulated:

Firstly, the letters written by each quarter or office to the [Governor-] General and
Councillors are read, generally starting with Ambon; then the responses to these
letters by the General and Councillors, and then likewise from place to place and
from office to office, following the order observed in the General Letter from the
General and Councillors to the meeting of the [Lords] XVII.27

This strictly geographical classification (see 10.5) facilitated access and use of the papers
from overseas. This, together with the reformatting and aggregation of the information,
made the Generale Missive and the integrated Overgekomen brieven en papieren two
special Dutch documentary genres.
27 Pieter van Dam, Beschryvinge van de Oostindische
Compagnie, vol. 1, ed. F.W. Stapel (’s-Gravenhage:
13.6 Draining the Polder
28
Nijhoff, 1927), p. 313.
28 L.E. Harris, Vermuyden and the Fens. A study of
Sir Cornelius Vermuyden and the Great Level (London:
Cleaver-Hume Press, 1953); J. Korthals Altes, The term polder model refers to that particular Dutch institution the polder, made by
Sir Cornelius Vermuyden. The lifework of a great
Anglo-Dutchman in land-reclamation and drainage …
diking and draining lakes and fenlands (see chapter 5). Dutch polders were articles of
(Arno Press: New York, 1977); Piet van Cruyningen, export. Since the late Middle Ages, experts in drainage from Holland, Zeeland, and
‘Dealing with drainage. State regulation of drainage
projects in the Dutch Republic, France, and England
Brabant were called in to manage projects abroad. In English early-modern drainage
during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries’, projects, for example, ‘much of the technical expertise, design, organization, labor, and
Economic History Review 68 (2015): 420-40.
the system of financing for such ventures were all imported from the Low Countries before
29 Eric H. Ash, ‘Reclaiming a new world. Fen drainage,
improvement, and projectors in seventeenth-century
the civil war period.’29 The system of financing and executing Dutch drainage implied a
England’, Early science and medicine 21 (2016): 447. paper trail (see 5.3). The Dutch financers of the drainage of Hatfield Chase in England
295a | 13 |
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(1626) were mostly rich Amsterdam merchants. They were shareholders of the VOC, but
in contrast with many other VOC participants they had not been involved in the drainage
of the Beemster lake (1612). It may be that they wanted to compensate for this missed
opportunity by involving themselves in this English project. While that may be, they were
undoubtedly informed of what a drainage entailed in terms of paperwork. Some of the
documentary genres, such as surveys and estimates, were not typically Dutch, although
technical knowledge was needed to draft these documents. In the beginning of the 17th
century only Dutch dikers, mill builders, and other experts had this knowledge. The
compagnie contract was new in England. Not before 1631 does one find a comparable
form of collaboration and distribution of gains and expenses. Then the Earl of Bedford,
together with 13 partners (who later formed the Bedford Level Company or the Society of
Adventurers), began the drainage of the Great Level (the Fens of East Central England).

Also typically Dutch are the letters patent (octrooi) with the clause of contentement,
obliging the investors to compromise with the owners of neighbouring land and other
interested parties. In the agreement to drain Hatfield Chase it was left to the King to
accord with the commoners and other parties. The entrepreneur, the Dutchman Cornelis
Vermuyden, however, started drainage before such a settlement had been reached,
resulting in fierce opposition by the commoners, bloody fights with the workmen, and
litigation. If only Vermuyden had followed the contentement clause in Dutch letters patent!

Dutch letters patent for drainage were used in 1652 by Duke Frederick III of Schleswig-
Holstein as a model for his contract with four Dutchmen to drain the isle of Nordstrand.30
However, the Oktroi-Vertrag (in Dutch!) simply expropriated the landowners and did not
contain the contentement and arbitration clauses which in Holland had facilitated the
smooth course of the drainage projects.

This goes to show that the two documents needed to start a Dutch draining project
30 Karl Kuenz, Nordstrand nach 1634. Die wiederein­
gedeichte nordfriesische Insel (Singen am Hohentwiel:
(the compagnie contract and the letters of patent) were also used abroad, although not
Im Selbstverlag, 1978). quite with the same effect they would have had in the Dutch consensus society.

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One of the rights granted by Duke Frederick to the participants in the drainage project was
the right of the wind. In Holland one needed letters patent (a ‘wind letter’ or windbrief)
from the sovereign to exploit a mill (Fig. 13.5; see also 7.6.1.1). In the process of granting
the windbrief the rights and interests of third parties were considered expressly, just as was
usual when granting letters patent for a drainage project. The windbrief and other
components of the drainage genre system are typically Dutch.

Fig. 13.5 Wind letter (windbrief) granted by the Audit Office of Holland to Claes and Isbrant
Claesz for the purpose of exploiting an oil mill in West Zaandam, 1623. City Archives Zaandam,
Gemeentebestuur Oost-Zaandam, West-Zaandam, Zaandam (OA-0053), inv. nr. 325.
 296a | 13 | 13.7 Trading and Rationing during
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the First World War

During the First World War the Netherlands was a neutral state. To regulate and control
Dutch trade and shipping during wartime, the Netherland Oversea Trust Company
(NOT) was established in 1914 (see 7.5). The NOT was a company with limited liability,
but in fact an extension of government. It was governed by a Board of Governors,
consisting of representatives of banking, trade, and shipping. From among its members the
Board appointed an Executive Committee, which established three sub-committees. Their
secretaries functioned as directors of the NOT, charged with implementing the decisions
of the Board and the Executive Committee. In accordance with the ‘meeting regime’, the
minutes of the meetings of these bodies form the backbone of the NOT archives. However,
the NOT worked with more than 2,500 different specially designed forms. Many of these
forms drew on well-known administrative practices, but some were invented by the NOT.
Examples of the former are the bill of lading (waybill) and the certificate of origin, an
example of the latter is the NOT certificate (fig. 13.6).

Besides the NOT there were a great number of State bureaus, committees, and other
bodies to meet the economic crisis resulting from the war. All these institutions (and the
municipalities as well) devised their own forms, registers, and certificates, for example the
ration books and ration cards, introduced well before the United Kingdom instituted
ration books. Much of the bureaucratic recordkeeping for rationing during the First World
War was introduced again during the Second World War (see 7.6.1.2 and 7.6.2.3), and
anew during the oil crisis of 1973.

Fig. 13.6 NOT-certificate, 1915, design Cato

Berlage. National Archives, Crisisinstellingen
(2.06.079), inv. nr. 1711.

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13.8 Comparative Archival History
Each of the examples presented thus far would lend itself as a starting point for research
in social, cultural, and political contexts outside the Netherlands. The Dutchness of Dutch
archives may therefore be regarded as a hypothesis to work from. Whenever we find
commonalities, we must ask whether these are accidental or due to conscious adoption
from abroad (13.2). More research is needed into the transfer of archival knowledge
between agents in different countries.

The resolutie system is believed to be typical for the Dutch vergaderland and its collegiate
consensual decision-making (13.3 and 13.4). It is an example of the influence of cultural
(and mostly tacit) norms on archiving. Current research focusing on information culture
and recordkeeping may benefit from a historical analysis spanning national boundaries.31

The Dutch East India Company (VOC) had to invent a system to archive the buying and
selling of shares (13.5). The large drainage projects necessitated archiving in new forms as
well (13.6). The Netherland Oversea Trust Company (NOT) had to establish archiving
systems from scratch and without precedent (13.7). Undoubtedly there were more cases of
newly established institutions that had to find solutions for archiving of new activities. Did
they search for examples that could be adapted, just as the VOC must have been inspired
by the archiving of joint ventures in shipping, trading, drainage, and milling? Which
factors determined the choices? To what extent, for example, were the archiving elements
of the rationing systems set up in various countries in the First World War and the Second
World War (13.7) ‘original’ or ‘import’? Comparative research of these questions in the
31 Gillian Oliver and Fiorella Foscarini, Records manage­
ment and information culture. Tackling the people
past may lead to a better insight in comparable challenges in the present.
problem (London: Facet, 2014). See also Eric Ketelaar,
‘The difference best postponed? Cultures and
comparative archival science’, Archivaria 44 (1997):
The aim of such comparative research should be to try to answer questions like ‘Why does
142-48. a particular archival system or strategy or methodology work well in a particular social and
32 Ketelaar, ‘Difference best postponed’: 147. cultural and economic environment, and not well in others?’32 One might put it differently
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by referring to the model of the archiving context (Fig. 0.2). What were the archivalization
(and other) factors steering archiving (or non-archiving)? These factors are a reflection not
only of the ‘why, who, what, and how’ of human endeavour, but also of societal challenges,
patterns, and norms and vice versa: archiving that conditions or facilitates societal
practices.

I am convinced that continuing comparative research in archival history should look

beyond archives as-a-product and try to uncover factors of archivalization. As Randolph
Head argues, ‘Considerable additional research is needed before we will fully understand
how changes in archival practice were connected to changes in political institutions and
culture, and to broader cultural transformations.’33 This additional research will benefit
from analyses of archiving in the social context of activities (work processes) of
communities, organizations, and individuals in different domains and in different times.
My book is one such an analysis, for a specific country, that may be used in further
comparative research by Dutch and foreign scholars.

33 Randolph C. Head, ‘Historical case studies of pre-

modern European archives. A comparative approach,
in Research in the archival multiverse, ed. Anne
J. Gilliland, Sue McKemmish and Andrew J. Lau
(Clayton: Monash University Press, 2016), pp. 451-2.

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Index
Index
Subjects can be found by using the search function of the application used for reading
the book. In addition, the index may be used to find the page(s) where a keyword is
explained or translated. The commands ‘use’ and ‘search also for’ apply to searching the
index and the entire book.

A
accessibility 98b, n. 48, 251b archief use: archive, archives as cultural assets 54a, 71a
accijns use: excise archiefdepot use: repository as a reflection of reality 17b
accounting 191b, 197b archiefwet use: Archives Act as symbols 163a
acta 67b archivalization 17b characteristics 17a
advocaat (solicitor) 217b archivarius 96b definition 16b
afhoren (auditing) 79a archive and archives 7a, 16b Archives with a capital A 97a
afschrift (transcript) 34b as a process 18b archiving, definition 16b
aggregation 101b, 251b buildings 271b army 42b
aldermen 107a chest 127a, 262b arrangement 72a
algemeen rijksarchivaris use: definition 16b, 280a assessment list 203a
General State Archivist duality of the 18b Association of Archivists in the
ambacht (local council) (search also for: fever 14b Netherlands (search also for: KVAN,
village) 132b meaning of 17a VAN) 281a
ambachtsbewaarders (local council) 126b subject as co-creator 16a asylum seekers 47a
ambachtsheerlijkheid use: seigniory translation 288a attorney 217b
annexation by France 23a user of 7a, 251b audio-visual archives use: film archives,
annuities 194b archivers 16b sound archives
apostil 81b Archives Act 283a Audit Office 130b
appraisal (search also for: sampling) archives auditing 79a
188b, 263b as a construction 80a automation (search also for:
as an institution 97a computerization, digitization) 35b

B C
Bank of Exchange 211b cadastre (land register) 145b community
banking 211b cartulary 58a juridical 140a
bankruptcy 156b cash book 194b of archives 120b
Batavian Republic, Batavian Revolution 23a Catholic Church 63b of records 120b
Batavians 24a cessio bonorum (cession of estate) 12b of the book 58a
bevolkingsregister use: population register Chamber of Desolate Estates 156b village 135b
bill of exchange 169a chapter 60a compagnie (company) 130b
bill of lading 173a charity 70a company (search also for: partnership)
blaffaard 150a chest 127a, 262b 130b
boedelscheiding 151b chief landholders 131b comparative archival history 21a, 296b
book, codex form 259a chirograaf (chirograph) 173a comptoir (office) 171a
book, community of the 58a chirograph (search also for: indenture) computerization 202a
bookkeeping 195a 173a concept (first draft) 79b
computerization 201a church archives 58b Confederacy 76a
mechanization 201a in public repositories 70b conservation 273a
brievenboek use: copybook, letter book cijnsboek (rental) 137b conscription 42b
burgerlijke stand use: civic registration citizens 23a, 35b consultability 98b, n. 48
burghers use: citizens City Archives (search also for: municipal control revolution 264a
business archives) 117a conveyance 142a, 152a
archives 187a city register 107b copybook 214a
letters 167a civic registration 27b Council of the Nassau Demesne 148a
rate 207a cognossement use: bill of lading counter-archivalization 20a
buurschap (village community) collection registers 203b Court of Audit 266b
(search also for: commons) 135b colonial affairs 248b curator (trustee) 157a
colonization 250a
commons 126b
299a | |
PAGE CHAPTER ARCHIVING PEOPLE
Index
doopceel (certificate of baptism) 26b F
dossier use: file faillissement use: insolvency
dossierstelsel use: subject files fair copy 79b
double-entry bookkeeping 196a family archive(s) 53a, 151b
draft (search also for: final draft, first draft) feoffment 152a
79b feudal tenure 140a
drainage 130a file 80a
D dredging 126a filing (search also for: subject files) 16b
datapolis 122b droogmakerij (drainage) 133b film archives 272b
data protection 34b duality final draft 93a
declaration of inheritance 146b of technology 275b Financie van Holland (Finance Office)
depot use: repository (search also for: of the archive 18b 205a
e-depot) Dutch Revolt 7b findability 101b
Derrida, Jacques 14b first draft 79b
Desolate Boedels, Kamer van de (Chamber form use: editorial form, external form
of Desolate Estates) 156b E forms, printed 255a
destruction 14b East Indies 235a France, annexation by 23a
digital archives 18a e-depot 257b
digitization 29a editorial form 257b
of collections 119a, 274a eigendomsoverdracht use: conveyance G
of work processes 232b encryption 257a gaderboek (collection register) 203b
dijkgraaf (dikereeve) 126b erfrenten use: annuities gemeentearchief use: City Archives
dikereeve 126b estate general ledger 186a
discussion culture 289b archives 52b General State Archives/Archivist (search
distilling 183a cession of 12b also for: National Archives, State
distributie use: rationing division of 12b Archives) 100a
division of estate 151b excise 202b Generaliteitslanden use: Generality Lands
documenting and archiving 16b expeditie (fair copy) 91b Generality Lands 75a
Domeinraad 148a exploring 236a genre system 17b

Gereformeerde Kerk use: Reformed Church I klad (rough draft) 79b

grand ledger (search also for: general id-cards 33a kohier use: assessment list, valuation list
ledger) 211b incorporation into France 23a kopieboek use: copybook
grootboek (general ledger) 196a indenture 173a kopieerpers use: letter press
guardian (voogd) 153b industry 166b kopijboek (copy book) (search also for:
insolvency (see also: estate, cession of ) 13a letter book) 214a
KVAN (Royal Association of Archivists in
H the Netherlands) 285b
Handleiding use: Manual J
heemraden (polder board) 126b Jews 26b, 30b
heerlijkheid use: seigniory joint heritage 244b L
Heren XVII use: Lords XVII journaal (in bookkeeping) use: waste book land register (search also for: cadastre)
hoefslag (homestead share) 126b judiciary 120a 145b
Holland (search also for: Netherlands) juridical archives (see also: litigation) 233a land tax 128b
County 75a, 81a appraisal 232a ledger (search also for: blaffaard, general
Kingdom 76b ledger, manuaal, pay-ledger) 127a
Holocaust 161b leenakte (deed of feoffment) 152a
homestead share 126b K legible citizen 27b
hoofdingelanden (chief landholders) 131b kadaster use: cadastre, land register letter book 168b
hoogheemraadschap (regional water board) kapittel use: chapter letter press 269a
126a keeper of mortgages 146b letters patent 130b
Hout, Jan van 109b kerkelijke archieven (church archives) 58b lias (file) 80a, 167b
huisarchief (estate archives) 52b kerkfabriek (maintenance fund) 70a lijfrenten use: annuities
hypotheekbewaarder (keeper of mortgages) kerkmeesters (church wardens) 70a litigation 215a
146b kerkvoogden (church guardians) 75a local council 132b
keur (ordinance) 107a loketkast (pigeonholes) 102a
keys 67a Lords XVII (Heren XVII) 236b
Kingdom of Holland 76b
Kingdom of the Netherlands 7b, 76b
300a | |
PAGE CHAPTER ARCHIVING PEOPLE
Index
N P
National Archives 97a paper
net use: fair copy introduction 254b
Netherlands 7b production (search also for: waste
acquisition by the Habsburgs 75a paper) 177b
M annexation by France 23a quality 315
mandement (writ) 217b map 75b parchment 254b
manor 54a northern 7b partenrederij (partnership) 177b
manuaal (ledger) 150a Republic of the United - 7b, 75a partnership (search also for: company)
Manual, Dutch 281b territory in the Middle Ages 75a 177b
maps 111a, 145b, 235b NOT (Netherlands Oversea Trust patent letters 130b
marke (commons) 126b Company) 175b patentrecht (business rate) 207a
materiality 254a, 276a notarial records 229b pay-ledger 39b
meaning of archives 17a notary 112b, 227b PC (personal computer) 269b
mechanization 201b nutsbedrijven (utility companies) 121a peat dredging 126a
mediation 16b pensionaris (pensionary) 67a
meente (community) 107a people register use: population register
memorie van successie (declaration of O perambulators 128b
inheritance) 146b objects as records 255b persoonsbewijs use: id-card
migrants 44a octrooi (letters patent) 130b pigeonholes 102a
minutes (search also for: acta, reces, office 171a plakaat (ordinance) 143a
resoluties, verbaal) 67b computerization 269b polder 126a
minuut use: final draft mechanization 269b board 126b
minuutplan (draft map) 145b Old Catholic Church 64a model 289b
mortgages, registration of 146b ommelopers (perambulators) 128b poorter use: citizen
Muller, Samuel 280a ontvanger (receiver) 205a population register 31b
municipal openbaar (accessible) 98b, n. 48, 251b ponskaart use: punchcard
archives (search also for: City Archives) ordinance 107a, 143a preservation 273b
117b orphan chamber 153b
utilities 121a overlopers (perambulators) 128b

press regional archives 118a Royal Association of Archivists in the

cupboard 61b historical centre 101a Netherlands (search also for: KVAN,
letter 269a water board 138b VAN) 285b
printing 110b registers of conveyances 140a
printed forms 255a registers of guarantees 143a
private archives (search also for: business Rekenkamer, use: Audit Office, Court of S
archives, estate archives, Audit sampling 232a
family archives) 71a, 188b Rembrandt 9a schepenen use: aldermen
procureur (attorney), 12b, 217b rental 148b schout (sheriff ) 126b
profession, definition 278a renten use: annuities schouw (visitation) 126b
protocols of sealings 142a repository (search also for: e-depot) 271b schuldboek 196a
publicity (search also for: accessibility) Republic of the United Netherlands 75a script 191a, 256b
of privileges 206a researchers, number of 99b seal 254b
of transactions 142a, 163b residents 35b search room 28b
punchcard 264b resolutie system 79b, 291b secrecy 252a
resoluties (search also for: acta, minutes, seigniory 150b
reces, verbaal) 79b, 291b selectie use: appraisal, sampling
R restorers 273a shipping 166a
raadpensionaris (pensionary) 80a retroacta 27b sheriff 126b
rationing 181a, 186a Revolt, Dutch 7b silences in the archive 20a
receiver 205a Riemsdijk, Theodoor van 120a social logic of archiving 17b
Receiver General 150b, 205a Rijksarchief (State Archives) (search also sociëteit (company) 130b
reces (report) 80b for: National Archives) 97a solicitor 217b
record subject 16a rijksdaalders (rix-dollars) 212b sound archives 272b
recordkeeping 16b rix-dollars 212b stadboek use: city register, town register
records, definition 16b rol 257b Stadholder 76a
redactionele vorm use: editorial form Roman Catholic Church 63b Stadsarchief use: City Archives
reflection of reality 19b, 233a Romans 24a State Archives 96b
Reformation 64a rough draft 79b States General 87a
Reformed Church 64b States 79a
301a | |
PAGE CHAPTER ARCHIVING PEOPLE
Index
tresoriers use: treasurers verponding (land tax) 128b
trustee (search also for: guardian) 154b, verschriftelijking (textualization) 107a
157a verzegelingen (protocols of sealings) 142a
village community 135b
streekarchieven (regional archives) 118a visitation 126b
stuiver 40b U VOC (United East Indian Company) 39b
subject files 95a uiterlijke vorm use: external form accounting 197b
substitution 232b United East India Company (search also archives 97a, 235a
successiememorie (declaration of for: VOC) 39b chambers 197b
inheritance) 146b Universal Decimal Code (UDC) 95a personnel administration 39b
utility companies 121a shares 235a, 292b
voogd (guardian, trustee) 153b
T
taxation 191b V
technologies 254a valuation list 127b W
technology change of/by (search also for: VAN (Association of Archivists in the waarboek (register of guarantees) 143a
Derrida) 275b, Fig. 11.21 Netherlands)(search also for: KVAN) Walloon Church 64b
textualization 107a 281a warrant 44b, 143a
thesauriers use: treasurers Van Hout, Jan 109b waste book 151b
time and distance 175a Van Riemsdijk, Theodoor 120a waste paper 159b
toegankelijk (accessible) 98b, n. 48, 251b vellum 254b waterschap (water board) 126b
town register 140a verbaal 89b weeskamer (orphan chamber) 153b
trade 166a verbaal system 91a water board 126b
transcript 34b Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie (United West Indies 7b, 170a
transfer tax 145a East Indian Company) (search also for: Wisselbank (Bank of Exchange) 211b
transfer to another medium 232b VOC) 39b, 235a wisselbrief use: bill of exchange
transfix 152b Vereniging van Archivarissen in Nederland women 16a
translation 288a (Association of Archivists in the work processes
transportregisters (registers of Netherlands), (search also for: VAN, archiving 16b, 19a, Fig. 0.2
conveyances) 140a KVAN) 281a digitization 232b
treasurers 205a vernacular 256b writ 217b

Z
zaaksgewijze ordening (subject files) 95a
Zaalberg, Johan 121a
zegel (seal) 254b
302a | |
PAGE CHAPTER ARCHIVING PEOPLE
About the Author
About the Author
Eric Ketelaar (1944) is Emeritus Professor at the University of Amsterdam. From 1997 to
2009 he was Professor of Archivistics in the Department of Media Studies of the Faculty of
Humanities of the University of Amsterdam. Educated as a lawyer and legal historian,
he received his LLM (1967) and LLD (cum laude) degrees from Leiden University.
He was Assistant Lecturer of Legal History at Leiden University, Secretary of the Archives
Council, Director of the Dutch State School of Archivists, and Assistant to the General
State Archivist. In 1980 he was appointed Deputy General State Archivist. Four years later
he moved to Groningen to become State Archivist of that province. He was General State
Archivist (National Archivist) of The Netherlands from 1989-1997.

From 1992-2002 he held the chair of archivistics in the Department of History of the
Leiden University. In 2000/2001 he was The Netherlands Visiting Professor at the
University of Michigan (School of Information), and from 2003 to 2008 he was Honorary
Professor at Monash University, Melbourne where he until 2018 continued to be involved
as an Adjunct Senior Research Fellow in the Faculty of Information Technology.

He has served the Royal Association of Archivists in the Netherlands as Vice President,
and President, and was Chairman of the Steering Committee on Automation. In 1987 the
Society awarded him with the first Hendrik van Wijn medal for his work as editor of the
series of thirteen guides to the archival repositories in the Netherlands. In 2009 he was
elected an honorary member of the Society.

He was Secretary for Standardization of the International Council on Archives (ICA)

from 1980-1984. The following eight years he was Secretary of the International
Conference of the Round Table on Archives. From 1996-2000 he was Chairman of the
Program Management Commission of ICA, Vice-President and (1998-2000) Acting
President of ICA. In September 2000 he was appointed Honorary President of ICA.

302b | |
PAGE CHAPTER ARCHIVING PEOPLE
About the Author
His keynote address Exploitation of new archival materials at the 1984 International
Congress on Archives was translated into six languages. He has presented papers at
conferences and seminars in several countries, including lecture tours in Australia and
South Africa, and on a wide range of subjects: archival training, legislation, professional
ethics, standards, access, appraisal, electronic records.

He wrote some 450 articles and wrote or co-authored several books, including two general
introductions on archival research and a handbook on Dutch archives and records
management law. From the foundation in 2001 of Archival Science, he was one of the
editors-in-chief. Since 2014 he is a member of the Editorial Board.

www.archivistics.nl

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