Maja Mechant
Introduction
At first glance, Bruges—a provincial town in Belgium—and prostitution may appear to be worlds apart. With its mediaeval and mediaeval-esque buildings, cobblestone streets, and canals, Bruges is known as a picture-perfect tour-ist destination. Its charms attract people from all over the world, but unlike in Amsterdam, the must-sees in Bruges do not include the red-light district.
Moreover, visitors who are not deliberately on the lookout for prostitutes are unlikely to have spotted a single one in the last decade because commercial sex is simply not part of the scenery.1 Of course, that is not to say that the sex trade is non-existent or that it has always been as small-scale and inconspicuous as it is now. As is the case elsewhere, prostitution evolved in tandem with the city’s size and economy, and at the end of the Middle Ages, Bruges was one of Europe’s largest, most thriving urban centres, and commercial sex was readily available.2 However, unlike most of the cities discussed in this volume, Bruges’
past is not characterized by progressive growth, urbanization, or industrializa-tion, or by a concomitant increase in its prostitution sector. Rather, contem-porary Bruges is a small provincial town, and as such it is an interesting case study because it affords us the opportunity to see how prostitution evolved in a languishing urban centre during the early modern and modern eras.
There is less literature on the sex trade in Bruges than there is for larger cities. Only one monograph has been published on the subject to date, namely
12
1 Despite the nuanced differences between “prostitute” and “sex worker”, I have occasionally used them synonymously in this chapter because of linguistic variations.
2 Guy Dupont, Maagdenverleidsters, hoeren en speculanten: Prostitutie in Brugge tijdens de Bourgondische periode (1385–1515) (Bruges, 1996), pp. 161–162.
* I am grateful to Thomas Donald Jacobs for reading this paper, improving it, and giving advice regarding my use of English, which was truly a great help. I am also grateful to the editors of this volume for their comments on an earlier version of this article.
© Maja Mechant, 2017 | doi 10.1163/9789004346253_004
Guy Dupont’s work regarding prostitution during the Burgundian period ( 1385–1515).3 The aim here, however, is to provide a long-term overview of the seventeenth century and onwards. In doing so, I will rely on unpublished re-search and data collected by myself, masters students, and Pasop, a non-profit organization that works with prostitutes in the region.4 The availability of in-formation means that my emphasis here is on the evolution that took place between the second half of the eighteenth century, the second half of the nine-teenth century, both World Wars, and the present day. Under discussion are the push and pull factors involved in the trade, the legal norms concerning prosti-tution, the social profiles of sex workers, their dependency on their employers, and their working conditions. Not all of these topics are analysed in depth for all the periods covered due to the limitations of the primary source material, which include normative sources, registration lists, police and court records, interviews, and social statistics. Each type of source has particular advantages and disadvantages, but discussing these in detail here would take us too far from the matter at hand. What is important to keep in mind is that the availability of a specific source largely depends on the legal framework of the era. However, before examining the legislation, I will first outline the context, as well as the factors that have influenced the supply and demand of commercial sex.
The Bruges Context
As mentioned in the introduction, while prostitution was widespread in Bruges at the end of the Middle Ages, the situation has since greatly altered. Two peri-ods proved decisive in bringing about this change. The first came at the end of
34
3 Ibid.
4 Maja Mechant, “Vrouwen met een uitzonderlijke overlevingsstrategie? De levenslopen van prostituees in Brugge (1750–1790)” (ongoing doctoral research, Ghent University); Israel Mertens, “Prostitutie in Vlaanderen: een sociografische en kwantitatieve studie van het pros-titutioneel kader. Brugge en Gent, 19e/begin 20e eeuw” (Unpublished m.a., Ghent University, 1981); Bernard Schotte, “Bestrijding van quat gedragh te Brugge in de 18de eeuw (1724–1774)”
(Unpublished m.a., Ghent University, 1982); Vania Vande Voorde, “Prostitutie te Brugge ti-jdens de Eerste en de Tweede Wereldoorlog” (Unpublished m.a., Ghent University, 2007).
Pasop, established in 1990, provides medical and social services to sex workers in the Belgian provinces of East and West Flanders. I am very grateful to Martine Claeyssens for allowing me to look at Pasop’s annual reports and for putting together tables pertaining to Bruges. I am equally indebted to Ans Traen, a doctor, and An Mortier, a nurse, for their willingness to share their knowledge and experiences when I interviewed them in Ghent on 12 June 2012.
Bruges’ “golden age” in the fifteenth century, when the city’s primary economic sectors, textile production and international commerce, dwindled, as did the numbers of businessmen and sailors. The population decreased from 42,000 inhabitants in 1477 to 29,000 just one hundred years later,5 and the sex trade shrank to meet the needs of the remaining locals as well as soldiers, merchants, and sailors. The second turning point came during the second half of the twen-tieth century when Bruges finally overcame its stagnation and increasingly was profiled as a tourist destination. Moreover, the development of Zeebrugge as a major European port shifted the focal point of the city’s economic life away from Bruges proper.6 This reorganization, along with the city’s new image as an affluent and wholesome tourist destination, led the sex workers who had been present in the heart of Bruges for centuries to relocate outside its mediaeval walls to the roadways around the town.
However, this is merely the long-term evolution, and a simplified picture of it at that. The era between the fifteenth and twentieth centuries was not a single uninterrupted run of financial desolation. Bruges did experience eco-nomic upswings, particularly during the region’s peaceful interludes, and it would be imprudent to use the city’s golden age as the yardstick for prosperity.
For example, periodic improvements to the port and waterways brought re-peated cycles of growth to the trade sector. When Ghent was reconnected with the sea around 1750, the canal shipping trade in Bruges thrived yet again.7 In fact, the end of the seventeenth century and the second half of the eighteenth century proved exceptions to the city’s long-term economic stagnation. Tex-tile production, although it had been in a state of crisis since the seventeenth century, remained important until it failed to industrialize in the nineteenth century. At that time it completely collapsed, resulting in the most sombre chapter of Bruges’ history. Abject poverty became widespread, and the crop failures of the 1840s worsened an already dire situation.8 Bruges was known as the poorest city in nineteenth-century Flanders, and while this portrayal has
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5 Heidi Deneweth, “Brugge, een veilige enclave in het krijgsgewoel”, in Valentin Vermeersch (ed.), Brugge (Antwerp, 2002), pp. 100–107, 105.
6 Romain Van Eeno, “Een onomkeerbare evolutie”, in Vermeersch, Brugge, pp. 142–155.
7 Ludo Vandamme and Jan D’hondt, “17de en 18de eeuw: Op zoek naar een nieuwe bestem-ming”, in Marc Ryckaert, André Vandewalle, and Jan D’hondt (eds), Brugge, de geschiedenis van een Europese stad (Tielt, 1999), pp. 141–165, 144–151; Heidi Deneweth, “Brugge, een veilige enclave in het krijgsgewoel”, pp. 100–107; Heidi Deneweth, “De twee gezichten van Brugge”, in Vermeersch, Brugge, pp. 108–123.
8 Romain Van Eeno, “De confrontatie met een gewijzigde wereld”, in Vermeersch, Brugge, pp. 124–131, 129; Romain Van Eeno, “Een politieke machtsverschuiving”, in Vermeersch, Brugge,
been somewhat altered in the current historiography, there is no doubt that the city was extremely impoverished.9
As the analysis of prostitutes’ wages below will make clear, these economic changes had an obvious impact on the demand and supply aspects of commer-cial sex, but until recently there was always a sizable call for such services in the city itself. Today’s clients are more mobile and tend to seek their sexual gratifi-cation further away, but in the past the prostitution sector catered to both the local townsmen and the surrounding rural population. Their customer base was varied, consisting of youngsters, married men, and the clergy as well, the latter being a fairly large group in Bruges. The presence of itinerates such as sailors, traveling merchants, and military troops caused the supply to exceed local demand, and the latter group in particular fuelled the trade. Bruges be-came a garrison town in the seventeenth century, and soldiers of all ranks show up as clients in the source materials well into the twentieth century. Between 1865 and 1882, for example, Bruges’ garrison consisted of about 1,200 men, a considerable number in a population of only 45,000.10
The constant demand by soldiers and other men for sex was met by a steady supply of impoverished women during all but the last period under discussion.
In Bruges, as elsewhere, women’s employment opportunities were limited, and what work there was did not pay well. For example, in the eighteenth century, lace makers and spinners—the most common occupations among Bruges’ fe-male population—only earned two to four pennies a day, while an unskilled male labourer received about twelve.11 Moreover, Bruges was characterized de-mographically by a preponderance of females, a high age of marriage, and a large proportion of permanently unwed women.12 This imbalance reached its peak at the start of the nineteenth century when only 36 per cent of women
910 1112
pp. 132–141, 133–135; Jan D’hondt, “Een moeizame industriële en sociale ontplooiing”, in Marc Ryckaert, André Vandewalle and Jan D’hondt, Brugge, pp. 167–189, 176–186.
9 Jan D’hondt, “Een moeizame industriële en sociale ontplooiing”, pp. 176–186.
10 Mertens, “Prostitutie in Vlaanderen”, pp. 189–190.
11 Yvan Vanden Berghe, Jacobijnen en traditionalisten: de reactie van de Bruggelingen in de revolutietijd (1780–1794) (Brussels, 1972), pp. 71–76; Conny Deneweth, “Vrouwenarbeid te Brugge in de achttiende eeuw” (Unpubished m.a., Ghent University, 1987), p. 108; Jan De-nolf, “Brugge 1748: Een socio-demografische schets van een stedelijke samenleving rond het midden van de 18e eeuw” (Unpublished m.a., Ghent University, 1981), p. 135.
12 Richard Wall, “The Composition of Households in a Population of 6 Men to 10 Women:
South-East Bruges in 1814”, in Richard Wall (ed.), Family Forms in Historic Europe (Cam-bridge, 1983), pp. 421–474, 428–430; Mertens, “Prostitutie in Vlaanderen”, p. 264; Sofie De Langhe, “Oude vrijsters; Bestaansstrategieën van ongehuwde vrouwen op het Brugse plat-teland, late achttiende—begin negentiende eeuw”, (Unpublished Ph.D., Ghent University,
above the age of 15 were married, as opposed to 57 per cent of the men.13 So at any given time there were many single females who had to survive without the benefit of a spouse. And while Bruges did not attract many immigrants, foreigners did supplement the local labour force; prostitution was a mobile occupation and women involved in it could pass through many urban centres in the region since the distances involved were small. Those travelling between Ghent, Dunkirk, Lille, and Ostend all stopped in Bruges on the way.
The Legal Framework
Just as Bruges’ socio-economic circumstances changed over the centuries, so too did the way in which the city dealt with prostitution. During the mediaeval and early modern eras, prostitution was handled via a combination of repres-sion and tolerance. The proportions of represrepres-sion and tolerance, however, fluc-tuated over both the short term and in the long run, although the terminology used sometimes makes this difficult to determine from the materials available.
Prostitution as such is not discussed in Bruges’ early normative sources, which only deal with adultery and encouraging fornication as criminal offences.14 In fact, no word even existed for a person selling sexual services, and the nearest equivalent—“whore”—was applied to any women engaging in extra-marital sex. Economic transactions were not entirely irrelevant, as the authorities did prosecute those who remunerated more often than women who had mere-ly had premarital sex. However, the sources require careful reading in order to distinguish which was which. Eventually, professional “whores” evolved into a separate category over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth
1314
2013), p. 8. The mean age at first marriage for women at the end of the eighteenth cen-tury was 27. This was calculated on the basis of a database constructed by volunteers at the Bruges archives, which contains 925 first marriages for 1796–1800, and 916 brides for which the age at marriage was known. According to the 1815 census, around one fifth of women never married at all; their exact numbers could not be determined, but the per-centage of unmarried women above the age of 50 is estimated to have been between 18 per cent and 28 per cent. J. De Belder, L. Jaspers, C. Gyssels, and C. Vandenbroeke, Arbeid en tewerkstelling in West-Vlaanderen 1814–1815, een socio-professionele en demografische analyse: Werkdocumenten 6 (n.p., 1986), pp. 1392–1393.
13 Wall, “The Composition of Households”, p. 431.
14 Joos de Damhouder, Practycke ende handbouck in criminele zaeken, republished by Jozef Dauwe and Jos Monballyu (Roeselare, 1981), pp. 144–159.
centuries15 as reflected by the appearance of the word “prostituting”, which gradually replaced “whoring” when the case involved commercial sex.16
Even so, actual prostitution was not always prosecuted. Tolerance prevailed during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and while brothel keepers were routinely fined, the collection pattern demonstrates that the fines were not meant to be punitive, but instead functioned as a form of taxation.17 Given Bruges’ status as a centre of international trade, the authorities may have found it convenient to allow a relatively free market for sexual gratification, and it seems that commercial sex was only cracked down on when excesses occurred. However, an increasing number of brothel keepers were prosecut-ed towards the end of the fifteenth century—perhaps not coincidentally, as Bruges was past its peak—and so tolerance gradually gave way to repression.18 It is not clear when this changed yet again, but it appears that tolerance once more dominated during most of the early modern period; in the mid-seven-teenth century, a mere handful of brothel keepers and prostitutes were prose-cuted and years could pass without a single arrest.19 However, this laissez-faire approach stands in sharp contrast with the eighteenth century, particularly during the second half, in which an average of nine prostitutes were prose-cuted a year. This was quite a substantial number given that the average in Ghent—a city almost twice the size of Bruges—was only two a year.20 Presum-ably this had more to do with the mechanisms of social control available in
1516 1718 1920
15 Adultery could be prosecuted both by the secular and the ecclesiastical courts, but moral offences committed by the laity were increasingly—and eventually exclusively—dealt with by the former.
16 This evolution was also found elsewhere: Lotte Van de Pol, Het Amsterdams hoerdom:
Prostitutie in de zeventiende en achttiende eeuw (Amsterdam, 1996), pp. 26–35; Ruth Mazo Karras, “Sex and the Singlewoman”, in Judith M. Bennett and Amy M. Froide (eds), Single-women in the European Past, 1250–1800 (Philadelphia, 1999), pp. 127–145, 130–131.
17 Dupont, Maagdenverleidsters, hoeren en speculanten, p. 52.
18 Ibid., pp. 159–162.
19 Marleen Mullie, “Zedendelicten te Brugge in de late 17de en 18de eeuw” (Unpublished m.a., Ghent University, 1995), pp. 84–87.
20 The average for Ghent between 1750 and 1779 was calculated on the basis of two other studies because the requisite information was not included in the criminal archives.
Anne Marie Roets, “‘Rudessen, dieften ende andere crimen’: Misdadigheid te Gent in de zeventiende en achttiende eeuw: een kwantitatieve en kwalitatieve analyse” (Unpub-lished Ph.D., Ghent University, 1987), iii, p. 1; Frédéric Van Waeijenberge, “Collocatie te Gent (1750–1779)” (Unpublished m.a., Ghent University, 1994), p. 124.
both cities than a difference in attitudes, and in any case Bruges had a larger police force.21
Nevertheless, the policy of repression was aimed at regulation rather than abolition, and as long as social norms were by and large respected, prostitution was tolerated to varying degrees. Many prostitutes were only brought to trial as the result of complaints or at the request of family members.22 And in many hearings, other prostitutes and brothel keepers were named who were not ar-rested afterwards. It seems that when the Bruges authorities deviated from this pattern it was because of a perception on the part of the authorities that the sector was growing too conspicuous. In some years, they raided brothel houses and arrested all the women present, which resulted in peaks in the prosecution rate of up to thirty-eight a year.
Indeed, visibility seems to have both triggered periods of repression and in-fluenced policy towards prostitution in general. Eighteenth-century court re-cords show that public solicitation was judged more harshly than prostitution hidden behind brothel doors, even though these houses were located in the centre of Bruges. When Louis Stevens was interrogated following an accusa-tion of brothel keeping in 1770, the aldermen seem to have been most upset by the fact that he lured in customers by sending his girls out onto the streets to seduce men.23 Moreover, there were a few city council resolutions concerning prostitution showing that Bruges’ authorities had experimented with segrega-tion at times. In 1491, nocturnal streetwalking in the town centre was prohib-ited and in 1624, an ordinance was adopted stipulating that “those keeping a brothel or dishonest house within the city would be confined and forced to
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21 Bruges’ police force was well established by early modern standards. In 1757, the city’s two permanent bodies of officers numbered 160 men in total, while Ghent had only forty-seven policemen in 1752. Although Ghent’s force quadrupled in the decades after, it is clear that Bruges still maintained a relatively large police presence. A. Vandewalle, Beknopte inventaris van het stadsarchief van Brugge (Bruges, 1979), pp. 77–78; Mullie,
“Zedendelicten te Brugge”, p. 28; Piet Lenders, Gent, een stad tussen traditie en verlicht-ing (1750–1787), (Courtrai, 1990), pp. 383–385; Harald Deceulaer, “Implicaties van de straat:
Rechten, plichten en conflicten in Gentse gebuurten (17de en 18de eeuw)”, Handelingen der maatschappij voor geschiedenis en oudheidkunde te Gent: Nieuwe Reeks, 50 (1996), pp.
121–147, 137–139.
22 Fernand Vanhemelryck, “De criminaliteit in de Ammanie van Brussel van de late mid-deleeuwen tot het einde van het Ancien Regime (1404–1789)” (Unpublished Ph.D., Ghent University, 1968), pp. 164–165.
23 Municipal Archives of Bruges [hereafter mab], 188, Criminele Informatiën, 2 June 1770, Louis Stevens.
move outside the old town to an area provided outside the city walls.”24 These laws cannot have been valid for very long, as court records do not indicate that any such policies were put into practise. Nevertheless, they show that the au-thorities were looking to remove prostitution from public spaces, not put a stop to it. As in most places in the early modern period, prostitution in Bruges was judged a “necessary evil”, impossible to repress entirely but still requiring some form of control.
The same attitude prevailed into the nineteenth century but was translated into an entirely different policy: regulation instead of repression or segrega-tion. Prostitution was allowed but could only take place in official brothel houses, and the prostitutes had to be registered and medically monitored. This approach was first put into practice in France at the start of the revolution, and under Napoleon it spread throughout much of Europe, including the south-ern Netherlands. Bruges, however, followed suit somewhat later. While Ghent already had an ordinance regarding the regulation of prostitution in 1809, the
The same attitude prevailed into the nineteenth century but was translated into an entirely different policy: regulation instead of repression or segrega-tion. Prostitution was allowed but could only take place in official brothel houses, and the prostitutes had to be registered and medically monitored. This approach was first put into practice in France at the start of the revolution, and under Napoleon it spread throughout much of Europe, including the south-ern Netherlands. Bruges, however, followed suit somewhat later. While Ghent already had an ordinance regarding the regulation of prostitution in 1809, the