Rural wage labour in the sixteenth- century Low Countries : an assessment of the importance and nature of wage labour in the countryside of Holland, Guelders and Flanders BAS J. P. VAN BAVEL* ABSTRACT. The rise of wage labour in the countryside forms a fundamental element in the transition to a modern, capitalist economy and society. Hard data on this devel- opment, however, are scarce. Here, the importance of wage labour around the middle of the sixteenth century is reconstructed for three regions in the Low Countries. This reconstruction shows not only a high importance of wage labour, between a quarter to almost 60 per cent of rural labour input, but also strong regional differences. These differences appear not to be connected to urbanization or to the rise of one or another sector in the rural economy, but to the regional social and institutional framework in which the economy developed. 1. INTRODUCTION In the debates about long-term structural changes in economy and society, increasing attention is being paid to the interaction between town and countryside and to the role of the rural economy in these changes. However, hard knowledge of the extent, nature and chronology of struc- tural changes in the rural economy before the seventeenth/eighteenth centuries is still limited; mostly there is speculation rather than firm empirical foundation. This applies to, for example, the development from subsistence agriculture to commercial, market-oriented farming. A few * Faculty of Arts, University of Utrecht, and Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research. Continuity and Change 21 (1), 2006, 37–72. f 2006 Cambridge University Press doi:10.1017/S0268416005005631 Printed in the United Kingdom 37