Voormalige sarrieshut
There are still six of these sarrie huts in the province of Groningen. One is also preserved in the Frisian town of Beesterzwaag. In the rest of the country, sarrie huts did not occur.
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Waging war requires money. A lot of money. That is why, at the start of the Eighty Years’ War, a tax was introduced on milled grain. Every time a farmer took grain to a mill to have it ground, he had to pay this tax. As many farmers tried to evade the tax, the States of the City and Country and the Ommelander States (in the province of Groningen) appointed tax collectors from 1628 onwards: ‘cherchers’. Houses were built specifically for these cherchers next to the corn mills: the sarrieshutten (sarries was a corruption of chercher, which in turn is derived from the French word for ‘to tax’: sarchier). The grain tax remained in place until well after the war. It was not until 1855 that the tax was abolished and most of the sarrieshutten disappeared.