Lady of Stavoren

Now a village of just 1,000 inhabitants, Stavoren was once a wealthy port city in the Dutch province of Friesland but began to decline in the late Middle Ages after a sandbank formed outside the harbour, blocking ships from entering and exiting.

Soon afterwards, during a banquet thrown for her fellow Hanseatic merchant princes, she finds the ring inside a large fish served to her.

As this event portended, she lost her wealth, living out her remaining years in destitution, begging for scraps of bread.

In divine retribution the port had silted, and the wheat that had been cast overboard now grew in the resulting sandbank that closed the harbour and ruined the city.

The sandbar on which only empty ears of wheat will grow was added in the eighteenth century, while the motif of the discarded ring appears for the first time around 1810.