As a rule, the license to brew beer for sale did not belong to the latter category; on the other hand, the fee for such license seems to have been very high. In 1647, Jean Labadie, formerly an assistant commissary, applied for permission to build a brewery, which was granted on his paying a yearly duty in the shape of beaver, amounting in value to about eighty dollars. Many other licenses had been granted since then, and the number of tapsters seems to have been very large; good reasons why the Court at Fort Orange, representing the Stuyvesant Government, should insist upon the payment of the tax. The Patroon, however, frustrated the first attempt to collect the excise and issued a proclamation expressly forbidding the brewers and tapsters to pay any duties. The tapsters, of course, readily obeyed this order. Finally, Stuyvesant ordered the Court at Orange to arrest one of the refractory tapsters, named Ariensen, and send him to Manhattan. The clerk of this court, Johann De Decker, successfully carried out this order by a ruse. He invited the unsuspecting Ariensen to his house and detained him, in spite of the protests of Van Rensselaer and the “schout” of the colony, and notwithstanding the offer of the former to vouch for the appearance of the prisoner. Ariensen, although compelled for security’s sake, to sleep in De Decker’s bed and to be watched over by a servant, managed to escape and took refuge in the house of Van Rensselaer. De Decker pursued the fugitive with the intention of re-apprehending him, but was met by a body of armed men who appeared determined to use force of arms, if necessary, to prevent the officer from fulfilling his duty. Bloodshed would inevitably have followed an attempt to recapture Ariensen, and, to avoid this, the officer retired, reporting the failure of his mission to the Director and asking that more soldiers be sent with him, having “among them one or two who are not nice about taking hold of a man.” As was to be expected, Stuyvesant resorted to measures which soon rendered the Patroon amenable to law and order, and the revenues derived from tapsters alone rose, within one year, from an insignificant sum to 4,200 guilders, in 1657. Nothing noteworthy occurred thereafter during Dutch dominion.