Women, Work and Wages in England, 1600-1850 (Women's & gender studies)

WOMEN, WORK AND WAGES IN ENGLAND, 1600-1850 Penelope Lane, Neil Raven, K.D.M. Snell

WOMEN, WORK AND WAGES IN ENGLAND, 1600–1850

This book comprises essays representing the very latest research into the subject of women’s work and gendered remuneration in Britain between 1600 and 1850. The chapters are wide-ranging in chronology, themes and regional coverage, indicating the importance of this subject in the historiography on the period of British industrialisation. The chapters are by leading academics associated with such research: Steve Hindle, Jane Humphries, Steven King, Penelope Lane, Neil Raven, Michael Roberts, Pamela Sharpe, K.D.M. Snell, Nicola Verdon, and Samantha Williams. There is discussion of such topics as children under the parish apprenticeship system, women’s work for poor law authorities and how it was taken into account by welfare systems, the changing nature of gendered work, remuneration and technology in British agriculture, questions of customary norms governing gendered pay, female employment in many hitherto neglected urban industries, and women and the East India Company. The issues of gendered wages and customary earnings, family economies, changing participation rates over time, regional and rural–urban contrasts, the impact of technological change, and the links between female work and formal welfare systems, are raised throughout. An inter-disciplinary introduction appraises the state of research and the ways in which it should develop in the future. Penelope Lane is Head of the History Department at Preston High School for young women in the Bronx, New York, and was formerly a research fellow in the Centre for English Local History at the University of Leicester. Neil Raven is Regional Coordinator of the Higher Education Summer School Programme, East Midlands Universities Association, and Honorary Research Fellow at the Centre for Urban History, University of Leicester. K.D.M. Snell is Professor of Rural and Cultural History at the Centre for English Local History, University of Leicester.

WOMEN, WORK AND WAGES IN ENGLAND, 1600–1850

Edited by Penelope Lane, Neil Raven and K.D.M. Snell

THE BOYDELL PRESS

© Editors and contributors 2004 All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner First published 2004 Published by The Boydell Press An imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. PO Box 41026, Rochester, NY 14604–4126, USA website: www.boydellandbrewer.com ISBN 1 84383 077 9

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Women, work and wages in England, 1600-1850 / edited by Penelope Lane, Neil Raven and K.D.M. Snell. p. cm. ISBN 1-84383-077-9 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Women—Employment—England—History. 2. Women—England —Economic conditions. 3. Women—England—Social conditions. 4. Sex role—England—History. I. Lane, Penelope. II. Raven, Neil, 1967– III. Snell, K. D. M. IV. Title. HD6136.W668 2004 331.4′0942′0903—dc22 2004000050

Typeset by Keystroke, Jacaranda Lodge, Wolverhampton Printed in Great Britain by St Edmundsbury Press Limited, Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk

Contents List of illustrations Notes on contributors Acknowledgements

vi vii x

Introduction Jane Humphries and K.D.M. Snell

1

1 ‘Waste’ children? Pauper apprenticeship under the Elizabethan poor laws, c. 1598–1697 Steve Hindle

15

2 Gender at sea: women and the East India Company in seventeenth-century London Pamela Sharpe

47

3 Sickles and scythes revisited: harvest work, wages and symbolic meanings Michael Roberts

68

4 A customary or market wage? Women and work in the East Midlands, c. 1700–1840 Penelope Lane

102

5 ‘Meer pennies for my baskitt will be enough’: women, work and welfare, 1770–1830 Steven King

119

6 Caring for the sick poor: poor law nurses in Bedfordshire, c. 1770–1834 Samantha Williams

141

7 ‘A ‘humbler, industrious class of female’: women’s employment and industry in the small towns of southern England, c. 1790–1840 Neil Raven

170

8 A diminishing force? Reassessing the employment of female day labourers in English agriculture, c. 1790–1850 Nicola Verdon

190

Bibliography Index

212 233 v

Illustrations Figures 2.1 ‘An Actuall Survey of the Parish of St Dunstan, Stepney, 1703’ 54–55 6.1 Poor relief expenditure and sums spent on carers in Campton and Shefford, 1767–1834 166 7.1 Small towns possessing manufacturing concerns located in seven southern counties, c. 1790–1840 173 7.2 The range of silk-related trades in north Essex and south-west Pennine towns 179 7.3 Silk business concentration in north Essex and south-west Pennine towns 186 8.1 Days worked by men, boy and women labourers at Stockbridge in 1816 194

Tables 1.1 Sex ratios of pauper apprentices bound in the 1630s, various counties 4.1 Male and female day wages for comparable work 4.2 Male and female servants’ yearly wages (Donington Park, Leicestershire) 6.1 Proportion of total expenditure on care in Campton and Shefford by decade 8.1 Percentage of farm labour payments made to female labourers on Essex farms, 1800 to 1850 8.2 Women’s wages by the day, at haymaking and harvest

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35 108 116 166 199 204

Notes on contributors Steve Hindle is Professor in the Department of History at the University of Warwick. He is the author of The State and Social Change in Early Modern England, 1550–1640 (2000); and of many articles on the governance of rural parishes in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; and co-editor with Paul Griffiths and Adam Fox of The Experience of Authority in Early Modern England (1996). He has recently completed a monograph entitled On the Parish? The Micro-Politics of Poor Relief in Rural England, c.1550–1750 (forthcoming Oxford, 2004). Jane Humphries is Reader in Economic History at Oxford University and a Fellow of All Souls College. She has published extensively on gender, the family and the history of women’s work. She is currently working on a book on child labour in the British Industrial Revolution in comparison with child labour in the world today. Steven King is Head of the Department of History at Oxford Brookes University. His research interests range widely from the history of industrialisation, through history of medicine to social welfare. At present he is working on a research project entitled ‘The experience of being poor in England, 1700–1900’ with colleagues at the University of Trier in Germany. His recent publications include: A Fylde Country Practice: Medicine and Society in Lancashire 1760–1840 (2002); with Alannah Tomkins (eds), The Poor in England 1700–1850: An Economy of Makeshifts; and a special issue of Textile History (33:1, 2002) on ‘The dress of the poor’. Penelope Lane is Head of the History Department at Preston High School for young women in the Bronx, New York, and was formerly a research fellow in the Centre for English Local History at the University of Leicester. She has published essays on women’s work, property and business. Her current research interests focus on women’s work in the early factory system. Neil Raven is Regional Coordinator of the Higher Education Summer School Programme, East Midlands Universities Association, and Honorary Research Fellow at the Centre for Urban History, University of Leicester. His recent publications include ‘Trade directories and business size: evidence from the small towns of north Essex, 1851’, The Local Historian, 31 (2001); and ‘The English county town during the Industrial Revolution: Chelmsford, c. 1790–1840’, Urban History, 30 (2003). vii

CONTRIBUTORS

Michael Roberts is interested in the social and economic history of early modern Britain, in historiography, the use of visual images and literary texts in historical representation, and in the history of women and gender. His publications include ‘Gender, work and socialization in Wales, c.1450– c.1850’, in S. Betts (ed.), Our Daughters’ Land: Past and Present (1996), and ‘“To bridle the falsehood of unconscionable workmen, and for her own satisfaction”: what the Jacobean housewife needed to know about men’s work, and why’, in the Labour History Review (1998). He has co-edited a collection of essays on Women and Gender in Early Modern Wales (2000). Pamela Sharpe is Queen Elizabeth II Research Fellow in the Discipline of History at the University of Western Australia in Perth. Her publications include many articles about women’s work in the English past and a chapter in The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, volume II: 1540–1840 (2000). She has written Adapting to Capitalism: Working Women in the English Economy (1996), and Population and Society in an East Devon Parish: Reproducing Colyton, 1540–1840 (2002). She co-edited Chronicling Poverty: the Voices and Strategies of the English Poor, 1640–1840 (1997), and edited a reader, Women’s Work: the English Experience, 1650–1914 (1998) as well as a series of essays, Women, Gender and Labour Migration: Historical and Global Perspectives (2001). K.D.M. Snell is Professor of Rural and Cultural History at the Centre for English Local History, University of Leicester. He is author of Annals of the Labouring Poor: Social Change and Agrarian England, 1660–1900 (1985); Church and Chapel in the North Midlands (1991); Rival Jerusalems: The Geography of Victorian Religion (2000) (with P.S. Ell); The Bibliography of Regional Fiction in Britain and Ireland, 1800–2000 (2002); (ed.), Alexander Somerville, The Whistler at the Plough (1989); (ed.), Letters from Ireland during the Famine of 1847 (1994); and (ed.), The Regional Novel in the British Isles, 1800–1990 (1998). He co-edits the journal Rural History: Economy, Society, Culture. He is currently writing a book on Parish and Belonging in England and Wales, 1660–1914. Nicola Verdon is a Research Fellow in the School of History at the University of Reading. She has published a number of articles on the work of women and children on farms in England since 1750 in the Agricultural History Review (2001 and 2003) and Economic History Review (2002), and is the author of Rural Women Workers in Nineteenth-Century England: Gender, Work and Wages (2002). Her current research focuses on farmers’ wives and widows in nineteenth- and twentieth-century England. Samantha Williams is College Lecturer, Trinity Hall, University of Cambridge. Her Cambridge Ph.D. was on ‘Poor relief, welfare and medical provision in Bedfordshire: the social, economic and demographic context, c. 1770–1834’ (1999); and her publications include ‘Life course and lifecycle: reconstructing the experience of poverty in the time of the Old viii

CONTRIBUTORS

Poor Law’, Archives (1998), (with S. Ottaway), and ‘Malthus, marriage and poor law allowances 1700–1834 revisited: a Bedfordshire case study’, Agricultural History Review (2004). Her research interests encompass the history of poverty in England since the eighteenth century, and she is currently researching on unmarried mothers in Victorian England.

ix

Acknowledgements This collection of scholarly essays results from a conference entitled ‘“Much toil and little hope”: work, gender and wages in England, 1600–1830’, which was held at Cromford Mill, Derbyshire, in May 2000. Most of the chapters here originated at that conference, so we thank the venue’s administrators for their assistance, and the conference participants. For their contributions, advice or help, we are most grateful to Peter Sowden of Boydell & Brewer for his patience and encouragement, to the Centre for English Local History at the University of Leicester, and to Joyce Ellis, Paul Glennie, Sara Horrell, Peter King and Donald Woodward.

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Penelope Lane:

To my parents, Megan and Alan Lane

Neil Raven:

To my parents, Douglas and Brenda Raven

Keith Snell:

To Hiroko

Introduction JANE HUMPHRIES AND K.D.M. SNELL

Women’s history has been one of the growth areas of historical enquiry over the past three decades. Inspired by the women’s movement, as well as by interest in the history of the family, historical demography and community history, the subject has come a long way from the writings of earlier scholars such as Alice Clark and Ivy Pinchbeck.1 It has diversified rapidly, incorporating all academic disciplines, building up much more complex theoretical perspectives, becoming highly international and comparative in scope, and starting to bring nuanced and discerning knowledge at the local or regional level. Its relevance to countless other fields of historical enquiry is now widely accepted. Women’s history has also become increasingly resourceful in its approaches, its methods and its handling of diverse sources. It has seen the inauguration of its own scholarly journals, study centres, archives and websites, has had many valuable regional museum displays dedicated to it, and has become a mainstay of teaching and research at all educational and academic levels. We now know infinitely more about women’s experiences in the past than we did thirty years ago, and this historical knowledge informs current social and political debates, ideologies and policy proposals in persistent and pervasive ways. Yet many of the debates that emerged in the early twentieth century, when Pinchbeck and Clark were writing, remain unresolved. In the British contexts, there is still disagreement over whether female participation in ‘the workforce’ (however defined) expanded or diminished during the Industrial Revolution. We do not know enough about locally specific rates and forms of remuneration accorded to women, or about the seasonal or cyclical nature of their work, or about how many hours they worked. Accordingly, major debates on issues such as how the standard of living altered during industrialisation, or the gendered nature of the home market, or the reasons for important nuptiality and fertility changes in English demography, have proceeded with meagre knowledge of women’s employment, wages and living standards. Arguments

1 A. Clark, Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century (London, 1919); I. Pinchbeck, Women Workers and the Industrial Revolution, 1750–1850 (London, 1930, 1969 edn). Both books remain important reference points for research.

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WOMEN, WORK AND WAGES IN ENGLAND, 1600–1850

about ‘patriarchy’, or changing gender standards, often still take place in swirling waters which lack the stepping-stones that understanding of the past could provide. Furthermore, we have little information about how women’s time was spent over the gamut of their routines both within and outside the familial household. Gendered time schedules, their causes and their relative rewards, remain little fathomed. Yet they are of great interest in any attempt to understand how work discipline and leisure preferences have shifted over the past few centuries, and to assess how our modern uses of time compare with the compulsions or freedoms that affected our ancestors. It is becoming apparent that great regional and local variations existed in the gendering of work. Historians have uncovered differences between rural areas with distinct topographies and agricultural specialisation; between ‘open’ and ‘closed’estate villages; and between cottage-industrial and more narrowly agricultural venues. In addition, there was a gulf between town and countryside; between different types of town or city as well; and even between the heterogeneous urban spaces within towns or cities. These differences were compounded by those between broader regions and pays which varied markedly in their cultural, religious, dialectal, ethnic, socio-economic, geographical and demographic characters. Even though almost all historians now remark upon such regional difference, there is still a surprising paucity of empirical research to inform us about it in a clear and unambiguous way. Variation in experiences is after all the essence of the past, providing the keys to understanding. Yet in this context the varied patterns seem to have disconcerted historians. When we come to broader generalisation or theory, we remain quite uncertain and sometimes disputatious about how our highly gendered experiences today compare with those in the past. One of the key debates has been about how women’s work changed over time, in particular during the restructuring of the economy that accompanied industrialisation. Views on this have ranged from seemingly optimistic accounts of women being ‘liberated’ by unprecedented earning power granted through industrialisation, to perhaps bleaker descriptions of women’s marginalisation from the formal workplace, and resulting vulnerability and dependence upon male breadwinners. Value judgements on any such changes have also shifted over time: from Pinchbeck’s celebration of the role of homemaker, to the prioritising of non-domestic work and market remuneration by many modern feminists. As we write, a historiographical view of some overall marginalisation of women from productive market-directed work between 1700 and 1900 – albeit with great regional variety and many important exceptions – seems to have emerged as a majority position among English historians.2 Yet all have stressed that the exceptions were often notable, and

2 While noting exceptions in some sectors, it has been argued elsewhere that there was ‘a rapid decline in the labour force participation of married women’ between 1800 and 1850, with women increasingly reliant upon male breadwinners. S. Horrell and J. Humphries,

2

INTRODUCTION

that in some sectors (e.g. pottery and ceramics, the cotton, woollen, hosiery, silk and other textile industries, boot and shoe manufacture, domestic service, dairying work in agriculture, alongside many others) women’s employment remained highly significant or expanded considerably. Even so, the growth of the heavy industries of Victorian England (the mining and extractive industries, metalworking, shipbuilding, boiler-making, engineering and so on) offered little scope for female work. Simultaneously, in many other occupations (e.g. the building trades, and many increasingly mechanised, traditionally apprenticed, handicraft trades) women’s employment had not been extensive and was in decline. In cereal-growing agriculture too, notably in eastern and southern England, a sector that accounted for very sizeable proportions of the population in these arable regions, women’s work seems to have undergone some decline, perhaps starting in the eighteenth century. But this was not necessarily a rural pattern shared in market-gardening districts, nor in more pastoral regions to the north and west, where women continued to play a vital and well remunerated role in small-scale agriculture, most particularly in areas where dairying predominated.3 As hinted above, there has also been disagreement over the timing of change as well as its intensity. Some historians have seen the origins of a regional diminution of female employment (e.g. in south-eastern arable agriculture) as lying in the demographic growth, rural structural changes, altering hand-tool technology, exacerbated poor-law problems and declining traditional family economies of the later eighteenth century: changes that were to be much compounded and intensified during the nineteenth century. Others have pointed to the role of so-called ‘Victorian values’ in rendering unacceptable many earlier forms of women’s work. Plainly, every industry and sector, indeed almost every locality and trade, had its own history in these respects. Here again, the dangers of over-generalisation have rarely been so apparent. What was morally acceptable or unquestioned – as women’s work – in a crowded, rack-rented, irreligious, gang-labour dominated, slum ‘open’ village on the edge of the fens, with prostitution, high illegitimacy rates, and a propensity to opium addiction, could be shunned as morally repugnant by resident employers in proximate estate parishes, perhaps priding themselves on their high Anglican ritual, paternalistic governance, and on righteous workmen inhabiting cottages ornés selected from pattern books on picturesque style.

‘Women’s labour force participation and the transition to the male breadwinner family, 1790–1865’, Economic History Review, 48 (1995), pp. 112–13. 3 K.D.M. Snell, Annals of the Labouring Poor: Social Change and Agrarian England, 1660–1900 (Cambridge, 1985), ch. 1; N. Verdon, Rural Women Workers in Nineteenthcentury England: Gender, Work and Wages (Woodbridge, 2002), pp. 64–5, 95, 123. See also J. Bourke, Husbandry to Housewifery: Women, Economic Change, and Housework in Ireland, 1890–1914 (Oxford, 1993). 3

WOMEN, WORK AND WAGES IN ENGLAND, 1600–1850

Local contrasts such as these become all too apparent when one considers the diversity of experiences and occupations across the entire country. Certainly by the 1860s women’s work was commonly a moral marker, a shameful stigma to many, as Thomas Hardy was aware when he wrote about women’s field labour in Tess of the d’Urbervilles: A Pure Woman (1891) – his contentious subtitle flying in the face of many contemporary readers’ beliefs. By the 1860s, and indeed earlier, an association between women’s fieldwork and bastard bearing was one held by many in aspiring, polite middle-class society.4 The Victorian attitudes that Hardy confronted were instrumental in further reducing women’s paid work, especially in outdoor employments. Yet, as the contributors to this book show, historians now also highlight many other cultural, social, economic, organisational, technological and demographic considerations to explain the complexity and changes affecting women’s work. They do so in analytical combinations and with emphases that try to account for both the regional specificity of women’s work experiences, and the disparate chronologies of change that are increasingly apparent. This is entirely appropriate. As has been argued elsewhere, simple, mono-causal and politicised explanations of panoramic transitions have long ceased to persuade.5 The ‘wage’ or the form of remuneration accorded to women, and how it might be researched, is one of the themes in these chapters. This may seem a fairly intelligible or even simple matter – after all, straightforward and transparent monetary remuneration for labour constitutes a ‘taken-forgranted’ aspect of modern life. However, in the local historical economies that we are dealing with here, recompense for labour was often highly complex, and the subtleties of these arrangements can be a fascinating opening to gender-related issues and contrasts. Let us take one narrow example, employing both men and women. In the later nineteenth-century boot and shoe trades in Kettering (Northamptonshire), women were employed in the processes of shoe ‘closing’ and some ‘finishing’ operations in the shoe rooms. Any ‘Statement of Wages’ lists over a hundred different piece rates or prices paid in respect of the work processes in which men were involved.6 These included a huge variety of types of work, such as bevel clumps, Yankee heels, patent plugs toe and joint, breasting heels, forepart bottoms, clumps, rounding outside clump soles, iron studs, half-wide welts, stitched foreparts, crup toe-

4

It was, for example, an association often made in the Report on the Employment of Women and Children in Agriculture, XVII (1867–68), and the Report on the Employment of Children, Young Persons, and Women in Agriculture, XIII (1868–69), more common by that date than in the earlier Report on the Employment of Women and Children in Agriculture, XII, XV (1843). 5 Horrell and Humphries, ‘Women’s labour force participation and the transition to the male breadwinner family’, pp. 89–117. 6 ‘Kettering statement of wages’, reprinted in The Shoe and Leather Record Annual (1892), p. 72 (kindly supplied by David Holmes). 4

INTRODUCTION

cap, heelpins, steel points and so on. In addition, ‘groundwork’ ‘qualities’ ranged from ‘firsts’ to ‘sevenths’; there were also six categories of ‘making’ such as ‘boys’, ‘youths’, ‘men’s’. All had their different ‘prices’. Similarly, for processes in which women were involved, equivalent work descriptions, prices or rates of pay existed. Again, over a hundred paid processes can be found relating to their branches of shoe manufacture – for there were about twenty different operations involved in closing a shoe. To these must be added the finishing operations (polishing, filling, pairing), and then all processes multiplied by the great variations by type of shoe and boot. As for the men, all these jobs and divisions of labour had their own rates of pay. In studying such complicated sources, even in one local industry, we begin to realise the complexity of gender divisions, work processes, their traditions and their relationships to changing technology. If this single trade example is multiplied by many thousands, to accommodate the huge diversity of nineteenth-century working environments in which women were involved, it becomes clear that the ‘wage’, ‘piece rate’ or ‘price’ for labour can tell us a great deal about gendered work, and women’s experiences in many types of workplace. This complexity becomes even more striking when consideration extends from such price or piece rates to other forms of waged work for women. Female farm servants, for example, received something in the order of 80 per cent of their pay in kind, a percentage that varied considerably by region and according to prevailing price levels. The substance of that ‘kind’ also varied greatly by region, customary expectation, cultures of diet and clothing, types of agricultural work and so on. These matters were adjudicated in legal disputes; they were the subjects of lengthy letters and orders from the Poor Law Commission and Poor Law Board (deciding whether and how to clothe children going out of poor-law care into service); they were compared with the similar payments often allowed female apprentices, whose own remuneration was subject to close scrutiny, localised variation, yearly alterations, and significant change over time. In north-eastern agriculture, other distinctive forms of payment existed (again partly in kind, and in different forms of kind) for the ‘hinds’ and female ‘bondagers’. Such ‘kind’ could include, in different parts of the country, grain, grist corn or meal, grain sold privately, permission and the means to keep sheep, cows, pigs or poultry, access to land or allotments to cultivate, potato ground, many forms of clothing, types of fuel, carting of coal, in-house accommodation, ‘bothy’ or dormitory accommodation, tied cottages, beer, cider, tea, malt and hops, harvest home suppers and so on.7 In some cases, diets (e.g. so much meat per week) were minutely specified and agreed upon with employers.

7

For example, see J.P.D. Dunbabin, Rural Discontent in Nineteenth Century Britain (London, 1974), pp. 18, 27, 66, 133–4, 157, 171; D.H. Morgan, Harvesters and Harvesting, 1840–1900: A Study of the Rural Proletariat (London, 1982), pp. 104–5, 108–9, 170. 5

WOMEN, WORK AND WAGES IN ENGLAND, 1600–1850

The ‘wage’ in these regions, indeed in every region, was therefore a complex cultural product that was also linked to different forms of social relationships. In some cases it had particular meanings in relation to girls or young women, and could be paid in distinct ways. Thus the gendered nature of the wage extended beyond the obviously different levels of pay or types of payment in kind afforded to men and women, to manifest itself in the partial dependency relationships of female service, female apprenticeship, agricultural bondaging, live-in millinery or sempstressing, indentured ‘housewifery’, or governessing. These involved levels of control and supervision less often extended to male counterparts. There could be payments to parents rather than to the employee, and for longer durations than was usually true for boys. As well as varying by gender, the wage also varied by age, marital status and number of children in the family. It was liable to many forms of supplementation, for example, under the old and new poor laws, or via parish or urban charities. Institutional interference in the market led persistently to reappraisals of wages – as with roundsman, labour-rate, Speenhamland, headallowance, ticket-system, poor-farming and other types of labour-market intervention by poor-law authorities who were also employers. This happened after 1834 as well, despite the resolve of the Poor Law Commission or Poor Law Board to avoid it. In many cases, appeals were made to ‘custom’ in disagreements over these matters; and ‘custom’ here as elsewhere was always a highly disputed matter, not least because of price movements. Certainly, many of these forms of remuneration were not new to the nineteenth century. Any earlier wage assessment by JPs, and many apprenticeship and artisan clubbing-out agreements, will show comparable divisions and subtleties, again demarcated by gender, age and types of work. In many cases, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century documentation on earnings provides fascinating precursors to structures of wages and gendered allocations of work in the nineteenth century, albeit with tantalising differences, terminological changes and shifts of apportionment. There has been a tendency to standardise such figures over the long term, using basic wage rates, so as to analyse real wage changes. Commendable intentions underlie such methods. However, such motives and data handling – in presuming unchanging work tasks and ascriptions, and by eliminating complications, extraneous asides or seasonal variations – may not do justice to the subtlety and complexity of wages and to their varying descriptive potential for the study of gender and work. Then there was ‘truck’: the payment of wages in tickets, order notes or tokens redeemable at company or other ‘Tommy-shops’, rather than in cash.8 This form of ‘wage’ was rampant in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,

8 The main Truck Acts, attempting to regulate or reform these methods of payment, were in 1743 (17 Geo. 2, c. 8), 1831 (1 & 2 Will. 4, c. 37), 1874 (37 & 38 Vic., c. 48), 1887 (50 & 51 Vic., c. 46), and 1896 (59 & 60 Vic., c. 44).

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INTRODUCTION

and perhaps much earlier. It had especial associations with newly formed industrial communities. We do not as yet know whether it had any lineage from labour obligations in earlier centuries, although some contemporaries felt that this was so. It came in many forms, such as the ‘long-pay’ system in parts of south Wales (e.g. Tredegar or Bedwellty). It affected the mining, ironmaking, navvying, hosiery and weaving workforces in particular,9 but was also common in seafaring occupations and in many agricultural regions. It was closely connected to forms of payment in kind. At the extreme, male and female framework knitters were sometimes said rarely to see or feel normal currency, for they operated in an exchange nexus of tickets and goods which were traded for other goods or services, many of them trade-related.10 Rent deductions for different gauges of framework knitting machine, shop- and standing-charges, for needle-making equipment and molten metals, yarn, candles, charges to undertakers, middlemen and bagmen, taking-in charges, shop-firing and so on – ‘all, more or less, diversified in particular localities’11 – further diminished framework knitters’ ‘wages’, the complexity and variety of which were compounded by the enormous range of products made. Women were central to this form of industrial outwork or ‘proto’-industry. It was said in 1845 that ‘Vast numbers of women and children are working side by side with men, often employed in the same description of frames, making the same fabrics, and at the same rate of wages; the only advantage over them which the man possesses being his superior strength, whereby he can undergo the fatigues of labour for longer hours’.12 The notorious lowness of framework knitting wages was much stressed by contemporaries, and it often necessitated parochial supplementation. 13 A complex web of outputting arrangements, seeping through the entire lives of framework knitters, existed in the East Midland industrial villages. The ‘abolition’ of truck in 1831 (in certain trades only) was widely ignored in the hosiery districts, as it was, for example, in the Derbyshire mining areas, for there were few ways in which it could be enforced.14 It went hand-in-glove with the 9 Report from the Commissioner Appointed to Inquire into the Condition of the Frame-work Knitters, XV (1845, Shannon, 1968 edn), pp. 44, 73–82; T. Cooper, The Life of Thomas Cooper, by Himself (1872, Leicester, 1971 edn), pp. 138–44; F. Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845, London, 1984 edn), pp. 209–12, 218; J. Ginswick (ed.), Labour and the Poor in England and Wales, 1849–1851: The Letters to The Morning Chronicle, vol. II: Northumberland and Durham, Staffordshire, the Midlands (London, 1983), pp. 105–10; A.R. Griffin, Mining in the East Midlands, 1550–1947 (London, 1971), pp. 29, 39–41; C.P. Griffin, The Leicestershire and South Derbyshire Miners, Vol. 1, 1840–1914 (Coalville, 1981), p. 73. 10 Report from the Commissioner Appointed to Inquire into the Condition of the Frame-work Knitters, XV (1845, Shannon, 1968 edn), pp. 77. 11 Report into the Condition of the Frame-work Knitters, p. 44. 12 Ibid., p. 101. 13 Ibid., pp. 41–5, 47. 14 J.E. Williams, The Derbyshire Miners (London, 1962), p. 61.

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WOMEN, WORK AND WAGES IN ENGLAND, 1600–1850

conditions of the framework knitters, and it provides us with yet another illustration of how complex and varied ‘wages’ were. Study of the wage in all its complexity promises to shed much light upon the conditions of women’s work and livelihoods, as is recognised by several contributors to this book. The essays by Roberts, Lane, Verdon and King in various ways and with different focuses embark on a related research agenda: to do justice to the historical complexity of wages, and to uncover more about the variety of gendered wage payments; to pursue the significance of minute fragmentation of work processes and earnings that occurred by gender, and to understand why they changed; to consider ratios between male and female earnings;15 to assess the types of work that were remunerated by gender and the types that were not; always to consider these matters in their local and occupationally specific contexts; to assess all such issues in relation to changing technologies; and to broaden the discussion to assess child labour, its remuneration, its monetary gradations into adulthood and its relationship to women’s employment. Running across such priorities, there is the question of whether and to what extent women’s work was remunerated in any such ‘monetary’ or quasimonetary forms. It would, for example, be an anachronism to argue that women’s employment expanded after c. 1750 on the basis of possible evidence showing women more frequently in receipt of wage payments in a market context. Any such hypothetical argument would beg questions about the commodification of large numbers of use values hitherto produced in the home, and specifically about the decline of the pre-industrial family economy, which was such an important long-term feature of our period. In trade after trade, where once the male home-place had been the work-place, increasingly the male place of work became alien and separate from the home, and the ‘home’ was redefined accordingly in ways that are familiar to us through Victorian literature and art. An ‘occupation’ originally meant to ‘occupy’ a place – but that meaning had become almost wholly anachronistic by the later nineteenth century.16 In many early modern family economies women had been integral to work and production, even if their work had often been unpaid. The co-location of home and work presented no spatial hindrance to their involvement. This was to change with the decline of traditional apprenticeship, with altering ratios between the traditional components of the artisan sector (apprentices – journeymen/women – masters/mistresses), augmenting the proletarian elements, with more highly capitalised production methods, more complex divisions of labour, and with the frequent displace-

15 As, for example, in N. Verdon, Rural Women Workers in Nineteenth-century England (Woodbridge, 2002), pp. 48, 70; M. Roberts, ‘Sickles and scythes: women’s work and men’s work at harvest time’, History Workshop, 7 (1979). 16 K.D.M. Snell, ‘Gravestones, belonging and local attachment in England, 1700–2000’, Past and Present, 179 (2003), pp. 131–2.

8

INTRODUCTION

ment of the hand-skilled content of work. The labour force became more dominated by a vulnerable proletarian mass that represented a lifetime state, rather than a stage through which many individuals passed on their way to master or mistress status. Women’s productive work was often liable to decline in such circumstances, except in those trades where they became employed in large numbers away from the home. These were patterns that were discernible in countless trades, though certainly not in all, and they were highly varied and differing in chronology, regionality and intensity. We therefore need more studies of processes of change away from the family economy in particular trades and localities. In such studies the role of the wage – of the form of remuneration accorded to men, women and children as these transitions took place – needs to be highlighted as a central and revealing historical feature. ‘Custom’ as a subject was raised initially by historians more concerned with class than gender.17 More recently customary interpretation of the gap between male and female wages has been debated. As with the extent of discrimination in modern labour markets, the role of custom in the historical determination of wages raises many questions related to deeply held views about economy and society. Custom, like discrimination, is inconsistent with the rational behaviour of economic agents and so means that markets do not operate efficiently. Historians, who incline towards progressive interpretations of market outcomes, must maintain that most economic actors focus on calculations of material costs and benefits. Market outcomes must have rational roots. Irrational customary differentials would be swept away by the opportunities they would afford to make above-normal profit or earn above normal wages. Specifically, differences in levels and forms of wages between men and women must be explicable in terms of productivity variations, residing in differences between men and women in (among other things) physical strength, skill, ability to work continuously, availability and mechanical aptitude. As with the issue of secular trends in women’s work, differences of interpretation can only be resolved by detailed analyses of the role of custom in particular contexts. How were male and female wages customarily pitched in relation to the other? How far were they dependent upon precedent and established practice? How ambivalent and contentious was ‘established practice’? What was the relation between customary and market wages for women? These issues are addressed directly in Penelope Lane’s chapter,18 while other authors take up less obvious ways in which custom impacted upon work and wages. How did customary work practices

17 Most notably, by E.P. Thompson, Customs in Common (1991, Harmondsworth, 1993 edn). One of his chapters (ch. 7: ‘The sale of wives’), however, was concerned very directly with gender issues. 18 And see J. Burnette,’An investigation of the female–male wage gap during the Industrial Revolution in Britain’, Economic History Review, L (1997).

9

WOMEN, WORK AND WAGES IN ENGLAND, 1600–1850

interact with technical changes and specifically changes in hand tools? Michael Roberts revisits his earlier influential work on the role of the supersession of sickles by scythes in the reduced role of women harvesters, and shows just how complex and multifaceted the issue of technology is. Turning to institutional regulation, what role should we accord to justices’ traditional wage assessments for every county, and how influential and long-lasting were such assessments? How immutable were customs governing apprenticeship, as studied here by Steve Hindle? What attitudes are revealed in that crucial institution, what effects did they have on the labour market and on male and female training and work? How were customary wage payments adjusted and negotiated in the long-run period of inflation from c. 1750 to c. 1815? How adequate are approaches that take enumerated money wage rates from one source as representative of actual earnings in any family economy? Does our modern terminology (of wages, incomes, earnings, pay, remuneration, revenue, let alone unemployment) really adequately describe the local economies of makeshift, the economic cultures, that we piece together when we study adult male and female, and child, livelihoods in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries? What effect did localised poor law administrations and their varied and much debated policies have upon incomes and livelihoods? How far did policies distinguish between male and female applicants for help, as authorities used gender-specific combinations of work and welfare to shore up the fragile households of the poor, as discussed by Steven King? How did ideas about ‘customary’ wages alter in the context of the striking changes in employment practice that occurred in many regions during the Industrial Revolution? It remains hard as yet to answer such questions with certainty. Nor do we know much about how women’s waged earnings from employers blended with their rights, gains or losses in the fields of more conventionally defined ‘custom’. How did involvement in a local labour market affect, for example, women’s access to water, fuel, livestock, wildfowl, in fact all the locally available common rights and related perquisites, from the much discussed livelihoods associated with the open-field village prior to enclosure, to the seasonal doles of institutionalised philanthropy? We know little either about the mix of earnings in money and kind that were paid to women, although it has been stressed, especially in rural surroundings, that many categories of women (e.g. farm or domestic servants) received most of their earnings in kind. Such a high reliance upon proceeds in kind was true as well for out-relief payments to women under both the old and new poor laws – which is another disputed area of ‘customary’ recipiency. We remain largely ignorant about the precise nature of such payments: how they changed over time or varied across localities, what their value was, how they were accorded and judged in relation to male and child earnings, how they fitted in with the life-cycle of the recipient, and how valuable they were to the women who received them. Supplementation of female wages under the poor law has never been considered by historians, nor has the apparently prime focus 10

INTRODUCTION

upon male earnings by poor-law authorities been seen in its ramifications for women’s work. Nor are we well informed about all the other kinds of services provided to women under the poor law, how those women were categorised, who the services were provided by, and what their value was to those employed to deliver them and those who benefited from them.19 Accordingly, the poor law is a subject that frequently comes into view in these chapters – notably in the fine essays by Steve Hindle, Steven King and Samantha Williams. Its centrality to issues of women’s livelihoods has never been in doubt. However, as Steve Hindle emphasises, the conjoined nature of work and welfare manifest in the origins and development of the old poor law in the seventeenth century remains a neglected topic. Similarly it is only recently that the huge scale of outdoor relief under the new poor law is being fully appreciated by historians.20 The value of such relief far exceeded the ‘less eligible’ indoor relief dished out in the Victorian workhouses.21 Women in particular were very frequently permitted outdoor relief after 1834, but the levels of such relief were low and they often had to augment it with work. Here again we see a form of ‘custom’ – the long-standing English and Welsh practice of domiciliary out-relief – persisting over unexpectedly lengthy periods. Such relief was adjusted to take account of numbers of children and many other considerations. It had major ramifications for female and child livelihoods. It also acted as a subsidy to a huge assortment of partial and sometimes sweated female employments. It is worth mentioning some of these in an illustrative fashion here, taking only a few of the many Victorian examples: sack and tarpaulin work, matchbox-making, jam-making, pickle-making, poultry keeping, the opening, tying, pruning and picking of hops, bakingpowder-making, spinning, cigar-making, rag chopping, weaving, framework knitting, hand-knitting, corset manufacture, tailoring, dressmaking, shirt- and collar-making, child’s coat-making, lace-making, twine-making, net-mending, fish-gutting, line-baiting, straw plaiting, paper-making, mat-making, seed sorting, button, hook and eye carding, laundressing and so on. A glance at any

19 However, see P. Thane, ‘Women and the poor law in Victorian and Edwardian Britain’, History Workshop, 6 (1978); K.D.M. Snell and J. Millar, ‘Lone-parent families and the Welfare State: past and present’, Continuity and Change, 2 (1987); P. Thane, Old Age in English History: Past Experiences, Present Issues (Oxford, 2000); L. Botelho and P. Thane (eds), Women and Ageing in British Society since 1500 (Harlow, 2001). 20 This point about out-relief and the new poor law was apparent in some earlier writing, notably by A. Digby, ‘The labour market and the continuity of social policy after 1834: the case of the eastern counties’, Economic History Review, XXVIII (1975), and M.E. Rose, ‘The allowance system under the New Poor Law’, Economic History Review, XIX (1966). Yet the workhouse looms much larger in most historians’ accounts of the formal welfare system after 1834, an emphasis that probably needs to be reappraised. 21 Fifth Annual Report of the Local Government Board (1875–76), pp. 218–71; Snell, ‘Gravestones, belonging and local attachment in England’, p. 126, n. 43.

11

WOMEN, WORK AND WAGES IN ENGLAND, 1600–1850

nineteenth-century occupational census reveals hundreds more out-working and related trades that women worked in: an old curiosity shop of pursuits that supplied only meagre and partial employment.22 Such a source gives us only a loosely descriptive quantitative facade, for it is as revealing as a shroud laid slackly upon a dead face underneath – a shroud that shows us contours, but veils the wearied, work-worn lineaments of the true face itself, as revealed by some Victorian photographers. As in earlier centuries, we know that such female ‘trades’ or work rarely supplied a living wage. If their participants were to survive, they had to supplement their work by other interlarded means, by a variety of sometimes desperate expedients and spliced-together employments. Those means and forms of remuneration take us to the heart of the jumbled, poorly coordinated and tight-fisted economic culture we are studying. This collection of scholarly essays aims to enhance understanding of these issues of ‘gender, work and wages’ in England. The aim is to supply detailed and closely researched academic case studies, for such studies will always have a more lasting influence than textbook generalisations. These chapters range chronologically from the early modern period to late Victorian times. They encompass pauper apprenticeship and the old poor law (Steve Hindle), harvest technology, harvest wages and their implications (Michael Roberts), women at sea, as associated with the East India Company (Pamela Sharpe), customary and market wages in the East Midlands (Penelope Lane), women’s work and the welfare system (Steven King), care for the sick and poor law nurses (Samantha Williams), small-town employments in southern England for women (Neil Raven), and the changing roles of women in agriculture (Nicola Verdon). We will not outline the detailed substance and findings of these chapters here – those are for the reader to discover – but they are all based upon primary research into local or regional employing conditions in England, and in combined erudition and range they open up fresh approaches and interpretations. Questions addressing the scope of women’s work, the female labour market, the gendered nexus between work and women’s poor relief, and in particular the reality and assumptions governing women’s ‘wages’ (however defined) are to the fore. In some cases the authors have pioneered detailed empirical work into sources documenting wage payments to women, as with Penelope Lane’s analysis of wage books from Derbyshire cotton mills and other East Midland employers, or with Nicola Verdon’s close analysis of agricultural wage and account books. A constant background issue is the effect

22

On the female sweated trades, see D. Bythell, The Sweated Trades: Outwork in Nineteenth-century Britain (London, 1978); J.A. Schmiechen, Sweated Industries and Sweated Labor: The London Clothing Trades, 1860–1914 (London, 1984); J. Morris, Women Workers and the Sweated Trades: The Origins of Minimum Wage Legislation (Aldershot, 1986). 12

INTRODUCTION

of economic change and long-term industrialisation on women’s work and on contemporary assumptions about how that work should be rewarded. A historical perspective necessitates coverage of developments before the Industrial Revolution, as well as during its progress. Thus the opening chapter by Steve Hindle explores how a key institution of the old poor law from its earliest times, pauper apprenticeship, linked work and welfare together in gendered packages with important implications for the subsequent development of labour markets, skills, female and child participation rates, and ideas about the deserving or undeserving character of the working poor. The authors have often delved into areas of society and geography that have received little or no attention with regard to women’s work. These include the more traditional southern English urban sector, or women at sea, or on the shore in seafaring communities, or women working as poor law carers and nurses. Care-givers are often as concealed from view in the historical environment as they are in the modern economy, but, as Samantha Williams shows, they were probably as important then as they are today. As with their modern equivalents, we need to address the issue of their remuneration and the functions they served. By paying indigent women to act as carers, the poor law authorities simultaneously relieved them and their families and secured services for needy third parties: another example of the welding together of work and welfare in practical combinations with women at their core. In her highly original chapter on women and the East India Company Pamela Sharpe observes that ‘There is scant historiography of women in seafaring communities’, and she rightly redresses this omission, while also taking on more global dimensions of the subject. Several authors point to the way in which a focus on women’s work reveals how compulsion lurked beneath the market mechanism in securing the reallocation of labour associated with the Industrial Revolution. In some instances market forces themselves were given a brutal edge by the unevenness of economic development. Thus Neil Raven contextualises the manufacturing activities typical of many small towns in southern England by pointing to the surplus of female and child labour in the surrounding countryside. With few alternative sources of livelihood, the push factors into nascent industry could hardly be resisted; but duress was also produced by extra-market mechanisms. Both Steve Hindle and Steven King, though dealing with different periods and policies, note how the conditionality of relief provision sharpened the edges of market forces. The extra-market mechanisms to secure flows of labour into industry appear more widespread than has hitherto been thought, involving more than a few metropolitan workhouses networked with early isolated and water-powered factories. In a labour-surplus economy with a tight-fisted and directive poor law, individuals could be detached from relatives and friends and driven to seek work in new and strange surroundings, the families left behind torn and reconfigured into shapes and sizes that were more acceptable to overseers or more consistent with independence. 13

WOMEN, WORK AND WAGES IN ENGLAND, 1600–1850

Like the other chapters, these studies reveal new perspectives, and untapped sources, on women’s lives in this period. Many sources of livelihood – such as acting as carers, healers, midwives, or mending clothes, doing laundry, charring, or labouring in many forgotten southern industries – can readily be missed in any simple, anachronistic, uni-occupational focus, or in a generalised account of change. The diversity of women’s work, the manifold ways in which they were remunerated, and the cultural implications of women’s work and wages, have rarely been so intently revealed. These chapters highlight a variegated and makeshift economy, which is itself one of the lessons of studying gender history. Yet in focusing upon the very mixed and resourceful livelihoods, by-employments and forms of payment that women tacked together for themselves, our panorama of diversity and of qualified generalisation is not the only conclusion of this book. Investigation of the complex meaning of remuneration, and the direct and indirect influences of custom, provide a shared structure and purpose which link these studies into a larger and more coherent picture. These initial studies open up countless opportunities for further local research, for new and more comprehensive approaches to social and economic history, and for the historical questioning of gender roles and for understanding our own gendered experiences and attitudes in time.

14

1

‘Waste’ children? Pauper apprenticeship under the Elizabethan poor laws, c. 1598–1697* STEVE HINDLE

Historians have regarded the provision of employment for the labouring poor as the ‘least practical’ of the clauses of the Elizabethan poor laws of 1598 and 1601. Work for the underemployed, it has been argued, proved to be a weaker pillar of policy than either doles for the deserving or whipstocks for the wandering.1 Despite the implicit recognition in the statutes that the ablebodied poor constituted a ‘pool of badly-managed labour’, parochial work schemes appear to have been successful only intermittently, if at all.2 The fate of the other employment provision of the welfare regime – the enforcement of pauper apprenticeship at the expense of the parish – has, however, received rather less attention in the seventeenth-century scholarship.3 Most studies of the binding out of poor children have tended to focus

* This chapter is part of a larger project on the local politics of poor relief, whose working title is On the Parish: The Micro-politics of Poor Relief in Rural England, c.1550–1750. I am grateful to the editors for the opportunity to give my preliminary thoughts an airing here; and to Tom Arkell, Pam Sharpe, Keith Snell and Michael Zell for generously offering constructive criticism at a busy time. 1 A.J. Fletcher, Reform in the Provinces: The Government of Stuart England (New Haven, 1986), p. 213; P. Slack, Poverty and Policy in Tudor and Stuart England (London, 1988), p. 128. The statutes are 39 Eliz. c.3 (1598) and 43 Eliz. c.2 (1601). The best introduction to the making of the Elizabethan poor laws remains Slack, Poverty and Policy, pp. 113–37. 2 Fletcher, Reform in the Provinces, p. 214; J. Appleby, Economic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth-century England (Princeton, 1978), pp. 129–57. Perhaps one in ten Warwickshire parishes were setting the labouring poor on work in the late 1630s. S. Hindle, The Birthpangs of Welfare: Poor Relief and Parish Governance in Seventeenthcentury Warwickshire (Dugdale Society Occasional Papers no.40, 2000), pp. 13–14. For the failure of the most ambitious scheme of all, see M.L. Zell, ‘ “Setting the poor on work”: Walter Morrell and the New Draperies Project, c.1603–31’, Historical Journal, 44:3 (2001), pp. 651–75. 3 The seminal account is still O.J. Dunlop and R.D. Denman, English Apprenticeship and Child Labour: A History (London, 1912), pp. 248–60 (ch.16: ‘Apprenticeship as a device 15

WOMEN, WORK AND WAGES IN ENGLAND, 1600–1850

on the eighteenth century, partly due to the increased survival rate of indentures for that period and partly due to the enduring historiographical interest in the settlement laws, with which parish apprenticeship became closely intertwined.4 Historians of seventeenth-century England have generally been concerned with pauper apprenticeship only as an index of the efficiency of local government.5 Indeed, so fragmentary is the existing scholarship that the current historiographical orthodoxy, even when stated by so magisterial an authority as Professor Paul Slack, is bound to be impresof poor relief’) and there is, of course, much of value in E.M. Leonard, The Early History of English Poor Relief (Cambridge, 1900) [index infra ‘apprentices, poor children placed as’]. More recent discussions, almost all of them extremely brief, include I. Pinchbeck and M. Hewitt, Children in English Society, Volume I: From Tudor Times to the Eighteenth Century (London, 1969), pp. 223–59 (ch. 9: ‘The Twin disciplines of work and worship, I: Apprenticeship’), esp. pp. 234ff.; G.J. Ashworth, ‘Some uses of apprenticeship returns in local studies’, The Local Historian, 8:7 (1969), pp. 232–6; E.G. Thomas, ‘The Old Poor Law and maritime apprenticeship’, Mariner’s Mirror, 63:2 (1977), pp. 153–61; E.G. Thomas, ‘Pauper apprenticeship’, The Local Historian, 14:7 (1981), pp. 400–6; J. Lane, Apprenticeship in England, 1600–1914 (London, 1996), pp. 81–94; and M.K. McIntosh, ‘Networks of care in Elizabethan English towns: the example of Hadleigh, Suffolk’, in P. Horden and R. Smith (eds) The Locus of Care: Families, Communities, Institutions and the Provision of Welfare Since Antiquity (London, 1998), pp. 83–5. M.G. Davies, The Enforcement of English Apprenticeship, 1563–1642: A Study in Applied Mercantilism (Cambridge, MA, 1956), pp. 12–13, eschewed discussion of parish apprenticeship because of its limited bearing on the enforcement of service contracts under the statute of artificers of 1563. More surprisingly, detailed treatments of pauper apprenticeship are conspicuous by their absence from either Slack, Poverty and Policy or P. Griffiths, Youth and Authority: Formative Experiences in England, 1560–1640 (Oxford, 1996). 4 For studies based on apprenticeship indentures surviving in parish archives, see E.M. Hampson, ‘Settlement and removal in Cambridgeshire, 1662–1834’, Cambridge Historical Journal, 2 (1926–28), pp. 282–4; F.G. Emmison, ‘The relief of the poor at Eaton Socon, 1706–1834’, Publications of the Bedfordshire Historical Record Society, 15 (1933), pp. 66–71; S.A. Cutlack, ‘The Gnosall records, 1679 to 1837: poor law administration’, Collections for A History of Staffordshire, Part I (1936), pp. 53–62; F.H. Hinton, ‘Notes on the administration of the relief of the poor of Lacock 1583–1834’, Wiltshire Archaeological Magazine, 49 (1940–42), pp. 182–7; I.F. Jones, ‘Aspects of poor law administration, seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, from Trull overseers accounts’, Somerset Archaeological and Natural History Society Proceedings, 95 (1951), pp. 96–9; H. Fearn, ‘The apprenticeship of pauper children in the Incorporated Hundreds of Suffolk’, Proceedings of the Suffolk Institute of Archaeology, 26 (1955), pp. 85–97; P. Anderson, ‘The Leeds workhouse under the Old Poor Law, 1726–1834’, The Thoresby Miscellany Volume 17 (Thoresby Society 56, 1981), pp. 99–104; M.B. Rose, ‘Social policy and business: parish apprenticeship and the early factory system, 1750–1834’, Business History, 31:4 (1989), pp. 5–32; and P. Sharpe, ‘Poor children as apprentices in Colyton, 1598–1830’, Continuity & Change, 6:2 (1991), pp. 253–70. For the relationship with the settlement laws, see K.D.M. Snell, Annals of the Labouring Poor: Social Change and Agrarian England, 1660–1900 (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 277–93; K.D.M. Snell, ‘Settlement, poor law and the rural historian: new approaches and opportunities’, Rural History, 3:2 (1992), pp. 157–60. 5 Fletcher, Reform in the Provinces, pp. 215–17, provides a convenient summary. 16

PAUPER APPRENTICESHIP UNDER ELIZABETHAN POOR LAWS

sionistic: in the early seventeenth century, he argues, pauper apprenticeship ‘may have made some modest contribution to dealing with the unemployed bulge in a relatively youthful population’.6 This chapter investigates the problems and opportunities presented by the compulsory binding out as apprentices of the children of the labouring poor, focusing not only on the notorious difficulties experienced in coercing recalcitrant masters to accept them but also on the less familiar problem of persuading reluctant parents to let their young go into service. In part, it will be argued, these tensions arose from the legal ambiguities of the statutes themselves. Although the poor laws had not explicitly obliged either masters to receive apprentices or parents to give up their children, rulings by the Jacobean and Caroline judiciary emphasised that the statutes implied compulsion. Despite repeated challenges to the prerogative basis of the policy, the certificates returned to the privy council by county benches under the terms of the Caroline ‘Book of Orders’ none the less suggest that by the 1630s magistrates and parish officers, if not employers, parents and children, had been gradually persuaded of the merits of the policy. By placing these early seventeenth-century initiatives in the context of the enforcement of service contracts and wage regulation in the later Stuart period, the following discussion illuminates an under-explored area of early modern social policy. It reassesses the nature of the relationship not only between parents and children, but also between employers, parish officers, magistrates and the labouring poor; and restores work to its appropriate place at the heart of any consideration of the historical provision of welfare. As we shall see, the work stipulated by the statutes was ‘husbandry and huswifery’, the very occupations that Gervase Markham, writing in 1613, thought most fitting for ‘Boyes and Girles, or other waste persons’.7

Welfare, discipline and the household It has become axiomatic in recent historical scholarship that the household was the foundation stone of the early modern political nation, the institution through which the most fundamental cultural values of obedience, deference and discipline were socially reproduced. The patriarchal language used by contemporaries to describe families has been reconstructed and the 6

P. Slack, From Reformation to Improvement: Public Welfare in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1999), p. 66. For the youthful age structure of early seventeenth-century English society, see E.A. Wrigley and R.S. Schofield, The Population History of England, 1541–1871: A Reconstruction (Cambridge, 1981), p. 216 [Figure 7.4]. 7 G. Markham, The English Husbandman. The First Part (London, 1613), sig D4b. As A. McRae, God Speed the Plough: The Representation of Agrarian England, 1500–1660 (Cambridge, 1996), p. 168, points out, this was a relatively novel use of ‘waste’ in the sense of ‘offscourings, dregs, worthless people’. 17

WOMEN, WORK AND WAGES IN ENGLAND, 1600–1850

implications of its central idiom, that the household was the little commonwealth in which the authority of the father and husband was analogous to that of the monarch, more fully appreciated.8 Indeed, the family is now understood as only the smallest of a series of concentric spheres of authority that expanded outward from the household, to the parish, to the county (or ‘country’), and ultimately to the realm itself.9 Ideally, these spheres of authority should have been perfectly congruent, the interests of fathers, parish officers, magistrates and monarch working together in the interests of order and harmony. The household was also, however, ‘an institution “geared for work” ’, directed towards the satisfaction of the household’s needs as a unit of consumption and reproduction but also of production’.10 The survival of households, especially among the labouring poor, depended upon contributions by all their members, contributions that were organised on the principle of hierarchical differentiation. Roles were allocated according to prevailing assumptions about gender, age and place. For the women of the labouring poor, whose responsibility it was to provision the family through the exploitation of tiny holdings and common rights, the opportunities for participation in household-based productive activity were rarer than they might be in manor house, farmyard or workshop. For them, the flexibility and adaptability of the female role were principally conditioned by the rhythms of pregnancy, childbearing and childrearing, which in turn ensured that they became the principal carers of the household. In such a context, it was expected that children too should play their role in the household economy. Although work skills were acquired early, Wrightson argues that the extent to which child labour was exploited should not be exaggerated. Even so, from the age of 7 or 8 most children had become part of the productive life of their families, and therefore contributed to, although they were unlikely to earn in full, their own keep. Until that age, the children of the poor in particular were ‘likely to have been a charge on, rather than a significant asset to, the family economy’.11 In practice, therefore, the circuits of social authority and household production intersected in curious ways. Indeed, pauper apprenticeship is of particular interest to students of social and economic relations precisely because it is earthed to one of those points of contact, indeed to a node of

8

S.D. Amussen, An Ordered Society: Gender and Class in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1988), pp. 34–66. 9 K. Wrightson, ‘The politics of the parish in early modern England’, in P. Griffiths, A. Fox and S. Hindle (eds) The Experience of Authority in Early Modern England (London, 1996), pp. 13–18 (‘The politics of patriarchy’). 10 K. Wrightson, Earthly Necessities: Economic Lives in Early Modern Britain (New Haven, 2000), p. 30. The following paragraph draws heavily on Wrightson’s vivid account of roles in the domestic economy. 11 Wrightson, Earthly Necessities, p. 50. 18

PAUPER APPRENTICESHIP UNDER ELIZABETHAN POOR LAWS

friction, in the local community. As is well known, the bureaucratisation of the parish under the terms of Elizabethan legislation bolstered the authority of local elites in the regulation of social and economic life. In particular the Elizabethan poor laws of 1598 and 1601 obliged local ratepayers to relieve the deserving poor in cash and kind; to set the idle on work; and to discipline beggars and migrants to prevent the unnecessary inflation of welfare costs. This corpus of legislation structured both popular attitudes towards, and local practices of, social welfare until they were finally amended in 1834. Rather less well known are the controversial powers granted to magistrates and parish officers in reconstituting households by binding out not only orphans, but also pauper children, as apprentices, thereby reducing relief expenditure by redistributing the burden of children from the less well-off to the more prosperous households within and beyond the parish. Compulsory pauper apprenticeship, it was argued, would inculcate those very virtues of industry and thrift that were all too frequently corrupted by the widespread practice of sending small children out begging. If begging was ‘a school of idleness’ as the puritan divine William Perkins believed, then parish apprenticeship was a school of industry in which the children of the poor in particular must be educated.12 The anonymous author of the parish officers’ handbook, An Ease for Overseers of the Poor (1601), provided the most coherent rationale for this policy. He noted that the world was becoming so ‘populous and poore’ precisely because ‘in this age, the poorer sort of men are straight inclined to marry without any respect howe to live’ and ‘commonly the poor do most of all multiply children’.13 The excellence of the Elizabethan poor laws therefore lay in the recognition that ‘although [children] bee blessings’, they ‘are a burden to many poore men’. Accordingly, the statutes provided that pauper children ‘should be trained up to some honest trade of life, when their parents for povertie cannot performe it’.14 Michael Dalton provided an even more idealised vision of the social function of pauper apprenticeship in 1635, when he argued in the authoritative magistrates’ handbook, The Country Justice, that the binding out of the children of the poor was ‘a seminarie of mercie’.15 How, then, did judges, magistrates and parish officers set about convincing the labouring poor and the prospective masters of their children of the desirability of the policy?

12

W. Perkins, ‘An instruction touching religious or divine worship’, in The Works of William Perkins, ed. I. Breward (Abingdon, 1970), p. 319. 13 An Ease for Overseers of the Poore: Abstracted from the Statutes (Cambridge, 1601), p. 26. For the wider resonance of these views, see S. Hindle, ‘The problem of pauper marriage in seventeenth-century England’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th ser., 8 (1998), pp. 71–89. 14 An Ease for Overseers of the Poore, p. 26. 15 M. Dalton, The Country Justice (London, 1635 edn), p. 94. This gloss on pauper apprenticeship is conspicuous by its absence from the 1618 edition. 19

WOMEN, WORK AND WAGES IN ENGLAND, 1600–1850

Judicial interpretations of pauper apprenticeship From the very outset, the binding out of pauper children was arguably the most controversial issue in the judicial interpretation of the Elizabethan poor laws. Indeed, only the vexed question of settlement proved anything like as problematic in this regard.16 So much courtroom oratory was necessary not only because of the centrality of work and training to Elizabethan welfare provision, but also because the wording of the apprenticeship clauses of the 1598 Act, confirmed in this respect as in so many others in 1601, was ambiguous: ‘the children of those parents which shall not be thought able to keep them are to be put apprentices until they determine certaine yeares: viz. 24 for men, 21 for women.’17 These clauses were not, it should be emphasised, principally concerned with orphans, since they assumed that at least one of the parents of poor children was still alive. The discretionary power of parish officers and magistrates therefore lay in determining whether the parents themselves were ‘thought able to keep and maintain their children’ either for the present or in the future. Overseers were advised to be circumspect both in choosing which children to apprentice, and to whom they should be bound. Parish officers were to distinguish between the child who ‘by his labour’ was ‘able to keep himselfe and yeelde some releefe to his parents’, who must be allowed to remain at home; and the child who was ‘a burden and charge’, who should be bound out. They should also have a keen eye to the ‘facultie, honestie and abilitie’ of the masters, lest they either provoke the apprentices to abscond or fail to provide adequate training and discipline.18 In interpreting the legislation, the judges initially trod carefully. Chief Justice Popham insisted that ‘it is most convenient’ for children between the ages of 7 and 16 to ‘be put to apprentis and especially to husbandrye and huswifery’. This would by definition relieve those families who were 16

P. Styles, ‘The evolution of the laws of settlement’, reprinted in Styles, Studies in Seventeenth-century West Midlands History (Kineton, 1978), pp. 175–204. 17 39 Eliz. I, c. 3 (1598), sect. 9 (1) [emphasis added]. An amendment in 1601 permitted poor girls to leave apprenticeship early in order to get married: 43 Eliz. I, c.2 (1601). When the act was continued in 1604, it was modified slightly to empower those who were given the custody of children by the overseers of the poor to take them on as apprentices, thereby formalising the relationship between boarding and binding out. D.M. Dean, Lawmaking and Society in Late Elizabethan England: The Parliament of England, 1584–1601 (Cambridge, 1996), p. 280. The origins of the policy lie not in the statute of artificers (5 Eliz. I, c. 4) but in the earliest poor relief legislation of the Reformation Parliament, which stipulated that children between the ages of 5 and 14 ‘that live in idleness who may be taken begging may be put to service’: 27 Henry VIII, c. 25 (1535). Under 14 Eliz. I, c. 5 (1572), beggars’ children aged between 5 and 14 were to be bound out to farmers and others until the boys were 24 and the girls 18. In Scotland, parish apprenticeships under the terms of an act of 1574 were of even longer duration, being mandatory until the ages of 24 for boys and 28 for girls. Leonard, The Early History of English Poor Relief, p. 279, n. 2. 18 An Ease for Overseers of the Poore, p. 27. 20

PAUPER APPRENTICESHIP UNDER ELIZABETHAN POOR LAWS

‘overburthened through charge of children’. The parents of any poor children who remained at home unbound, he implied, were to be denied parish relief: ‘for the rest of the children they must laye at the charge of their parentes to be relieved by the labour of their parents’ rather than by the parish.19 The eighth of the judges’ ‘resolutions’ of 1599 concurred: ‘if the parents be able and cannot gett worke they are to keepe their children by their owne labour and nott [by] the parishe, but if they be over burthened with children it shall be a very good waye to procure some of them to be apprentices according to the statute.’20 Under the terms of both rulings, it seems, poor parents were not legally compelled to comply with the apprenticeship of their children, but could easily be blackmailed into doing so. Coercion of this kind was the corollary of the powerful discretionary impulse that lay at the heart of all seventeenth-century social policy. Perhaps its most extreme manifestation is revealed in the dynamics of the transportation of vagrant children to the American colonies in the period 1618 to 1622. Any parents in the City of London who, being ‘overcharged and burdened with poor children’, refused to send them to Virginia, were to be told that they would not receive any further poor relief from the parish until they complied.21 By the late 1610s, then, Popham’s doctrine of ‘implied compulsion’ was becoming something of a mantra, and was rehearsed verbatim by Chief Justice Montagu in 1617.22 The judges were, however, concerned to demonstrate that the discretionary binding out of pauper apprentices was not merely a matter of expediency, but also one of conscience. In the first place, it was in the putative interests of the child. As the Lancashire bench put it in 1618, pauper apprenticeship was

19

Historical Manuscripts Commission, Report on the Manuscripts of the Marquess of Lothian Preserved at Blickling (London, 1905), p. 76 (emphasis added). This undated reading of the 1598 legislation appears to have been composed by Sir John Popham, who served as CJKB from 1592 to 1607. See The History of Parliament: The House of Commons, 1558–1603, ed. P.W. Hasler (3 vols, London, 1981), III, pp. 234–46. 20 The ‘resolutions’ first appeared in W. Lambarde, Eirenarcha (London, 1599), pp. 206ff. [here quoting Resolution no.9, emphasis added] and were reprinted both in subsequent editions – see e.g. Lambarde, Eirenarcha (1614 edn), pp. 209–10 – and in Dalton, The Country Justice (1618 edn), pp. 74–6. For one of the very few local copies surviving from the turn of the century, see ‘[Articles] To the Constables of Swanbourne, 10 Dec. 1599’, in Papers From an Iron Chest at Doddershall, Bucks., ed. G. Eland (Aylesbury, 1937), pp. 39–43. Francis Moore MP for Reading urged the House of Commons in December 1601 that the resolutions should themselves be appended to the statute but Solicitor-General Francis Bacon dissented on the grounds that because they were ‘done by Judges and privately perhaps in a chamber’, they should not be enacted ‘without scanning or view’ by Parliament. S. D’Ewes, The Journals of All the Parliaments During the Reign of Queen Elizabeth (London, 1682), p. 670. 21 R.C. Johnson, ‘The transportation of vagrant children from London to Virginia, 1618–1622’, in H.S. Reinmuth (ed.) Early Stuart Studies: Essays in Honour of David Harris Wilson (Minneapolis, 1970), p. 142. 22 Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS Tanner 243/39, fol.14r. 21

WOMEN, WORK AND WAGES IN ENGLAND, 1600–1850

appropriate for all those poor children ‘whose parents are not able to breed them wooll [sic. ?well]’.23 In the second, parish officers had a moral obligation to protect ratepayers from the unnecessary inflation of welfare costs. Montagu recognised as much in 1617 when he justified parish apprenticeships on the grounds that the tax base could not otherwise cope with the demands of children: ‘there are a multitude of poor through idleness in all places which if they should be relieved whollie by charritie would be more burthensome than the better sort are well able to bear.’24 Characteristically, Lord Keeper Bacon chose to emphasise the economic advantages of the policy to the commonwealth in general, and to the textile industry in particular, when he urged the judges to monitor the binding out of poor children as parish apprentices to ‘cherish manufactures, old and new, especially draperies’.25 These apologias notwithstanding, pauper apprenticeship remained a profoundly controversial item on the agenda of governors of county and parish alike, especially after the Caroline ‘Book of Orders’ emphasised its centrality to the operation of the Elizabethan poor laws. The ‘Book of Orders’ was issued on 31 January 1631. Its third ‘direction’, significantly ranked ahead of the enforcement of either the statute of artificers or the relief of the poor by rates, stipulated that: The poore children in every parish be put forth apprentices to husbandry, and other handy-crafts; and money to be raised in the parishes for placing them, according to the law; and if any party shall refuse to take the said apprentice, being put out according to the law, such party as shall refuse to take the said apprentice, to be bound over to the next quarter sessions, or assizes, and there to be bound to his good behaviour, or otherwise ordered, as shall be found fit.26

The intention was clearly to reduce the burden on rates by alleviating lifecycle poverty. Ratepayers, however, came to feel that they were being doubly charged, financing both pensions and premiums. As early as June 1631 the Hertfordshire yeoman John Dards of Knebworth was hauled before the Privy Council and committed to Fleet prison for having publicly challenged the legality of pauper apprenticeship. He had argued in open sessions that

23

Proceedings of the Lancashire Justices of the Peace at the Sherriff’s Table During Assize Week, 1578–1694, ed. B.W. Quintrell (Record Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, 121, 1981), p. 176. 24 Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS Tanner 243/39, fol.14r. Montagu then went on to reiterate verbatim Popham’s order of 1598. 25 The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. J. Spedding, R.L. Ellis and D.D. Heath (14 vols, London, 1857–74), XIII, pp. 302–6. 26 Orders and Directions, Together With a Commission for the Better Administration of Justice and More Perfect Information of His Majestie [‘The Book of Orders’] (London 1630), sigs.G-Gv. The most accessible modern text of the Orders is Frederick Eden, The State of the Poor (2nd edn, 1965), pp. 156–60. 22

PAUPER APPRENTICESHIP UNDER ELIZABETHAN POOR LAWS

ratepayers had ‘sufficiently provided for their poore and therefore for them to take or put forth theire Prentizes was more than they were compellable to by lawe and that the direccions of the Lords of the Councell could not impose any such thing upon them’.27 By April 1632 the council was getting suspicious of passive resistance by magistrates and parish officers alike; and by 1633 the binding out of pauper children had proved so controversial that Lord Keeper Coventry’s charge to the judges began with the injunction that a ‘strict course be taken against them that oppose’ it.28 The first serious attempt to settle the controversy occurred in 1633, when the Norfolk bench put their doubts about interpretation of the poor laws to Chief Justice Heath. The first seven of the thirty-eight questions turned on the legality of compulsory pauper apprenticeship. By now, magistrates and parish officers were wondering whether they had authority to force not only poor parents to allow their children to be bound, but also whether they might compel reluctant employers to take them on. As far as Heath was concerned, both masters and parents could be compelled: the Act of 1601, he insisted, ‘necessarily implyeth that such as are fit must receive apprentices’ (Res. 1). Indeed, no social rank was exempt from accepting pauper children (Res. 3); and any ratepayer could be taxed to finance the expense of the premium (if any), the value of which was left to the discretion of the parish officers and if necessary arbitrated by the JPs (Res. 2). Those who refused to accept such apprentices should be bound over and, failing that, committed to gaol (Res. 6–7). Further recalcitrance should result in indictment for contempt or ultimately even a summons for personal appearance before the Privy Council. Any parents refusing to have their children bound were not only to be denied relief but also sent to the House of Correction (Res. 7).29 There was also, moreover, an important spatial dimension to the 1633 resolutions, since Heath argued that apprentices could be placed not only within the parish, but also beyond its borders in other parishes in the county (Res. 5). It is often argued that, in stipulating that legal apprenticeship actually created a settlement, the 1662 and 1691 Settlement Laws encouraged the policy of binding out apprentices to foreign parishes in order to remove a potential liability from the resident ratepayers. It is, however, clear that judicial interpretation of the Elizabethan statutes had tended in this direction for almost thirty years. Indeed, Heath’s twenty-fifth resolution was explicit, arguing that ‘servants and apprentices are by law settled in that parish . . . [where they are in service]’.30 In one respect, this policy amounted to an indirect means by which neighbouring parishes provided a form of ‘rate-in-aid’

27 Acts of the Privy Council 1630–31, pp. 386, 388, 401–2; [P]ublic [R]ecord [O]ffice, London, PC 2/42, pp. 410–11. 28 PRO PC 2/41, p. 545; SP16/232/42. 29 PRO SP16/255/46, printed in Somerset Assize Orders 1629–1640, ed. T.G. Barnes (Somerset Record Society 65, 1959), pp. 63–70 [no.186]. 30 Somerset Assize Orders, p. 68.

23

WOMEN, WORK AND WAGES IN ENGLAND, 1600–1850

for a particularly overburdened parish, since the weight of the poor in a parish could be distributed more evenly over a number of her neighbours. In some respects, Heath’s decisions created more problems than they solved. It has been argued that the 1633 resolutions ‘effected the final absorption of the Elizabethan poor laws into the routine working of the justices of the peace’. Indeed, they were published as an appendix to The Complete Justice in 1661, and at least six of them were regarded as authoritative by the chairman of the Worcestershire bench in the early 1660s.31 Even so, their authority was not always accepted unquestioningly. Although known popularly as the ‘resolutions of all the judges’, Heath’s brethren in the Exchequer Chamber refused to subscribe to them, and Justice Twisden was to deny their validity as late as 1676.32 They were certainly subject to legal challenge. In one case at least, Heath dashed the hopes of the recalcitrant. The Somerset attorney Thomas Trevellian of Langport argued that as ‘a wealthy man keeping few or noe servants’ he was liable to contribute only towards the binding out of an apprentice rather than to receive one himself, and he referred, unsuccessfully as it turned out, to the recently issued resolutions for a final settlement of the matter.33 Much more serious were the reservations expressed by those same local officers who were responsible for enforcing the policy. The resistance of John Potkins, churchwarden of Pluckley (Kent), who refused to take an apprentice even when offered a premium in 1633, undermined the whole enterprise in the parish.34 Perhaps the most serious objections, however, arose from magistrates themselves. The Hertfordshire JP Thomas Coningsby was put out of the commission and fined £1000 in Star Chamber in 1635 for publicly declaring his opinion that enforced apprenticeship was illegal. Coningsby’s were precisely the kind of objections that Cock had in mind when he condemned ‘the pettish niggardliness of some men in authority’ who construed the imposition of a pauper child on a reluctant master to be ‘against the libertie of the subject’.35 31

T.G. Barnes, Somerset, 1625–40: A County’s Government During the Personal Rule (Cambridge, Mass., 1961), p. 189; The Complete Justice (London, 1661); ‘Henry Townshend’s “Notes of the Office of a Justice of the Peace’, ed. R.D. Hunt, Worcestershire Historical Record Society: Miscellany II (Leeds, 1967), pp. 70, 118–20. 32 Somerset Assize Orders 1629–1640, p. xxviii; Dalton, The Country Justice (1727 edn), p. 231. 33 PRO SP16/239/6; PC2/43, p. 71. Trevellian’s position turned on the distinction made in Heath’s third and fourth resolutions between those whose callings required them to hire other servants (who could therefore be compelled to take parish children) and those who had no personal use for servants (who could only be taxed towards binding parish children out). Since Heath did not explicitly include attorneys in the latter category, Trevellian was forced to submit. Barnes, Somerset, pp. 185–6. 34 PRO SP16/240/35; PC2/43, p. 98. Cf. P. Clark, English Provincial Society from the Reformation to the Revolution (Hassocks, 1977), p. 352. 35 Barnes, Somerset, p. 186 n.30; Georce Cock cited in Pinchbeck and Hewitt, Children in English Society, I, p. 241. 24

PAUPER APPRENTICESHIP UNDER ELIZABETHAN POOR LAWS

The increased assiduity with which magistrates applied the apprenticeship policy in the years 1633 to 1635 almost certainly owes something to Heath, though arguably also to Archbishop Laud, ‘a well-known sponsor of charities for poor children’.36 Heath himself certainly reiterated the message to the Somerset assizes at Chard in 1638: ‘for prevention of charge that cometh upon parishes by children which live idely and be fitting to be bound forth apprentices’, any recalcitrant parents were to be committed to the house of correction whether or not they were actually in receipt of the ‘almes of the parish’.37 For the next three decades, the judges upheld the compulsive spirit (if not the letter) of the law as interpreted by Heath. Sergeant Wilde exemplified this stance in a decision at the Salisbury summer assizes in 1648, when one recalcitrant master was actually committed to gaol.38 The first judicial decision against compulsion came after the restoration, perhaps as part of the backlash against the prerogative basis of much early Stuart social policy, the arbitrary nature of which tainted pauper apprenticeship by association.39 From 1679, the judges at the Staffordshire assizes were discharging employers of the apprentices which they had reluctantly taken on, citing as their justification a declaration ‘by all the Judges that no employer ought by law to be so enforced’.40 Even so, judicial opinion on the issue was still divided into the very late seventeenth century. Dalton’s Country Justice had to concede in 1682 that the compulsive powers that lay behind pauper apprenticeship were ‘never judicially & solemnly resolved’. Matthew Hale noted in 1683 that the act did not explicitly compel masters to take parish apprentices.41 The upshot was that various county benches reached conflicting decisions. In 1688, Sir Edward Lutwyche charged the Lancashire bench that, although ‘some judges have been of contrary opinion’, the 1601 Act ‘undoubtedly by implicacion’ (note Heath’s formulation here) empowered JPs to compel recalcitrant masters. After further consultation with Lutwyche and his fellow judge Sir Edward Powell, the JPs satisfied themselves that compulsory pauper apprenticeship would ‘much tend to lessen the numbers of the poor and conduce greatly to the ease and benefit of the Country’, and

36 Leonard, The Early History of English Poor Relief, pp. 216–17, 295. For criticism of Leonard’s view that the ‘orders and directions’ were originally formulated by Laud (and by Wentworth), however, see Quintrell, ‘The making of Charles I’s Book of Orders’, pp. 556–7. 37 PRO ASSI24/20, pt. II, fol. 165v, printed in Western Circuit Assize Orders, 1629–1648: A Calendar, ed. J.S. Cockburn (Camden Society 4th ser. 17, 1976), pp. 144–5 [no.613]. 38 PRO ASSI24/21, fol. 121r, printed in Western Circuit Assize Orders, p. 286 [no.1198]; Edmund Bott, A Collection of Decisions of the Court of King’s Bench upon the Poor’s Laws (2 vols, London, 1793 edn), I, pp. 540–1. 39 Slack, From Reformation to Improvement, pp.53–76 (ch. 3, ‘Absolute power’). 40 PRO ASSI2/1, f. 306r. 41 Dalton, Countrey Justice (1682 edn), p. 151; M. Hale, A Discourse Touching Provision for the Poor (1683), p. 4.

25

WOMEN, WORK AND WAGES IN ENGLAND, 1600–1850

accordingly resolved to recommend Lutwyche’s opinion to all the other justices in the county. ‘Their care,’ Lutwyche insisted, ‘should be to have the poor provided for that they should not need nor be permitted to wander and beg abroad as they now doe to the great reproach of the Country.’ Instead, the JPs should reform or punish not only ‘the vagabond that will not be reclaymed’ but also the ‘remiss overseers’ who refused to enforce pauper apprenticeship. At the Aylesbury sessions of January 1690, by contrast, ‘upon the complaint of several parishioners of High Wycombe, the opinion of the Buckinghamshire JPs was given that “no persons ought to be burthened with parish children as apprentices against their consents” ’.42 The practical difficulties created by these inconsistencies are nicely revealed in the protracted dispute over the legality of forcing masters to take apprentices in the Warwickshire parish of Solihull. The parish officers and ratepayers of Solihull had their differences about the principle of enforced pauper apprenticeship as early as 1662, but they resurfaced in earnest whenever attempts were made to bind out large numbers of parish children simultaneously: nine in 1677, a further five in 1679 and another eight in 1685. During these decades the parish officers repeatedly updated lists of the most suitable masters, and regularly had to withstand appeals to the justices that they were acting illegally. Even the vicar Henry Greswold was subject to a justices’ order of this kind in 1679.43 The legal basis of pauper apprenticeship was finally resolved only in the parliamentary session of 1696–97, when 8 & 9 William III c.30 stipulated that local masters and mistresses might be forced to take quotas of parish apprentices, and fined heavily if they refused to do so.44 By the time the compulsory obligation of ratepayers to receive parish apprentices was abolished in 1844, moreover, a very extensive body of legislation afforded what may have been greater legal protection to parish apprentices than to their private counterparts, a corpus which was created partly because of the 42

Proceedings of the Lancashire Justices of the Peace, p. 154 (emphasis added); County of Buckingham: Calendar to the Sessions Records, Volume I, 1678 to 1694, ed. W. Le Hardy and G.L. Reckitt (Aylesbury, 1933), p. 322. 43 The dispute may be traced in Warwick County Records, ed. S.C. Ratcliff and H.C. Johnson (9 vols, Warwick, 1935–64), IV, p. 193; VII, pp. 76, 107, 149; VIII, pp. 63, 65, 126, 128, 138, 166, 174, 200, 240, 245, 253, 261, 269; IX, pp. 3, 14. For a similarly hardfought campaign in a late seventeenth-century Buckinghamshire parish, see John Broad, ‘The smallholder and cottager after disafforestation: a legacy of poverty?’ in J. Broad and R. Hoyle (eds) Bernwood: The Life and Afterlife of a Forest (Preston, 1997), pp. 102–3. On clerical desire for exemption from compulsory apprenticeship even after the act of 1697, see Historical Manuscripts Commission, Twelfth Report, Appendix, Part II: The Manuscripts of the Earl Cowper, K.G., Preserved at Melbourne Hall, Derbyshire, Vol. II (London, 1888), p. 387. 44 8 & 9 William III, c. 30 (1697). In eighteenth-century Leeds, these fines generated income of at least £8340 in the years 1730 to 1808. Anderson, ‘The Leeds Workhouse under the Old Poor Law’, p. 112 [Appendix 1]. 26

PAUPER APPRENTICESHIP UNDER ELIZABETHAN POOR LAWS

widely recognised tensions consequent upon the export of the children of the poor into the houses of their wealthier neighbours.45 For a century, the Stuart regime had wrestled with the ambiguities of the Elizabethan legislation, creating space for local negotiation of a policy which was as controversial in rural vestries and in the cottages of the labouring poor as it was in the court of King’s Bench.

Popular responses to pauper apprenticeship Despite the ambiguous legal basis of pauper apprenticeship, there is some patchy evidence of early enthusiasm for the policy, with parishes such as Elmstead (Essex), Lacock (Wiltshire) and Shorne (Kent) complying almost immediately.46 In some cases, such as Great Bentley and Wivenhoe (both Essex), where the earliest pauper apprenticeship indentures survive from 1577 and 1578 respectively; Colyton (Devon), where the parish officers had bound out fifty-five children by the turn of the sixteenth century; or Eaton Socon (Bedfordshire), where the equivalent of a year’s poor relief expenditure was spent ‘for putting forthe of the childrinn’ in 1595, pauper apprenticeship predated the 1598 statute, perhaps (as at Walsham le Willows, Suffolk or Great Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire) evolving from the ‘boarding out’ system which was widely practised (primarily for orphans) in parishes such as Hadleigh, Sudbury or Wattisfield (all Suffolk) in the Elizabethan period.47 The policy was evidently far easier to enforce in those parishes, such as Henley (Oxfordshire), where a local charity endowed for the specific purpose of financing pauper apprenticeship made it easier to persuade reluctant masters to undertake the commitment by offering premiums twice or three times as generous as the nominal sums that would otherwise have been paid.48

45 Snell, Annals, pp. 284–5 and n.32; K.D.M. Snell, ‘The apprenticeship system in British history: the fragmentation of a cultural institution’, History of Education, 25:4 (1996), p. 312 n. 24. 46 F.G. Emmison, ‘The care of the poor in Elizabethan Essex: recently discovered records’, Essex Review, 62 [no.248] (September 1953), pp. 22–3; Hinton, ‘The relief of the poor of Lacock’, pp. 182–3; A.F. Allen, ‘An early poor law account’, Archaeologia Cantiana, 64 (1951), p. 83. 47 Emmison, ‘The care of the poor in Elizabethan Essex’, pp. 13, 14; Sharpe, ‘Poor children’, p. 259; F.G. Emmison, ‘Poor relief accounts of two rural parishes in Bedfordshire, 1563–1598’, Economic History Review, 3 (1931–32), p. 110; M.K. McIntosh, ‘Local responses to the poor in late Medieval and Tudor England’, Continuity and Change, 3:2 (1988), pp. 232, 244 n.95; McIntosh, ‘Networks of care in Elizabethan English towns’, p. 84. Parish officers within the Landrich Hundred of Norfolk were empowered to bind out poor children from 1595. W.B.H. Chandler, ‘Directions to overseers of the poor, 1595’, Norfolk Archaeology, 32:3 (1961), pp. 230–1. 48 Thomas, ‘Pauper apprenticeship’, p. 400. For discussion of several Yorkshire charities endowed for subsidising the costs of parish apprenticeship, see W.K. Jordan, The Charities

27

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Early Stuart judges certainly applied pressure to enforce the legislation. Parish relief of the poor by apprenticing children was included in articles to JPs from the second decade of the seventeenth century: for the JPs of the West Riding and of Lancashire in 1618, for example.49 It is, however, difficult to be sure how sustained these initiatives were. Although the Hertfordshire bench apprenticed over 1500 poor children when moved to do so by the judges in 1619, the grand jury complained in 1624 that most of them had left their masters and ‘now live idly at home with their friends to the hurt of the common wealthe’.50 Even if the policy had succeeded, however, the Hertfordshire bench had evidently cooperated only because they saw parish apprenticeship as a lesser evil than the ‘verry troublesome and chargeable’ new draperies scheme envisaged by Walter Morrell. Indeed, the deputy lieutenants of Hertfordshire informed the council in 1620 that they had ‘founde the Cuntrey the rather willing to take the said children apprentices to husbandry, for that they did hope in soe doinge they should be eased’ of Morrell’s project.51 Even this early initiative suggests that magistrates were prepared to enforce the policy only when they could see no realistic alternative. By the early 1620s, the stand-off between the council and the county benches had reached stalemate. Sir Julius Caesar, Master of the Rolls, was informed in 1624 that the vagrancy problem was so acute in Norfolk precisely because overseers had failed to enforce the apprenticeship clauses of the Elizabethan statutes.52 It was, however, the ‘Book of Orders’ that most effectively galvanised the magistrates into activity, especially in the two or three years after Heath had reiterated the compulsory logic of the legislation. This impression is confirmed by systematic analysis of the magistrates’ reports to the Privy Council in the 1630s, which provide the clearest, though by no means unambiguous, evidence of popular response to the policy.53 In the first place, the certificates

of Rural England, 1480–1640 (London, 1961), p. 288. Jordan notes, however, that only a quarter of the value of benefactions for the support of apprenticeship schemes in his sample was vested in parish officers to provide premiums for pauper children, the remainder being donated to secure footholds for poor boys in the named and recognised companies and guilds. W.K. Jordan, Philanthropy in England, 1480–1640: A Study of the Changing Pattern of English Social Aspirations (Cambridge, Mass., 1959), p. 268. 49 West Riding Sessions Records, Vol. II: 1611–1642, ed. J. Lister (Yorkshire Archaeological Record Society Series 54, 1915), p. 397; Proceedings of the Lancashire Justices of the Peace, p. 176. 50 Calendar of Assize Records: Hertfordshire Indictments, James I, ed. J.S. Cockburn (London, 1975), p. 275 [no.1369]. 51 PRO SP14/115/13. Cf. Zell, ‘Setting the poor on work’. 52 British Library, London, MS Additional 12496, fol. 238. 53 The magistrates’ certificates in PRO SP16 provide the basis of the following discussion. For very brief preliminary work on apprenticeship as revealed by the certificates for individual counties, see J. Hurstfield, ‘County government: Wiltshire, c. 1530–1660’, reprinted in Hurstfield, Freedom, Corruption and Government in Elizabethan England (London, 1973), pp. 272–4; Barnes, Somerset, pp. 185–7; A. Fletcher, A County Community 28

PAUPER APPRENTICESHIP UNDER ELIZABETHAN POOR LAWS

are highly inconsistent on the numbers of children bound. When the Privy Council collated sixty-three certificates from eighteen counties which had been submitted in 1633, only eighteen (29 per cent) gave explicit statistical detail on the enforcement of the policy. Although caution should be used in the aggregation of figures which are sometimes suspiciously rounded, the scale of the achievement is none the less impressive. These eighteen certificates (drawn, remarkably, from only five counties) give a combined total of 2292 pauper children bound apprentice – 74 in Kent, 106 in Sussex, 200 in Rutland, 285 in Surrey and 1627 in Yorkshire – within the space of one calendar year.54 Numerous other statistical reports are scattered around the certificates, some of them bearing striking testimony to the zeal of parish officers and magistrates alike.55 In other cases, silences are eloquent. Of the twenty-seven parishes in the Ashendon hundred of Buckinghamshire which reported in 1636, not a single one had bound poor children out.56 None the less, the evidence of parish papers suggests that the Caroline enforcement drive really did have a marked effect in local communities: nineteen (over 6 per cent) of all the pauper children documented as apprenticed in seventeenth-century Colyton were bound out in the year 1631 alone; and over half of the surviving indentures for Eaton Socon date from the 1630s. The parish constables of Gissing made at least three appearances before the Norfolk justices concerning apprentices in 1631.57 The cumulative significance of these figures is striking. The (significantly precise) figure of in Peace and War: Sussex, 1600–1660 (London, 1975), pp. 157–8; Clark, English Provincial Society, pp. 350–3; C. Holmes, Seventeenth-century Lincolnshire (Lincoln, 1980), pp. 109–12; S.K. Roberts, Recovery and Restoration in an English County: Devon Local Administration, 1646–1670 (Exeter, 1985), p. 183; A. Hughes, Politics, Society and Civil War in Warwickshire, 1620–1660 (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 57–8; A. Duffin, Faith and Faction: Politics and Religion of the Cornish Gentry Before the Civil War (Exeter, 1996), pp. 114–17. The best survey of local response to the requirements of the ‘Book of Orders’ is H. Langeluddecke, ‘“Patchy and spasmodic”: the response of Justices of the Peace to Charles I’s Book of Orders’, English Historical Review, 113 [no. 454] (November 1998), pp. 1231–48; and the best introduction to the genesis of the orders themselves is B.W. Quintrell, ‘The making of Charles I’s Book of Orders’, English Historical Review, 95 (1980), pp. 553–72. For the prehistory of the Orders, see P. Slack, ‘Books of Orders: the making of English social policy, 1577–1631’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser. 30 (1980), pp. 1–22. 54 PRO SP16/259/88. Twenty-two others referred to unspecified numbers of children bound (although one of these to ‘a great number’). The remaining twenty-three made no reference at all to pauper apprenticeship. 55 For what it is worth, in a sample of fifty certificates from various counties which included (usually, of course, suspiciously rounded) numbers bound in the period 1634–37, the binding out of some 3924 children is itemised. PRO SP16/267–363. 56 PRO SP16/328/6. 57 Sharpe, ‘Poor children’, pp. 259–60; Emmison, ‘Poor relief accounts’, p. 67 n.157; J. Kent, The English Village Constable, 1580–1642: A Social and Administrative Study (Oxford, 1986), pp. 192–3. 29

WOMEN, WORK AND WAGES IN ENGLAND, 1600–1850

1526 pauper apprentices bound out in Hertfordshire in 1619 might represent as many as 30 per cent of all the boys and girls in the county aged between 7 and 16.58 Although there is therefore abundant evidence that magistrates and parish officers might be persuaded to seek masters for poor children, it is none the less clear that employers resisted the policy, sometimes actively. The objections of masters were predictable and exceed even their chorus of disapproval with respect to the 1563 statute of artificers.59 Employers were both resentful of zealous magistrates and suspicious of idle children. ‘Most men’, reported the Yorkshire justices in May 1631, were ‘desirous to free themselves of the burden’.60 Accordingly, it was especially difficult to find sufficient numbers of employers for pauper children. By June 1631 the JPs of Norfolk had ‘bound out apprentice [only] soe manie poore children as wee can find masters fitt to be charged with such’, implying that the supply of willing householders had been exhausted.61 The situation was exacerbated in years of high prices. In May 1631, the justices of Fawsley (Northamptonshire) found pauper apprenticeship ‘somewhat difficult in respect of the hardness of the tymes’: ‘those masters who should take apprentices seeme somewhat unwilling to increase their charges as feeling the burthen of their own familyes already’. The Devon bench, which had combined the apprenticeship of children with the billeting (i.e. boarding) of those too young to work despaired that they ‘knew not what may remaineth’ for them to do, ‘considering the great burthens of the persons of every quality and deadness of the time’. These protests chime with the common assumption that servants were dismissed in years of high prices.62 Even when prices fell, there were problems enforcing apprenticeship contracts in an agrarian economy in which the demand for labour fluctuated markedly over the course of the year. The Norfolk bench acknowledged in the summer of 1634 that pauper apprenticeship had to be accommodated with the 58

Hertfordshire Indictments, James I, p. 275. This approximate calculation assumes that no more than 20 percent of the population was aged between 7 and 16. Wrigley and Schofield, Population History of England, p. 528 (Table A3.1) suggests that the proportion aged between 5 and 14 in 1621 was 20.74 percent. It also assumes that the population of Hertfordshire was approximately 25,000 in the early seventeenth century. L. Munby, Hertfordshire Population Statistics, 1563–1801 (Hitchin, 1964), p. 21, suggests that there were 5526 ‘families’ in the county in 1603. 59 Davies, The Enforcement of English Apprenticeship, part II, passim. 60 PRO SP 16/190/56. 61 PRO SP16/193/40. This formula is repeated in three other Norfolk certificates: SP16/310/104, 329/23–4. 62 PRO SP16/191/67, 189/5. H. Arthington, Provision for the Poore, Now in Penurie (London, 1597), sig.C2; A. Standish, New Directions of Experience to the Commons Complaint by the Incouragement of the Kings Most Excellent Maiesty, As May Appeare for the Planting of Timber and Fire-wood (London, 1611), p. 16; J. Cook, Unum Necessarium: Or, The Poor Man’s Case: Being An Expedient to Make Provision for all Poore People in the Kingdome (London, 1647), p. 5. 30

PAUPER APPRENTICESHIP UNDER ELIZABETHAN POOR LAWS

seasonal demands of the local labour market. Although they noted that a few children had recently been apprenticed, they could fulfil their intention ‘to putt forth as many as we can find masters for’ only after ‘the end of harvest’.63 Even after indentures were signed, however, there were abuses on both sides. Disputes were ubiquitous and were most commonly adjudicated at quarter sessions, where parish apprenticeship seems to have been much more controversial than its non-parochial equivalent in the 1630s.64 Initially compliant masters might subsequently prove themselves to be devious and fraudulent, abusing or maltreating unwanted children to the extent that they would abscond, and some employers were doubtless serial offenders in this respect.65 As early as May 1631 Norfolk JPs were concerned about ‘such poor children as departed from service unlawfully or are by their masters cast off least any by such ways should be inforced to become rogues’.66 By July 1632, the Cambridgeshire JPs had been forced to take action against those who had taken apprentices but ‘had putt them away’ by this kind of stratagem, and had ‘settled them againe with their said masters where they remayne quietly’.67 The Nottinghamshire justices adopted a similar policy of forcing masters to take back those children they had unlawfully discharged, and backed it up with a fine of a shilling a week for those who were reluctant to comply.68 That reluctance was almost certainly encouraged by the increasing association of the poor with dirt, pollution and peril, and of their offspring with inherited traits of idleness and disobedience. The clothiers and other tradesmen of Wiltshire were particularly unwilling to take pauper apprentices on the grounds that the children of the poore were ‘for the most part untrustye and theevishe and therefore daungerous for them to keepe’.69 The concomitant fear that employers might be particularly severe on the children of the poor explains the passive resistance of parents to the removal of their offspring. The Wiltshire JPs complained of ‘the unwillingness of the foolishe poore parents to depart with their children’, a statement redolent of magistrates’ patronising disdain for the affective bonds within poor labouring families.70 Their colleagues in Leicestershire were only slightly more sympathetic, accommodating the request of those parents who had ‘prayed a short

63

PRO SP16/272/44. Davies, The Enforcement of English Apprenticeship, p. 211; Barnes, Somerset, p. 186; Roberts, Recovery and Restoration, p. 35. 65 For a notorious example, see Barnes, Somerset, p. 186. 66 PRO SP16/197/13. 67 PRO SP16/216/45. 68 Nottinghamshire County Records, ed. H.H. Copnall (Nottingham, 1915), p. 129. 69 PRO SP16/250/10. Fears of embezzlement almost certainly lie behind statements of this kind. Cf. J. Styles, ‘Embezzlement, industry and the law in England, 1500–1800’, in M. Berg, P. Hudson and M. Sonnenscher (eds) Manufacture in Town and Countryside Before the Factory (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 173–210. 70 PRO SP16/250/10. 64

31

WOMEN, WORK AND WAGES IN ENGLAND, 1600–1850

tyme to provide masters for their children, desiringe rather that they might comende maisters to their children than to be appointed by the overseers’.71 The Nottinghamshire JPs complained that even though parish apprenticeship had left them with ‘little rest either at home or abroad’ they still found ‘manie difficulties to contente poore people’.72 Given that over 90 per cent of those poor children bound out in the first half of the seventeenth century had at least one parent surviving, and that over 25 per cent were apprenticed from households where both the mother and father were still alive, it is hardly surprising that parents should be so concerned about the fate of their children.73 In Nottinghamshire, parents apparently adopted desperate measures, encouraging their children to behave badly so as to get themselves dismissed from apprenticeships.74 The parental sense of emotional deprivation that fuelled such reactions was arguably also infused with a sense of indignation that parish officers and magistrates did not trust them to bring up their own offspring effectively. After all, to insist on the apprenticeship of a poor child was by implication to impugn the capacity of its parents to inculcate the habits of diligence and deference upon which labour discipline depended. To these emotional reservations might be added the economic rationale of the utility of children in the domestic workforce. Historians are becoming increasingly sensitive to the significant contribution child labour might make in the cottages of the labouring poor. The labour power of the whole household might be significantly increased by the ‘substitution effect’, whereby parents were able to perform other work because even very young children carried out activities which in and of themselves had no monetary value attached to them. Up to the age of 8, a child’s work might include gathering fuel, fetching water, food preparation, cleaning, sweeping, running errands, and care, or at least oversight, of their younger siblings. Between the ages of 9 and 12, children might be encouraged to spin, knit, mend clothes, tend fires, and tend livestock and poultry.75 Almost everywhere, therefore, the policy sapped the energy and enthusiasm of the magistrates: it was ‘difficult’ in Northamptonshire, ‘troublesome and difficult’ in Wiltshire, a ‘labour’ in Monmouthshire, a ‘matter of no small difficultie’ and even one of ‘continuall trouble’ in Nottinghamshire. The East Riding justices complied with it only ‘with a great deale of reluctation’.76 In one part of Norfolk the magistrates had been forced to meet ‘severall tymes 71

PRO SP16/193/89. PRO SP16/189/12. 73 Of 165 poor children apprenticed in Colyton between 1598 and 1649, only sixteen (9.7 percent) were orphans and forty-two (25.4 percent) had both parents alive. Sharpe, ‘Poor children’, p. 263. 74 PRO SP16/272/40. 75 D. Levine, Reproducing Families: The Political Economy of English Population History (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 112–14. 76 PRO SP16/191/67, 250/10, 270/74, 270/40, 190/56. 72

32

PAUPER APPRENTICESHIP UNDER ELIZABETHAN POOR LAWS

touching the service’; in another it required ‘care and diligence’; and in a third it had taken up ‘some extraordinary time’ at meetings. 77 In Cambridgeshire the ‘putting forth of apprentices’ had ‘imployed soe much of [the magistrates’] time’ that they had ‘perfected nothing’ with respect to the enforcement of the 1563 statute of artificers.78 By the mid-1630s, however, some benches were striking a more optimistic note. The JPs of Usk (Monmouthshire) reported that they had ‘laboured with all sorts of men, with whom we found great conformitye’, even to the extent of exhausting the labour supply among those ‘whoe are not settled and imployed to gett their maintenance’.79 In Lancashire in 1635 the magistrates were at least rewarded by the feeling that although they had spend ‘much labour and paynes’ in the business, it had ‘yeelded such satisfaction’ that it made their ‘burdens seeme less’.80 By 1638, the Norfolk magistrates’ efforts had apparently resulted in fewer refusals or complaints over the binding out of parish children.81 A number of county benches none the less dared to elaborate on the shortcomings of a policy that they regarded as patently unenforceable. In May 1631, the justices of Fawsley (Northamptonshire) pleaded that it was far better to relieve poor children by collection than by coercing recalcitrant employers, who also of course paid poor rates.82 Wiltshire JPs argued that the fault lay with parish officers, who were apparently either negligent (preferring to tax ratepayers for the relief of poor families than to organise parish apprenticeship) or malicious (‘imposinge apprentices upon such as are not of abilitye to keepe them’).83 In the summer of 1637, the Lancashire bench reported the converse problem, that the extensive participation of poor labouring families in ‘the great trading of fustians and woollen cloth’ meant that the ‘inhabitants have contynuell ymployment for their children in spinning and other necessary labour’. Even if it was poorly paid and vulnerable to cyclical slump, domestic employment in the cloth industry was infinitely preferable to apprenticeship with a reluctant and potentially abusive master.84

The gender, age and occupational distribution of pauper apprentices Although the Privy Council was clearly rather more interested in the numbers of apprentices than in their gender, the occasional certificate provides names 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84

PRO SP16/329/9, 329/10, 385/27. PRO SP16/216/45. PRO SP16/270/74. PRO SP16/535/115. PRO SP16/385/27. PRO SP16/191/67. PRO SP16/250/10. PRO SP16/364/122. 33

WOMEN, WORK AND WAGES IN ENGLAND, 1600–1850

of pauper children from which gender may be deduced. Indeed, in 1635 the Judges of the Western Circuit required magistrates to ‘expresse the particular names of all those apprentices formerly bound’, information that had not previously been required by the Orders themselves.85 The county benches of Cornwall, Dorset, Somerset and Wiltshire immediately complied, and their reports, combined with five others submitted throughout the country in the period 1634–36, provide a sample of thirteen certificates in which the gender of some 802 pauper apprentices is apparent. A very consistent pattern emerges. Boys were very significantly over-represented, almost invariably comprising at least two-thirds of those bound out. As Table 1.1 shows, the proportion of male apprentices ranged from a maximum of 83.9 per cent in the Dorchester division of Dorset to 62.5 per cent in the Lincolnshire wolds and averaged 69.6 per cent across the country.86 This sex ratio of 229 is much higher than that for seventeenth-century Colyton, even despite its rise in that community from 156.8 in the period 1600–49 to 197.0 in the period 1650–99.87 Pamela Sharpe explains the high and rising proportion of poor boys apprenticed there in terms of the increasing home employment opportunities for girls in domestic lace-making, and the very high sex ratios in our Caroline sample might suggest that the gender preferences of employers were less significant than those of parents. The regional differentials are slight, but they suggest that poor girls may have represented a higher proportion of children apprenticed in areas where the textile industry required spinners, as in the North Riding of Yorkshire where girls comprised 34.4 per cent of those bound. The under-representation of girls may also reflect greater unwillingness on the part of parents to send their daughters away, even though the fragmentary evidence suggests that girls were bound out when slightly younger than boys.88 Indeed, the advantages of ‘timely’ apprenticing of children, when they were pedagogically malleable, were frequently stressed. An Ease for Overseers urged that poor children, like ‘a twigge that will best bende when it is greene’, were ‘fittest to be bound when they are young’. William Lambarde advised overseers in 1602 to put the poor in service ‘while they be young and tractable, and before they be corrupted with vice and idleness’.89 As we have seen, moreover,

85

PRO SP16/289/14. PRO SP16/272/23, 272/43, 281/84, 289/14, 289/20/1, 289/29/1, 289/43, 289/48, 289/57, 289/64, 289/73, 329/9, 310/65. The Wiltshire figure of 76.4 percent male is very close to eighteenth-century figures in the county. In the Wiltshire parish of Lacock, 74.4 percent of the parish apprentices bound in the period between 1667 and 1832 were male. Hinton, ‘Relief of the poor of Lacock’, p. 186. 87 Sharpe, ‘Poor children’, p. 259. 88 PRO SP16/310/65. In seventeenth-century Colyton, by contrast, the girls’ average age (12.0 years) was slightly older than the boys’ (11.7). Sharpe, ‘Poor children’, p. 256. 89 An Ease for Overseers of the Poore, p. 27; W. Lambarde, The Duties of Constables (London, 1602), p. 129. 86

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PAUPER APPRENTICESHIP UNDER ELIZABETHAN POOR LAWS

Table 1.1 Sex ratios of pauper apprentices bound in the 1630s, various counties County

Division

Dorset Devon Somerset Wiltshire Norfolk

Dorchester Torrington [unnamed] Potterne South Erpingham Shropham Frome Pyder Whitleigh Flegg Allerton Blandford Gartree

Norfolk Somerset Cornwall Somerset Norfolk Yorkshire (North Riding) Dorset Lincolnshire Total Colyton 1600–49 Colyton 1650–99

Total no. of apprentices bound

Boys

Girls

Ratio

Males as a % of total

62 44 19 55 24

52 35 15 42 18

10 9 4 13 6

520.0 388.9 375.0 323.1 300.0

83.9 79.5 78.9 76.4 75.0

76 41 48 160 53 93

53 28 32 106 35 61

23 13 16 54 18 32

230.4 215.4 200.0 196.3 194.4 190.6

69.7 68.3 66.7 66.3 66.0 65.6

119 8

76 5

43 3

176.7 166.7

63.9 62.5

802 208 98

558 127 65

244 81 33

228.7 156.8 197.0

69.6 61.1 66.3

Sources: PRO SP 16/272/23, 272/43, 281/84, 289/14, 289/20/1, 289/29/1, 289/43, 289/48, 289/57, 289/64, 289/73, 329/9, 310/65; Sharpe (1991: 259).

the judges repeatedly emphasised that children might be apprenticed from the age of 7. Indeed, although the modal age of the thirty-eight boys and girls of known years who were bound out in the West Riding in the mid-1630s was 11, the average was less than 10, with the mean age of the girls (9 years and 3 months) being slightly lower than that of the boys (9 years and 9 months).90 It is none the less striking that only three children as young as 7 occur in this sample. Despite the suggestion that ‘the most common age for apprenticing children was when they reached their eighth birthday’, most parishes seem to have waited at least a year, and possibly two, longer.91 In Shorne (Kent) and Hadleigh (Suffolk) 9 and 10 respectively seem to have been the minimum ages at which parish children were apprenticed in the Elizabethan period.92 Indeed, when the Hampshire justices sought likely apprentices among the

90

PRO SP16/310/65. Sharpe, ‘Poor children’, p. 254. 92 Allen, ‘An early poor law account’, p. 77; McIntosh, ‘Networks of care in Elizabethan English towns’, p. 85. 91

35

WOMEN, WORK AND WAGES IN ENGLAND, 1600–1850

poor of the Fawley division in 1631, they enquired only after those aged 10 and over, and the Leicestershire bench similarly referred only to ‘children and youthes between ten and sixteen as fitt for apprenticeship’.93 A similar minimum was judged appropriate in Cambridgeshire, where although girls were ‘frequently apprenticed at the early age of nine’, the ‘boys not usually till twelve, or even fourteen or fifteen’.94 As we have seen, the age at which children were bound out had important implications for the activities they might reasonably be asked to perform. Several benches made explicit provision for children who were regarded as too young to be apprenticed, although they are seldom as explicit as these JPs on what they considered to be the minimum age. The JPs of the Arundel rape of Sussex took a note ‘of all children above the age of eight years, which are yet unfit to be put forth’, although the reasons for their unreadiness are unspecified. They none the less made ready a list of the names of the ablest inhabitants in every parish ‘which are fitt to receive them’.95 The Hertfordshire JPs noted in 1631 that ‘those poore children who were not yet of fitt yeares to be putt forth they had caused to be sett to spinning or such small worke as is moste meete for them according to the tendernesse of their age that idlenesse may not fasten in them’. The Leicestershire JPs had similarly ordered the purchase of hemp, flax and wool ‘for the imployinge of little children not yet able to be putt apprentice or to service’. Other expedients were used elsewhere. For example, Widow Hodgson and two young children ‘not fitt to be bound apprentice’ had a house provided for her by the parish officers of Kirkham (Lancashire) in 1636 and was accordingly able to maintain herself without a pension.96 The magistrates referred only very occasionally to the trades to which pauper children were bound: to ‘husbandmen and artificers’ in Norfolk in 1631, for example; to ‘handicrafts’ in Guildford (Surrey) in 1631; or to ‘several trades and husbandryes’ in Monmouthshire in 1634.97 Of the ten masters who accepted pauper apprentices in the half-hundred of Hitchin (Hertfordshire) in 1638, the occupations of eight can be determined: five yeoman, two maltsters and one weaver.98 The craftsmen who agreed to take parish apprentices in early seventeenth-century Worth (Sussex) included two ironworkers, two blacksmiths, a mason, a warrender, a thatcher, a silkweaver

93

PRO SP16/188/85, 193/89 (emphasis added). E.M. Hampson, The Treatment of Poverty in Cambridgeshire, 1597–1834 (Cambridge, 1934), pp. 49–50; Hampson, ‘Settlement and removal’, p. 283. 95 PRO SP16/263/82 (emphasis added). 96 PRO SP16/189/79, 193/89, 330/64. In 1623, parish officers were enjoined to cause ‘such Children of the sayde laborers and poore people, that have not yet ben apprentices, nor in work, to be taught to knitt, and to spin by some honest women in the Towne that are fitt to teach them’. Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS Tanner 73, fol. 390. 97 PRO SP16/190/20, 191/78, 191/42, 270/74. 98 PRO SP16/385/43. 94

36

PAUPER APPRENTICESHIP UNDER ELIZABETHAN POOR LAWS

and a tanner. Even so, twenty-one (70 per cent) of the thirty children bound out between 1615 and 1660 were destined for husbandry and housewifery.99 The generic reference, however, was to the trades of ‘husbandrie and huswiferie’, as in Norfolk in 1634.100 Although this was the kind of profile envisaged by those who drafted the statute, it was not universal. Even in such an agricultural county as Cambridgeshire, less than 4 per cent of the parish apprentices bound between 1631 and 1830 were apprenticed to husbandry, a strikingly low proportion which demonstrates the extraordinary reluctance of farmers to take on such a long commitment. In Cambridgeshire, the most common occupation for boys was cordwaining, the remainder being set to other village craftsmen or shopkeepers. The overwhelming majority of girls were bound to the ‘art and mystery of huswifery’.101 Similarly, all the girls who were apprenticed from Rye (Sussex) between 1602 and 1645 were bound to housewifery.102 On balance, it seems, parish apprenticeship was easier to enforce in arable communities because there was limited demand for child labour wherever the rhythms of the agricultural economy were seasonal. In the wood-pasture zones, by contrast, the labour of youths might be crucial to the household production of textiles or other industrial goods, and children and their parents could less easily be induced to comply with the statute. Evidence of premiums is relatively scarce, since they were usually itemised only where a more specialised trade was involved. Two paupers were apprenticed from the Lancashire parish of Kirkham in 1636, for example, Jane Fletcher to the wife of a local bonelace worker with a premium of £8 6s 8d; William Barnes to a weaver with a premium of £5.103 But ‘considerations’ of this kind were the exception rather than the rule. In a sample of 344 apprenticeship indentures drawn up in the parishes of mid-Sussex in the period 1589 to 1750, only sixty-two (18 per cent) specified that any premium was to be paid to the master. The sums involved ranged between £1 and £10 and were very occasionally supplemented by clothing or shoes. The average cash value was £5 1s, though the fluctuations either side of this mean owe more to the length of the apprenticeship (and therefore ultimately to the age of the child) than to the particular trade involved. Cumulatively, of course, these expenses might be very substantial in a particular parish. In St Giles Cripplegate, the expenditure on premiums and clothing for the nineteen parish apprentices bound out in the years 1630–32 totalled almost £34, just under half the annual income from the poor rate.104 A similar situation

99 100 101 102 103 104

Thomas, ‘Pauper apprenticeship’, p. 401. PRO SP16/281/84. Hampson, ‘Settlement and removal’, p. 283. Thomas, ‘Pauper apprenticeship’, p. 401. PRO SP16/330/64. PRO SP16/226/78. 37

WOMEN, WORK AND WAGES IN ENGLAND, 1600–1850

prevailed in Kenilworth (Warwickshire), where the overseers spent almost £25 (46 per cent) of their outgoings for the accounting year 1670 on apprenticing five parish children. Expenditure on this scale might easily be justified in a context where the maintenance of just two parish orphans represented a recurrent drain of £10 annually on parish finances.105 On the whole, however, the nominal premiums on offer were usually only attractive to householders who were themselves indigent, a tendency reflected in complaints that ‘poor inhabitants’ had taken on apprentices ‘for the lucre of gain’ only for their households in turn to fall upon the parish.106 Indeed it was not uncommon for masters to be forced to enter into penal bonds for substantial sums which would be forfeited to the parish if they breached the terms of the agreement: twenty-six (7.6 per cent) mid-Sussex masters were bound in this way, some of them in recognizances of £100.107 Other inducements were therefore occasionally used to persuade reluctant masters, some of whom evidently drove a hard bargain. Edward Sewer not only received a premium of £5 for taking a parish child of Henfield (Sussex) in 1600 but also secured an agreement that he should not contribute to poor rates for the following six years. Michael Harmes persuaded the parish officers of Bolney (Sussex) to supplement his consideration of £2 with a promise that he would not be obliged to take any other child while James Terry was apprenticed to him.108 Magistrates were none the less blunt about the desirability of removing children from the pernicious influence of their parents. For the JPs of Leicestershire, for instance, pauper apprenticeship was simply a matter of taking children from their parents so that ‘young people and children may receive imployment and fitting education and soe avoide idleness and lewdenes of life’. In doing so, they distilled the essence of the Ease for Overseers of 1601 which had argued that ‘poor children by reason of their idle and base educations, will hardly hold service but as they have wavering and wandering mindes so they will have wandering and other staied bodies which will sooner be disposed to vagrancie than activitie to idlenesse then to worke’.109 Norfolk JPs adopted a rather more sympathetic tone in 1636 when they noted that they had bound forth such children ‘whose friends were not able otherwise to provide for them’.110 This laconic reference to the attenuated nature of kin support helps explain the relatively high proportion of apprentices who were bound out to foreign parishes, even in the 1630s. Of twenty-six paupers apprenticed in the Norfolk hundreds of South Erpingham 105

T. Arkell, ‘The incidence of poverty in England in the later seventeenth century’, Social History, 12:1 (January 1987), p. 41. 106 Buckinghamshire Sessions Records, II, pp. 256, 265. 107 Mid-Sussex Poor Law Records, 1601–1835, ed. N. Pilbeam and I. Nelson (Sussex Record Society, 83, 2000), passim. Cf. Hampson, Treatment of Poverty in Cambridgeshire, p. 162. 108 Mid-Sussex Poor Law Records, pp. 68, 242. 109 PRO SP16/193/89, 216/103; An Ease for Overseers of the Poore, p. 27. 110 PRO SP16/193/89, 216/103, 329/10–11 (emphasis added). 38

PAUPER APPRENTICESHIP UNDER ELIZABETHAN POOR LAWS

and Eynsford in 1634, seven (27 per cent) were bound out to masters outside their own parish, a proportion which bears comparison with the figures for many rural parishes after the late seventeenth-century settlement acts had supposedly perverted parish apprenticeship into a mechanism for ridding ratepayers of the liability of a pauper child.111 Even so, the disciplinary agenda of the policy is nicely encapsulated in Michael Dalton’s reminder of the very limited ambitions of the scheme: the apprenticeship clauses of the poor laws, he insisted, were intended ‘not for the education of boys in arts but for charity to keep them and relieve them from turning to roguery and idleness’.112

The later history of pauper apprenticeship, 1662–97 Pauper apprenticeship generally seems to have fallen into abeyance in the late seventeenth century, partly because the use of the prerogative to enforce social policy was so politically sensitive and partly because of the changing demographic circumstances of the Restoration period.113 Magistrates

111 PRO SP16/281/84. In the eighteenth century, the proportions bound out beyond the parish boundary ranged from 17.6 per cent in Gnosall, Staffordshire (1691–1816), 22.2 per cent in Eaton Socon, Bedfordshire (1693–1731), to 24.4 per cent in Doveridge, Derbyshire (1699–1818), 68.2 per cent in Maulden, Bedfordshire (1658–1788). Cutlack, ‘Gnosall records’, pp. 34–5; Emmison, ‘Relief of the poor at Eaton Socon’, p. 70; Tate, Parish Chest, p. 221. The study which shows the most striking change in policy between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is Hampson, ‘Settlement and removal’, pp. 282–3, which demonstrates that the proportion bound out ‘abroad’ rose from 15.3 per cent (1631–91) to 69.3 per cent (1691–1830), although the proportion sent to ‘distant’ rather than ‘neighbouring’ parishes dropped from 7.7 to 0.7 per cent. The equivalent figures for Henfield (Sussex) are 13 per cent before the 1691 statute, and nearly 60 per cent afterwards. More continuity (a nominal increase from 20 to 25 per cent in the Sussex parish of Worth, even a constant proportion across the whole period 1638 to 1840 at Yealmpton in Devon) is evident elsewhere. Thomas, ‘Pauper apprenticeship’, p. 403. The vestrymen of Frampton, Lincolnshire repeatedly changed their policy on binding apprentices in the early eighteenth century. S. Hindle, ‘Power, poor relief and social relations in Holland Fen, c. 1600–1800’, Historical Journal, 41:4 (1998), pp. 86–7. In eighteenth-century Stone (Staffordshire), full use was made of the opportunity to apprentice pauper children to distant masters in the Potteries and the Black Country. S.R. Broadbridge, ‘The Old Poor Law in the parish of Stone’, North Staffordshire Journal of Field Studies, 13 (1973), p. 14. The temptation to apprentice out of parish was greatest in heavily burdened areas such as London, where proportions in excess of 90 per cent were not uncommon at the turn of the nineteenth century. Rose, ‘Social policy and business’, p. 9. The classic statement of the damaging consequences of the settlement laws for the operation of parish apprenticeship is D. Marshall, The English Poor in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1926), p. 183. 112 Dalton cited in Robert E. Leader, History of the Company of Cutlers in Hallamshire in the County of York (2 vols, Sheffield, 1906), I, p. 57n. 113 Slack, From Reformation to Improvement, pp. 53–76; Steve Hindle, ‘The growth of social stability in Restoration England’, The European Legacy, 5:4 (2000), pp. 563–76.

39

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apparently turned their attention from apprenticing parish children to enforcing compulsory service for young adults under the terms of the statute of artificers. General initiatives of this kind were taken in the West Riding of Yorkshire in 1641, in Wiltshire in 1656, in Cambridgeshire in 1661, in the North Riding in 1670, in Hertfordshire in 1675 and 1687, in Essex in 1677 and again in 1684, and in Buckinghamshire repeatedly in the late 1680s.114 As the late seventeenth-century cycle of demographic stagnation, modest price deflation and rising wages reduced the bargaining power of employers, magistrates seem to have devoted more of their energies to the labour discipline of a slightly older age group. It was only, it seems, after 1697 that parish apprenticeship once again featured high on the agenda of local government. It certainly kept Kent JPs busy in the early eighteenth century: magistrates at the Sevenoaks petty sessions signed thirty-one sets of indentures in the period 1716–19, and their colleagues at Blackheath forty sets in the period 1745–48.115 More contracts inevitably entailed more disputes, and it is hardly surprising that at least ninety Kent apprentices had their indentures cancelled at quarter sessions between 1705 and 1754.116 Even so, parish apprenticeships became ubiquitous. In Doveridge (Derbyshire), ninety children were placed by the overseers between 1669 and 1818; in Frampton (Lincolnshire), there were ninety-six between 1678 and 1772; in Lacock (Wiltshire) 194 between 1667 and 1832; in Gnosall (Staffordshire) 216 between 1691 and 1816; and in Colyton at least 552 between 1650 and 1837. These figures are, of course, dwarfed by those for the industrialising towns. In Leeds, the parish bound out almost 1800 apprentices in the years between 1730 and 1799, at an annual average of almost twenty-six. In the capital, 2794 children were apprenticed by the parishes within the London Bills of Mortality in the years between 1767 and 1778.117

114

West Riding Sessions Records, II, pp. 11, 33; ‘The records of Quarter Sessions in the county of Wilts.’, in Historical Manuscripts Commission, Reports on Manuscripts in Various Collections, Vol. I (London, 1901), p. 132; Hampson, Treatment of Poverty, p. 55; North Riding Quarter Sessions Records, ed. J.C. Atkinson (9 vols, North Riding Record Society, I–IX, 1884–92), VI , p. 220; Notes and Extracts from the Sessions Rolls, 1581–1698, ed. W.J. Hardy (Hertford, 1905), p. 254; Calendar to the Sessions Books and Sessions Minute Books, 1658–1700, ed. W. Le Hardy (Hertford, 1930), pp. 405–8; J.A. Sharpe, Crime in Seventeenth-century England: A County Study (Cambridge, 1983), p. 45; Buckingham: Sessions Records, I, pp. 176–7, 234, 322, 336. 115 N. Landau, The Justices of the Peace, 1679–1760 (Berkeley, 1984), pp. 216–17. 116 Ibid., pp. 250–1. 117 W.E. Tate, The Parish Chest (London, 1946), p. 221; Hindle, ‘Power, poor relief & social relations’, p. 86; Hinton, ‘The relief of the poor of Lacock’, p. 184; Cutlack, ‘The Gnosall records’, pp. 53–4; Sharpe, ‘Poor children’, pp. 259; Anderson, ‘The Leeds workhouse’, p. 112 [Appendix A]; Rose, ‘Social policy and business’, p. 9. For similar figures for Cambridge, see Hampson, Treatment of Poverty in Cambridgeshire, pp. 152–5. 40

PAUPER APPRENTICESHIP UNDER ELIZABETHAN POOR LAWS

Impressive as these statistics are, they must be seen alongside the scattered qualitative assessments of the policy. Indeed, four commentators provide particularly revealing anecdotal evidence of the limitations of parish apprenticeship as it was carried out in the late seventeenth century. Samuel Pepys noted on 20 August 1663 that he had returned home for lunch to ‘find a little girle, which she told my wife herself her name was Jinny; by which name we shall call her – I think a good likely girl and a parish-child of St Bride’s, of honest parentage and recommended by the church-warden’. That evening, however, having been deloused and clothed by Mrs Pepys, ‘she run away from Goody Taylor that was showing her the way to the bakehouse, and we heard no more of her’. The following day, Jinny was brought back by ‘a beadle of St Bride’s parish’, only to be stripped and sent away by her master and mistress. Pepys noted laconically that a new parish child came, also at the recommendation of churchwarden Griffings, ‘which I think will prove a pretty girl – her name, Susan’.118 For Jinny, and others like her, parish apprenticeship was little more than an endless sequence of revolving doors, an experience nicely, if a little sardonically, described by Richard Dunning in 1685 as a ‘masterless method’, whereby ‘many serve more masters in a week than they spend sober nights’.119 The Quaker tradesman William Stout of Lancaster had a different, though no less problematic encounter, with a parish apprentice at the turn of the seventeenth century. Stout remembered that in 1706 he: had a parish apprintice put upon me, about ten years of age, John Robinson, sone of James Robinson. I sent him to the free schoole for at least fower years, and he learned well to the entring into Greek, and could write well. I bound him apprintice to a worsted weaver, gave 4l with him, and found him clothes. He served his time and then begun trade for himselfe, but was not so industrious or carfull as he ought, fell to drinking and broke; then went to London, got a wife and portion, which he spent, and left her, and went to America. He cost me at least forty pounds.120

That Stout’s frustrations are far from unique is demonstrated by the comprehensive critique of pauper apprenticeship launched by the Norfolk magistrate Robert Doughty. In a remarkable memorandum drawn up in the early 1660s, Doughty located the difficulties of administering parish apprenticeship in the wider context of the desirability of enforcing the labour

118

The Diary of Samuel Pepys: A New and Complete Transcription, Volume IV (1663), ed. R. Latham and W. Matthews (London, 1971), pp. 282–4. 119 R. Dunning, A Plain and Easie Method Shewing How the Office of Overseer of the Poor May be Managed (London, 1685), ‘The Prefatory Dedication’, unfol. 120 The Autobiography of William Stout of Lancaster, 1665–1752, ed. J.D. Marshall (Chetham Society, 3rd ser., 14, Manchester 1967), p. 154. 41

WOMEN, WORK AND WAGES IN ENGLAND, 1600–1850

laws, especially the statute of artificers.121 Doughty noted the obvious structural problem that because children were apprenticed young, the seven years which was the maximum which most masters were prepared to tolerate would expire well before they had reached the age of 24. Others still were bound by antedated indentures which meant that they ‘really serve but three, foure or five of the seaven’. Whether or not indentures were correctly drawn up, they were seldom enrolled, which created acute difficulties in enforcing the penalties stipulated by the statute. Worse still, few employers wanted these children after their apprenticeship expired, so that they were forced to live at their own hands and haunt alehouses tending not only to ‘the loss of their tyme and money’ but also to the ‘corrupting, depraving and debauching of all youth’. Even more significantly, Doughty pointed to the gender-specific difficulties of enforcing parish apprenticeship: those ‘wenches (or maydes) as are ablest’ for housewifery abandoned apprenticeship because they could make far better earnings ‘by spinning and knitting, gleaning & stealing in harvest, & perhaps by secret whoredoms all the yeare’. To this prurient fantasy Doughty added another, hardly more sympathetic, image of lads who had abandoned service only to ‘play smoake & slaver away’ their summer earnings in the winter murk of the alehouse. At its best, then, parish apprenticeship had ‘all the advantages of boarding out plus technical training’.122 At its worst, it amounted to little more than the exploitation of cheap labour on the land and in domestic drudgery. For the majority, the experience must have lain somewhere between the two.

Conclusion: Industry and idleness among the labouring poor Economic historians have recently disagreed over the essential purpose of parish apprenticeship as it was practised in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. For Mary Rose, the policy was little more than ‘a method of transmitting child labour into the low skilled trades rather than an investment in the human capital of poor children’.123 More optimistically, Sara Horrell, Jane Humphries and Hans-Joachim Voth have regarded it as a direct means of ‘shoring up the health and human capital formation of children in poor

121

Norfolk Record Office, Norwich, Aylsham, 304 (undated memorandum headed ‘5 Eliz c.4’). Unless otherwise noted, all subsequent quotations are taken from this source, which is not among those in The Notebook of Robert Doughty, 1662–1665, ed. J.M. Rosenheim (Norfolk Record Society, 54, 1989). For Doughty himself, see J.M. Rosenheim, ‘Robert Doughty of Hanworth: a Restoration Magistrate’, Norfolk Archaeology, 38:3 (1983), pp. 296–312; J.M. Rosenheim, ‘Documenting authority: texts and magistracy in Restoration Society’, Albion, 25:4 (winter 1993), pp. 591–604. 122 Pinchbeck and Hewitt, Children in English Society, Vol. I, p. 242. 123 Rose, ‘Social policy and business’, p. 9. 42

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households’.124 Although the two assessments share a lack of historical perspective, their different emphases reflect the divergent agenda of studies aimed at the historiographies of early factory production on the one hand and of the ‘standard of living debate’ on the other. They also grow out of the long-standing reluctance of welfare historians to take seriously the apprenticeship and employment clauses of the Elizabethan poor laws. The plentiful evidence of the provision of parish pensions has itself obscured the leading role of work and labour discipline in early modern welfare policy. From its very outset, it should be emphasised, Elizabethan poor relief was a form of governmental intervention ‘intended to break the cycle of deprivation and ensure that poor children grew up to become productive members of the community’.125 This refreshing insight none the less underestimates the acute tensions created by a policy that strained the political and economic, and arguably even the emotional, sinews of households and communities all over the country. All the evidence suggests that the enforcement of parish apprenticeship was deeply problematic for judges, magistrates and parish officers; for parents, employers and ratepayers; and, not least, for the children themselves. Indeed, the conflicts created by judicial interpretation of, and popular responses to, parish apprenticeship reveal the extraordinarily ambiguous role of children in the makeshift economies of the labouring poor. Children’s hands might equally be busied in spinning in the family home or outstretched in a gesture of importunacy at the kitchen doors of their neighbours. From one perspective, then, children represented an invaluable supply of cheap labour, contributing in numerous ways to the operation of the household economy. From another, however, they represented a potential drain on the charitable resources of wealthier neighbours, either through the dispensation of casual alms or the provision of formal relief, and were therefore a group in particular need of social discipline. Contemporaries actually made creative use of this paradox, since it helped them discriminate between the ‘deserving’ and the ‘undeserving’ at the very time when that age-old binary distinction was being distorted by the ‘discovery’ of the labouring poor in the urban censuses of the late sixteenth century.126 Of course, the deserving poor might be characterised in numerous ways: by their industry, their thrift, their sobriety, their deference, their honesty and their fear of God. But it was arguably in their relations with their children that the deserving poor were most easily identified. The result was the elaboration of the very frequently employed social stereotypes of the ‘worthy’, who took pains in their children’s

124 S. Horrell, J. Humphries and H-J. Voth, ‘Destined for deprivation: human capital formation and intergenerational poverty in nineteenth century England’, Explorations in Economic History, 38:3 (2001), p. 358. 125 Ibid., p. 356. 126 Slack, Poverty and Policy, pp. 27–32.

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education and maintenance; and the ‘unworthy’, who allowed, arguably even encouraged, their children to develop habits of idleness. In a label that was itself ‘gentry-made’, ‘the poore’ as a class might accordingly be characterised by the indiscipline and disorder that they passed on to their young.127 ‘Lifecycle’ poverty, then, was the unfortunate condition of the deserving poor, an inevitable consequence of universal human processes of reproduction and ageing.128 ‘Inherited’ poverty, however, was a far less sympathetic state, most often understood as the consequence of imprudent parental behaviour rather than of deteriorating wage levels.129 This concern extended even to the regulation of family formation: parish officers not infrequently inhibited the marriages of the poor on the grounds that they would ‘breed up a charge’ on the poor rate.130 Perhaps for these reasons, it was the parents of young families who were most vulnerable to the discretionary punishments of the civil parish. Where the poor were disorderly, parish officers were actively enjoined to suspend or abate pensions.131 Such threats were most difficult to carry out in the cases of the elderly, among whom all too evident human need militated against the withdrawal of parish pensions and for whom the notion of a customary ‘right’ to relief was most difficult to challenge.132 Parents who kept their children at home, by contrast, might plausibly be accused of encouraging idleness. Alexander Strange, vicar of the Hertfordshire parish of Layston, was eloquent on this issue in 1636, when he complained about the ‘misery and sorrow’ inflicted on the community by an influx of twenty immigrant families over the previous generation: ‘The young people in these familyes are brought up so idlye’, he argued, ‘many of them getting their living more by begging and by stealing than by any honest labor’, that ‘when their parents shal be taken awaye and they necessarlye to be kept, no honest man will willingly take such ill condicioned people into their howse for servants, hardly upon any

127 For ‘the poore’ as a ‘gentry-made’ term, see E.P. Thompson, Customs in Common (London, 1991), p. 17. 128 T. Wales, ‘Poverty, poor relief and the life-cycle: some evidence from seventeenthcentury Norfolk’, in R.M. Smith (ed.) Land, Kinship and Life-cycle (Cambridge, 1984), pp. 351–404. 129 B. Stapleton, ‘Inherited poverty and life-cycle poverty: Odiham, Hampshire, 1650–1850’, Social History, 18:3 (October 1993), pp. 339–55. 130 Hindle, ‘The problem of pauper marriage’, p. 79. 131 See the full treatment of this theme in Hindle, On the Parish (forthcoming), ch. 6 (‘Negotiation’). 132 Cf. the rhetoric of the aged petitioners to the Norfolk bench who referred in 1670 to the overseers as ‘those whose office it is to provide for the wants of such as are poor and impotent and past their labours’. Steve Hindle, ‘Exhortation and entitlement: negotiating inequality in English rural communities, 1550–1650’, in Michael Braddick and John Walter (eds) Negotiating Power in Early Modern Society: Order, Hierarchy and Subordination in Britain and Ireland (Cambridge, 2001), p. 116.

44

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termes or conditions, because they have bynne so ill and unprofitably brought up’.133 In the context of such attitudes, it was little wonder that parish officers took the advice of the judges and actually did withhold pensions from parents who refused to bind out their children and kept them at home. Examples could be cited from across the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: from Eaton Socon (Bedfordshire) in 1596, Street (Somerset) in 1621, Braintree (Essex) in 1635, Northaw (Hertfordshire) in 1637, Wakefield (West Riding of Yorkshire) in 1641, Aldenham (Hertfordshire) in 1701.134 These sanctions were also applied in the eighteenth century. In Brill (Buckinghamshire) in 1703, the parents of those children who, despite their families’ inability to maintain them, yet none the less ‘do live and cohabit’ with them that thereby ‘the collection is likely to be increased to the great prejudice’ of the ratepayers, were ‘to have no relief or collection’ unless the children were swiftly bound out. At Colyton in 1747, Widow Hannah Pitfield had her poor relief cut to one-third of its original level when she refused to have her children bound out despite being destitute.135 Some slight latitude over the minimum age of parish apprenticeship seems, however, to have developed over time. By the eighteenth century any adults who applied for poor relief in Terling (Essex) and Charmouth (Dorset) were required to send all their children aged 15 and over out to service.136 By the 1780s, the exclusion from relief of mothers who resisted the banishment of their children to the new industrial mills encouraged the systematic traffic in pauper apprentices that was developing between many urban centres and the early cotton factories.137 When children were bound out, moreover, parish officers might adjust pensions accordingly. Roger Hodgkins of Shrowley-in-Hatton (Warwickshire), for example, had his weekly allowance reduced from 18d to 12d in 1641 because he was ‘freed of some of the great charge of children’, the eldest of his five sons

133

Hertfordshire Archives and Local Studies, Hertford, D/P65/3/3, p. 327. For the context, see Steve Hindle, ‘Exclusion crises: poverty, migration and parochial responsibility in English rural communities, c.1560–1660’, Rural History, 7:2 (1996), pp. 125–49. 134 Emmison, ‘Poor relief accounts’, p. 111; Quarter Sessions Records for the County of Somerset, Vol. I: James I, 1607–1625, ed. E.H. Bates (Somerset Record Society, 23, 1907), p. 283; Early Essex Town Meetings, ed. F.G. Emmison (Chichester, 1970), p. 101; PRO SP16/344/30/3; West Riding Sessions Records, II, pp. 26–7; W. Newman-Brown, ‘The receipt of poor relief and family situation: Aldenham, Hertfordshire, 1630–90’, in Smith (ed.) Land, Kinship and Life-Cycle, p. 418. 135 Broad, ‘Smallholder and cottager after disafforestation’, p. 103; Sharpe, ‘Poor children’, pp. 256–7. 136 S.R. Ottaway, ‘Providing for the elderly in eighteenth-century England’, Continuity & Change, 13:3 (1998), pp. 406, 417 n.47. 137 J. Lane, ‘Apprenticeship in Warwickshire cotton mills, 1790–1830’, Textile History, 10 (1979); P. Carter, ‘Poor relief strategies – women, children and enclosure in Hanwell, Middlesex, 1780–1816’, The Local Historian, 25:3 (1995), p. 170; Rose, ‘Social policy and business’, pp. 13–20. 45

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having been bound apprentice at the insistence of the county bench.138 Having more children at home ‘than was needful’ for them, therefore, evidently rendered the poor vulnerable to the disciplinary sanctions of the civil parish.139 These cases demonstrate the operation of legal power of the early modern state to intervene in the processes through which poor households were constituted and social and moral values inculcated. If labouring parents overburdened with young children were among the more frequent recipients of the carrots dispensed by the overseers of the poor, it was precisely this group, and their ‘waste’ children, who were most commonly beaten with sticks. In their attitudes to child employment and parish apprenticeship, therefore, the labouring poor opted themselves, and were placed into, the mental categories of the authorities – to be seen as worthy or unworthy; painful or careless; industrious or idle.

138

Warwick County Records, Vol. II: Quarter Sessions Order Book, Michaelmas 1637 to Epiphany 1650, ed. S.C. Ratcliff and H.C. Johnson (Warwick, 1936), pp. 25, 96, 106. 139 These policies extended even to grandparents who accommodated their children’s offspring. Goodwife Martin of Stevenage (Hertfordshire) was threatened with the cancellation of her pension in 1677 if she failed to send her grandchildren home. HALS D/P 105/8/2, fol. 5r (June 1677). Parish charities also employed similar tactics. At Geddington (Northamptonshire) from 1636, any of the twenty-four recipients of Robert Dallington’s bread charity who kept ‘more children at home than is needful for their use’ were to be displaced and others put in their stead. S. Hindle, ‘“Not by bread only”?: common right, parish relief and endowed charity in a forest economy, c.1600–1800’, in S. King and A. Tomkins (eds) The Poor in England, 1700–1850: An Economy of Makeshifts (Manchester, 2003), pp. 39–75. 46

2

Gender at sea Women and the East India Company in seventeenth-century London PAMELA SHARPE

Journalistic comment on the recent anti-globalization protests make the assumption that multinational trade, where companies take on some of the functions of nations, is a modern phenomenon. Yet the East India Companies of the various states of the seventeenth century present some similar circumstances, and the English East India Company has recently celebrated its 400th anniversary. As the major historian of the English East India Company, Chaudhuri, put it: ‘In many ways, the East India Company was the direct ancestor of the modern giant business firm, handling a multitude of trading products and operating in an international setting.’1 The East India Company traded on the seas – the pre-eminent commercial realm of the early modern period – but also their operations included quasi-banking functions, property management and a role in the relief of poverty. A very large part of the lives of those who worked for the East India Company became inextricably connected with its fortunes. In this light, I have always had difficulty with a remark that the early modern historian Olwen Hufton, perhaps offhandedly, made in her article about women without men in the eighteenth century. Hufton stated: ‘There was no East India Company for women’ when arguing that while single men had difficulties in forging a business career if they had no access to business networks and patronage, this could not be compared with the plight of the single woman.2 Yet, as I will show here, the all-encompassing presence of the East India Company did make a material difference to the lives of widows and to other women in a number of ways.

1

K.N. Chaudhuri, The Trading World of Asia and the English East India Company, 1660–1760 (Cambridge, 1978), p. 21. 2 O. Hufton, ‘Women without men: widows and spinsters in Britain and France in the eighteenth century’, Journal of Family History, 9 (1984), p. 372. 47

WOMEN, WORK AND WAGES IN ENGLAND, 1600–1850

There is scant historiography of women in seafaring communities. The picture we can develop comes from court records or poor law accounts, such as the ‘Voices of Londoners’ cited by Peter Earle in A City Full of People for the period 1650 to 1750: ‘I endeavor to maintaine myself and my family by winding of silke’, said a sailor’s wife; ‘In the absence of my husband (who is at sea) I sell bisketts by which and other work as of sewing . . . I get a living’, said another. More strikingly, Jane Smith aged 50, of Bermondsey (in the dock area of London), said: ‘I have had six husbands. Their names were Richard Williams, John Freeman, John Turner, John Hussey, Thomas Richards and Thomas Smith. Williams was a merchant and lived at Jamaica and was afterwards executed upon the account of the Duke of Monmouth’s Rebellion. John Freeman was a clergyman and lived and died and was buryed at New York in America. John Turner was a barrister at law and lived in America and coming over to England was taken by the French and carried to Brest where he dyed and was buryed. John Hussey was a Leiftenant of the Devonshire Man of War and dyed at sea in the year 1693. Thomas Richards was a mariner and dyed at sea and my present husband is also a mariner and is now at sea’.3

Thomas Smith was her present husband, yet something about this passage makes us think he could almost be in the past tense. The work of the first two women – winding silk (a product of the East India trade) and toiling at anything that could be got – were undoubtedly part of the life experiences of sailors’ wives. The life of Jane Smith – serial marriage, constant changes of name, catching the tails of relatively well-off but unfortunate men – less so, but hardly unique. Yet these experiences hide the more substantial benefits that the East India Company’s organization brought to some London women. It is these experiences that I hope to highlight in this chapter. Women of all statuses played a prominent role in the workings of this particular maritime economy and not only in informal areas of this sector of commerce. This is certainly not reflected in the current voluminous literature on the East India Company where women are – to use a phrase that has now become hackneyed – simply invisible. In a significant contribution in this area, Margaret Creighton and Lisa Norling in their book Iron Men, Wooden Women consider gender and seafaring in the Atlantic world and stress the obvious point that the long history of seafaring has been devoted to the association of maritime pursuits with rugged masculinity. One of their counter-arguments that I will endorse here is that ‘the shore has been vital in shaping seafaring experience’.4 As has been found for other occupational communities where

3

P. Earle, A City Full of People (London, 1994), pp. 201, 206, 239. M.S. Creighton and L. Norling, Iron Men, Wooden Women: Gender and Seafaring in the Atlantic World, 1700–1920 (Baltimore, 1996), p. vii. 4

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masculinity is proven through physical strength or heroic pursuits, strong networks were also forged on land among women who were ‘left behind’. 5 We should also avoid making easy assumptions about camaraderie on board ship – quintessential ‘mateship’. The discipline regime on East India Company vessels reinforced hierarchy. The maritime archaeology of the Dutch East India Company vessel the Batavia that went aground on the morning reef of the Abrolhos Islands off the West Australian coast en route from Amsterdam to Batavia in 1629 is suggestive of some aspects of everyday life on such boats. Fragile artefacts survived over the centuries through being embedded in a conglomerate of seabed sediments and iron corrosion products, and suggest elements of urban sophistication on board ship. Fragments of Italian bobbin lace used on collars and cuffs were recovered from the Batavia along with a brass barber’s bowl, majolica ointment jars, a tortoiseshell comb and a small stoneware jug. We know from written records that both an upper and under barber were on board. The association of the lace with the barber-surgeon suggests the lace collar was a part of the coiffure of the senior mariners on board ship. In another part of the wreck lace bobbins were found along with a cannon, suggesting to me that they could have been love tokens being kept by a gunner.6 Finally I believe that the ball-like object that I was asked to identify for the museum was a pomander, filled with herbs to ward off the high stench that had doubtless developed by the time the vessels reached the other side of the world.7 Such ships were microcosms of the societies from which they travelled. The social history of the everyday life of such vessels is little researched. I hope that this exploration will complement my other recent work that considers women’s place in long-distance and international trade and in occupational communities.8 I will first try to place women’s work in the context of the English East India Company in seventeenth-century London and then consider the interactions of women with the Company.

5

R.W. Hendon, ‘The domestic cost of seafaring: town leaders and seamen’s families in eighteenth-century Rhode Island’, in Creighton and Norling, Iron Men, Wooden Women, pp. 59–60. 6 Personal communication with Patrick Baker, underwater photographer at the Western Australian Maritime Museum, Fremantle, Western Australia. 7 Personal communication with Juliet Pasveer, archaeologist at the Western Australian Maritime Museum, Fremantle. For the full story of the Batavia, see M. Dash, Batavia’s Graveyard (London, 2002). 8 P. Sharpe, ‘Gender in the economy: female merchants and family businesses in the British Isles, 1600–1850’, Social History/Histoire Sociale, 34 (2002), pp. 283–306 and the other essays of this international forum; P. Sharpe (ed.), Women, Gender and Labour Migration: Historical and Global Perspectives (London, 2001); ‘Lace and place: women’s business in occupational communities in England, 1550–1950’, in A. Summers and J. Shaw (eds) Woman in Her Place: Essays for Mary Prior (forthcoming, 2004). 49

WOMEN, WORK AND WAGES IN ENGLAND, 1600–1850

The East India Company The East India Company received a royal charter from Queen Elizabeth I in 1600 and was granted a monopoly over the Indies and Far East routes. A sophisticated administrative structure soon developed where twenty-four ‘committees’ looked over every aspect of the company’s business, a system that permitted great attention to detail.9 It is the minutes of the Court of these Committees that form my main source for this chapter. The Company was unusual for its time because it was a single company operating on the joint stock principle. Chaudhuri comments that ‘although the managerial control of the company’s affairs remained firmly in the hands of the City Merchants, the effect of the association of capital in the East India trade was to encourage the idea of an impersonal business concern which was not only an instrument of trade but also an outlet of investment’.10 The Company consisted of freemen who had gained their position by patrimony, service such as apprenticeship, redemption or as a gift.11 The Company had soon established a ‘factory-system’ with factors to enable a quick turnaround for ships at the ports in Asia. These factors were essentially salaried employees. By 1620 the Company had established over twelve trading stations in Asia employing more than 200 factors. The major trading ports to develop over the seventeenth century were all in India: Surat (1612), Madras (1639), Bombay (1665) and Calcutta (1690). The first two decades of the Company’s operations saw great prosperity. According to Chaudhuri, by 1620 ‘It had set up two shipyards on the Thames, built a total of 76 ships and become one of the largest employers of labour in the London area’.12 As early as 1621 Thomas Mun argued that the East India trade would easily maintain 10,000 tons of shipping which would employ 2500 ‘mariners’ but ‘the building with the repairing of the said ships, here at home will set to work 500 men, carpenters, caulkers, carvers, joiners, smiths and other labourers’.13 The Company suffered along with the rest of the English economy in the 1620s, but overall there was a threefold increase in shipping over the first four decades of the seventeenth century. However, the ‘golden age’ came after 1660. The Company made immense profits after the Restoration with returns of 20 per cent to stockholders in the early 1660s, soaring to 40 per cent in 1665 and actually reaching 50 per cent in 1685–89. This was

9 P. Lawson, The East India Company: A History (London, 1993), pp. 21–2. Here ‘Committee’ is used in the seventeenth-century sense meaning a single Director; see Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles. 10 K.N. Chaudhuri, The English East India Company: the Study of an Early Joint-Stock Company 1600–1640 (London, 1965), pp. 21–2. 11 W. Foster, The East India House: its History and Associations (London, 1924), p. 8. 12 Chaudhuri, English East India Company, p. 21. 13 Ibid., p. 90.

50

WOMEN AND THE EAST INDIA COMPANY

‘wealth beyond compare for investors’, as Lawson put it.14 After 1657 the Company finally decided to abandon shipbuilding and ownership, replacing its own fleet with ships hired exclusively from a group of powerful owners who became known as ‘the shipping interest’ within the Company. This cut costs, and promoted the development of an insurance market, and a powerful shipping contingent in the City of London. In the period from the 1659/60 season to 1688/89, 358 voyages commenced with up to twenty company ships at sea at any one time.15 In the 1680s under the leadership of Sir Josiah Child and with the backing of the Stuart monarchy, the Company pursued an aggressive imperial policy.16 It was after 1688 that the Company faced competitive challenges and proved to be a victim of its own success, but it is also the case that the Company could never, in the seventeenth century, rival its Dutch competitor, the VOC (Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie). Initially, the Company dealt in luxury goods of enormous value but small volume. The basis of the trade of the first half of the seventeenth century was the monopoly on the valuable commodity of pepper along with other spices. In the second half of the century the Company diversified into greater imports of tea, coffee and chocolate. Tea from China complemented sugar from the West Indies and surged in popularity in the 1680s and 1690s. Indian textiles also became an important staple: half calicoes, cotton ‘piece goods’ (called ‘Madras Prints’) and silks. In the English market, women were important consumers of these luxury goods. 17 The expansion over the course of the seventeenth century meant that the Company had an ever-growing need for greater warehousing, particularly as its sales method involved auctioning all its own goods in the time it took an inch-long candle to burn. By the 1690s the East India Company was the wealthiest business to be assessed for tax in London on the basis of its goods and moveable property.18 By contrast, the company’s capital holdings were slight – most of their warehousing was rented, as was East India House in Leadenhall Street. In the course of the century, the original buildings built at Blackwall Dock were surrounded by more warehousing, but also almshouses

14

Lawson, East India Company, p. 44. Calculation by Huw Bowen based on Anthony Farringdon’s Catalogue of Company Ships Logs and Journals. 16 Ibid., p. 50. 17 B. Lemire, Fashions Favourite: The Cotton Trade and the Consumer in Britain, 1660–1800 (Oxford, 1991); M. Berg, ‘New commodities, luxuries and their consumers in eighteenthcentury England’, in M. Berg and H. Clifford (eds) Consumers and Luxury: Consumer Culture in Europe, 1650–1850 (Manchester, 1999), pp. 62–87; J.E. Wills, ‘European consumption and Asian production in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’, in J.Brewer and R. Porter (eds) Consumption and the World of Goods (London, 1993), pp. 133–47. 18 C. Spence, London in the 1690s: A Social Atlas (London, 2000), p. 152. 15

51

WOMEN, WORK AND WAGES IN ENGLAND, 1600–1850

(pre-1632) and a chapel (1642).19 Until the Company stopped building ships there were shipbuilding operations at both Deptford and the new dock at Limehouse whereas Blackwall was mainly used for repairs. All of this centred on the Isle of Dogs, the area now known as Docklands (see Figure 2.1). The Company set up iron foundries for making ships’ anchors, chains, nails and other iron implements, a spinning house for making cordage and many storehouses for timber, canvas and provisions.20 The merchant fleet was both commercial and military in its aims so ships had to be well armed and equipped. It is easy to forget just how labour intensive work at early modern dockyards would have been. Ships left London during the sailing season between October and April. The ‘Good Hope’ they had was to catch the south-west monsoon after rounding the Cape. This took them to the west coast of India by October or November. It was similarly necessary to catch the weather on the way back. We also forget nowadays how slow and uncertain a journey dependent on winds and tides might have been. Seamen usually spent over two years on a voyage, during which time their lives would be inextricably connected to that of the ship and the Company. For a sailor, this was relatively secure work compared with labouring at the docks in a casual and unpredictable market. The vessels for these demanding voyages were very large for their time (usually 300 to 500 tonnes) and required a significant crew. From 80 to 100 sailors were required on the smaller ships used by the company, with up to 200 on the great ships.21 As Rediker puts it, this was considered ‘one of the most trying routes of early modern seafaring’.22 The wages were poor, the Company was thought to have scant concern for its employees and ordinary sailors were subject to severe discipline, including flogging.23 The mortality levels for the East India Company employees are unknown but the Dutch equivalent showed massive loss of human life in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with an estimate of a 70 per cent mortality rate over all their voyages. 24 Drink and illness took their toll. The President Henry Hawley wrote from Batavia to the East India Company headquarters in London in 1626 that those workmen he had were either sick or drunk, and ended, ‘To conclude, our remnant is so

19

Lawson, East India Company, p. 62. See also M. Makepeace, ‘Sources for London history at the India Office Library and Records’, London Topographical Record, 26 (1990), pp. 153–76. 20 Chaudhuri, English East India Company, p. 98. 21 Ibid., p. 105. 22 M. Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea (Cambridge, 1987), p. 39. See also G. Dening, Mr Bligh’s Bad Language: Passion, Power and Theatre on the Bounty (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 61–4. 23 Ibid., p. 41. 24 J. De Vries, European Urbanization, 1500–1800 (London, 1984), p. 210, cited in M. Hunt, ‘Women and the fiscal-imperial state in late seventeenth- and early eighteenthcentury London’ (unpublished paper, 2002). 52

WOMEN AND THE EAST INDIA COMPANY

weake and of soe evill disposition that whatsoever wee have to doe must be acted by Chineses’.25 Many of those who did return home must have been severely debilitated. There was a pause on the return voyage, at the idyllic island of St Helena off the west coast of Africa. Here scurvy-stricken, exhausted sailors were literally stretchered off East India Company vessels and stayed on the island to recuperate before completing the voyage home. So why did men go to sea? As well as providing secure employment and food over a long period, the prospects for career advancement well exceeded those available in other trades. Naturally, advancement depended on survival, but if a mariner progressed to a sea captain, the trading rights meant that he would be a wealthy man within the space of four or five voyages.26 ‘Impressed money’, ‘the power’, and ‘the privilege’ The poor wages that the sailor received in the seventeenth century amounted to £5 a year. In the context of London this was very low and would explain why their wives had to work. An unusual aspect of the payment system was that part of the wage was received in advance and this was referred to as the ‘impressed money’, perhaps suggesting a link to those impressed into the navy. In 1623 the Court of Committees decided to discontinue this method of payment because sailors who had already received their money were in the habit of jumping ship at Gravesend. This caused a mutiny on the Charles: men refused to weigh anchor unless first paid their impressed money and the Company was forced to give way rather than miss the time of departure necessary to benefit from the winds in India.27 The East India wage contracts stipulated that one month in every six months wages should be paid to some named person in England.28 The usual method of paying wages to the factors resident in the Indies was to allow them one-third on the spot in cash and, when it was established, credit the rest to their account in the joint stock, or pay it to relatives. In addition, factors were expected to invest some of their own money in the Company.29 Nevertheless, it was not unusual for the wives of factors to have to plead to the Committee. In 1640 ‘Anne, wife of Thomas Leyning, a factor in India, [was] to be paid one-third of her husband’s wages’.30 In 1673

25

East India Company Records, CE/3/11 f.83.v, dated 6/2/1626. On display at ‘Trading Places’ exhibition, British Library, London, May to September 2002. 26 R. Davis, The Rise of the English Shipping Industry in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (London, 1962), p. 148. 27 Chaudhuri, English East India Company, p. 105. 28 Davis, Rise of the English Shipping Industry, p. 143. 29 Ibid., p. 84. 30 E.B. Sainsbury, A Calendar of the Court Minutes of the East India Company, 1640–43 (Oxford, 1909), p. 23, 10/3/1640. 53

WOMEN, WORK AND WAGES IN ENGLAND, 1600–1850

Figure 2.1 ‘An Actuall Survey of the Parish of St Dunstan, Stepney, 1703’ Source: From Henry Green and Robert Wigram, Chronicles of Blackwell Yard (London: Whitehead, Morris and Lowe, 1881) 54

WOMEN AND THE EAST INDIA COMPANY

55

WOMEN, WORK AND WAGES IN ENGLAND, 1600–1850

Margaret, wife of Samuel Foote, factor at Bantam, was to be paid £20 on account of her husband’s wages, and advice to be sent out that half of Foote’s salary was in future to be paid to his wife in England towards her subsistence.31 Women very often tried to be paid for the professional services of their husbands, for example, in the case of surgeons who worked on the larger ships. Sailors conferred ‘power of attorney’ on their female kin. In an interesting counterpart to the ‘impressed’, East London women referred to this as ‘the power’. It allowed mariners’ representatives to collect all or part of their male relative’s wages, to receive money on bills, transact in property, appear in court on their husbands or male relatives’ behalf and carry out business in his name. Margaret Hunt has written about the practice of ticket discounting that developed from this, and argues that as a result women in seafaring communities had more independence than other early modern women.32 The normal system employed by the East India Company was to offer two months’ advance pay before the ship departed and then to permit a designated representative to collect their wages at regular intervals during the voyage.33 Another aspect of East India Company practices was ‘the privilege’ accorded each seaman down to the rank of carpenter. Each man on board ship was granted a small amount of cargo space in which he could ship, freight free, a few items for ‘private trading’. Rediker estimates that 5 per cent of cargo space was allotted for private trade. The amount was allocated by rank but even the cabin boy had a little space for small ‘ventures’, although those of lowliest standing could only benefit from unofficial trade.34 The use of these privileges, and the practices of ticket discounting linked the seafaring world to the semi-criminal. The situation that was created meant that women could set up as moneylenders and pawnbrokers as a means to cope with the fluctuations in the uncertain maritime economy.35 Although this was a close community with strong networks of women, competing claims to use the power of attorney and access the privileges must have been a source of friction. There are many examples of cases heard by the Court of Committees concerning the ‘privilege’. For example, in 1635, Mary Fall, the wife of a factor

31

Sainsbury, Calendar, 1671–73, 16/5/1673, p. 237. Hunt, ‘Women and the fiscal-imperial state’, esp. p. 3. 33 Rediker, Between the Devil, p. 41. 34 Ibid., p. 131. Custom-made items, such as Chinese porcelain that incorporated family coats of arms, were often dealt with by private trade. 35 M. Hunt, ‘Women, credit and the seafaring community in early eighteenth-century London’ (unpublished paper at International Economic History Congress, Madrid, August 1998). For the connections with recruitment and collection of payments for those who were overseas in the Dutch context see M.A. van Alphen, ‘The female side of Dutch shipping: financial bonds of seamen ashore in the seventeenth and eighteenth century’, in J.R. Bruijn and W.F.R. Mörzer Bruyns (eds) Anglo-Dutch Mercantile Relations, 1700–1850 (Leiden, 1991). 32

56

WOMEN AND THE EAST INDIA COMPANY

in Persia, wanted to make sure that two Persian carpets and forty pieces of ‘coast linen’ were to be considered as part of the private trade of herself and her husband.36 Sometimes such attempts were foiled by accusations of past corruption. In 1640 Captain Hall and Mr Steevens, the Company’s shipwright, intervened on behalf of Mrs Steevens, the wife of Thomas Steevens (presumably the shipwright’s brother), master of the Crispian, for remission of freight on calicoes brought home by her husband on the Mary. The application was refused, because the Court remembered that Steevens had received favour for private trade when he was master of the Swan, and also his frustrated attempt to carry away some calicoes secretly.37 In 1641 the Court discussed the unloading of the Hopewell and paying the mariners the balance of their wages. They had so far refused to give a widow, Mrs Roberts, a warrant for the dividends due upon her late husband’s adventure, as he had a debt of over £600 to the Company, shared with two others. After consideration of the matter, it was decided that on payment of half the debt she should be given a warrant to receive the dividend of the calicoes. But by the end of the month the Court ordered that Mrs Roberts be paid everything due to her from her late husband’s adventure.38 The ‘power’, the ‘privilege’ and the ‘impressed money’ carry their own weight as words. But what is evident is that, despite the fact that the East India Company did not have a good record for the way it treated its workers, in comparison with other types of long distance seafaring this allowance and payment system seems generous. In nineteenth-century America, whaling vessels could be at sea for up to three years but it was only the wives of trusted and senior seamen who were given advances – whaling was too unpredictable for that. As a result such whaling communities saw much female piecework, shopkeeping, taking in of boarders and other contrivances to make ends meet.39 It is evident that there would have been many lodging houses in the vicinity of the East India Company’s operations in London but they make only rare appearances in the records. In 1643 the Court authorized for Anne Bullock to board and lodge ‘Black John’ as cheaply as possible. This Indian counterpart of ‘Black Jack’ came in the Reformation and was to be employed at the shipyard at wages fitting for his maintenance until the departure of the next ship for India.40 The involvement of women in the broader schemes of the Company becomes more apparent when poor relief and financial paternalism are considered.

36

Sainsbury, Calendar, 1635–39, 28/8/1635, p. 84. Sainsbury, Calendar, 1640–43, 6/5/1640, p. 38. 38 Sainsbury, Calendar, 1640–43, p. 184; 12/8/1641, p. 184; 27/8/1641, p. 188. 39 See L. Norling, ‘Ahab’s wife: women and the American whaling industry, 1820–1870’, in Creighton and Norling Iron Men, Wooden Women, p. 77, and L. Norling, Captain Ahab had a Wife: New England Women and the Whalefishery, 1720–1870 (Chapel Hill, 2000). 40 Sainsbury, Calendar, 1640–43, 23/8/1643, p. 344. 37

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WOMEN, WORK AND WAGES IN ENGLAND, 1600–1850

Poor relief and financial paternalism In these areas surveying the records of the Court produces an extraordinary range of interactions between women and the East India Company. If we take two months of the year of 1635, for example, we can see women of all social levels appearing at the Court. Sarah, wife of John Harley in the Reformation, a nurse to Sir Thomas Richardson’s child, was allowed to receive two months’ extra pay of her husband’s wages.41 The Court ‘Ordered that Mrs Collyns be sent for to give account of sixty barrels of the Company’s powder she had to mend and should long since have been sent to Blackwall’.42 And showing evidence of the patronage of elite women within the Company, ‘Richard Harvey, entertained as a barber in the William, on recommendation of the Countess of Dorset’.43 The early modern historian Joan Thirsk has postulated that women are often found at the outset of initiatives whenever new openings have appeared on the English scene, whether in crafts, or in trade . . . women have usually been prominent alongside the men, sometimes even outnumbering them. Certainly they have been involved on a basis of equality with men. But that situation has lasted only until the venture has been satisfactorily and firmly established, and when it has become institutionalized, formalized and organized. 44

However, ‘Thirsk’s Law’ does not quite work in this case; women are not at all evident in the Minutes of the Court at the very beginning of the East India Company trading in the 1600s but they are a clear part of it by the 1630s.45 One reason for this was that by this point the Company had become established and permanent, and had moved from being a single terminable joint stock organisation and developed the infrastructure to support a more sophisticated form of institution. Women were admitted as voters to joint stock companies on the same terms as men.46 Another reason is that the Company gradually created its own female workforce. Mrs Collyns was probably a ‘middling sort’ of widow who was granted business preferences because of her late husband’s service to the Company. He may have also left her some capital. Often when women

41

Sainsbury, Calendar, 1635–39, 16/1/1635, p. 6 Sainsbury, Calendar, 1635–39 23/2/1635 p. 27. 43 Sainsbury, Calendar, 1635–39, 21/1/1635, p. 8. 44 J. Thirsk, ‘The history women’, in M. O’Dowd and M. Wichert (eds) Chattel, Servant or Citizen: Women’s Status in Church, State and Society (Belfast, 1995) pp. 1–2. 45 H. Stevens (ed.), The Dawn of British Trade to the East Indies as Recorded in the Court Minutes of the East India Company, 1599–1603 (London, 1886). 46 S. Staves, ‘Investments, votes and “bribes”: women as shareholders in the Chartered National Companies’, in H.L. Smith (ed.) Women Writers and the Early Modern British Political Tradition (Cambridge, 1998). 42

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pursued claims relating to their late husbands they had already changed their name, indicating the rapid remarriage we would expect to find in a seafaring community. Such women had often married other mariners and, by employing them as well, the East India Company effectively subsidised its own workforce. Palpably, looking through the records, women formed the settled core of this seafaring community. Seventeenth-century Stepney, for example, was a teeming parish with a striking number of remarriages of widows.47 Of course, some women were not in a position to work for the Company, and a group referred to as ‘the poore East India widdowes’ is often mentioned in the Court minutes. Thomas Mun said in 1621: ‘many poor widows, wives, and children of Blackwall, Limehouse, Ratcliffe, Shadwell, and Wapping [are] often relieved by the East India Company with whole hogsheads of good beef and port, biscuit and doles of ready money.’48 The Company also maintained a poor box. Although we cannot discern her connection, if any, with the Company, in 1640 on her petition and the Lord Mayor’s recommendation £5 was given from the poor box to Hannah Pendred, only daughter of ‘that reverend Gent the late William Perkyns of Cambridge (celebrated divine), to supply her wants’.49 In 1642 a Mrs Muschampe petitioned the Court about the great losses her husband sustained after returning from his employment, and the long and expensive law case he entered into ‘to afford her and her five small children some relief, they being reduced to a miserable and comfortless state’. The Court agreed to petition the General Court and said, ‘though nothing is due to her yet it is conceived that it would be an act of charity for the general court to bestow upon her £200, if on receipt of her husbands accounts everything appears straight’.50 In other cases the Company helped widows by providing a sort of quasibanking service or ‘mutual fund’. In particular, they offered preferred lender status to small investors who were connected to the Company through the service of their husbands or other relatives. In the 1670s a petition was read to the Court from Ellen Durley, widow of Henry Durley who served the Company in nine voyages to the Indies. She asked that the whole estate of £600 left to her and her children be taken into the Company’s cash at interest. The Treasury Committee were directed to receive the sum and allow the widow interest at 5 per cent.51 Similar functions were taken on when the Company agreed to safeguard money for children. In the 1630s the widow and

47

London Metropolitan Archives Baptism (1656–81) and Marriage Registers (1657/8– 1686) for St Dunstan and All Saints, Stepney, microfilms X24/67 P93/DUN/258 and X24/68 P93/DUN/266. 48 Chaudhuri, English East India Company, p. 90. 49 Sainsbury, 1640–43, 103/1640, p. 23. According to The Dictionary of National Biography, vol. XV, pp. 892–895, William Perkyns married in 1594 and died in 1602, so his daughter was presumably born between those dates. 50 Sainsbury, Calendar, 1640–43, 4/3/1642, p. 235. 51 Sainsbury, Calendar, 1674–76, 18/8/1675, p. 205. 59

WOMEN, WORK AND WAGES IN ENGLAND, 1600–1850

administratrix of Henry Stout asked to be paid £22 belonging to her late husband and left by her for two years in the Company’s hands, on their promise to allow 5 per cent interest for the good of her son, as the boy’s uncle had promised to add to this sum and buy a piece of land for his nephew. It was ordered that both principal and interest be paid to her, she giving security to employ the money as she had promised.52 In the 1640s, Rose Fuller was to be paid £5l 5s (part of the money in the Company’s keeping for the use of her daughter) because of her own and her daughter’s great necessity. She promised to leave the remaining amount with the Company until her daughter came of age, without troubling them again and with 8 per cent interest to be paid to her.53 Such schemes, similar to those operated by some town corporations and pre-dating reliable banks, raised money for the Company but mixed money management with paternalism for employees’ relatives. Many widows had complicated sets of circumstances to unravel as a result of their husbands’ deaths and it is here that we see the Company taking on the functions of a civil court. Widow Thompkins petitioned for the wages of the late John Clarke, in payment of a debt due to her late husband. It was ordered that she be paid the debt and her charges but that Clarke’s estate be reserved for his father, who was still living. Another widow and her son, both executors to a dead mariner, also transferred the profits from stock to Clarke’s father. 54 As the Company expanded, it also became apparent that it had to make more provision for women. In 1642 the case of William Satterford was discussed. He had been admitted to the Company’s almshouse but he was not able to manage without the assistance of his wife. As women were not admitted to the almshouse, the Court ordered him to remain at home and to be given 2s 6d a week in addition to his allowance as an almsman.55 Eight months later, Mr Satterford was back in the almshouse at Blackwall but was told that his wife was not to lodge there but only to assist him in the daytime.56 By contrast, ten years later, Mary Thorne, who had lost two husbands in the Company’s service, was admitted to the Company’s almshouse in her own right, ‘but order is given that her admittance shall be no president [precedent]

52

Sainsbury, Calendar, 1635–36, 8/4/1636, p. 169. Sainsbury, Calendar, 1640–43, 22/11/1643, p. 364. 54 Sainsbury, Calendar, 1640–43, 28/2/1640, p. 21, and in Calendar, 1650–54, 4/9/1650, p. 57. Court of Committees for the Fourth Joint Stock and Second General Voyage: ‘Lettice Young who has troubled the Company and Mr Sambrooke many years, comes into court with Mr Owen and two other solicitors, and desires that some exposition concerning her case may be read; but her case having been dismissed from Chancery, her request is refused, and Mr Owen is told that it is thought that the Co. or Sambrooke have wronged her, she can take what course she pleases against them.’ 55 Sainsbury, Calendar, 1640–43, 19/10/1642, p. 278. 56 Sainsbury, Calendar, 1640–43, 5/5/1643, p. 321. 53

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for women for the future’.57 Was Mary Gargon also pushing at the boundaries in 1666? She was the wife of Henry Gargon, and she asked the Court for an annual ‘salary’ for herself and her sister and for them to fund their voyage to St Helena where presumably Henry Gargon languished. The request of the two women was refused, but they were granted £5 (a whole year’s wages if Gargon was an ordinary sailor).58 Women’s business with the Company As we have already seen, it was a favour to widows to be given the tenders to make items needed for the ships and shipyards such as spikes, ropes, ironwork, glass, tillets (wrappers made of coarse cloth) and supply of provisions such as oatmeal and cider. Women also worked as dyers, calenderers, dressers and packers of broadcloth and long ells that were purchased for export, linking the Company with a large number of provincial industries. 59 Meanwhile the everincreasing amounts of imported cloth created the need for those who would press the cloth before it was sold. In 1668 Mrs Dent, a hot presser to the Company, stated that having lately changed her condition (perhaps she had married), she did not intend to continue that work.60 In 1635 the Court mentioned that Lucy Ashmore had been granted the Company’s work at Blackwall ‘as formerly’.61 In 1643 Lucy Ashmore’s daughters, Lucy Bearblocke and Margaret Coates, petitioned the Court concerning a house standing on the Company’s ground at the East India Yard at Blackwall. The house had been bought twenty years earlier by their mother, Lucy Ashmore (who, following ‘Thirsk’s Law’, was clearly alive to the opportunities when the Company expansion was happening) ‘for making of spunne yarn and twice layd ropes’. About fourteen years later the Company had granted to Boatswain Ingram a piece of the same ground on which he built three houses, and then took down the petitioner’s house ‘which stood upon a sufficient wharfe’ and rebuilt it on the marsh to their great disadvantage. They understood that Ingram was now to have a large part of the same ground where their warehouse stood, and if their business were moved again they would be bankrupt. They begged that their house and ground may ‘remaine to them as formerly’. 62 A month later a meeting took place at Blackwall at the request of Lucy and

57

Sainsbury, Calendar, 1650–54, 21/10/1653, p. 270. Sainsbury, Calendar, 1664–67, 21/12/1666, p. 269. 59 H.V. Bowen, ‘Sinews of trade and Empire: the supply of commodity exports to the East India Company during the late eighteenth century’, Economic History Review, LV (2002), pp. 466–86. 60 Sainsbury, Calendar, 1668–70, 21/10/1668, p. 107. 61 Sainsbury, Calendar, 1635–39, 10/7/1635, p. 75. 62 Sainsbury, Calendar, 1640–43, 19/5/1643, pp. 323–4. 58

61

WOMEN, WORK AND WAGES IN ENGLAND, 1600–1850

Margaret with the result that they could remain in possession of their building if it were repaired within a month and continue making spun yarn and ropes for the company. The request of Boatswain Ingram, for six feet of ground at the southwest end of Blackwall Causeway and for six old masts, was refused.63 The Company’s ever-increasing need for warehousing meant that it had to negotiate with many wealthy women to rent storage space. One complaint was that it needed to take action on being stinted for warehouse room in cellars at Lady Clitherow’s house.64 This house was the original location of East India House.65 Much of the land on which the new docks were built belonged to women. In 1647 a gentleman appeared at the Court on behalf of Mrs Cony, from whom the Company had the lease of the dock and tenements at Deptford and stated that these, which the Company was bound to maintain, were much in need of repair.66 Three weeks later a man appeared on behalf of another woman from whom the Company leased a dock at Deptford and desired repair. He was told to return in mid-May when it had been viewed.67 In 1651 a gentleman appeared on behalf of Lady Wylde [Lady Frances Weld] about Blackwell Yard for putting in of two lives on the lease. The Company offered £300 but Lady Weld’s representative stood out for £350.68 However, a week later it was agreed to give her the amount she wanted ‘if the title is found to be good’.69 Women also emerge as important lenders to the Company. This was evident when in 1640 following a rumour that the king intended to coin copper money, Lady Moulson, who had lent the Company a round sum which was now due, required to be repaid unless assurance was given that the debt could be repaid either in gold or silver coin at its present value. The Court considered this a most important matter and saw how difficult it would be if others drew in their debts. They asked their Secretary to write a petition to the King pointing out that the Company trade ‘which has never been in a more hopeful condition – will be much endangered’.70 In 1653, Elizabeth Ward, who had left £300 at interest with the Company in September 1652 and had not renewed her bill since, the Court ‘in regard she was a woman’, agreed to allow her interest up to the previous September, but no longer. Elizabeth Ward persisted and a week later renewed her request for additional interest. The order was given for her £300 principal to be returned with £15 interest for the year, and one of the Company officials was directed to make

63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70

Sainsbury, Calendar, 1640–43, 19/6/1643, p. 326. Sainsbury, Calendar, 1640–43, 19/10/1642, p. 278. Foster, East India House, pp. 1–19. Sainsbury, Calendar, 1644–49, 2/4/1647, p. 200. Sainsbury, Calendar, 1644–49, 23/4/1647, pp. 201–2. Sainsbury, Calendar, 1650–54, 15/1/1651, p. 84. Sainsbury, Calendar, 1650–54, 22/1/1651, p. 85. Sainsbury, Calendar, 1640–43, 15/7/1640, p. 64. 62

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her some allowance for the surplus time the Company had had the money, ‘but not for interest because of precedent’.71 As well as direct loan of money, women were stockholders in the Company. Lists of the transfer of stock perhaps surprisingly include many young women, suggesting that women might be having ‘adventures’ in stock rather than on the high seas.72 In 1669 an item relating to the freedom of the Company was raised. All single women (not being widows of freemen) having adventures in this stock by original subscription or purchase, are to pay £5, for they having their share of the £5 paid in by others, with privileges for their interest of trade and commerce, and when this has not been paid by any single woman who is now an adventurer in this stock the £5 is to be put into her account.73

Dickson, the historian of finance in this era, finds that ‘Women were less important as subscribers to the Bank and as East India stockholders than as subscribers to government annuities and as stockholders of the Bank of England’; nevertheless, 10.6 per cent of total holders of East India stock in 1709 were women.74 In 1748 women comprised 22.5 per cent of East India Company stockholders so there was a discernible rise over the early eighteenth century. According to Dickson, ‘In Bank and East India stock women owned proportionately more than they had thirty years earlier, and had also somewhat increased as a total number of owners’.75 I have not attempted to analyse the business activities between women and the eighteenth-century Company, and it is possible that increasing stockholdings suggest a rise in passive rather than active involvement with the Company. In other words, we may find fewer women’s businesses operating in the eighteenth-century shipyards.76

71

Sainsbury, Calendar, 1650–54, 7/12/1653, p. 278; 14/12/1653, p. 281. H.V. Bowen, ‘Investment and Empire in the later eighteenth century: East India stockholding, 1756–1791’, Economic History Review, 42 (1989), pp. 186–206. 73 Sainsbury, Calendar, 1668–70, 31/3/1669, p. 182. 74 P.G.M. Dickson, The Financial Revolution in England: A Study in the Development of Public Credit, 1688–1756 (Aldershot, 1967, 1993 edn), pp. 268–9. See also K.G. Davies, ‘Joint stock investment in the later seventeenth century’, Economic History Review, 5 (1952), pp. 283–301. 75 Dickson, The Financial Revolution, p. 298. 76 These are, of course, private rather than Company shipyards by this stage. Huw Bowen’s research on cash journals shows an increasing number and range of women supplying goods and services to the Company in the eighteenth century so it may be that this supposition is not correct because it is offset by other factors (private communication). 72

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Gender at sea In the second half of the seventeenth century the Court often debated whether women should be allowed to travel: ‘Aaron Baker and Captain Blackman ask to take their wives to Surat with their women attendants, although this has never been allowed before’ (20 February 1650).77 After a ‘long debate’ (which we wish we could hear), the Court decided that the request of the two men should be permitted. For the next few decades this issue did not go away. Soon after Bombay had been established the Company started to set rules for women travelling there that would not restrict their potential as marriage partners: ‘women or maidservants going to Bombay are not to be obliged to remain with their employers over a year from the time of arrival and, if they marry an Englishman within the said year, with consent of the Governor and Council, they are to have their liberty and their husband is not to give their employer any consideration for their time.’78 A few weeks later this was refined and single women were actively persuaded to go. If any single women or maids related to the soldiers or others ‘of sober and civil lives’ were willing to go to Bombay, ‘twenty shall be permitted to do so at the Company’s expense, and if they desire it and do not marry Englishmen, then for one year after their arrival, the company are to provide them with food and a suit of clothes “according to the fashion of the country” during which time they were to be employed in the Company’s service, but not in planting. These women are not allowed to marry any but those of their own nation, or such as are Protestants, and upon marriage they are to be free.’ 79 By the late 1660s it had become usual for wives of planters, factors or soldiers to go – indeed they were thought to ease the expense of provisions and aid settlement of ‘an English collony’.80 But in 1672 the ‘Rules to be prepared by the Committee for Shipping and Plantations for such women as are permitted to go to Bombay’ stated that ‘Only women of good behavior, and those suitable as wives for the soldiers and planters, be permitted to go to India unless it be some sober person to goe along with any considerable factor, or persons of quality that take their wives with them’.81 This issue was discussed again for other trading ports during 1672 and 1673 although the debate mainly concerned Bombay.82 There was even a plan to send young women

77

Sainsbury, Calendar, 1650–54, 20/2//1650, p. 21. Sainsbury, Calendar, 1664–67, 4/12/1668, p. 125. 79 Sainsbury, Calendar, 1668–70, 30/12/1668, p. 135. 80 W. Foster, The English Factories in India 1668–1669 (Oxford, 1927), p. v. 81 Sainsbury, Calendar, 1668–70, 14/12/1670, p. 393. 82 Sainsbury, Calendar 1671–73, 14/11/1672, p. 19; 8/10/1673, p. 274. Dash, Batavia’s Graveyard, p. 90, suggests that from the first debate about the issue in 1610 the VOC also vacillated on whether or not to encourage women to travel. 78

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from Christ’s Hospital – thus ensuring that they had received a ‘virtuous education’.83 In the third quarter of the seventeenth century, the Company therefore had to confront the question of whether women should travel on their behalf. The discussions here are not dissimilar to those about female migration from England and Ireland to Australia two centuries later. As Jan Gothard has recently argued, such women were not perceived only as marriage partners.84 For the East India Company, this was the role that the Company hoped women would take, but they are also envisaged as servants or Company employees.

Conclusion It turned out to be Captain Bildad, who along with Captain Peleg, was one of the largest owners of the vessel; the other shares, as is sometimes the case in these ports, being held by a crowd of old annuitants; widows, fatherless children, and Chancery Wards, each owning about the value of a timber head, or a food of plank, or a nail or two in the ship. People in Nantucket invest their money in whaling vessels, the same way that you do yours in approved state stocks bringing in good interest. (Herman Melville, Moby Dick, or The Whale, Random House, p.106)

Rather like Herman Melville’s description of the whaling ports of North America in Moby Dick, the tentacles of the East India Company seemed to draw everyone in. The social history of the East India Company’s operations seem little researched compared to its economic, militaristic and imperial contribution, yet its function as both a bank and a social welfare institution clearly had an enormous impact on both local people and those beyond the hinterland of the Company’s immediate operations in the East End of London. Most women did work in early modern London (and in different employment sectors from their husbands) and the East India Company fostered this pattern of work in the docklands.85 The vast undertaking of the dockyards and warehouses provided women’s work in an industrial complex that must have made an enormous difference to livelihoods in the area. Some of the work must have been as makeshift as that of the sailors’ wives described at the outset, but for others, such as the apparently woman-only business run by Lucy Ashmore and her daughters, there were more substantial opportunities. Moreover, the Company provided women with investment opportunities such 83

Sainsbury, Calendar, 1674–76, p. xi. J. Gothard, Blue China: Single Female Migration to Colonial Australia (Melbourne, 2001); J. Gothard, ‘Wives or workers? Single British female migration to Colonial Australia’, in Sharpe (ed.) Women, Gender and Labour Migration, pp. 145–62. 85 P. Earle, ‘The female labour market in London in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries’, Economic History Review, 42 (1989), pp. 328–53. 84

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as the knitting frames that women put spare capital into in the industrial towns of Leicestershire considered by Penny Lane, or the women who had shares in lead mines in Derbyshire described by Andy Wood, or, indeed, the people of Nantucket and other ports who had shares in boats.86 The evidence about women’s interactions with the Company put a different cast on the belief that the Company treated its employees badly. Although this trading company was impersonal, it was not lacking in generosity, and the petitioning of women to the Court seems to have generally been effective, even if the age we are viewing here appears to have been one of precedents. The advance payment systems also reflect some concern for the family of employees. Nevertheless, this impression has been drawn from one source. Wider study of local and civil court records and poor relief documentation would obviously embellish this picture and help to place the functioning of the Company within the context of the local economy. It would hardly be a surprise if the view from outside the inner circle of those who benefited from the Company’s largesse would be less optimistic. The Court gives us details of the English-born who had long established links with the Company, often over generations. In actuality, the seafaring population would have been much more diverse and cosmopolitan than these records suggest.87 Regardless of their economic standing, local women became connected to the wider world through the dealings of the Company, especially when they also began to travel with the Company rather than just dealing with ‘the power’ and ‘the privilege’ on behalf of their menfolk. A woman like the sixtimes widowed Jane Smith, mentioned at the outset, developed an international outlook. For many women, issues may have resembled those faced by modern people who work for global companies. While their husbands’ absences meant they had to develop independent lives, they were always influenced by the vicissitudes of the Company. As we have seen, such influence persisted beyond the death of a Company man. It was pervasive and paternalist, forming the background to the situation where by the end of the eighteenth century the Directors often talked about their responsibility to their ‘family’ or the ‘children of the East India House’.88 This Company was not without impact on the material lives of women as well as men. These were lives of much toil but some hope.

86

A. Wood, The Politics of Social Conflict: the Peak Country, 1520–1720 (Cambridge, 1999), p. 173; P. Lane, ‘Women, property and inheritance: wealth creation and income generation in small English towns, 1750–1835’, in J. Stobart and A. Owens (eds) Urban Fortunes: Property and Inheritance in the Town, 1700–1900 (Aldershot, 2000). 87 See P. Linebaugh and M. Rediker, Many Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (London, 2000). 88 I owe this observation to Huw Bowen. 66

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Acknowledgements The language used in the Court of Committees has been modernised by the editor of the published minutes. My thanks for help to Huw Bowen, Margaret Hunt, the UWA Discipline of History Postgraduate seminar (especially Bill Walker), and for the discussion at the research seminar when I presented this paper at Keio University, Tokyo, and to the Maritime History Group at Hull University, UK.

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3

Sickles and scythes revisited Harvest work, wages and symbolic meanings MICHAEL ROBERTS

My original ‘Sickles and scythes’ article was a response to the work of Eve Hostettler, who had had the good idea of using visual representations of harvest work in her discussion of the nineteenth-century sexual division of labour.1 I took that story back before 1800, and tried to use evidence of harvest scenes to chart the use of hand tools by men and women across a long period of time. My approach had several origins: some impatience with the imperialistic claims of nineteenth-century social historians; an early modernist’s commitment to demonstrating the fluidity and fertility of ‘preindustrial’ developments; a descendant of Lancashire weavers’ axiomatic understanding of the importance of women’s work; and an interest in the possibility of using new sources not only to explore historical topics but also to make visible to the reader the processes of historical enquiry. ‘Sickles and scythes’ was an experimental essay in what was then a young and experimental journal. In the issue in which it was published the editorial collective called for volunteers to pay larger subscriptions to support its expansion, adding rather defensively that ‘the Journal is now an unshakeable fact’. Born out of the exciting and often rowdy sessions of the History Workshop movement – crowded, contentious, and strenuously if variously committed to the broad political usefulness of the past – the journal invited a degree of mixed-media presentation, and of authorial self-reflection, which, even after more than a quarter of a century of Past and Present, were then (and possibly still are) unusual in British historical publications. While the editorial collective did me proud with an excellent selection of illustrations, there was less agreement as to the role of the statistical tables. For

1 M. Roberts, ‘Sickles and scythes: women’s work and men’s work at harvest time’, History Workshop Journal, 7 (1979); E. Hostettler, ‘Gourlay Steele and the sexual division of labour’, History Workshop Journal, 4 (1977). It is worth noting that Hostettler’s article appeared in the same year as J. Kelly-Gadol’s path-breaking ‘Did women have a Renaissance?’ in, R. Bridenthal and C. Koonz (eds) Becoming Visible: Women in European History (Boston, 1977).

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their inclusion I had to argue firmly that their omission would actually be more condescending towards the hoped-for popular audience. There was also some editorial unease that I seemed to be arguing that women’s occupational roles might be determined by their physiology, having found that while women worked as reapers using sickles to cut the corn, they did not seem to be employed as mowers once the scythe came into common use for this purpose. The tables stayed too, and shortly after publication Donald Woodward was the first to call into question, in personal correspondence, how I was using the quantitative material, as he prepared a wonderful new edition of Henry Best’s farming books. On the whole much less attention was paid to my cautious ‘Afterword’ (introduced as ‘a final note of warning and selfcriticism’), which the editors bracketed with a lovely medieval illuminated letter H, on whose cross-bar sits a weary mower, a man, with his scythe resting on his shoulder.2 Looking back at the article after the elapse of much time, the shifting emphasis between a cultural and a physical or biological explanation for the confinement of scythes to male mowers seems most evident. I noted how ‘The tendency for men to adopt the heavier implements can be detected at the earliest stage of agricultural development’, and that ‘The increased size and weight of the scythe emphasised the strength and stature required of the mower, effectively confining its use to the strongest men’ (emphasis added).3 But it was also stated categorically that the male mowing monopoly could best be explained in terms not of social convention but ‘of greater male strength and physical stature’. The difficulty here arose, of course, from the need to empathise with the outlook of a seventeenth-century farmer like Henry Best while at the same time offering an interpretation which accorded with developing feminist thinking in the 1970s. Moreover, despite the fragility of the evidence and some of the inferences, the article presented a robust longterm vantage point from which it seemed light could be thrown on important aspects of the ‘agricultural revolution’, what Amanda Vickery has characterised in terms of women’s history as ‘the saga of decline and fall in the corn belt’.4 In particular, the greater use of scythes wielded by highly paid men seemed to be reflected in the changing sexual division of labour in mideighteenth-century English agriculture as reconstructed by Keith Snell from settlement examinations and other sources.5 2

I relate this to repay part of the enormous debt of inspiration I owe to both Tim Mason and Raphael Samuel, and to the Workshop project as a whole. 3 ’Sickles and scythes’, pp. 7–8. 4 A. Vickery, ‘Golden age to separate spheres? A review of the categories and chronology of English women’s history’, Historical Journal, 36 (1993), reprinted in P. Sharpe (ed.) Women’s Work: The English Experience 1650–1914 (London, 1998), pp. 328–9 n. 74. 5 K.D.M. Snell, Annals of the Labouring Poor: Social Change and Agrarian England, 1660–1900 (Cambridge, 1985); see also now Sharpe (ed.), Women’s Work, pp. 73–121. For doubts about the settlement evidence, which do not in my view undermine its plausibility 69

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A kind of grand narrative thus came to be constructed out of the longterm association between men and scythes, whereas my initial impulse in responding to Hostettler had been to demonstrate rather the mutability of the sexual division of labour across time. By endeavouring to clinch the consistent lack of association between scythes and women as a device by which to plot the employment available where scythes were used, the result dramatised a single story of exclusion. It was hard to avoid a tendency to emphasise the binary pairing or opposition between sickles and scythes, and a long-term linear shift from the use of one to the use of the other. Such a shift did not entail any simple substitution of male for female labour, since sickles were used by both sexes whereas scythes were not, and the wider body of followers and binders included both sexes. But the controversial question of strength, physique and stamina seemed to reinforce the binary opposition between the sexes, as did certain cultural uses of harvesting implements. In turn, this particular setting seemed to fit with our wider picture of gender asymmetry at work and in wage payments: what we needed to explain were the long-term, seemingly structural, inferiority of women’s opportunities, status and rewards. The Afterword’s warnings about the need to investigate variations within the harvest brought by age, farm size and orientation towards the market, and to consider the typicality of the harvest as a form of work were certainly required. Subsequent studies have often tended to emphasise complexity and variability. As Nicola Verdon has recently confirmed from a survey of nineteenth-century parliamentary papers and farm accounts, there were ‘subtle regional patterns of work and wages for men and women’ in agriculture even in that period, patterns which also changed through time.6 Another recent student of medieval women’s waged work has also concluded that the picture emerging from our sources ‘is a complex one’. The growing number of relevant studies in this field has itself also tended to emphasise the variety.7

as a guide to seasonal unemployment, see N. Landau, ‘Who was subjected to the laws of settlement? Procedure under the settlement laws in eighteenth-century England’, Agricultural Historical Review, 43 (1995), pp. 139–59. 6 N. Verdon, Rural Women Workers in Nineteenth-Century England: Gender, Work and Wages (Woodbridge, 2002), p. 121. 7 S. Bardsley, ‘Women’s work reconsidered: gender and wage differentiation in late medieval England’, Past and Present, 165 (1999), pp. 3–29. To the works of Verdon and Bardsley, which make reference to this ample literature, might be added J. Burnette, ‘Labourers at the Oakes: changes in the demand for female day-labourers at a farm near Sheffield during the Agricultural Revolution’, Journal of Economic History, lix (1999), pp. 41–67; S. Horrell and J. Humphries, ‘Women’s labour force participation and the transition to the male-breadwinner family, 1790–1865’, Economic History Review, xlviii (1995), pp. 89–117, reprinted in Sharpe (ed.), Women’s Work, pp. 172–204; J. Humphries, ‘Enclosures, common rights and women: the proletarianization of families in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries’, Journal of Economic History, l (1990), pp. 17–42. 70

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What I had been trying to convey was the permeability of the technological, the biological, the material and the cultural, something which has become easier to grasp through the intervening development of historical interest in subjects such as the body, identity and in symbolic meanings. This had been one of the reasons for drawing on both pictures and statistics, as a rhetorical, or suggestive, device in writing the article. What an employer like Henry Best believed to be the case about the human body was what mattered historically, though by demonstrating how his own biological determinism may have led to the exclusion of women from high-paying harvest roles I sought also to show how the shifting sexual division of labour, within so primal a scene as the harvest, ultimately implied a lack of fixity in such arrangements when viewed over the long term, even if for Best these arrangements seemed justified by matters of immutable biological (and theological) fact. The argument also allowed for the possibility that technological change, even at this relatively modest level, might by no means conduce to the advantage of women. Since then we have come almost full circle and it is now positively fashionable to offer physiological explanations for the sexual division of labour. As Olwen Hufton asserts at the start of her survey of European women’s history, The Prospect Before Her, ‘In the early modern period, biology has to count for something. No one, for example, could plough a five-inch furrow in a condition of advanced or even early pregnancy.’8 ‘This,’ wrote Pat Thane in reviewing the book, ‘is to throw down the gauntlet to currently influential approaches: to accept such categories as “experience” and “real people” and the capacity of the historian to discern them in the past.’9 This return to ‘real people’ has come about as the pioneering generation of women’s historians from the 1960s and 1970s has aged, and confronted the full range of embodied experience in their own lives. Structural social history has given way to notions of social construction which have themselves been edged aside by a renewed interest in the material, and literally embodied, dimensions of the subject. Over the same period ‘economic’ approaches to the subject have bifurcated into distinct schools of quantitative and cultural economics. Meanwhile, what had been the moral burden of the 1970s historiography, namely its commitment to the experience of labour, has been replaced by the pursuit of identities. The representational sources I used to try to track actual tool usage in the harvest have almost become the object of study in their own right, so that we can now best appreciate the work of the harvester through the web of representations which was woven around it, rather than

8

O. Hufton, The Prospect Before Her: A History of Women in Western Europe, vol. i, 1500–1800 (1995), p. 5. 9 P. Thane, review of The Prospect Before Her, in the University of London, Institute of Historical Research, Reviews in History online series, June 1996: http://www.ihrinfo.ac.uk/ reviews/paper/editedh1.html. 71

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by treating the paid reward as a single, solid marker of its social meaning. Thanks to the work of Craig Muldrew and others, on the importance of trust in an economy chronically short of coinage, the harvest’s elaborate paraphernalia of symbolic reassurances may seem less quaint.10 While recent work by economic historians on the medieval period has often tended to emphasise the early development of the market,11 an emphasis often linked with methods being taken from economic analysis and community studies, we still need to keep developing a rather more ‘cultural’ approach to the early modern economy. If there has been a return of interest in the material body, bodily experience is never entirely unmediated. Anthropological studies of tool-using behaviour suggest that while there are superficial parallels with the way humans use language (most obviously in the symbolic role of tools such as the hammer and sickle), tool use in practice tends to be very largely learned, rather than inherited, behaviour.12 This places great importance on the learning environment, and on the observation and repeated practice which are required to achieve dexterity. The harvest field must always have been one such school, though one with a peculiarly fraught agenda, in that the pressures of changing weather could easily wipe out any time available for learning on the job. Looking back, I’m surprised at just how far my attempt to take the long view, chronologically speaking, led me to concentrate far too intently on the process of cutting the crop, at the expense of the broader social matrix within which harvesting was cast. The need to think in a more rounded way has been demonstrated by recent contributions to the history of women’s work in agriculture,13 and indeed by the marked disassociation between much of this material and studies of agricultural history more generally.14 The level of women’s harvest wages is still being used in some contexts as a touchstone for their economic status as a whole, while in other contexts cliometric speculations on productivity growth tend to omit women’s earnings altogether. While the grand narrative identified (somewhat crudely) by Vickery as ‘decline and fall in the corn belt’ has been criticised, there has actually been no conceptual shift towards a more subtle or complex combination of evidence and hypothesis. Not the least interesting aspect of this situation is the tendency to suppress the implied

10

C. Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England (London, 1998); J-C. Agnew, Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theatre in Anglo-American Thought (London, 1989). 11 For example, J. Masschaele, Peasants, Merchants, and Markets: Inland Trade in Medieval England, 1150–1350 (New York, 1997). 12 T. Ingold and K.R. Gibson (eds), Tools, Language and Cognition in Human Evolution (Cambridge, 1993). 13 Usefully summarised by Bardsley and Verdon, see nn. 5 and 6 above. 14 This is most marked in the literature on productivity, total factor or otherwise, and least obvious in the Agrarian History of England and Wales, vols v and vi, see nn. 37, 45. 72

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questioning of what historical practice might actually be for, and achieve. By drawing on Hayden White’s suggestive analysis of the deep structure of historical works, together with Bonnie Smith’s characterisation of the historical discipline in terms of its heavily male social formation, we can perhaps pull back from some of the more obvious confrontations between rival approaches to consider the underlying poetic tensions between a ‘pastoral’ history of lost innocence on the one hand, and a Promethian narrative of technical ‘progress’ on the other.15 But in the field of work, ‘poetic tensions’ can often seem to be beside the point. Pam Sharpe, in briskly summarising responses to Keith Snell’s argument, writes that it privileges ‘economic factors’ over ‘social attitudes’ in explaining how tool use affected opportunities for women. She adds that ‘many feminist historians’ would prefer to privilege attitudinal factors, noting work by both Karen Sayer and Deborah Valenze which demonstrates the impact of such attitudes.16 In fact, Snell himself had already pointed to the possible importance of sexual attitudes in making livestock, dairying and hay harvest work relatively more important for women in the western counties, as compared with the east. Snell subtly challenged the feminist assumption that men would lay claim to the region’s dominant forms of specialisation, and suggested that the seasonality of pastoral specialisation may have fitted women better as compared with a tight harvest schedule. Moreover, Snell’s book is remarkable for the attention it devotes to Hardy’s literary representation of the rural world, and the discrepancies between Wessex fiction and reality. Our understanding of the past world of work depends in important respects on how we read histories, as well as the primary evidence, and on how we choose to write them. Both the growing body of studies on ‘women’s work’, and the literature on agricultural history more generally, tend to be compromised by the imposition of an external frame of reference on to subjects like the harvest through which it becomes a measure of progress (or of course, ‘decline and fall’). This procedure seems to be justified by the very evidence itself, which from medieval times onward subjects the process of cutting and stacking the crop to so many regulatory observations, through labour legislation, courts of law, books of husbandry and so on. Harvesting, and women’s place within it, in other words, seems to contribute quite naturally to an emerging discourse of economics, and the counter-discourse represented by studies of women’s work. Henry Best’s careful observations on the deployment of his harvest labour

15 H. White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore, 1973); B. Smith, The Gender of History: Men, Women and Historical Practice (Cambridge, Mass., 1998); R. Waswo, The Founding Legend of Western Civilization: From Vergil to Vietnam (London, 1997); C. Steedman, Dust (Manchester, 2002). 16 P. Sharpe (ed.), Women’s Work: The English Experience 1650–1914 (London, 1998), p. 71.

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seem to prefigure our own quest for an understanding of the springs of productivity growth. Yet there may be another way of using the ‘origins’ of labour economics to our advantage. Jane Humphries has argued that the organisation of economics as a discipline around a methodology rather than a subject matter tends to protect it from criticism, and leaves the fundamental critique available from feminism on the outside, looking in. Her response is to use concepts from within neoclassical economics itself for feminist purposes.17 An alternative or complementary strategy might be to think of economics in historical terms, as a discipline built on assumptions about, and carrying the residues of, an earlier culture. Diana Strassman has noted how quantitative economic analysis rests in the end on narrative assumptions, and we can also see assumptions at play in early descriptions of harvest techniques, or in the model budgets constructed by surveyors of agriculture in the later eighteenth century.18 But a ‘cultural’ reading of such evidence still tends to be regarded as somehow additional to the main business of conducting an economic analysis, even though it can only be by reconstructing the world of assumptions surrounding them that such puzzling phenomena as wage ‘payments’ that were sticky or stable (and, for women, small) over long periods of time can be fully understood.19 Viewed on its own terms, rather than ours, the harvest prior to 1800 (and in much of the British Isles for a good while afterwards) represented a potent engagement between the powers of human calculation and the flux of the unpredictable. Through its combination of concerted human mobilisation and the inevitably wayward weather, the harvest generated each year a situation in which all elements had to be weighed and handled carefully. Cutting the crop tore nature into culture, but a culture which acted like a force of nature in the respects in which it determined how far practice was improvable. For this reason, early analytical accounts of harvest management like Best’s have this pioneering air about them, even though in some respects they are composed within an old tradition. The situation also called for an explanation of how those elements which could be controlled were related to the things which could not. This is what the symbolic paraphernalia of the harvest provided, imposing by analogy on to the uncontrollable, the illusion of mastery. Control over the harvest’s symbolic meaning was inevitably contested, a contest itself represented through challenge rituals, and the race to cut the last

17 J. Humphries, ‘Rational economic families’, in J. Cook, J. Roberts and G. Waylen (eds) Towards a Gendered Political Economy (London, 2000). 18 D. Strassman, ‘Editorial: Expanding the methodological boundaries of economics’, Feminist Economics, iii.2 (1997). 19 Verdon, Women, Work and Wages, pp. 26–30, summarising recent works relating to women’s wages.

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sheaf. Physical actions made palpable the outcome of uncertainty, and we need to think of the deployment of male and female labour too within this framework. As Sandy Bardsley has reminded us, there were different age groups at work in the harvest, and bodily prowess was a question of stamina as well as of brute strength, and the sexual division of stamina was much less unequal than of strength.20 How these variables were construed was determined by ideas about gender which may have changed substantially between the Middle Ages and the nineteenth century, interpreted in a number of alternative traditions by historians interested in proletarianisation, the growth of the market, the persistence of ‘custom’, demographic cycles, the mystery of productivity, or the enduring hold of patriarchal ‘structures’. The harvest, too, combines both local and universal elements, a relation which undoubtedly changed through time. The harvest sponsored the earliest forms of legitimate popular mobility in the medieval period, and the strong ‘local’ dimension to our understanding of harvest work which we have inherited may well be an artefact of relatively recent historical change, whereby what were once acknowledged as universally-valid cultural forms have come to be seen as peculiarly local figures. The local in any case has itself been subject to historical transformation, and part of the ‘customary’ side of the harvest entailed provisions to feed, equip and accommodate migrant harvesters, to make them feel at least temporarily at home.21 Mobility linked to the harvest connected towns and cities with the hinterlands from which their populations had been drawn, as well as linking different farming regions. In this respect there was a ‘real’ engagement between observers and participants to match that rehearsed ideologically in pastoral literature.22 The harvest as an interface between the urban and the rural world deserves closer attention.23 In any case, as Liana Vardi has shown in the case of France, ‘Pastoral’ regard for harvest labour could have a very hard-headed political message.24 To

20 S. Bardsley, ‘Reply’, Past and Present, 173 (2001), a reply to J. Hatcher, ‘Women’s work reconsidered: gender and wage differentiation in late medieval England’, Past and Present, 173 (2001). 21 J. Lucassen has noted, for example, how migrant grass mowers who moved to work on the dairy farms of Friesland from the east were known as ‘ants’: Migrant Labour in Europe 1600–1900: The Drift to the North Sea (London, 1987), p. 53. 22 J. Goodridge, Rural Life in Eighteenth-Century English Poetry (Cambridge, 1996). 23 See e.g. C. Estabrook, Urbane and Rustic England: Cultural Ties and Social Spheres in the Provinces, 1660–1780 (1998); cf. B. Hill, Women, Work and Sexual Politics in Eighteenthcentury England (London, 1994), p. 39, for the late eighteenth-century urban exodus to the harvest fields. 24 L. Vardi, ‘Imagining the harvest in early modern Europe’, American Historical Review, 101 (1996). Vardi’s interesting analysis of successive images of muscular French harvesters during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries underplays the role of women, since her main concern is with the harvesting peasant as a figure of political consequence. Cf.

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pastoral discourse, of course, we should also add the language evolved in this period to domesticate and make profitable rural industry.25 Another evolving discourse may have been that associating the corn harvest with fertility rituals. The figure of the ‘corn goddess’, which folklorists often associate with the harvest, only became dominant in the study of ancient and peasant societies during the nineteenth century, when James Frazer borrowed heavily from the folklorist Wilhelm Mannhardt in developing his notion of a corn demon worshipped by contemporary European peasants and related by ‘the law of similarity’ to the earliest known human behaviour in antiquity.26 An alternative approach views harvest ‘ritual’ as more pragmatically instrumental, like the stories of the Rye Mother who could crush children to death which were used to discourage children from picking poppies or cornflowers amid the growing crops in Germany.27 Much of the associated ritual drew on elements of the popular culture of shaming and ribaldry, as with the widespread folk jeers at anyone lagging behind, the competitive eagerness not to cut the last corn, and the throwing of the last sheaf on to a lagging neighbour’s harvest fields in Wales and Scotland. The ritual elements also helped to objectify the competitive and potentially disorderly tensions on the harvest field, by dramatising the potency of any cutting work; and the urgent meaning of any entry on to the harvest field without intent to reap or mow. In this reading, the symbolic content carries its effect through the direction of attention, not through any latent remembrance of ancient narrative. If we accept this interpretation it should have implications for our view of the relationship between work and symbolic meanings over time, and we might expect harvest customs to shift or evolve in accordance with the changing social relationships of the village or the labour force. Part of our difficulty here comes from the quite heavy shaping influence of nineteenth- and twentieth-century representations of the harvest, and their often reductive or simplistic understandings of the wit, irony and transgression of supposedly ‘traditional’ folk practice. Where we have access to a semi-outsider’s view of events (as we have from Lewis Morris in mid-Wales in the eighteenth century), or a particularly detailed account of the harvest season, we can see just how ambiguous or contested the expected routines of folk custom might be.28 In Wales, too, the ceremonies which attended the cutting of the last of the corn

L. Vardi, ‘Construing the harvest: gleaners, farmers and officials in early modern France’, in American Historical Review, 98 (1993). 25 D. Rollison, ‘Discourse and class struggle: the politics of industry in early modern England’, Social History, xxvi.2 (2001), pp. 166–89. 26 R. Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft (Oxford, 2001); and R. Ackerman, J.G. Frazer: His Life and Work (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 81–2. 27 J. Blum (ed.), Our Forgotten Past (London, 1982), p. 167. 28 Lewis Morris’ observations may be found in T. M. Owen, Welsh Folk Customs (Cardiff, 1959), pp. 113, 121 and idem, A Pocket Guide: The Customs and Traditions of Wales (Cardiff, 1991), pp. 14–15. 76

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survived as late and as vibrantly as anywhere in the British Isles, and this despite the common observance of ‘pastoral’ seasonality in the hiring of farm servants, in early May and November. Folklorists’ accounts of these rituals imply a heavily male presence in the role of the person cutting the last stalks of corn; yet contemporary photographs show reaping parties mixed equally between women and men, all of them brandishing their sickles. This may be another instance of the tendency identified by Martine Segalen in nineteenth-century France, where bourgeois folklorists’ exaggeratedly vertical sense of hierarchy led them to depict a peasant society highly stratified by gender, while the surviving relics of peasant speech, for example, in the form of proverbs, suggest a much more even-handed parity of status. I will say more about these customs below. By the same token, of course, where the harvest is mediated through means of representation obedient to complex and well-established conventions, as in Baroque paintings and engravings, the wit, irony and transgression, the sheer messiness of a field at work, are often smoothed away in the artist’s eagerness to embrace compositional (and thus moral) order.29 This poses particular problems for a gendered reading of harvest work, since both tools and workforce are susceptible to an orderly binary disposition which possibly grossly misrepresents the actualities of the tasks undertaken. My own intuition here is that we should also be prepared to regard administrative and economic representations as in themselves also shaped to some extent by a similar type of regular coding. This is the case, for example, in the remarkable tendency for both male and female labour to be regulated on a basis of conceptual (if certainly not monetary) parity by Parliament and the magistrates. Although the ordering of wage rates in an assessment of wages was usually severely hierarchical, that vertical array was also variously shaped into a more complex visual pattern, within which meaning and status arose less from the great chain of being than from interchangeable positions on the grid of employment and rewards. Something of the sort can be recognised in painterly representations, as the harvest field or the lunch-time siesta offers up a microcosm of human activity at large, where women and men intermingle over the food or in repose, rather than appearing as superiors and inferiors. This leads us on to the question of how wage payments defined officially as pertaining to individuals were handled in practice, an issue Sandy Bardsley raises in her interesting study of medieval women’s work. While she suggests that these would very often have been handed over to the head of a harvest gang, so that we cannot tell what wages if any an individual woman might ‘receive’, for a later period it is perhaps easier to identify payment practices. There are

29

But see G. Jaritz, in D. Sweeney (ed.) Agriculture in the Middle Ages (Philadelphia, 1995), p. 180, for the grim depiction of a scythe being used in an act of harvesting as destruction; cf. p. 168 for satirical representation of a ‘noble’ peasant using a sickle, and p. 171 for idealised peasants. 77

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also suggestive cultural uses to which the idea of fair payment could be put. One of the most interesting of these was reflection on the Christian parable of the labourers in the vineyard, which we can see dramatically depicted in contemporary paintings. But another important dimension of the subject, given the historical roots of wage payment in military contexts, are the comparisons drawn at the popular as well as at the pastoral poet’s level between harvest work and preparation for war: it was ‘a quasi military operation’, observed George Ewart Evans, the Welsh-born East Anglian recorder of rural experience, ‘it was like an attack to beat an ancient enemy, the weather’. In the Netherlands the poet Lucas Rotgans wrote of migrant grass mowers in 1715 as so many ‘Westphalian heroes who wield the scythe as a spear./Grass knights, intrepidly swinging their arms.’30 In the light of these examples, we need not so much reject the evidence of what I am here calling representations, as to complicate and enrich our treatment of them, bearing in mind the multiplicity of discourses through which harvest work could be viewed, and the possibilities for analogical, inversionary or ironic references between them. As printed guides to farming practice, or wage assessments, put ideas about work, skill and value into circulation, so did the technical equipment of the harvest itself sustain the de facto growth of the metalworking and adjunct trades which supplied reaping hooks, scythes and scythe stones on a cross-regional basis. At the end of our period, when Thorold Rogers’ indefatigable collection of wage statistics was helping to establish the modern discipline of statistical economics, his contemporary Sir George Clausen was dwelling with equal intensity on farm work in a poignant and oddly disturbing series of paintings. Both perspectives ought to be brought together. The richness and non-linear nature of the representational evidence is most easily indicated through visual images. The late medieval ‘Books of Hours’ celebrated the labours of the months as an aspect of the wider order and sequence of the created world and of human labour within it, sometimes seeming to do so at quite a distance, as ‘pastoral’ commentary rather than heart-felt sympathy, and with the accompaniment of the shifting order of the constellations. Whether or not this representational tradition then fed into later forms of art such as landscape or genre painting seems to have something to do with the actualities of local agriculture. Although Brueghel’s depictions of the hay and corn harvest are well known to us from reproductions, whole volumes of Dutch landscape paintings from the mid-sixteenth century onward can in fact be consulted without finding many more or later examples. This may be related to the tendency for Dutch agriculture (or at least that of Holland) to abandon cereal production and shift towards dairying from the later Middle Ages onward.

30

Lucassen, Migrant Labour, p. 54. 78

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Because the harvest occurred each year, and people became habituated to it, descriptions of it cannot always be trusted to report ‘accurately’ on what transpired. Part of our difficulty here arises from the highly loaded way language is used when talking or writing about the rural world, agriculture and the production of food.31 It is also difficult from a technological point of view to avoid writing a whig history of increasing clarity, calculation and rationality on the part of those observing or commenting on the harvest process. Historians themselves also tend to carve up the subject into calculable elements, which allow for empirical analysis of many instances, perhaps grouped into time series of inputs and outputs, but only by stripping them of the frictional clutter which surrounds the secular trend. In the quantitative work of Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie on France, and in the majestic succession of volumes of the Agrarian History of England and Wales, the ‘big picture’ has been given pride of place, making all the more potent the move towards women’s small-scale cultivation, and alternative husbandry in general, which has characterised the recent work of the Agrarian History’s general editor, Joan Thirsk. This preference for the big picture, the agrarian arm of England’s imperial destiny, presents us, through the sheer ubiquity of English evidence and perhaps English self-regard, with an overpowering image of rural history and its place in the ‘national’ story. For this reason there is much to be said for taking an oblique view of what is believed to be the main story. Since I work in Wales, and have gained much from comparing its very different history with that of England, this is the oblique view I now prefer. But first, we can explore more obviously relevant aspects of the English harvest. There is another sense in which our opposition between rural labour and an urban and industrialising world is often overdrawn. As David Hey has shown, Norton, on the southern border of Hallamshire in Derbyshire, had a well-established trade in scythe manufacture by the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign and only there and in a couple of parishes on the Worcestershire– Staffordshire border were scythes made for a national market at that time. In the mid-seventeenth century, the Blythes of Norton Lees kept stocks of 2000 to sell in the markets of northern England and Scotland. The scythemakers were the richest of the rural metalworkers, and with the largest farms. Sickles were made by an even more concentrated group of families in the neighbouring parish of Eckington, where twenty-five of thirty-one sickle manufacturers in the 1787 Sheffield Directory were living.32 The sharpening stones which the seventeenth-century Lancashire shopkeeper Robert Lowe purchased, along with scythes for his shop at Ashton, were themselves also the products of intensely localised production, based around the available deposits

31

B. Rogers, Beef and Liberty (London, 2003). D. Hey, The Fiery Blades of Hallamshire: Sheffield and its Neighbourhood, 1660–1740 (Leicester, 1991), pp. 82, 95. 32

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of fine stone and connected to the agrarian economy through a web of trade routes, often by water, down the Severn or around the southern coast, and markets such as the annual Exeter Scythestone Fair in May or June each year.33 Scythe-making was not only economically valuable, it also came to represent the flourishing state of the whole economy, thriving in West Midlands parishes whose agriculture was also thriving, and distributing its products through a network of credit.34 A trade token issued by William Snead in Chester in 1668 had showed simply a scythe, an implement impressive and memorable perhaps through its shape and size. When Richard Baxter had commented in the seventeenth century on mowing pulling forth a whole man’s whole strength, he had had to say the same of scythe-making, too. But the enormous demand from the hay harvest and an expanding corn harvest use of scythes prompted innovation. There survive tokens from Staffordshire in 1814 which depict Withymoor scythe works, and its complex machinery, in compelling detail. This seems to have been the only firm to issue a token depicting the mechanisation of farming.35 Waldron Hill estimated that some 10,000 dozen scythes were produced annually in the West Midlands alone around 1787 and observed that ‘As long as the Kingdom is peopled there will be a certain demand for scythes’.36 By 1800 it has been suggested, ‘urban edge-tool makers had all but eclipsed their country-based counterparts in the production of sickles and scythes’.37 This technological expansion merely marked the latest phase in a process which had been under way for centuries, and whose implications for notions of gender identity may be profound. Viking Age finds from Norway show that ‘Sickles blades . . . are those most commonly found, in both male and female graves; other tools, such as scythe blades . . . and plough shares . . . are more generally restricted to male burials’.38 How we tease out those implications remains methodologically problematic. There is widespread scepticism among a younger generation of historians powerfully trained in archival research about the value of representations as evidence, and of a ‘cultural’ approach to economic phenomena. Yet these can yield surprising evidence about the thought-world in which tools were wielded and food gathered. The herald Randle Holme’s eccentric yet beguiling Academy of Armoury, for example, set out to equip the herald painter with the wherewithal to emblazon the arms of a man of any occupation. At one level the perspective is predictably condescending, as when including an 33

T.S. Willan, The Inland Trade (Manchester, 1976), p. 90. J. Thirsk (ed.), The Agrarian History of England and Wales, vol. i (Cambridge, 1985), p. 134. 35 J.R.S. Whiting, Trade Tokens (Newton Abbot, 1971), pp. 37, 151, 154. 36 M.B. Rowlands, Masters and Men in the West Midland Metalware Trades before the Industrial Revolution (Manchester, 1975), pp. 16, 23, 29–31, 42, 45. 37 G.E. Mingay (ed.), The Agrarian History of England and Wales, vol. vi (Cambridge, 1989), p. 543. 38 J. Graham-Campbell (ed.), Cultural Atlas of the Viking World (Abingdon, 1994), p. 59. 34

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image of the costume worn by a ‘country clown’. But also included are images of a mower, and even of a harvest bottle: ‘This and the foresaid are kind of bottles, which Reapers and Mowers use to carry their Drink or Milk in, when they are about such harvest work.’ Most revealing of the familiarity of a mower’s skill was his apologetic remark that ‘This Mower hath the point of his Sithe turned the wrong way, which if it were to the dexter side, the right hand then should be uppermost; but Pardon is desired for this fault, by the Graver’.39 Here attention to the precise stance combines painterly exactitude with sensitivity to the weight and awkwardness of a poorly-held implement. The mower’s scythe in another respect seems quite distinct from the sickle: in that mowing was universally an action associated with the cutting of grass, and thus with the more pastoral elements of the economy (though it would be naive to ignore the commercial dimension to the production of fodder), whereas the cutting of corn had a shifting association with particular tools and indeed with the social composition of the workforce. This may have had implications for the centrality and stability of visual representations, and for the ways in which women’s work with reaping hooks or sickles was regarded. We need to bear in mind, too, that literary accounts of the mower’s work could both foreground his heroic efforts and insert them into a banal list of rural tasks.40 Central to many discussions of women’s work in agriculture is the concept of ‘custom’ and the presumed opposition between this and the influence of the market. It may be that we need to soften this sense of opposition, just as ‘difference feminism’ has to some extent complicated the identity of ‘women’ and so the opposition to ‘men’. From an economic point of view ‘custom’ tends to be regarded as a brake on efficiency. Yet when viewed anthropologically the harvest necessarily combines custom with calculation, whether the participants view the weather as controlled by fate, the divinity or human propitiation. The evidence of material culture and archaeology helps to sharpen our understanding of how long-standing these calculations must have been. Karl Brunner, for example, has shown how closer inspection of a large hoard of iron tools found on the ancient borders of the Roman Empire between Würzburg and Heilbronn reveals these to be the work of post-Roman Germanic craftsmen, responding to the changed requirements of agriculture in the fifth century. The scythes found in the hoard show a development beyond the Roman pattern (in which what are called scythes were essentially 39 R. Holme, The Academy of Armory, or, A Storehouse of Armory and Blazon (Chester, 1688), Book III, vol. iii, pp. 40, 72, 336. For the reclining mower as a figure of pastoral ease in this period, see M.E. Burkett, Read’s Point of View: Paintings of the Cumbrian Countryside : Mathias Read, 1669–1747 (London, 1995), plates 3 and 15. 40 A. MacRae, God Speed the Plough: The Representation of Agrarian England, 1500–1660 (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 222–3, discussing N. Breton’s Fantasticks (1626), and p. 225, J. Taylor’s Travels of Twelve Pence (1635) on ‘the toyling Plow-man, he is sowing, He’s hedging, ditching, taking, reaping, mowing, Goes to bed late, and rises before day.’

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large sickles) to introduce a handle fixed at an angle to the blade, and a blade which was thinner but flanged at the back for extra rigidity. Although the detailed history of their use remains obscure, these lighter scythes would have allowed their holders to stand erect before the crop, more grass to be mown for fodder, and thus more cattle to be overwintered.41 In this context it is difficult to separate out an instrumental act of ‘work’, given the implications of the new development for physique and stature, and the entanglement of body with landscape. The anthropologist Tim Ingold has recently suggested that we recognise how cultural ‘form arises and is held in place within action: it is movement congealed’.42 We speak, too, of actions repeated many times as becoming ‘second nature’, so that harvesters might be thought to have become absorbed, bodily and emotionally, into the very ‘nature’ they were cutting.43 In trying to understand the meaning of men’s and women’s working alongside each other with their sickles we need to remember how differently early modern people thought through their bodies.44 The body is also at the forefront, of course, of attempts to measure and explain changes in agricultural productivity, though it is often difficult to be sure how many hours or days harvesters’ bodies were deployed in labour.45 Gregory Clark has argued that substantial improvements in English productivity were achieved between the fourteenth and the later sixteenth centuries through ‘an increase in the intensity of labour’, together with the substitution of wage-paid for servile labour.46 In the early modern period in south-east England the greatest constraint on output according to Clark was ‘the amount each worker could harvest’.47 Under conditions of population pressure sixteenth-century labour productivity may actually have fallen, as the hours worked increased, though we need to distinguish overall labour inputs here from the days typically worked per individual.48 The use of hand tools is generally regarded in this context as a key limit on productivity.49 A sequence 41

K. Brunner, ‘Continuity and discontinuity of Roman agricultural knowledge in the early Middle Ages’, in D. Sweeney (ed.) Agriculture in the Middle Ages: Technology, Practice, and Representation (Philadelphia, 1995), pp. 26–9. 42 C. Tilley, Metaphor and Material Culture (Oxford, 1999), pp. 50–1. 43 K. Hastrup, A Passage to Anthropology: Between Experience and Theory (London, 1995), p. 89. 44 M. Schoenfelt, ‘Fables of the belly in early modern England’, in D. Hillman and C. Mazzio (eds) The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe (New York and London, 1997), noting at p. 258 the attenuated sense we have of which areas of knowledge may be relevant to the expression of an inward self. 45 B.M.S. Campbell and M. Overton (eds), Land, Labour and Livestock: Historical Studies in European Agricultural Productivity (Manchester, 1991), p. 19. 46 Clark, in Campbell and Overton (eds) Land, pp. 213, 235. 47 Ibid., p. 226. 48 M. Overton, Agricultural Revolution in England: The Transformation of the Agrarian Economy 1500–1850 (Cambridge, 1996), p. 87. 49 Ibid., p. 48. 82

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of changes to the form of sickles played with the combinations of serrated and smooth edges, weight and flexibility.50 Even after the scythe was used to cut wheat, variations remained in the height attempted (the corn was cut low only outside the south and east). Reaping continued to be used even for barley and oats north of a line between York and Chester. Mark Overton has noted the broad contours of change thereafter, with wheat cut with the sickle until the mid-eighteenth century, followed by the bagging hook and, beginning in the period 1799 to 1815, the scythe. Scythes were not widespread in this role, however, until after 1835. In 1790 it is estimated that some 90 per cent of wheat in England was still cut with the sickle.51 The change in tools was encouraged by arable farmers’ growing interest in cereals, especially wheat, after 1750, when scythes and bagging hooks were used to cut wheat on the larger, more innovative farms.52 Recent work on market integration by John Chartres argues for considerable integration by the late seventeenth century, driven by London’s growth, but with the emergence of a less integrated regional market between 1760 and 1820 driven by regional urban growth.53 In this context the more frequent use of scythes to cut corn represented an aspect of diversification rather than a tendency towards uniformity. The importance of changes in harvest tool use might also be inferred from changes in farm output, though these have been the subject of considerable debate among historians. Gregory Clark has recently argued that increases in agricultural productivity during the period 1670 to 1869 were extremely limited, and largely confined to the early nineteenth century.54 Clark has also presented calculations of real wage income after 1670 which depend on estimates of the ratio of winter to harvest wages. These suggest that hay and corn harvest earnings for an adult male worker would produce some 23 per cent of his annual income, and that other members of the labourer’s family together would earn the equivalent of 25 per cent of the adult male wage.55 Clark concludes that the absence of significant real wage increases between the years 1670 and 1850 indicates the absence of an agricultural ‘revolution’. Yet his findings do show significant regional change, in that northern real wages grew by 75 per cent and Midland wages by 47 per cent across this period. Men’s real wages were growing most where women continued an

50

Overton, Agricultural Revolution, p. 122. Ibid., p. 124. 52 Mingay (ed.), Agrarian History, vol. vi , pp. 290–2. 53 J.A. Chartres, ‘Market integration and agricultural output in seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and early nineteenth-century England’, Agricultural Historical Review, vol. xliii (1995), pp. 117–37. 54 G. Clark, ‘Farm wages and living standards in the Industrial Revolution: England, 1670–1869’, Economic History Review, (2001). 55 G. Clark, ‘Labour productivity in English agriculture, 1300–1860’, in Campbell and Overton (eds) Land, Labour and Livestock. 51

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active role in cutting the crops, and this pattern may be related to the regional diversification of agricultural specialisation charted by Ann Kussmaul. Where, by contrast, corn growing was concentrated on larger farms in the south and east, more scythes were used and the employment of male harvest gangs working on an itinerant basis may have provided access to relatively cheaper labour than would have been supplied by local men, as well as other kinds of competition.56 The growth in farm size entailed a reduction in the opportunities for women, and an increased employment of specialist male labour, though observers like Arthur Young seem to have been misled by the total numbers employed, albeit on fewer farms, into thinking of larger farms as increasing the overall demand for labour.57 Men’s real wages as a whole stagnated and the apparatus of wage regulation fell into disuse.58 Leigh ShawTaylor’s recent studies of access to common rights in the South and East Midlands demonstrate the very limited access to common rights available to labourers even before parliamentary enclosure, and thus their vulnerability to any reduced demand for labour.59 Thus while in some respects the opportunities available to women at least in the south and east of England seem to have been diminishing, current thinking in other respects tends to emphasise the sheer variety of practices, and the reversibility of seemingly progressive change. In nineteenth-century Oxfordshire, there was a shift away from mowing back to the use of a fagging hook, as efforts were made to respond most sensitively to the needs of crop and weather.60 In early nineteenth-century Shropshire wheat was still reaped by broad hooks or sickles, barley, oats and hay mown by scythes. There was no simple progression from one technique to another. Machine reaping appeared on large farms in the 1850s, but hand cutting continued on small farms for a hundred years.61 In such contexts the sickle continued to have an appeal through its sheer neatness, whereas the act of fagging or bagging had a more brutal, chopping motion which Richard Jefferies said meant ‘the reaper [sic] chops at the straw as he might an enemy’.62 Nor was a change of tools always crucial. The substitution of the cradled scythe for the sickle improved harvest

56

The Norfolk farmer’s daughter Mary Hardy recorded three companies of harvest men there in 1775: Hill, Women, Work and Sexual Politics, p. 29. 57 R. Allen, ‘Tracking the Agricultural Revolution in England’, Economic History Review, 52 (1999), pp. 209–35. 58 A. Kussmaul, A General View of the Rural Economy of England 1538–1840 (Cambridge, 1990). 59 L. Shaw-Taylor, ‘Parliamentary enclosure and the emergence of an English agricultural proletariat’, Journal of Economic History, 61.3 (2001), pp. 640–62. 60 D.H. Morgan, Harvesters and Harvesting: A Study of the Rural Proletariat, 1840–1900 (London, 1982), p. 18. 61 P. Stamper, ‘The Farmer Feeds us All’: A Short History of Shropshire Agriculture (Shrewsbury, 1989), p. 57. 62 Morgan, Harvesters and Harvesting, p. 16. 84

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productivity in nineteenth-century France.63 However, it had also been possible to improve productivity in the eighteenth-century Paris basin through choosing to grow more wheat, and varieties which yielded more straw for the Paris market.64 The use of scythes to cut corn was but one facet of a complex array of options, from the farmer’s technical and management skills,65 to the landlord’s consolidation of holdings.66 Yet we may also need to consider the cultural meaning of the crops being harvested, as, for example, in medieval England where the pre-eminently commercial wheat crop would never have actually been eaten by the harvesters themselves.67 Despite the growing use of the scythe to cut corn in the nineteenth century, women do seem to have continued to play a role in cutting the crop in some areas. In late-nineteenth century Oxfordshire women could still contribute substantially to the family income with the reaping hook, and in some cases were even celebrated for cutting the last sheaf as the ‘Harvest Queen’.68 Even where women worked mainly as followers, the importance of their role might be signalled when men without wives to follow were called ‘widow men’.69 As Sandy Bardsley has argued for the medieval period, we need to be aware of the complexity of labour deployment in the harvest. We might add that for the early modern period there were in effect two markets for women’s agricultural labour, one in which women were alternatives to or companions of men in reaping, and one in which they worked at non-reaping labour. The increase in the use of scythes must have altered the relation between these two markets, though, as is increasingly recognised, this process was long-drawnout, locally variable, and reversible.70 The evidence of wage payments recorded by Arthur Young in the late eighteenth century shows that whereas the majority of employers paid women in winter at 50 per cent or below the male rate, their harvest day wages still tended to be substantially above 50 per cent of the male equivalent, typically at 8d to the male 12d or 12d to the male 18d.71 The current emphasis on relatively slow, long-drawn-out processes of change, and almost infinite variety across space has allowed, and been further

63

G. Grantham, in Campbell and Overton (eds), Land, p. 356. P. T. Hoffman, Growth in a Traditional Society: The French Countryside 1450–1815 (Princeton, NJ, 1996), p. 150. 65 Ibid., p. 26 66 Ibid., p. 25. 67 R. H. Britnell and B. M.S. Campbell (eds), A Commercialising Economy: England 1086 to c.1300 (Manchester, 1995), p. 156. 68 Morgan, Harvesters and Harvesting, pp. 109–10, 164. 69 Ibid., p. 98. 70 Verdon, Rural Women Workers, p. 27; P. Sharpe, ‘The female labour market in English agriculture during the Industrial Revolution: expansion or contraction?’, Agricultural Historical Review, vol. xlvii (1999), p. 171. 71 Mingay (ed.), Agrarian History, vol. vi, Table IV.4. 64

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encouraged by, a more even-handed treatment of farming in the British Isles as a whole, whereby small-scale peasant farming using ‘backward’ methods such as reaping has come to be treated with more respect.72 With the growth of interest in sustainable agriculture the advantages of cutting with a sickle so as to leave a tall stubble behind to feed the livestock who will then also manure the ground are being recognised again.73 In this sense we are returning to medieval wisdom. The representation of a corn harvest cut by scythes was used by at least one fourteenth-century scribe to illustrate the devastating effects of the Midianites on the corn fields of Israel (Judges 6: 1–4).74 Small family farms in northern England and Wales would also have been smaller users of wage labour, suggesting that our view of the wage–sickle link ought perhaps to be more complicated.75 The adoption of the scythe to cut corn could be prompted by several motives. On the Wolds where labour was plentiful, it was used to reduce delays, thus preserving the quality and size of the crop from destruction by the weather. In places where light soils sustained four or five course rotations, the acute demand for labour again made the quicker scythe attractive. But it is difficult to view the scythe and the men who wielded it in isolation. In wartime in particular, faster hand tools were combined with the employment of more women and children.76 In Berkshire, women so dominated the reaping in the absence of their menfolk that their efforts were called ‘petticoat harvests’.77 It has even been suggested that efforts to develop reaping machines during the Napoleonic Wars indicated an insufficiency of or dissatisfaction with women’s harvest labour.78 The choice of implements also had implications for the sense of community and identity. By the 1820s harvest labour in England was being supplied by workers bred in the towns and less familiar with rural skills. At the same time the scythe and bagging hook were confining the best-paid work to specialists.79 Male migrants from Scotland served in this role from the later eighteenth century, though the Irish harvesters who grew in number from the Napoleonic Wars onward were specialists in hard work with the sickle.80 Their prominence up to the Irish Famine may help to account for the ambivalent attitude towards sickles and reaping hooks on the part of English farmers thereafter. Another factor 72

A. Howkins, Reshaping Rural England: A Social History 1850–1925 (London, 1991); M. Reed, ‘ “Gnawing it out”: a new look at economic relations in nineteenth-century rural England’, Rural History, i (1990), pp. 83–94; Morgan, Harvesters and Harvesting. 73 A.W. Crosby, ‘Afterword’, in Sweeney (ed.) Agriculture in the Middle Ages, p. 337. 74 G. Jaritz, ‘The material culture of the peasantry in the late Middle Ages: “image” and “reality”’, in Sweeney (ed.) Agriculture in the Middle Ages, p. 178 and Fig. 26. 75 Mingay (ed.), Agrarian History, vol. vi, p. 678. 76 Ibid., pp. 291–2. 77 Mingay (ed.), Agrarian History, vol. vi. pp. 684–5. 78 Ibid., p. 703. 79 Mingay (ed.), Agrarian History, vol. vi, p. 680. 80 Ibid., pp. 680–1. 86

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affecting the sense of community was the growth of gang-harvesting in the eastern counties, a system which, by exploiting women and children to work at piecework but for daily wages, ultimately led to the prohibition of female work in gangs in 1867.81 The tendency for women’s harvest work to be less strenuous in the south and east may have made this abuse the more apparent. The growth of reliance on piecework from the later eighteenth century also has implications for the visibility of women harvesters in our records in the south and east where it was most prevalent.82 Geographical variations also affect the typicality of the harvest as an occasion of work, and complicate our reading of any representations of it. Ann Kussmaul’s analysis of growing regional specialisation suggests a long-term shift in the overall centrality of the grain harvest as an actually experienced event in southern Britain. This shift happens to coincide with the reception and elaboration of classically derived pastoral literary modes. It also coincides with the development of labour-intensive projects to provide employment for a population too large to be accommodated on arable farmsteads. One solution was radically to adjust the image of the ideal use of land, to embrace full-time cultivation of woad, for example, as did Robert Payne,83 who envisaged paying daily wages as small in all conscience as could possibly be given, an approach which was usually taken to the payment of spinsters’ wages, and which had generated sufficient concern to prompt minimum wage legislation at the end of the sixteenth century. Another solution embraced enclosure as a way of making arable farming more labour intensive, as adopted by Adam Moore. His work of 1653, Bread for the Poor, envisaged turning the criminal poor to ‘Diking, Hedging, Fencing, Setting, Sowing, Reaping, Gleaning, Mowing, Making Hay, and what not?’84 This was an interesting list not least for its inclusion of gleaning alongside many paid tasks. Access to gleaning rights was indeed perpetually contested, and had been hedged around by manorial rules since the medieval period. But the value of the gleanings also reflected the techniques and skills of those who cut the crop in the first place, so that the adoption of the corn scythe, with or without its cradle, and cutting ‘high’ or ‘low’, would have had serious implications for women allocated gleaning rights.85 In the late eighteenth century William Marshall observed how women young and fit enough to reap would have felt

81

Ibid., p. 686. Ibid., pp. 690–1. 83 MacRae, God Speed, pp. 152–6. 84 A. Moore, Bread for the Poor. And Advancement of the English Nation. Promised by the Enclosure of the Wastes and Common Groundes of England (1653), p. 30, quoted in MacRae, God Speed, p. 167. 85 Hill, Women, Work and Sexual Politics, p. 37; A. Laurence, Women in England 1500–1760: A Social History (London, 1994), p. 120; P. King, ‘Customary rights and women’s earnings: the importance of gleaning to the rural labouring poor, 1750–1850’, Economic History Review, xliv (1991), pp. 461–76. 82

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ashamed to be gleaners, an observation which returns us to the psychological dimension of bodily effort. Whether or not scythes were actually used extensively to cut corn prior to 1800 there was, so to speak, an implementation of a scythe-like attitude to rural labour on the part of those who owned the land itself. From the sixteenth century onward the georgic tradition redefined rural labour as a fit concern of the entrepreneurial landlord, a movement typified by the surveyor John Norden, who saw a new kind of labour ‘pursued by the godly individualist working the land defined by the surveyor as his “own”’.86 Andrew MacRae has argued that this new georgic perspective abandoned the household focus that we see in the works of Thomas Tusser for a more strictly masculine line: ‘The new georgic economy effaces the labours of women, whether in the fields, in the household or in childbirth. If the curse was Adam’s, so shall be the reward.’87 MacRae’s work reflects the substantial investment made by literary scholars over the past two decades in the study of non-canonical, and even non-‘literary’ works. This movement ought to enrich and complicate our understanding of the interplay between the bodily facts of work and representations of it. But the traffic needs to be in more than one direction. MacRae’s one-dimensional account of farming practice could well be enriched by Joan Thirsk’s revisionist treatment of farm productivity, in which periods of rising population saw plentiful labour applied to the fastidious cultivation of crops in ‘mainstream agriculture’, and periods of slow demographic growth conversely saw falling demand for cereals and falling yields as labour was transferred to alternative forms of husbandry. With its attention to the work women did, particularly in alternative forms of husbandry, this account provides a valuable framework in which to view their changing contribution to harvest work.88 It also squares with studies of plebeian literary works which reflect on the labours of the fields, so that Arthur Young’s observation that ‘even’ at the end of the eighteenth century it was assumed that ‘the yearly rent of the labourer’s cottage was paid by the harvest labours of his wife and children’, can be read as a record of revival rather than of survival.89 Part of our problem here is the appeal to ‘custom’, which has become quite a common shorthand way of explaining the operations of patriarchy in

86

MacRae, God Speed, p. 213. Ibid., p. 217. This may make some sense of the varied metaphorical approaches to women’s labour I discussed in ‘ “Words they are women, deeds they are men”: images of work and gender in early modern England’, in L. Charles and L. Duffin (eds) Women and Work in Pre-Industrial England (1985). 88 J. Thirsk, Alternative Agriculture: A History (Oxford, 1997), pp. 252–5. 89 D. Landry, The Muses of Resistance: Laboring-Class Women’s Poetry in Britain, 1739–1796 (Cambridge, 1990), p. 67. The passage from Collier Landry discusses here describes the mothers of new-born ‘babes’ carrying them into the fields where they will ‘gather up the Corn’. She cites a Poor Law Commissioners’ report of 1835 relating to Sussex to the 87

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practice, as in the case of women’s stagnant wage rates.90 With their wages often unresponsive to actual circumstances, it is argued, women’s entry into the labour market became dependent upon the vicissitudes of male wages.91 We need to think carefully about the distinction between the local ‘norm’, which, as the evidence of wage assessments shows, might prevail for decades at a time, and the package of non-monetary rewards which fluctuated from week to week and from year to year as the real value and character of payments in kind shifted with the price of food and other necessities.92 There are other aspects of ‘custom’ which illustrate quite vividly the lack of incompatibility between its observance and an effective ‘market’. An example is the practice of hiring labour by the day in north Wales at what were called ‘cross wages’ or, as at Rhuddlan, at wages decided each Sunday for the following week, a practice discontinued in 1802 after opposition from the Methodist preacher John Elias.93 Cross wages were also paid for the hiring of reapers on Sundays in Dalton in Furness.94 These meetings operated rather like the hiring fairs for yearly servants in providing a forum for the testing of the market and appraisal of supply and demand. The element of sanctity associated with the cross may also be found in muted form in attitudes towards the tools themselves. The recent work of Sarah Pennell is very suggestive, drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of cultural capital in illustrating how food items, though often of negligible monetary value, ‘carried moral resonances’.95 This may have been true, too, of the tools which were used to garner the food. Sickles and scythes were stored indoors for protection from theft and the weather, even if this meant that these bladed implements were to be found close to domestic activities. In fourteen inventories from mid-Essex over the century or so after 1635 sickles were recorded four times in a house’s hall, three times in the chamber above the parlour, twice above the buttery and once in a parlour, as well as in a kitchen, corn chamber and brewhouse. Scythes (in eighteen inventories) appeared in two parlours and a parlour chamber, as well as in or above a hall (2), but were rather further from the living quarters in most cases, in the

effect that this practice was becoming increasingly common: p. 296 n. 23. Cf. Hill, Women, Work and Sexual Politics, pp 34–5, noting how Stephen Duck and Mary Collier differed precisely over how much contribution women make to harvest. 90 Verdon, Women, Work and Wages, pp. 29–30. 91 O. Saito, ‘Labour supply behaviour of the poor in the English Industrial Revolution’, Journal of European Economic History, x (1981), pp. 646–7. 92 M. Roberts, ‘Wages and wage-earners in England: the evidence of the wage assessments, 1563–1725’ (Oxford University D.Phil. thesis, 1981). 93 T.M. Owen, ‘Cyflog y groes’ [Cross wages]’, Medel, i (1985), pp. 27–33. 94 J. Harland and T.T. Wilkinson, Lancashire Folk-Lore (Manchester, 1882), p. 299. 95 S. Pennell, ‘The material culture of food in early modern England c. 1650–1750’, in S. Tarlow and S. West (eds) The Familiar Past? Archaeologies of Later Historical Britain (London, 1999), p. 42. 89

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kitchen (2), buttery (2), in the malthouse or kilnhouse (3), over the buttery (2) or milkhouse (1).96 Only the owner of a scythe could touch it in Wales.97 Yet more overt spiritual connections could also backfire, as in John Flavell’s didactic work Husbandry Spiritualised, which applied an unrealistically manly conception of the reaper’s role. Husbandmen presently prepare their scythes and sickles, send for their harvest-men, who quickly reap and mow the corn; and after these follow the binders, who tie it up; . . . When the harvest-men enter into the field, it is before them, like the garden of Eden, and behind them a desolate wilderness; . . . the harvest is the end of the world; the reapers are the Angels . . . death is the sickle that reaps down both. Neither the corn nor the tares can possibly resist the sharp and keen sickle, when it is applied to them by the reaper’s hand.98

Flavell’s account seems to confirm MacRae’s suggestion of a more masculine approach to georgic matters in this period. But it may also tell us something of the impatience with which farmers actually did survey their crops in the Restoration period, as population growth stagnated and real wage costs rose. There is an interesting anthropological analogy in the way the Dou Donggo of Indonesia used to treat rice, their staple food crop, as a living, feeling creature, taking it offerings in the evening before harvest, and in the following morning sending the unmarried women of the village in their best clothes to begin cutting the stalks with gently concealed small ceremonial knives. More recently, they have cultivated a high-yielding ‘miracle rice’ which the men cut with sickles, paying scant attention to ceremony, for sale as a cash crop. The men apparently feel uneasy about treating the rice in this violent fashion, and no one would dream of serving such rice to a guest. Even less would they attribute to this rice the property of growing while stored in the granary which the rice treated with respect was thought to exhibit.99 A seemingly ‘exotic’ parallel of this kind may help to sensitise us to the ways in which our own evidence is structured by assumptions and conventions, and this may be particularly useful if we are interested in making use of quite recent evidence relating to tool use from outside England. J. Geraint Jenkins has argued, for example, that corn in Wales was mostly cut with scythes in the late nineteenth century, only with sickles if very wet or lain; but he also notes how the pattern of labour deployment varied between the cooperative work of the hay harvest, and the corn harvest, when the work

96

F.W. Steer, Farm and Cottage Inventories of Mid Essex 1635–1749 (London, 1950). J.G. Jenkins, Life and Tradition in Rural Wales (London, 1991), p. 47. 98 J. Flavell, Husbandry spiritualized: or, The heavenly use of earthly things (1669), in Works (1820), pp. 86–7. 99 John Monaghan and Peter Just, Social and Cultural Anthropology: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2000), p. 131. 97

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debts of cottagers would be called in instead. While the change to mowing corn had occurred by the mid-nineteenth century, according to Jenkins, a sickle was retained for the ritual of cutting the last sheaf. After the cutting of the last sheaf women tried to wet it and men keep it dry as it was taken into the farmhouse, where it would be preserved, perhaps like the pair of crossed sheaves which may be seen pinned to the wall with a rake head in Peter Bruegel the Elder’s famous painting of a Peasant Wedding from 1568.100 The difficulty with accounts of this kind lies in the tendency to presuppose a type of ethnographic norm, often defined implicitly or explicitly against the contrasting world of mechanical harvesting. Thus in another account describing Radnorshire, ‘Wheat was cut with the sickle, oats and barley more usually with the scythe’.101 The people who gathered at each farm for ‘reaps’, to cut the corn, were here ‘neighbours’ rather than obligated cottagers. We can see similar inconsistencies in accounts of the last sheaf itself. Trefor Owen’s summary of caseg fedi traditions suggests overwhelmingly that the reapers were male, and indeed that the successful last cutter’s entry to the house had some gendered significance for the maids inside, as a kind of contest. But there is also reference to rolling the younger maid servants in the loose corn on the barn floor, outside the house, and similar behaviour in the hay harvest which clearly had sexual overtones. Photographic evidence on the other hand shows mixed reaping groups: one photograph shows a party of sixteen, eight of whom are women, and of which seven may be seen clearly holding the sickles. A possibility, however, is that the contribution of the women varied. One source indicates that there was a large number of both sexes reaping on the final day of the harvest, that men threw out the last stalks, and that in carrying the last sheaf to the farmer’s house men would be met by the house’s servant maids, whose numbers may have been augmented in preparation for harvest feasting.102 Another difficulty with quite recent evidence is that it is often energised by a pronounced sense of change and decay. The prolific journalist and publisher Hugh Evans left an account of harvesting in the Denbighshire uplands of north Wales in the period before he left for Liverpool in 1875. His grandfather had been a neighbour of John Jones, Jac Glan-y-Gors, who in 1795 had published Seren Tan Gwmmwl [A Star under a Cloud], a work that brought the radical ideas of Tom Paine to the Welsh uplands.103 Hugh also traced the cultivation of the hill land around Cwm Eithin. In reality, the area between

100

Jenkins, Life and Tradition, pp. 20, 41. W.H. Howse, Radnorshire (Hereford, 1949; reprinted for the Radnorshire Society, Ilkley, 1973), p. 88. 102 Owen, Welsh Folk Customs, pp. 113, 121; Pocket Guide, p. 15; J.C. Davies, Folk-Lore of Mid and West Wales (Aberystwyth, 1911). 103 H. Evans, Cwm Eithin (Liverpool, 1931), translated as The Gorse Glen (Liverpool, 1948). 101

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the piecemeal encroachment on the uplands by cabanau unnos, small cottages built overnight to gain traditional squatters’ rights, had been followed by the landowners’ extension of their own claims to the newly cultivated, and evidently productive, land.104 Where Hugh’s grandfather had had ten acres of hill land which he had reclaimed with his own hands, he was left with only three acres of the poorest land by the time the landowner had surveyed and reassigned the mountain. Evans’ recollections were not worked up into a thoroughgoing historical interpretation, and his book is still described somewhat misleadingly as a mere ‘thesaurus of information about rural life and crafts’.105 His account of harvesting nevertheless conveys a vivid sense of technological change. The expropriation of those who had first cultivated the mountain land seems to have given particular weight to the choice of harvesting technique. ‘In the old times corn, wheat in particular, was always cut with the reaping hook or the sickle. It was a slower process than cutting with the scythe, but it was a cleaner job and there was less wastage of the grain, an important consideration at that time of high prices.’106 Evans described the two tools, noting that ‘the sickle was the older implement’.107 He also noted that ‘In my time both sickle and reaping hook were rapidly giving way to the scythe; the younger men went away to harvest armed with scythe and whetstone, but the older men still clung to the older implements and continued to do so for a long time.’ By the time Evans had established a successful printing business in Liverpool in 1896, and was contributing the articles which formed the basis for Cwm Eithin to his own newspaper Y Brython [The Briton] a decade later, the scythe had been superseded by the mechanical reaper.108 In Evans’ own life as in his account of harvesting there was a continuum between men’s work, migration and technological prowess. His discussion of harvest work began with a bald statement of the ways in which the later seasons of the Welsh uplands led ‘The men, who were hired for a year’, to stipulate a month’s leave for harvesting in Shropshire or Dyffryn Clwyd as part of their contract. He added recollections from men who had worked in this way during the first part of the nineteenth century, noticing ‘lasses’ only along with the ‘lads’ who enjoyed the end of harvest celebrations, not as cutters of the crop. How much a man could cut was of first importance: when working in a butty gang from dawn until night one man would ‘cut, bind and stack about two and a half acres of corn in a week’, while by the 1920s ‘one man with the [mechanical] reaper can cut as much corn in a day as twenty or more 104

Evans, Gorse Glen, pp. 73–7. M. Stephens (ed.), The New Companion to the Literature of Wales (Cardiff, 1998), p. 235. 106 Ibid., p. 110. Evans did not explain exactly which were ‘the old times’ but his tracing of the cultivation of mountain land in his grandfather’s books led him back to 1815, and the reference to notably high prices seems also to refer to that decade: Ibid., p. 74. 107 Evans, Gorse Glen, p. 110. 108 Ibid., p. 111. 105

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men with the reaping hook or sickle’.109 Yet sheer physical stamina, or technological artifice, were not the only considerations, and even in this clear-eyed, politically charged memoir we find an air of mystery. Evans enquired of the readers of his newspaper about the meaning of an old reaping practice known in Welsh as sbaeno, which was distinguished by the reapers following each other in a row, rather than each tackling a section of the field. (One correspondent told Evans that ‘a reaper’s daily task was supposed to be a ridge of half an acre’.) A Cardiganshire respondent traced the term to the English word span, noting how the reaper grasped the corn in one hand before cutting. ‘More picturesque was the legendary explanation that a Spanish ship was once wrecked off the Caernarvonshire coast near Llanfairfechan, the crew struggling to land near where some Welsh people were cutting corn. They were kindly treated by the Welsh people and in return they taught their hosts the Spanish method of reaping – hence sbaeno.’110 This was a kindly response from a people who in 1588 had lost a vessel to the perplexity of the sandbanks and hesitant magistrates of Merioneth at Aberdovey. This story has something of the epic quality which Richard Waswo has found to be characteristic of western foundation-narratives in general.111 It suggests how all harvests interconnected past and present through the necessary explication of habits and techniques, a process which allowed for a great deal of local cultural elaboration. Because grain harvesting seems so elemental a feature of the world we have lost, accounts of it often blur the local and the universal, making it difficult to identify what is being supplied through acute observation, and what through unconscious delivery of common sense. Even when an informant has had a sophisticated, multicultural experience, or perhaps all the more so in such cases, the pull of nostalgic remembrance was still powerful. Daniel Parry-Jones, who was born in Carmarthenshire in 1891, described the sensation of entering Welsh Wales by the LMS railway; when passing beyond Llandrindod Wells ‘one becomes conscious of having crossed a boundary. Among other things one noticed women working in the hayfields; . . . communal helpers in the harvest; . . . the hay-cocks and the Cardiganshire cocks in the fields at their respective harvests.’ In his case the most distinctive tool was the long-handled shovel, of a type found in Cornwall and Ireland. Speculating that the form might have had Celtic origins, ParryJones recounted how a Redruth ironmonger had found the English shovels supplied in ignorance by a Sheffield manufacturer to be unsaleable in Cornwall.112 The awkward reference to a pan-Celtic cultural sphere, expressed

109

Ibid., pp. 111–12. Ibid., pp. 112–13. 111 Waswo, Founding Legend. 112 D. Parry-Jones, Welsh Country Upbringing (London, 1948, reprinted Upton, 1974), p. 100. 110

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through its tools of choice, alerts us to the possibility that all such descriptions (of English custom by English people, as well as of Welsh custom by Welshmen) may be variously forced and tendentious. Like so many inexpert observers of harvest technique, Parry-Jones assumed that the tools of his youth represented an authentic and incomparable point of reference, suggesting that the cradle fitted to the scythes which were used to mow oats was peculiar to west Wales. His description of the scythes-men of his boyhood, whose own memories stretched back to the 1845–80 period, records their pride in their skill, and their contempt for mechanical binders which left ‘half the fodder in the fields by cutting so high’. Reaping corn (as Parry-Jones calls it, though describing mowing) was different from the round swing adopted in cutting hay; it was a straight stroke otherwise the gathered stalks would become askew in the cradle and could not be neatly put down. A good workman never bent more than he could, the aim was to ‘keep the edge pointing to one’s teeth’ as I heard my father say many a time when putting youngsters through their apprenticeship. It demanded strong arms and ribs of steel, but they were soon acquired.113

The scythesmen’s skill, however, was far from being confined to this physical prowess. An entire ecological outlook was involved, as well as a collective nurturing of human capital.114 Children entered the cornfields when the corn was seven or eight inches high to cut the thistles, using two sticks topped by a fork and a blade, in almost a parody of adult reaping. The point at which certain oats were ripe for cutting was when they were ‘the colour of wood pigeon’, just as the stack of oats in the farmer’s yard would eventually be built in the shape of an acorn, though these were acorns crafted out of organic materials ‘as if they had been built by a mason’.115 Those cutting the corn were not hired, but summoned to the task in repayment of the debt incurred from the farmer’s haulage work on their behalf or by the privilege of planting potatoes on his land. Cottagers, craftsmen and even miners were thus repeatedly reabsorbed into a rural culture, so that their livelihoods ‘and certainly their interests, centred in those seasonal activities’.116 The harvest drew its components from a whole region, like the sandstones brought from the Black Mountains, to be finely ground and used to edge the ‘rip’ or sharpening tool for the scythes. The climate dictated the

113

Ibid., pp. 63–4. ’If the education of children was a purely private matter, some households might not be able to provide enough care and material goods to build up the children’s human capital’, S. Wunderink-van Veen, ‘New home economics: children and the labour market participation of women’, in A.G. Dijkstra and J. Planenga (eds) Gender and Economics: A European Perspective (New York, 1997), p. 35. 115 Parry-Jones, Welsh Country Upbringing, pp. 64–5. 116 Ibid., p. 63. 114

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pattern of work, and its characteristic products, such as the ‘Cardiganshire cocks’ of cut corn which, when well stacked, could withstand the effects of rain in wet west Wales ‘up till almost Christmas’. But the annual sequence of work also created narrative links between the present and the past, as the scythes-men gloomily eyed ‘an upland heath that once knew fields of flowing grain high as their waist’, at a time when farms once hiring four servants and three maids now only hired one or two each. Parry-Jones noted how his mother’s religious scruples about the effects of beer led his father to discontinue the provision of drink at the harvest home, a change which happened to coincide with the advent of mechanical reaping. So, too, the custom of cutting the last sheaf ‘demanded the use of hooks and when they gave way before the scythe, the old custom departed with them’.117 But stories about this custom clearly continued to be told each harvest, probably due to the combination of boisterous competition between those throwing the hooks, and later, the men and the women intent on wetting the sheaf. The sense of the sheaf as a maternal corn spirit or ‘gaseg’ (mare) to be preserved indoors on a wall or under the ceiling was contrasted with the custom elsewhere of calling the sheaf a ‘gwrach’ (hag) and of attempting to deliver it to a neighbouring farm where cutting had not yet finished. Parry-Jones makes us wonder if Sir James Frazer was so off-beam after all. The decline of such customs and their transformation into markers of a past culture took place over a long period of time, and under the impact of many technical and social changes. As early as the 1790s the Swiss writer von Bonstetten was inspired during a stay in Denmark by the statues of Norwegian peasants dressed in folk costume which were exhibited in the park at Fredensborg Castle, to suggest that their houses, furniture and tools should be displayed too.118 Yet viewed from another angle, the romantically appealing inheritance from the folk past was tempting the folk to follow blindly in the footsteps of their forefathers, and from this vantage point later eighteenthcentury writers such as Arthur Young developed a deliberate contrast between ‘English’ improvement and the idle and slovenly methods of other parts of the British Isles.119 Mark Davies has pointed to an interesting feature of this perspective in the reluctance of travellers from Scotland or Wales to recognise parallels between reportedly ‘backward’ habits in Sweden and what they knew of contemporary practice in their own lands.120 The testimony of Evans and Parry-Jones is clearly ‘anachronistic’ and unrepresentative, if we are intent on writing the history of harvests in East 117

Ibid., p. 65. P. Michelsen, Frilands Museet: The Danish Museum Village at Sorgenfri (Copenhagen, 1973), p. 13. 119 M. Davies, A Perambulating Paradox: British Travel Literature and the Image of Sweden, c. 1770–1865 (Lund, n.d.), pp. 143–5, for allowing thistles to grow amidst corn, and cutting grass too high, as lazy practices noticed in Sweden. 120 Ibid., p. 146. 118

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Anglia. But it nevertheless records, in relatively full form, an attitude towards harvesting which was once common across the whole of southern Britain. Insofar as Adam Smith persuaded people to view the economy as a ‘natural’ phenomenon, this reduced the need for a separate ‘organic’ outlook, so that seasonal activity changed from being the potent focal point of the year’s struggle to survive into a form of ‘temporary employment’, which today associates women harvesters of fruit, grapes or tomatoes in southern Europe with ‘informal’ work without an employment contract.121 It is worth noting how our means of accessing the more value-laden representations of harvest work are themselves subject to historical transformation at precisely the period in which the scythe may have been making its greatest incursions into the corn harvest. One implication of this may be a heightened sensitivity in prose descriptions of the harvest to questions of tool use, and ritual, which may overly organise and smooth out more irregular and inconsistent practice. Greater awareness of the detailed variety of farming landscapes in the century after 1750 was registered in both painting and fiction. Keith Snell has recently shown how a distinctive genre of regional novels began to appear after Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent in 1800, following on from the taste for closer attention to detail and for more fidelity to nature in painting. This went along with a taste for the anti-pastoral, and with the burgeoning topographical literature which had grown out of the picturesque writing of the 1760s. Snell argues that the quantity of the publications was unprecedented after 1770, to the extent that in the nineteenth century regional writing often replaced painting as a way of looking at the landscape. Attention to the specificity of a locality was also by definition contra-metropolitan, and particularly early examples of parish histories were Edmund Jones’ The History of the Parish of Aberystruth (1779), and Pennant’s history of Whiteford and Holywell (1796).122 The painted harvest in this period superficially shared the fidelity to local detail. As Christina Payne has argued, the wheat harvest was the most popular subject, the harvest in which reaping continued longest, unlike the barley harvest where the crop was mown. However, though the subject would have allowed the content of the harvest season to include women working alongside men, and for this to contribute to the impression of harmonious achievement, few of the images she reproduces show both sexes reaping, and many concentrate on the moments of rest, or the valedictory evening walk from the fields. In these images women as figures of the domestic infiltrate

121 D. Vaiou and M. Stratigaki, ‘Women in the south: diverse experiences of work in a unifying Europe’, in Dijkstra and Plantenga (eds) Gender and Economics, p. 111. 122 K.D.M. Snell, ‘The regional novel: themes for interdisciplinary research’, in K.D.M. Snell (ed.), The Regional Novel in Britain and Ireland, 1800–1990 (Cambridge, 1998).

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the picture of the ‘working’ scene and, even where the crops are being shorn rather than mown, those cutting them are usually men.123 The marginalisation of women as active participants in the harvest by nineteenth-century painters may have had a disproportionate effect on historians’ assumptions about earlier reality. It has been suggested that in the English Midlands the enlargement of farms increased productivity apparently by employing more specialists and ‘fewer unskilled workers such as women’.124 But this seems less true of France, and Robert Allen’s argument as a whole also indicates that productivity gains came from peasant rather than larger farms, where the difficulties of labour supervision may have been counterproductive.125 This latter point may suggest that we should look more closely at the workings of the payment system in the harvest as a mechanism for securing an effective deployment of labour. This is very much what is implied by Best’s explicit equivalences, and it is interesting that he employed in his own hay harvest twice as many haymakers (who might be preponderantly female) as mowers, so that, for example, a haytime with four mowers and eight haymakers working by day would cost 3s 4d for the mowing and almost as much, 2s 8d, for the haymaking. In retrospect what impresses about Henry Best’s advice is the multi-layered consideration of quantities. The order of mowing grass was determined by the moisture of the land (so that oldest enclosed land and ‘fatte earthe’ would be cut last). Mowers of grass who would have 10d a day without food would not take piece-work unless it would guarantee them 1s a day. They would supply their own equipment from local fairs, scythes costing 2s 2d to 2s 4d or even 2s 6d, though sometimes they could be bought for as little as 1s 10d. The wooden sharpening strickle might cost 1d or 2d ‘but a good one will cost and is worth 2d’.126 The sand to be used in sharpening was bought by the penniworth in Malton. Best himself obtained hay rakes from Malton for 1s 2d a dozen, and ash fork shafts for the haymaking. The grass mower’s progress was measured by the breadth of grass mown between sharpenings, but also by the neatness with which cutting was achieved ‘att pointe and att heale’ of the scythe blade. The ideal was to avoid

123

C. Payne, Toil and Plenty: Images of the Agricultural Landscape in England, 1780–1890 (London, 1993), pp. 94–6, 123, 127, 130–3 and at p. 120, noting how women’s binding and gleaning were replaced as motifs by the mid-Victorian period by women resting or looking after children. In the same period even the mixing of the sexes at the harvest home might be discouraged: W.H. Howse, Radnorshire (Hereford, 1949; reprinted for the Radnorshire Society, Ilkley, 1973), p. 132. 124 Hoffman, Growth, p. 156, summarising the findings of R.C. Allen, Enclosure and the Yeoman (Oxford, 1992), pp. 211–31. 125 Hoffman, Growth, p. 191. 126 D. Woodward (ed.), The Farming and Memorandum Books of Henry Best of Elmswell, 1642 (London, for the British Academy,1984), p. 34. 97

WOMEN, WORK AND WAGES IN ENGLAND, 1600–1850

loss of time and grass by leaving only the minimum sweath-balke, or stubble between the swathes of adjacent mowers. A haymaker working for 4d a day without food could spread as much in a day as six mowers could mow. A good mower could cut the equivalent of forty grass cocks per day, or ‘a load and a half’ counting twenty-six or twentyeight cocks as a ‘sufficient load’. It would take four good haymakers to rake and cock five loads per day. Best immediately added to these notes an account of exactly how much a load or even a cock of grass would bring when sold. He also made a short note of the four hindrances in a mower’s work: weeds, molehills, grass overlain by cattle and fallen wood.127 A woman’s wage as a haymaker was 4d a day without food, and Best treated this as a substantial reward, providing that women employed in raking after the cart while carrying the load out of the fields should be paid 4d a day so long as the hay harvest (and equivalently paid work as a haymaker) was available, ‘or else it were an injury to take them from hey-makinge and not to make them like the rest’.128 Another equivalence was made between the man placed on the grass mow to help ‘teame’ or unload the grass from the cart, and ‘one of the ablest of the women’. A man’s height was the measure of the conical hay ‘pike’ or stack before it began to taper, while Best’s various fields were defined by the numbers of dayworks they provided for one mower, but then redefined in terms of their liability for tithe, and the number of cocks or load equivalents of grass they yielded. Best rounded off his account of the hay harvest by repeating his formula of one and a half loads of grass to be mown per mower per day before also noting: ‘Looke howe many heymakers yow have and yow may expeckt that there shall be soe many goode landes [arable ridges between two furrows] raked and cocked in a daye as they are in number.’129 Best had earlier reported his usual practice of emplying four or five mowers and eight or ten haymakers.130 Although Best may not have been a particularly large-scale or selfconsciously ‘improving’ farmer, his attention to detail in the deployment of his ‘folks’, and his preparedness to consign so much detail to writing, do evoke the world recently detailed by Mauro Ambrosioli, where productivity gains were achieved through weeding, manuring, marling and the growing of vetches.131 The ideal was to improve the field itself, the lie of the seed, the drainage and the airing of the soil. Hence in due course the importance of enclosure, clover, turnips and the seed drill. As Robert Allen has argued, yeomen farmers, rather than large owners, actually improved wheat yields by expending labour on the

127

Woodward, Henry Best, p. 37. Ibid., p. 38. 129 Ibid., p. 42. 130 Ibid., p. 34. 131 M. Ambrosoli, The Wild and the Sown: Botany and Agriculture in Western Europe, 1350–1850 (Cambridge, 1997), p. 366. 128

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open fields, selecting seed more carefully, increasing legumes, livestock and manure. While enclosure has been associated by some literary historians with a more individualist attitude towards the acquisition of wealth in this period, the improvement of the land and the mobilisation of the community to harvest its products continued to exert a collective influence.132 The communal influence, so easily dismissed as imposing the dead force of custom, from this perspective sustained an air of carefulness, a kind of total quality management we might ourselves aspire to. After all, in the Middle Ages cutting corn with a scythe had been regarded as madness, or the work of the devil, destroying stubble which could be used to feed animals.133 The slow adoption of the scythe to cut corn represented a long-drawn-out battle between the advocates of two senses of care: one stressing the urgency of cutting the crop to protect it from the weather, the other the importance of maximising the quality, and variety of the cut sheaves and stubble. At the same time, the deployment of women was used not for their care, as for their stamina.134 This is brought out particularly well in evidence from those parts of the British Isles where reaping continued longest. In early eighteenthcentury Lanarkshire magistrates set wages for ‘strong and sufficient’ women servants, who would be employed ‘for barns, byers, shearing, brewing, baking, washing’.135 In the harvesting arrangement known as the bandwin, a man cut the longest and strongest corn with a sickle in the middle of the work group, but the woman who was on the right-hand side of each ridge had the most laborious task because she had to stretch to meet the adjacent ridge.136 As the standard account of wages in Scotland has it, ‘Women were long accepted as being particularly tough and useful in the harvest field’, and this was reflected in the narrow differentials between male and female harvest wages.137 Yet there does also seem to have been a recognition of the sickle’s neatness. William Marshall recorded of the harvest in the central Highlands of Scotland that ‘the women, in this, as in other employments, are attentive and laborious. Oats and beer are unusually “shorn” with sickles, and mostly by women; who cut low, level, and clean to a degree I have never before observed.’138 On the Isle of Lewis it was even reported that hay was cut with sickles.139 Perhaps not surprisingly, in the crofting counties of north-west

132

MacRae, God Speed; R. Burt and J.M. Archer (eds), Enclosure Acts: Sexuality, Property and Culture in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY, 1994). 133 Sweeney, Agriculture, p. 178. 134 A. Fenton, The Shape of the Past: Essays in Scottish Ethnology (2 vols) (Edinburgh, 1986). 135 A.J.S. Gibson and T.C. Smout, Prices, Food and Wages in Scotland, 1550–1780 (Cambridge, 1995), p. 267. 136 Fenton, Shape, vol. i, p. 118. 137 Gibson and Smout, Prices, p. 290. 138 W. Marshall, General View of the Agriculture of the Central Highlands of Scotland (London, 1794), p. 40. 139 R. Heron, General View of the Natural Circumstances of Those Isles, Adjacent to the North99

WOMEN, WORK AND WAGES IN ENGLAND, 1600–1850

Scotland the scythe which was eventually adopted was known sardonically as the ‘Aberdeenshire slasher’.140 The scythe was in fact more readily adopted in the far north, where family-run farms absorbed the mowers’ wage costs, whereas in the south of Scotland a pool of readily available seasonal labour, and the difficulty of establishing a convenient distribution network for the heavy implements, encouraged continued use of the sickle.141 The need to invert our own inherited assumptions, about women’s neatness and weakness, for example, is matched by the need to think beyond modern assumptions about domesticity and privacy. It has been assumed that where a woman’s wage was paid to her husband, or to a gang leader, we cannot be sure that ‘her’ recompense would match that which was officially regulated by the magistrates as due to her.142 But this may be to impose too bourgeois a notion of the privacy of marital finances on to the period before 1800.143 As studies of earlier twentieth-century rural life in Wales remind us, the year was divided into periods of intense moneyed activity and periods of lull. Much of women’s income was obtained through management of chickens, pigs and cows which they themselves had a role in marketing.144 Farmers’ wives were a model to other women of financial competence, which probably influenced women’s awareness of monetary matters in the context of harvest wages. As the ecological awareness of Thomas Tryon grew in the Restoration period, when real wages for the poorer sort were rising, so a number of women such as Hannah Wolley turned their attention to the business of counting. It was in this period that Alice George of Oxford boasted of having been able to reap as much as a man, ‘and had as much wages’.145 George’s was a rare boast for a woman, but the underlying practical competence to which she laid claim seems entirely plausible. Both sexes depended on adopting what may only be

West Coast of Scotland which are distinguished by the Common Name of Hebudae or Hebrides (Edinburgh, 1794), p. 14. 140 Fenton, Shape, vol. i, p. 122. 141 Ibid. 142 Bardsley, ‘Women’s work reconsidered’, p. 16. 143 Jan Pahl, Money and Marriage (London, 1989). 144 A.D. Rees, Life in a Welsh Countryside (Cardiff, 1950); M. Roberts, ‘ “To bridle the falsehood of unconscionable workmen, and for her own satisfaction”: what the Jacobean housewife needed to know about men’s work and why’, Labour Historical Review, 63.1 (1998). 145 T. Tryon, Some memoirs of the Life of Mr Tho: Tryon late of London, merchant, written by himself (1705); cf. N. Smith,. ‘Enthusiasm and enlightenment of food, filth and slavery’, in G. MacLean, D. Landry and J. Patrick (eds) The Country and the City Revisited: England and the Politics of Culture, 1550–1850 (Cambridge, 1999; Roberts, ‘Sickles and scythes’, p. 19; cf. Advice to the Women and Maidens of London (London, 1678) for a ‘ready reckoner’ approach to tabulating ordinary household income and expenditure for women. See also M. Roberts, ‘Recovering a lost inheritance: the marital economy and its absence from the prehistory of economics in Britain’, in M. Ågren and A. Erickson (eds) The Marital Economy in Britain and Scandinavia 1400–1900 (forthcoming, Aldershot, 2004). 100

HARVEST WORK, WAGES AND SYMBOLIC MEANINGS

called a ‘workmanlike’ attitude towards skills, experience and the micromanagement of the working day, an attitude to which William Cobbett was to pay respect in the organisation of his Cottage Economy (1822).146 This largely unacknowledged practical awareness among those who actually cut the crops lay like a land of mystery before the eyes of those who did not. William Marshall forced himself to become ‘my own bailiff ’ in order to glean such insights, comparing his situation to that of ‘a traveller in a strange forest’.147 Marshall considered labourers’ ‘machine-like perseverance’ to make them better than inventors in the development of the most effective techniques.148 He walked the fields himself, picking up the corn spilled by careless Scotchmen who had reaped his Great Six Acres, and carefully weighing the risks of mowing corn.149 Marshall contrived a carefully turned rhetoric when observing the harvesting of corn in Yorkshire, arguing that ‘It is probable that nine-tenths of the corn which is cut with the sickle in this kingdom is cut by men’, whereas in Yorkshire it is ‘rare to see a sickle in the hands of a man’.150 Moreover, ‘far from being thought a hardship, [harvesting] is, by women who have been bred to it, considered a relaxation to domestic confinement, and less agreeable employments.’151 Marshall went on to hint at the ‘leisure opportunity’ afforded to young men mowers and women layers when working together while mowing corn straight against the standing corn, a new technique he wanted to export to other places for use ‘on a large scale, whenever a wet season, or a backward harvest should happen.’152 Even where an agricultural writer was more decisive in his opinions, as Henry Stephens was in his insistence that ‘The scythe can only be used by men, the sickle by both women and men’, careful reading reveals a more sensitive recognition of women’s powers which suggests the limited scope for patriarchal condescension when an imperilled crop lay at the mercy of the weather. Stephens asserted confidently that a woman with a sickle ‘is as efficient a worker as a man; indeed, what is called a maiden-ridge, of 3 young women, will beat a bull-ridge, of 3 men, at reaping any sort of corn, on any given day.’153 It may have been observations such as these, and the reality they reflected, which put limits to that advance of the corn scythe which once seemed to historians so threatening to women’s interests.

146 As noted by E. K. Helsinger: Rural Scenes and National Representation: Britain, 1815–1850 (Princeton, NJ, 1997), pp. 115–16. 147 W. Marshall, Minutes of Agriculture; with Experiments and Observations concerning Agriculture and the Weather (London, 1783), n.p. Minutes dated 18 July 1774. 148 Ibid., 13 May 1775. 149 Ibid., August 1777. 150 W. Marshall, The Rural Economy of Yorkshire (2 vols, London, 1788), i., p. 388. 151 Ibid., p. 389. 152 Ibid., pp. 399–400. 153 H. Stephens, The Book of the Farm (London, 1844), p. 1051.

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4

A customary or market wage? Women and work in the East Midlands, c. 1700–1840* PENELOPE LANE

Women’s historians of the medieval through to the modern period have observed the sizeable difference between the money wages received by women and men, which could range from as little as one-third to one-half. This discrepancy, some of them have concluded, indicates that women’s wages were the product of custom and not equality in the labour market. Furthermore, some historians see such disparity as arising from women’s position in the family, which places them as dependent rather than as fully independent economic agents.1 The role of custom in determining wage levels is difficult to ascertain with any precision, given that it is not always clear what other factors may have contributed at different times and locations. Woodward has described custom as ‘that great stand-by of the social historian and frequently invoked explanation for all that is difficult to understand’.2 However, his comments with regard to women’s wages still stress the role of custom. ‘The low rates of pay given to most women in the early modern period were rooted in convictions – underscored by biblical authority – about their physical, economic and social, intellectual and political inferiority . . . which has

* I am indebted to the following organisations and institutions that awarded me grants to undertake my research on women’s work in the East Midlands: the Economic and Social Research Council; the British Cotton Growing Association, Work People’s Collection Fund; and the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Leicester. 1 J.M. Bennett, ‘Medieval women, modern women: across the great divide’, in D. Aers (ed.) Culture and History, 1350–1600 (London, 1992), p. 161; M. Berg, ‘What difference did women’s work make to the industrial revolution’, History Workshop Journal, 35 (1993), p. 31; D. Valenze, The First Industrial Woman (Oxford and New York, 1995), p. 89; J. Humphries, ‘ “Lurking in the wings . . .” Women in the historiography of the Industrial Revolution’, Business and Economic History, 20 (1991), p. 39; M. Barrett and M. McIntosh, ‘The “family wage” ’, in E. Whitelegg et al. (eds) The Changing Experience of Women (Oxford, 1982), p. 79. 2 D. Woodward, Men at Work (Cambridge, 1995), p. 181.

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characterised English society into the present century.’3 Sharpe, in her study of working women in the south of England, concluded that for the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries women’s wages contained both a customary and a market element.4 In a challenging article, Joyce Burnette took this issue a step further, and contended that for the period of the Industrial Revolution women were in general paid market wages. Moreover, she argued that the notion of a customary wage has arisen due to errors in measurement and differences in the productivity levels of men and women. If wage discrimination did exist, it occurred in areas of the labour market that were the least competitive.5 One of the problems that women’s historians have in determining trends over time in wage rates, or the differences in wage levels that existed between men and women, is the absence of data beyond a handful of examples. Indeed, as Burnette pointed out, a number of major studies have drawn upon a thin body of evidence with which to support the view of widespread wage discrimination.6 It is certainly true that difficulties arising from the way wages/earnings were documented can lead to misinterpretation, and Burnette was correct to highlight these problems. Likewise, not taking account of the number of hours worked by men and women would have a spurious effect on the female–male wage gap. However, not all the wages which Burnette quoted have been proved to be subject to the problems she described, nor are the differences between men and women’s ability to move heavy external objects sufficient to account for sometimes widely contrasting wage levels. The lack of long runs of wage data for female labour has in particular hindered discussion of the impact of the Industrial Revolution on the standard of living of working people. Historians have, nevertheless, found optimism among wage series created from male occupations. Lindert and Williamson, for example, have argued that between 1781 and 1851 there were impressive net gains in the standard of living: over 60 per cent for farm labourers, over 86 per cent for blue-collar workers, and over 140 per cent for all workers. The hardships faced by workers at the end of the Industrial Revolution cannot have been nearly as great as those of their grandparents. Lindert and Williamson believe that most of these gains occurred after 1820.7 More recently, Gregory Clark has argued that male farm workers saw little improvement in their standard of living until after 1820.8 Other historians 3

Ibid., p. 197. P. Sharpe, Adapting to Capitalism (London, 1996). 5 J. Burnette, ‘An Investigation of the female–male wage gap’, Economic History Review, 50 (1997), pp. 257–81. 6 Ibid., p. 260. 7 P.H. Lindert and J.G. Williamson, ‘English workers living standards during the industrial revolution: a new look’, Economic History Review, 36 (1983), p. 24. 8 G. Clark, ‘Farm wages and living standards in the industrial revolution: England, 1670–1869’, Economic History Review, 54 (2001), pp. 477–505. 4

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WOMEN, WORK AND WAGES IN ENGLAND, 1600–1850

have been critical of an approach to the standard of living for ‘all workers’ that is based on ‘a selection of daily and weekly wage rates from eighteen male occupations’.9 They argue that such standard of living indices do not take account of, for example, family earnings, women’s earnings, regional and county differences, and periods of underemployment and unemployment.10 Examining family incomes by deploying household budget data, Horrell and Humphries have lent support to the view that members of the British working class saw substantial gains in their standard of living during the period 1787 to 1865, although this improvement was uneven.11 However, their study of female labour force participation concluded that married women became less able to contribute to family incomes over this period. This overall decline in labour force participation was ‘neither continuous nor uniform across occupational categories’.12 Nicholas and Oxley have also explored the question of the changes in the standard of living of women during the Industrial Revolution. Data on the height of female convicts transported to New South Wales, and from the registers of prisoners in Newgate Prison, showed that the height of rural-born women declined between 1785 and 1815, and did so significantly more than for urban-born women and urbanborn men. Thus they contend that industrialisation had a negative effect on women’s living standards, especially on those from rural areas.13 Charles Feinstein’s project to measure changes in nominal wages over the course of the Industrial Revolution included some categories of women workers. He found that during the 1780s to 1870 the standard of living for the average workingclass family improved by less than 15 per cent.14 In all such discussion, it has become clear that this debate cannot progress without a more thorough understanding of the characteristics of women’s employment, and of the factors that influenced their wage levels.

9 R.S. Neale, Writing Marxist History: British Society, Economy and Culture since 1700 (Oxford, 1985), p. 112. 10 Ibid.; J. Humphries, ‘ “Lurking in the wings. . .” women in the historiography of the industrial revolution’, Business and Economic History, 20 (1991), p. 36. 11 S. Horrell and J. Humphries, ‘Old questions, new data, and alternative perspectives: families’ living standards in the industrial revolution’, Journal of Economic History, 55 (1992), pp. 849–80. 12 S. Horrell and J. Humphries, ‘Women’s labour force participation and the transition to the male breadwinner family, 1790–1865’, Economic History Review, 48 (1995), pp. 89–117. 13 S. Nicholas and D. Oxley, ‘The living standards of women during the industrial revolution, 1795–1820’, Economic History Review, 46 (1993), pp. 723–49; and ‘Living standards of women in England and Wales, 1785–1815: new evidence from Newgate prison records’, Economic History Review, 49 (1996), pp. 591–9. 14 C. Feinstein, ‘Pessimism perpetuated: real wages and the standard of living in Britain during and after the industrial revolution’, Journal of Economic History, 58 (1998), pp. 625–58.

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Women’s wage rates and earnings: the problems Determining the wage rates and earnings of women workers is far from easy.15 The inclusion of women’s wages in standard of living indices has to be done with great care. We still know relatively little about the regional and local labour markets in which women operated. Historians have constructed wage series for farm and domestic servants’ annual wages, and have highlighted the difficulties of discerning trends because wage levels could be so wide ranging at any given time.16 Less effort has been expended on trying to detect trends in female daily wages. Not only is information difficult to find, but an individual’s remuneration was not always given in money alone. Workers were often paid part of their wage, for example, in drink, food or fuel. In addition, perquisites or appropriated goods added to incomes. However, as Schwarz comments: At its most cautious, it can at least be said that the money wage rate was probably the major component in the income of many urban dwellers as well as being a good indicator of what was happening with non-monetary forms of remuneration. It is, however, more a barometer of changes in incomes than an accurate monitor.17

We also have to assume that money was the major element of incomes for those living in rural areas. However, there were more likely to have been greater opportunities to supplement incomes, at least in the earlier part of the period, but these would have declined as the exploitation of common land by working people became more difficult. Indeed, Humphries has argued that with the erosion of common rights women became increasingly dependent on wage labour.18 The data presented in this chapter are drawn from settlement examinations, wage lists and books located in parliamentary reports; business, estate and poor law records. The advantage of using wage books and lists is that wage rates are documented, plus the amount that was actually earned. As Elizabeth

15 At the first meeting of the ESRC seminar series on Occupational Information in Social and Economic Research on 30 March 2000, the problems of determining and classifying women’s wages were discussed, with several male historians identifying themselves as guilty of ignoring women’s wages altogether in their standard of living analyses due to the difficulties of finding and dealing with the evidence. 16 Sharpe, Adapting to Capitalism, p. 191; K.D.M. Snell, Annals of the Labouring Poor: Social Change and Agrarian England, 1660–1900 (Cambridge, 1985), passim; Neale, Writing Marxist History, p. 120; P. Lane, ‘Women in the regional economy: the East Midlands, 1700–1830’ (unpub. Ph.D. thesis, University of Warwick, 2000), pp. 171, 178–9. 17 L.D. Schwarz, London in the Age of Industrialisation (Cambridge, 1992), p. 166. 18 J. Humphries, ‘Enclosure, common rights and women: the proletarianisation of families in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries’, Journal of Economic History, 50 (1990), pp. 17–42.

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Gilboy recognised, much of the early research on the condition of the labouring classes used the writings of contemporary commentators, some of whom were more interested in following a particular agenda than recording wages and household budgets accurately.19 There were many factors that influenced the wage rates and earnings of women during the period from 1700 to 1830. Some of these factors are easier to detect than others. These could include, for example, the urgency of the job that needed to be done, the availability of male labour, age, length of service and rank, as in the case of some domestic servants. Although we have information about the payments made to women, and these were, with the exception of those for the hosiery trade, readily identifiable in sources, data relating to the hours and conditions of work in the eighteenth century are much more difficult to come by. None the less, sufficient information remains for an exploration of the foundation of some of the current arguments in the context of the East Midlands economy and English economies elsewhere.

Background An investigation of female labour in the East Midlands shows that, for the most part, women were clustered into those areas of the economy that were considered unskilled. Thus they were frequently found in the supporting role of haymaker, cleaner or seamer.20 Research confirms Pam Sharpe’s impression that the demand for female agricultural labour even prior to the Industrial Revolution was limited.21 Furthermore, from the beginning of the eighteenth century there was a very clearly defined sexual division of labour in agriculture. From the third quarter of the eighteenth century the gap between male and female day wages in agriculture began to broaden significantly. Prior to the expansion of the hosiery industry from 1750, and factory-based textile production from the later eighteenth century, domestic service in one form or another together with agricultural work occupied the majority of women. Indeed, with an acceleration in the trend towards a pastoral economy in the region, the relationship between agricultural labour and domestic service, always a close one, became closer still. Women who worked as dairy maids (work often classed as agricultural) moved regularly between this occupation and others in domestic service.22 The work that both men and women did in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was heavy and laborious, and remained so, even with the

19

E. Gilboy, Wages in Eighteenth Century England (Cambridge, 1934), pp. xviii–xxxiii. See Lane, ‘Women in the regional economy’, part II. 21 P. Sharpe, ‘The female labour market in English agriculture during the industrial revolution: expansion or contraction?’, Agricultural History Review, 47 (1999), pp. 161–81. 22 Lane, ‘Women in the regional economy’, pp. 156–64. 20

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advent of technology.23 There is plenty of evidence to show that working women were no strangers to hard manual labour and were introduced to it from an early age. Hannah Barnard’s study of the household economies of 1820 in the Hudson Valley of New York State noted that when it came to running the dairy a farmer relied on his wife’s ‘mind, two hands and bodily strength’.24 Pinchbeck wrote of the strength and endurance of the ‘sturdy women’ who walked from village to village carrying perishable goods, hardware or smallwares for sale. She also drew attention to Hannah Snell who apparently spent twenty-one years in the army before traversing the countryside with a basket of goods strapped to her back.25 In addition, there is the story, attributed to John Locke, of the mighty Alice George who could reap on a par with any man, and earned as much.26 Women’s exertions did, however, also provoke negative comment. Male contemporaries were surprised, or professed surprise, at the heavy work of women involved in dairying. The sight, for example, of a maid turning a heavy Cheshire cheese, weighing in some cases over a hundred pounds, caused dismay among some observers.27 Often greater concern surfaced from what commentators thought fit work for women, even among men of their own class. At the enquiry into framework knitting of 1845, John Geary, a framework knitter from Anstey in Leicestershire, considered, ‘The thing is quite inconsistent with reason that a woman should ever work a frame at all: it is too heavy and too laborious for any female to work in’, although he also observed that ‘there is a difference in the strength of women as well as in that of men’.28 Women were therefore capable of regular back-breaking manual labour, much more so than the women in this present age of obesity, and there were also others of such Amazonian proportions that they were the equal of most men.

Productivity differences We know that men in general were, and are, stronger than women. Burnette demonstrated this fact by referring to various physical tasks carried out by women and men in the United States Army of today. She commented that while the differences between the sexes were minimal when it came to

23

R. Samuel, ‘Workshop of the world: steam power and hand technology in mid-Victorian Britain’, History Workshop Journal, 3 (1977), p. 8. 24 M. Bruegel, ‘Work, gender and authority on the farm: the Hudson Valley countryside, 1790s–1850s’, Agricultural History, 76 (2000), pp. 5–6. 25 I. Pinchbeck, Women Workers and the Industrial Revolution, 1750–1850 (London, 1930, 1969 edn), p. 298 nn 4 and 5. 26 Woodward, Men at Work, p. 110. 27 D. Valenze, The First Industrial Woman (Oxford and New York, 1995), pp. 59–60. 28 Parliamentary Papers, 1845, XV, Report from the Commissioner to Enquire into the Condition of the Framework Knitters, p. 103. 107

WOMEN, WORK AND WAGES IN ENGLAND, 1600–1850

performing sit-ups or running, men could lift twice as much as women. Given that manual work during the Industrial Revolution often required strength, this ‘led to differences in productivity, and thus differences in market wages’. She then went on to extrapolate from nineteenth- century productivity studies of male and female labour to argue that the productivity ratio between men and women was ‘about 0.6’, a figure which should be included in assessment of wage ratios.29 The productivity of an individual in past times could be affected by many things such as the level of fitness or degree of motivation. It has been found, for example, that in the medieval agrarian economy of the fourteenth century customary labour was less productive than hired labour.30 In Table 4.1, a number of tasks are shown in which men and women were paid by the day. If we were to alter the ratios on the basis of productivity differences along the lines suggested by Burnette, then we could agree that women were indeed paid market wages. However, in some of these tasks it is not at all clear that women would have been less productive, because they did not have the skills to do the job, or the strength. Let us first examine haymaking, work in the garden and loading hay. Haymaking involved tossing and loosening the mown grass, Table 4.1 Male and female day wages for comparable work Year

Task

Males

Females

Ratio1†

Ratio2††

1723 1723 1767 1770 1771 1778 1786 1794 1794/5 1811 1821

Mower/Reaper Haymaking Work in Garden Weeding Loading Hay Carrying Wood Cotton Spinner Cotton Spinner Cotton Spinner Work in Garden Loading Bricks

12d 12d 12d 16d 16d 16d 17d 16d) 18d) 22d 24d

8d 6d 6d 7d 7d 12d 10.5d 10d) 14d) 10d 15d

0.66 0.50 0.50 0.44 0.44 0.75 0.62 0.62 0.77 0.45 0.62

0.80 0.60 0.60 0.53 0.53 0.90 0.67* 0.68* 0.84* 0.54 0.75

Source: Huntington Library, Hastings Collection, HAF/46/9, HAF/48/2, HAF/49/4, HAF/53/7, HAF/71/Unsorted Bundle, HAF/75/Unsorted Bundle, Bakewell Mill wage books vol. 1, 1786. H.L; Page (ed.), The Victoria County History of Nottinghamshire, II, p. 295; Chambers, Nottinghamshire in the Eighteenth Century, p. 283. Notes: †Ratio 1 is the proportion of female–male wages. ††Ratio 2 is the female–male wage ratio based on the assumption that women worked two hours less than men in a twelve-hour working day. *Ratio when accounting for women working one hour a day less than men.

29

Burnette, ‘An investigation of the female–male wage gap’, pp. 275–7. D. Stone, ‘The productivity of hired and customary labour: evidence from Wisbech Barton in the fourteenth century’, Economic History Review, 50 (1997), pp. 640–56. 30

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before spreading it out and turning it occasionally so as to expose it to the sun’s rays. While this work was arduous, it was not beyond the capabilities of many women to perform this work on or near equal terms with men, and it is doubtful that productivity differences alone would account for the disparity in wages. Pitching hay upwards on to a cart was a much more strenuous exercise. However, a single female is recorded as undertaking this task at Ledstone in Yorkshire in 1771. Unfortunately, as with many wage rates, we do not know the circumstances in which people were working or their full conditions of employment. Presumably, however, this woman was selected, first, because there was no man available to load hay, and second, because she was capable of doing a job approximately equal to her male counterparts. Yet she received less than half the male wage. ‘Work in the garden’ at both dates showed similar disparities in daily earnings. However, again, it is unlikely that productivity differences based on men being better at undertaking severe labour account for this wage differential, but we cannot be entirely sure of this. In terms of the male mower and the female reaper, the wage ratio of 0.66 conforms to a productivity ratio of two-thirds for reaping judged by contemporaries as representative of the differences between men and women at this work, and noted by Burnette.31 The other example in her support is that of the male weeder, who mowed weeds while women were extracting them from between cracks in the pavement. Thus, in this instance, we are not dealing strictly with the same type of work. Mowing with a scythe, whether hay, weeds or otherwise, required great strength and was considered to be one of the most arduous of all agricultural operations.32 We know relatively little about the conditions of work in the early cotton mills of the North Midlands, but research suggests that the notion of a customary wage for females was transferred directly into the early factory system.33 Manufacturers may have been keen to secure labour for their mills, but this does not appear to have extended to paying women more for their work, because here again, we find differences in the female–male wage gap that cannot easily be accounted for by a variation in the productivity levels of men and women. When we examine the wage rates of adult male and female cotton spinners at Bakewell Mill in Derbyshire in the late eighteenth century, for example, we see that female spinners earned around two-thirds of the wages paid to male spinners. With the application of water power, cotton spinners worked long, monotonous hours in which they were required to be attentive in their work, rather than to exhibit great strength.34 Work where it is very apparent that strength was needed, and where greater productivity would clearly be exhibited by men, could be found in the

31 32 33 34

Burnette, ‘An investigation of the female–male wage gap’, p. 275. Stone, ‘The productivity of hired and customary labour’, p. 651. P. Lane, ‘Women and work in the early cotton mills’ (forthcoming). M. Berg, The Age of Manufactures (London, 1994), p. 155. 109

WOMEN, WORK AND WAGES IN ENGLAND, 1600–1850

building trades, for example, when it came to lifting wood or masonry. Woodward has shown that women worked as labourers on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century building sites in northern England and were found carrying gravel, sand, water and lime. These materials, unlike large, solid objects, were easily divided into manageable lots and so could be carried by women. However, although women were visible in this type of employment they formed a very insignificant element of this labour force.35 In Table 4.1 there are two jobs of this kind, namely carrying wood and loading bricks. Women undertaking this type of work very rarely appeared in the estate accounts or other sources used in this study, which suggests little change from earlier centuries. In 1778 to the south-west of Donington Park, at the Melbourne coppice, a lone woman, Ann Hattler, was employed with three men who worked for three days removing wood. She was the only woman recorded participating in the work from July to September, which saw men engaged in felling, cleaving and carrying timber.36 The wage of 1s a day is consistent with the time of year, August. It is probable that her employment arose from a shortage of male labour. Of the work listed, this example gives the highest female–male wage ratio of 0.75. Over forty years later we find women this time on a building site in the town of Ashby de la Zouch. In January 1821, three females were occupied in loading bricks ‘for the use of Ashby Baths’.37 This example, conversely, comes at a time of year when there would be the least demand for labour, and when we would assume there would be little need to employ women. However, it is possible that in this case the cost of labour, as well as the speed with which the task was carried out, was important, and this is perhaps why we see women employed occasionally in this kind of work. At the Donington Park farm in 1811, those in charge of hiring workers made the distinction between ‘superior’ and ‘inferior’ labour and the differences in expenditure on each. Employers were concerned about labour costs, and, by reducing them and still completing the work when specified, labour productivity increased. Before discussing productivity as a reflection of human capital differences, we need to turn to other perceived reasons for the female–male wage gap.

The mismeasurement of earnings If the evidence for differences in productivity based on muscle power is not conclusive, what of the effect of mismeasurement? One of the causes of mismeasurement of earnings, it has been argued, is the failure to take account

35

Woodward, Men at Work, p. 109. Huntington Library (HL), San Merino, California, USA: Hastings Collection, HAF/53/7. 37 HL Hastings Collection, HAF/75/Unsorted Bundle. 36

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of the fact that married women worked fewer hours than men. It is noted, for example, that married women undertaking agricultural work in the parish of Sheepy Magna in Leicestershire in 1843 worked only between eight and nine hours a day, as they required the extra hour in the morning to make breakfast for their families. This, it is suggested, was also the case at Thornborough in Yorkshire during the eighteenth century, with women starting one or two hours later.38 If we consider the final column in Table 4.1, ‘Ratio 2’, and compare it with that for ‘Ratio 1’, we can see that on an assumption that women worked two hours a day less than men, the female–male wage gap is not so pronounced. In those areas where strength differences were of minor importance the wage gap is still significant. However, the fewer hours argument is really concerned with married women. Staying at home to cook breakfast would not have been as applicable to the unmarried. Interestingly, if we calculate weekly earnings for haymakers in 1753 at Thornborough, on wages of 10d and 6d a day respectively, we find that on the basis of a six-day week, with women working two hours less a day than men, they were earning the equivalent of 0.6d an hour and men 0.83d an hour. However, as argued above, it cannot be concluded that men were more productive than women in this work. In addition, since individuals were paid by the day it made little sense for either gender to labour as if on piece rates. If we consider other wage information from Essex in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, difference in hours worked as explanation for the female–male wage gap is not supported. Female weeders in 1570 were paid at the rate of 3d a day for wives, 4d for girls and 5d for widows. Male weeders also received 5d.39 Could this be related to the fact that widows worked the same hours as men? This is unlikely, since wives would have had to work four hours a day less than their husbands in order to get anywhere near an equivalent hourly wage rate. Sharpe interprets the lower wages of wives as an outcome of them working alongside their partners, and therefore custom dictated that the women should be paid less. In the 1630s, a man and wife employed at weeding were both given 6d a day. In the harvest, however, the labourer got 12d while his wife earned only 6d at ‘making the stake of hay’.40 But, again, even if the remunerative gap for two hours a day is deducted from the wife’s wages, she was still paid less than her husband. On the assumption that a man worked twelve hours a day in the summer and was paid 12d, and his wife ten hours a day, this would be equal to a male wage rate of 1d per hour compared to a female rate of 0.6d. Can it be proven that this woman’s productivity was significantly lower than her partner’s? The difference in wages had less to do with productivity based on physical advantages than on the scarcity of labour at the time of year. In the case of weeding, it could be

38 39 40

Burnette, ‘An investigation of the female–male wage gap’, p. 268. Sharpe, Adapting to Capitalism, p. 79. Ibid., pp. 79–80. 111

WOMEN, WORK AND WAGES IN ENGLAND, 1600–1850

argued that women were actually more efficient at this task, since weeding was so closely associated with them in any century, and therefore they should have received higher wages than men. One sector of employment where we can be more precise about the days and hours worked is in textile mills. Burnette cited wage rates for work in the cotton factories of Scotland and the north of England in the 1830s, and pointed to the comments of a Scottish manufacturer in 1816, in which he stated that cotton pickers at his mill worked irregular hours. He believed that on average, they laboured seven hours a day, although he did note that ‘some of them’ could work as many as eleven or twelve hours in the summer months.41 Evidence from the time books of Samuel Oldknow’s cotton spinning mill at Mellor in Derbyshire in the early 1790s, and the wage books from Bakewell Mill, indeed suggest that the hours and days of work of cotton pickers could be variable. However, Burnette did not refer to other categories of cotton worker. Evidence from Mellor Mill shows that overall, females worked fewer days than males, 42 and this was also true for day spinners at Bakewell Mill, where in 1786 around 70 per cent of female day spinners worked a full six days a week compared to 77 per cent of males.43 However, for those males and females working a full six days, twelve or thirteen hours was usually the norm. Even if we deduct two hours from an adult female spinner’s working day, she still received only about three-quarters of the wage of a male spinner, and as noted above, the gap that remains cannot be accounted for by differences in productivity. Hans-Joachim Voth has claimed that the working hours of males increased during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.44 If this was the case, then in all likelihood so did the hours of women and children, especially as they were the primary workforce employed in the expansion of commercially oriented textile manufacturing.45 The hours that women could work in the hosiery trade were also affected by other duties in the home. Evidence given by William Felkin, for example, supports the view that women were unable to spend as many hours as men employed in domestic industry. On a visit to framework knitters’ shops in Leicester, Felkin described how he found ‘a female at work between 9 and 10 o’clock at night; her husband and two journeymen at work above her head, up the step ladder over the kitchen place she was occupying. . . . The mother of fifteen children; 10 of whom were bred up stockingers. She could not work before breakfast, but laboured every night until 10 o’clock.’ He also noted that

41

Burnette, ‘An investigation of the female–male wage gap’, p. 263. John Rylands Library, University of Manchester. Time Books for Mellor Mill, SO/12/1–4. P. Lane, ‘Labour retention in the Derbyshire cotton mills’ (forthcoming). 43 Chesterfield Public Library, wage books, Bakewell Mill. 44 H-J. Voth, ‘The longest years: new estimates of labour input in England, 1760–1830’, Journal of Economic History, 61 (2001), pp. 165–82. 45 Berg, ‘What difference did women’s work make?’, pp. 223–50. 42

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she ‘was cheerful, uncomplaining, thankful, and pious in her manner and speech’.46 A list of the daily hours that men and women spent working in various branches of the trade showed that the highest number was eighteen for men and sixteen for women. The average, however, was fifteen and thirteen respectively.47 It certainly appears to be the case that many married women did not work the same hours as men. Felkin was probably more aware than most about what actually went on in a stockinger’s home. However, other investigators and social commentators had ideas about the suitability of certain work for women, and what role they should play in the home in terms of mothers and home-makers. These men may have assumed that women spent a certain proportion of their time on household duties when in fact they did not. In the hosiery trade young girls were used to cook and care for children while the mother worked. However, economic circumstances dictated that women had to earn to maintain their family, even if that family at times suffered from neglect. In the 1840s, a Dr Shaw from Leicester considered that the high infant mortality in the town resulted from mothers not having time to care for their children because they spent so much of it working in a stocking frame.48 Economic need may well have prevailed over emotional need when it came to determining the number of hours knitting or seaming. A Jane Withers, aged 31 from Leicester with a family of six (including herself), was reported as working sixteen hours a day, the same as her husband, at sewing up worsted hose. Her earnings of 2s a week were separated out from those of her husband’s and son’s.49 Here the wages paid and hours worked were given, but even if investigators reported earnings alone it cannot be assumed that married women worked fewer hours than men because of household duties. One also needs to note that, as in some of the cases that Burnette drew upon, contemporary reports and studies were often undertaken at times of economic misfortune. Burnette cited, for example, the Parliamentary Report of 1845 to show that female framework knitters were paid the same rate of wages as male. However, the industry was in an extremely depressed state by that time, and wages were at their lowest levels. Moreover, male concern had long since emerged about the growing numbers of women in the trade having contributed to the decline in wages. Thomas Hartshorne thought that ‘if there were no women employed we might have half as much more I should think’.50 The entry of women into an industry previously restricted to ‘skilled’ men, as historians have observed with other

46 Parliamentary Papers, 1845, XV, Report from the Commissioner to Enquire into the Condition of the Framework Knitters, Minutes of Evidence, p. 15. 47 Ibid., pp. 18–22. 48 Parliamentary Papers, 1845, XV, Report from the Commissioner to Enquire into the Condition of the Framework Knitters, p. 103. 49 Ibid., pp. 18–19. 50 Ibid., p. 103.

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trades, prompted a rapid decline in the wage rate.51 Thus it was not so much that women were getting the same wages as men, as that men had been reduced to the same rates as women. Perhaps, it may be argued that women were getting a market wage, but with framework knitting it was one that had come to signify extremely debased skilled labour, to levels of remuneration below common day labouring.

Payments in kind As we will recall, wages did not consist only of money payments. Food often supplemented a wage. In the Victorian period washerwomen were sometimes given bread and cheese and occasionally cast-off clothing by their employers.52 Contemporaries were also cognisant of the necessity of an adequate food intake when withstanding the rigours of hard work. Eden, for example, recorded that in the workhouse at Derby ‘women when they wash, and other persons, during severe labour, have an additional allowance of victuals’.53 The argument has been made that payments in kind should be added to the wages of men and women in order to establish a more accurate wage ratio. For farm servants, on the assumption that it would cost two-thirds as much to board a woman as a man, this being the opinion of Arthur Young, the wage ratio of the farm servants’ wages Burnette reviewed would increase from ‘a little more than one third to over a half’.54 However, women were still paid less than men, and again, productivity differences have been thought to account for much of the gap that remained. This would mean that a greater proportion of women’s wages comprised in-kind payments, as they were for unskilled workers generally. In 1723 an assessment of wage rates for men and women working in the hay harvest was set at 10d and 6d, as shown in Table 4.1. If food was not provided, effective remuneration dropped to 6d and 3d respectively,55 which is equal to a reduction of 40 per cent of the male wage and 50 per cent of that of the female. If we apply the two-thirds proportion of payments in kind, then women’s wages should have been reduced by 6d, not 3d. However, this is of less importance than the loss of half of a woman’s wage to food and drink costs. It is likely that most married women took the full 6d where it was offered, since they could not afford to see half their wage lost to their families. Thus women at times of economic adversity were the first

51

Schwartz, London in the Age of Industrialisation, p. 46. P.E. Malcolmson, English Laundresses: a Social History, 1850–1930 (Chicago, 1986), p. 13. 53 F.M. Eden, The State of the Poor, II (1795), p. 379. 54 Burnette, ‘The female–male wage gap’, pp. 270–1. 55 J.D. Chambers, Nottinghamshire in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1966), pp. 282–3. 52

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to suffer in terms of their calorific intake.56 In some cases this would have affected their ability to work, and hence their productivity. Historians have argued that non-monetary payments and incentives such as subsidised rents, schooling, sick clubs, fuel and provisions were of great significance in the recruitment of workers to the early cotton mills.57 Such incentives were especially important in the recruitment of skilled workers. Chapman notes how in 1783 Richard Arkwright ‘gave his principal workmen’ twenty-seven milch cows worth £8 to £10 each.58 Undoubtedly, the benefits accrued to male skilled workers such as joiners, wheelwrights, smiths and filers, and to their families, could be considerable. However, not everyone was working as a member of a family group,59 or indeed located within one that would have the advantage of some of these more significant income enhancements. Single or widowed women, for example, who worked as cotton pickers would be among those least to benefit. This was also true for those workers who were not employed by a wealthy cotton manufacturer, because not all employers could provide incentives and non-monetary payments on the scale of Arkwright and Oldknow.60 Moreover, if manufacturers could add to people’s incomes they could also subtract from them. A wage list of 1795 shows that of the women working at Chapel-en-le-Frith in Derbyshire, five of the sixty employed had between 1s 6d and 3s deducted from their wages which ranged from 3s 9d to 4s.61 Poor work, cursing and swearing led to fines and deductions which no doubt affected males and females in similar ways. However, in terms of in-kind payments and incentives, it is more likely that these increased the female–male wage gap rather than decreased it. Servants were sometimes paid board wages in lieu of meals. If we take the weekly board wages paid to Mary Bromley, dairy maid, John Ward, brewer, and Thomas Clarkson, gardener, of Donington Park in 1734, we find that both men received board wages of 5s and Mary Bromley 4s.62 We may suppose that there is an equality based on the presumption that men would consume a larger quantity of food than women, and would therefore require more board wages, but this is by no means certain given the very long working hours of a dairy maid and the fatiguing nature of her work. It is clear, however, that board wages were affected by other factors than purely the need to maintain a person’s level of nutrition. The payment of the monthly board wages at

56 M. Mitchell, ‘The effects of unemployment on the social condition of women and children in the 1930s’, History Workshop Journal, 19 (1985), p. 111. 57 S.D. Chapman, The Early Factory Masters (Newton Abbot, 1967), pp. 157–62. 58 Ibid., p. 160. 59 H. Freudenberger, F. Mather and C. Nardinelli, ‘A new look at the early factory labour force’, Journal of Economic History, 44 (1984), p. 1087. 60 Chapman, Early Factory Masters, p. 160. 61 Rare Books and Manuscripts Library, Columbia University, New York. Arkwright and Oldknow Collection, Accounts, 7 May 1795. 62 HL Hastings Collection, HAF/36/5.

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Donington Park in 1794 and 1795 show that senior males received 10s 6d, and male servants of a lower status 7s a week.63 What we see operating in the payment of board wages are not only variations in the prices of foodstuffs, but also such differences as rank and status, and quite possibly custom. Unfortunately, there is insufficient information for female servants to make a direct comparison, but surely estimating boarding costs for men and women on the basis that females secured two-thirds of those of males may not be realistic in all circumstances. Furthermore, the greater visibility of some male servants would have provided them with more opportunity to extract other forms of payment from guests, such as vails. This would have increased earnings at least until the second half of the eighteenth century, when vail giving began to diminish.64

Differences in human capital In Table 4.2 the yearly wages of a number of male and female domestic servants are illustrated. In each case the contrast in the wages paid to men and women within the servant hierarchy demonstrates that in most cases women were paid considerably less than men. A further reason sometimes suggested for the differences in market wages is that women lacked skills and training, and so this meant they were not as productive.65 In these domestic service occupations less importance would be attached to the productivity of manual Table 4.2 Male and female servants’ yearly wages in £s (Donington Park, Leicestershire) Years

Occupation – M/F

Male

Female

Ratio†

1693 1729–30 1729–30 1775–6 1775–6 1778/1775 1783 1783

Footman/housemaid Footman/housemaid Cook/housekeeper Footman/housemaid Butler/housekeeper Cook/cook Footman/housemaid Cook/housekeeper

4 7 25 15 31.5 36.75 15 42

3 5 7 7/8 25 20 7/8 30

0.75 0.71 0.28 0.53/0.46 0.79 0.54 0.53/0.46 0.71

Source: Huntington Library, Hastings Collection: HAF/25/48, HAF/34/41, HAF/52/16, HAF/53/10, HAF/56/7, H.L. Note: †Ratio is the proportion of female to male wages.

63

HL Hastings Collection, HAF/62/8. J.J. Hecht, The Domestic Servant Class in Eighteenth-century England (London, 1956), p. 163. 65 Burnette, ‘An investigation of the female–male wage gap’, p. 272. 64

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labour, except perhaps in the case of housemaids, and more emphasis would be placed on differences in human capital. A low level of literacy is another reason cited for women’s lack of comparative productivity. However, female servants at Donington Park were much more likely to be literate than other women workers.66 Many of these female servants had skills and rank that were not dissimilar to those of their male near-counterparts; for example, for the years 1775–76, the housekeeper compared with the butler. A very wide disparity appears in 1729–30 between the housekeeper and the male cook. This may be partly accounted for by the social status of the housekeeper, who in this instance was probably not of the lower-middling sort. Again immediately noticeable for the 1770s is the wide difference between the incomes of male and female cooks. A male cook who could perform his art in the French style became highly sought after as the eighteenth century wore on. Sometimes it was advantageous to a woman when looking for a position to stress that she had worked under a ‘man-cook’ and could prepare food in the French manner. It might help her job prospects, but she was still considered inferior despite having the skills and training.67 Therefore, it was not only a question of the right skills. Since male servants were employed for the purposes of prestige as well as any practical function they might perform, it is difficult to argue that women were paid disproportionately on the basis of productivity or human capital differences. Women received a lower wage because they were women and of less value. Burnette refers only to farm servants in her article and no real mention is made of domestic servants. The nearest she gets to discussing domestic service is in connection with workhouse administrators. Discrimination existed in this area of work but Burnette argued that this could be accounted for by a non-competitive market. What is suggestive is that the wage ratio for a footman and housemaid in 1693 in comparison with that for 1783 shows women’s weakening position in the labour market. Towards the final years of the eighteenth century domestic service was almost the only avenue of employment open to those who had the skills and respectability to work in people’s homes. Many women brought up in the hosiery industry, for example, were effectively excluded.

Conclusion The evidence presented here and the arguments made cast considerable doubt on Joyce Burnette’s view that women in the Industrial Revolution period were likely to receive a market wage for their work. However, her assertions did highlight the importance of deploying wage data with care and the problems of not taking into account the social and economic contexts in which wages

66 67

Lane, ‘Women in the Regional Economy’, pp. 181–4. Hecht, Domestic Servant Class, pp. 64–5. 117

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were earned. Historians are aware of the effect produced on female wage levels by male labour shortages, or the availability of alternative employment, but a flexibility that breaks with custom is not evidence of a market wage. Women were normally confined to tasks that paid significantly less than men. The important issue is not only that women were paid a half or three-quarters of what men earned a day for the same work, but that the sexual division of labour meant women were on the whole limited to tasks that would always ensure they received lower wages.68 For the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the notion of a customary wage for women cannot be rejected, and if women experienced widespread discrimination outside the labour market, why should it generally stop inside? We need to know much more about the work and wages of women in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries before we can form any real opinion on the mechanisms that affected wages in regional and local labour markets. Or indeed, before we can draw firm conclusions about the impact of the Industrial Revolution on the standard of living of working people.

68

This form of gender discrimination is still with us. According to a report from the Equality Opportunities Commission (EOC) at the end of the twentieth century, women in Britain earned 80 per cent of average full-time male hourly earnings. When we look at the English regions, interestingly, average weekly earnings for women were lowest in the East Midlands, and this is where the gender pay gap was widest. Women received 70 per cent of the average weekly earnings of men in this region. Women and Men in Britain – Pay and Income, Equality Opportunities Commission (EOC) downloaded from the EOC webpage, 2000, www.eoc.org.uk. 118

5

‘Meer pennies for my baskitt will be enough’ Women, work and welfare, 1770–1830 STEVEN KING

Overview1 The Introduction to this volume has shown that the issues of women’s labour force participation and remuneration are the subject of much debate. In terms of formal female labour force participation, some historians have suggested that opportunities for women workers were undermined by the revamping of the economic infrastructure taking place during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Even in proto-industrial areas, where it has long been accepted that there was a premium on the family labour force, technological redundancy hit women first and hardest.2 In agricultural regions of the Southeast and South midlands, Keith Snell argues persuasively that there was a marginalisation of women in the rural labour market occasioned by the decline of some rural industries, changing land use, harvest technology and farm reorganisation.3 In addition, feminist historians have traced in some detail attempts by employers and male workers to undermine the labour force participation of women in textile and other factories.4 Even in Lancashire, where it is conventional to see more in the way of economic opportunity for women of all ages compared to the rural south and east, there is considerable

1

The research for this chapter was conducted with the aid of grants from the British Academy and the Leverhulme Trust. I am grateful to Anne-Marie Kilday, John Stewart and Jonathan Andrews for their valuable comments on earlier drafts of this chapter. I am also grateful to Keith Snell for his perceptive substantive and stylistic comments. 2 For the most recent review of the evidence, see J.G. Timmins, Made in Lancashire (Manchester, 1998), pp. 155–77. 3 K.D.M. Snell, Annals of the Labouring Poor: Social Change and Agrarian England, 1660–1900 (Cambridge, 1985), ch. 1. He also argues for much more continuity of women’s work in the western pastoral regions. 4 See E. Jordan, ‘The exclusion of women from industry in nineteenth century Britain’, Comparative Studies in Social History, 31 (1989), and C. Morgan, ‘Gender construction and gender relations in cotton and chain making in England: a contested and varied terrain’, Women’s History Review, 6 (1997). 119

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evidence – in settlement examinations and other documentation arising out of the poor law, for instance – that many women found it difficult to obtain long-term full-time employment.5 Other historians, however, have adopted a contrary view, arguing that the labour force role of women actually increased during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as women carved out niche opportunities, reacted to opportunity in a rather faster and more flexible way than men, and colonised many of the newest trades that were to provide the growth areas of the nineteenth century. Indeed, the very presence of a pool of low paid female labour has been seen as a factor underpinning industrialisation processes in both England and Scotland.6 That we miss these developments, it is sometimes argued, reflects the fact that we misinterpret sources, look in the wrong places, or are beguiled by the invisibility of paid women’s work.7 To take just one example of the problems involved in reconstructing participation rates, a young woman called Ann Dewhurst wrote to the overseer of her home parish of Billington in Lancashire in October 1821 from a small hamlet just outside Preston: Sir as you have Relieved Ann Dewhurst with 1s 6d per week I have sent you a few lines to let you know that the last time I wrote you sent me 5s which did me great kindness. I desired in the last letter that you would Relieve me with 2s per week and now I am indeed forced to tell you that if you can not relieve me 2s per week I must be removed in a cart to your parish . . . I desire that you would be so Charitable as to allow me 6d per week more and some money to bye into my Baskitt. I could remain in my situation and I would return you many thanks for so doing so I desire that you as soon as possible will let the said Peter Worden. I know that he must relieve me with 2s per week and meer pennies for my Baskitt will be enough and I should be greatly Obliged for your goodness. So I am your most affectionate Servant – Ann Dewhurst.8

It is clearly unlikely that any historical source would pick up Ann Dewhurst’s entrepreneurial wanderings with her ‘baskitt’. Yet she was, in every

5

For an overview, see D. Valenze, The First Industrial Woman (Oxford, 1997). On the Lancashire experience, see M. Hanly, ‘Women and the poor law in Lancashire’, Lancashire Local Historian, 15 (2002). 6 On Scotland, see C. Whatley, ‘Women and the economic transformation of Scotland, 1740–1830’, Scottish Economic and Social History, 14 (1994); R.A. Houston, ‘Women in the economy and society of Scotland, 1500–1800’, in R.A. Houston and I.D. Whyte (eds) Scottish Society, 1500–1800 (Cambridge, 1989). For a particularly good early attempt at locating the role of women in industrialisation, see P. Hudson and M. Berg, ‘Rehabilitating the Industrial Revolution’, Economic History Review, 45 (1992). 7 See A. Lawrence, Women in England 1500–1760: A Social History (London, 1994), and B. Hill, Women, Work and Sexual Politics (London, 1989). 8 This document was brought to my attention from his private collection by Peter Titterington. It appears to be a rough copy of a letter in the Lancashire Record Office (hereafter LRO) PR2391/19, ‘Letter’. 120

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sense of the word, engaged in the labour market at the same time as she was tied into overlapping and complementary resource-accumulation strategies such as turning to the poor law. Sara Mendelson and Patricia Crawford suggest that reconstructing the nature of women’s work is a matter of concentrating on ‘tiny glimpses . . . and on a multitude of examples’ like that of Dewhurst, with all the associated problems of moving from the particular to the general in this area of debate.9 It is not surprising, therefore, to find some arguing that understanding and reconstructing the nature of women’s labour force participation requires a different methodology (and perhaps a different language) than that employed in approaching male work patterns.10 Historians have found it no easier to agree on the nature and scale of remuneration of women’s work. At one end of the historiographical spectrum, both John Burnett and Pamela Sharpe have argued that women in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century agricultural occupations experienced remarkably sticky wage rates that moved little in response to the relative supply of female labour or variations in its quality. This, argues Sharpe, amounted to a ‘customary wage’, and such wage structures were also duplicated in rural industrial and industrial occupations that were dominated by female labour.11 Customary or not, it has been argued that female wages in most occupations were relatively low (even where women did the same job as men in the same place), reflecting cultural presuppositions about the role of the female wage, the different architecture of the female labour market and the manipulation of employers and other employees. Elasticity of labour supply is also said to have influenced the level and flexibility of the female wage. Jane Humphries, for instance, has argued that restrictions on access to common-right forced a wave of female labour into the formal labour market, depressing wages and intensifying under-employment trends already in existence for female agricultural labour in particular.12 Even in urban industrial areas it is becoming clearer that the fact that women had a much more spatially limited labour market than men means that women from the same locality would effectively undercut prevailing wage levels by competing with each other for jobs in local factories rather than finding work further

9

S. Mendelson and P. Crawford, Women in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1999), p. 259. For an interesting theoretical discussion, see D. Massey, Space, Place and Gender (Oxford, 1994). 11 P. Sharpe, ‘The female labour market in English agriculture during the Industrial Revolution: expansion or contraction?’, Agricultural History Review, 47 (1999); P. Sharpe and S.D. Chapman, ‘Women’s employment and industrial organisation: commercial lace embroidery in early nineteenth century Ireland and England’, Women’s History Review, 5 (1996); J. Burnett, Idle Hands: The Experience of Unemployment, 1790–1990 (London, 1994), pp. 32–40. 12 J. Humphries, ‘Enclosure, common right and women: the proletarianisation of families in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries’, Journal of Economic History, L (1990). 10

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afield.13 Mendelson and Crawford thus conclude that ‘Typically the work of poor women was labour intensive and ill-paid’ and that women in general were ‘partial wage-earners’.14 There will thus be little surprise to see that household budgets suggest women played a limited part in generating yearly household resources in many communities and in most life-cycle scenarios.15 Yet there are alternative perspectives on the issue of remuneration. Where piece rates (payment of wages according to the quantity of output rather than the time put into production) did not dominate the structure of pay in the Lancashire textile industries, female wage rates were remarkably responsive to issues of supply and demand. Even where piece rates dominated, what becomes clear from looking at wage books is the variation in female effort that was put into the wage-earning process over the course of a month or year. Thus, in some weeks or months women would put in very considerable hours and generate significant returns from piece rate work, while at other times (and even where there was clearly enough work to earn more) they worked more limited hours. Burnette makes similar observations and offers persuasive arguments why this should have been the case.16 For the rural county of Herefordshire, Richard Kelsall also questions the idea of a customary/sticky wage. In the early to mid-eighteenth century, magistrates in the county were attempting to regulate wages in a complex scheme designed, for both sexes, to differentiate between the wage rates suitable for those of different ages or with different responsibilities. He argues that the magistrates would hardly have gone to this trouble if a sticky customary wage regime had been in force.17 Nor, meanwhile, were wages necessarily low. Lord suggests that women in framework knitting, lace-making and straw plaiting, both young and single and older and married, earned enough to be paying 6d–10d per month to participate in East Midlands female friendly societies.18 The same was true of rural areas in north Lancashire, Cumberland and Westmorland. Here it is possible to trace numerous female friendly societies between 1789 and 1820,

13 S.A. King, ‘Labour markets in Lancashire’, in D. Ebeling and S.A. King (eds) Paths to European Industrialisation (Berlin, 2004). 14 Mendelson and Crawford, Women, pp. 261–2. 15 S. Horrell and J. Humphries, ‘Old questions, new data and alternative perspectives: families living standards in the Industrial Revolution’, Journal of Economic History, 52 (1992). 16 King, ‘Labour markets’; J. Burnette,’An investigation of the female–male wage gap during the Industrial Revolution in Britain’, Economic History Review, L (1997), p. 279. 17 Though one might regard this process as the mere institutionalisation of customary wages. R. Kelsall, ‘A century of wage assessment in Herefordshire, 1662–1762’, in W. Minchinton (ed.) Wage Regulation in Pre-industrial England (Newton Abbott, 1972), pp. 200–38. 18 E. Lord, ‘The friendly society movement and the respectability of the rural working class’, Rural History, 8 (1997).

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and in places such as Troutbeck or Lamplugh in Westmorland up to two-thirds of all women of working age belonged to the local friendly society.19 The poor law attached considerable significance in the north of England to such membership. In the Lancashire town of Bolton, for instance, overseers collected friendly society membership certificates between 1799 and 1834, both as evidence of their liability or not to pay poor relief and as confirmation that applicants for poor relief had previously been of good working character.20 Moreover, while Horrell and Humphries offer a pessimistic interpretation of the place of the female wage in the household economies of labouring families, Peter King is more optimistic, pointing to the continued importance of gleaning in some rural areas into the 1830s.21 Likewise, Richard Wall has mined rich data from Corfe Castle in Dorset to show that women consistently provided about 30 per cent of household income through their activities in the labour market during the later eighteenth century.22 Nor, perhaps, should we forget that whatever women’s contribution to the household economy, the fact that they earned anything at all had an important symbolism in the eyes of both working people and the welfare system to which many of them might have to turn. In other words, female wages had a value over and above the money that was actually paid in return for work, as becomes clear where we analyse the manner in which those who wrote pauper letters refer to income from employment in relation to their relief applications. The mere fact that they earned or threatened to earn counted in their favour in a way that it would not have done in relation to men, at least for the north of England.23 Navigating this complex maze of historiographical opinion is a difficult proposition. Clearly, many questions require further attention. What is the best way to measure female labour force participation? What was the representative wage form for female workers? Did the wage form differ across

19 See S. King, ‘Making the most of opportunity: the economy of makeshifts in the early modern rural north’, in S. King and A. Tomkins (eds) The Poor in England, 1700–1850: An Economy of Makeshifts (Manchester, 2003); M. Parsons, ‘Poor relief in Troutbeck, 1640–1836’, Transactions of the Cumberland and Westmorland Antiquarian and Archaeological Society, 95 (1995); R. Dickinson, ‘The friendly society of the inhabitants of the parish of Lamplugh and its neighbourhood’, Transactions of the Cumberland and Westmorland Antiquarian and Archaeological Society, 65 (1965). 20 Bolton Library (hereafter BL), PGB 2/1–76, ‘Friendly society membership certificates’. The poor law here seems to have been particularly prone to collect such certificates from women. 21 P. King, ‘Customary rights and women’s earnings: the importance of gleaning to the rural labouring poor, 1750–1850’, Economic History Review, 44 (1991). 22 R. Wall, ‘Some implications of the earnings, income and expenditure patterns of married women in populations in the past’, in J. Henderson and R. Wall (eds) Poor Women and Children in the European Past (London, 1994). 23 On the symbolism of wages, see S.A. King and J.C. Muldrew, ‘Cash, wages and the economy of makeshifts in England, 1650–1800’, in P. Scholliers and L. Schwarz (eds) Worlds of Wages (Oxford, 2003).

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single, widowed, older or younger women? If the wage form was geared towards providing a customary rather than a market wage, was the level of that wage low? If women obtained customary wages, why did such wage rates persist? Were women powerless in the labour market? These are important issues, and they are questions that all contributors to this volume address in a variety of ways. This chapter will be underpinned by a standpoint that is different from much of the literature. Focusing on communities in the north of England, particularly Lancashire, it will argue first that one of the key elements in the web of resources deployed by individuals and households to cope with everyday hardship was a seamless join between work and poor relief. Second, and most importantly, the chapter will suggest that this seamless join was particularly relevant for women, whatever their marital status, life-cycle stage or residential arrangements, with the poor law, by accident or design, modifying the architecture of the northern female labour market in a way that was not duplicated for men.24 Using overseers’ account books, vestry minutes and pauper letters, I will suggest that when we set female work and remuneration patterns within the context of the makeshift economy, and particularly poor relief policy, it is possible to see women workers as actively having choices over where to deploy effort in order to maximise their income. Implicitly, I question the easy assumption that the 40 to 70 per cent of the female population (married, single, widowed/deserted) that might be in or near poverty during the long eighteenth century had to work where they could and for whatever wages they could obtain. Such an assumption – implicit in the work of Mendelson and Crawford cited above – would fit well with our understanding of the dynamics of the family economy in the rural south-east but for women in the north-west the existence of low and sticky wages and of partial wage earning against the backdrop of a work–welfare nexus might actually be a reflection of female success in resource acquisition, rather than their failure. In other words, this chapter takes a step back from the debate over the level and fluidity of the female wage and its outstanding questions. I suggest that to resolve the conundrum of female labour force participation and remuneration it is important not to start in the middle of a story that begins with the question ‘Where did women’s work and remuneration “fit” in the web of making ends meet?’ Only by reconstructing the place of work as but one element in the local and regional web of resources that constituted the makeshift economy can we understand how much control women were likely to have had over the nature and extent of their engagement with the labour market, and the significance of wage levels and forms.

24

Similar arguments have been made about the relationship between poor relief and male work patterns for the south of England in G.R. Boyer, An Economic History of the English Poor Law, 1750–1850 (Cambridge, 1990). 124

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Women and the poor law – an aggregate view As a starting point for this argument, we must appreciate that the poverty of women at all stages of the individual and family life-cycle remained a central concern of the poor law in many northern communities throughout the long eighteenth century. As I have suggested elsewhere,25 there appears to have been no sustained tendency in the north (as there was in many southern communities) for the numerical bias in favour of female recipients of cash payments from the poor law to be undermined by the appearance of more and more men with families on the relief lists by the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.26 Outside of the biggest urban areas, women continued to dominate lists of regular pensioners and those receiving irregular cash payments. Women were also disproportionately likely in many northern communities to benefit from payments in kind – notably clothing, food and fuel. Whether these ‘payments’ were meant for women themselves or for the wider family is usually unclear, but the very fact that goods were given to women at all says much about the gendered expectations of poor law officials. Given these observations, it is not surprising that in northern communities women dominate a ranking of both the number of relief applications and the amount of money devoted to individuals during much of the eighteenth century. In turn, the sheer number of women coming into contact with the poor law was considerable. For the parish of Ravenstonedale in Cumbria, at least a quarter of adult women were in receipt of some form of relief between 1720 and 1770, while in the Lancashire town of Leigh the figure is nearer 30 per cent by the 1790s. By the early nineteenth century, perhaps 12 per cent of all women were coming into contact on a regular basis with the poor law in the Rossendale villages of Cowpe, Lenches, Newhallhey and Hall Carr.27 That said, the scale of payments was generally small. Even by the early nineteenth century it was relatively rare for total payments to individual women to average out at more than 4s per week, and most consolidated payments were considerably less than this.28 While Richard Smith and others have questioned just how many people such payments were supposed to

25 S.A. King, Poverty and Welfare in England 1700–1850: a Regional Perspective (Manchester, 2000), pp. 181–226. 26 See L. Hollen-Lees, The Solidarities of Strangers: The English Poor Laws and the People, 1700–1948 (Cambridge, 1998). 27 Cumbria Record Office (uncatalogued), ‘The great end book of Ravenstonedale’; Rawtenstall Library, ‘Overseer accounts of Cowpe, Lenches, Newhahllhey and Hall Carr’; Wigan Record Office, ‘Poor law accounts of Leigh’. 28 Little work has been done on consolidated payments for the south and east. However, even if we reject the representativeness of David Thomson’s very generous Bedfordshire parishes, it seems likely that allowances were somewhat above the levels for northern England in many southern communities. See King, Poverty and Welfare, p. 48.

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support,29 there can be little doubt that most of the northern women granted relief payments of 1–3s per week would have been engaged in a complex economy of makeshifts at individual and family level.30 Moreover, many female poor law recipients in such northern communities must have been working.31 Some were certainly employed directly by the parish itself, for nursing or laying out the dead, as I will demonstrate below. Many more would have been engaged in the open labour market of their parishes in observable or unobservable (as was the case with Anne Dewhurst) occupations. In other words, there was a de facto relationship between women’s work and poor relief, much as there was a relationship between male relief and male labour markets in the rural south. Of course, this relationship was not unique to female paupers in the north. Male recipients of poor law payments were also often working and indeed obliged to work by local vestries. Their relief was, however, more grudging and inconsistent than that afforded to women. Part of the difference in treatment might be a reflection of the fact that when in work or partial work, men in northern communities were often well paid and thus less likely as individuals to engage in an economy of makeshifts. However, as we shall see, there were also more positive reasons for poor law officials to create a work–relief nexus in relation to women and to have a particular concern with the resource accumulation strategies of women. Pauper letters provide initial evidence of the character of this connection between work and poor relief. Thus, on 10 December 1816, the overseer for the town of Preston wrote to the overseer of the township of Billington in Lancashire in the following terms: I am directed to acquaint you that Ann Shuttleworth wife of William Shuttleworth belonging your Township, has applied here for Relief . . . she has now no work, neither has she looms to work on, the state of her family is as follows, viz:- Ann Shuttleworth aged 23, 3 children aged 4, 2, 1 month, lately confined, and now no work – had she a pair of looms and a little allowance, thinks she could do.32

Work is emphasised heavily in the letter, highlighting the centrality of this component of the economy of makeshifts in Lancashire. It was both the cause of poverty and a partial solution to that condition. However, this was work with strings attached. Shuttleworth wanted the poor law to make

29

R.M. Smith, ‘Ageing and well-being in early modern England: pension trends and gender preferences under the English old poor law, c. 1650–1800’, in P. Johnson and P. Thane (eds) Old Age From Antiquity to Post-modernity (London, 1998). 30 A point made well by P. Thane, Old Age in English History: Past Experiences, Present Issues (Oxford, 2000). 31 A point which I also make in respect of late seventeenth-century relief recipients. See S.A. King, ‘Locating and characterising poor households in late seventeenth century Bolton: sources and interpretations’, Local Population Studies, 68 (2002). 32 LRO, PR 2391/23, ‘Letter’. My italics. 126

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available a pair of looms and to pay an ongoing allowance to support her earning activities from weaving. Just as significantly, the letter was written by a fellow overseer, and might be read as this official seeing nothing wrong in asking the overseer of Billington to allow this complementary subsidy and to allow it for a young married woman. Other pauper letters confirm that the inability of married women to work (or at least to work as much as usual) could be a reason to seek a connection between work and poor relief. The overseer of the Westmorland parish of Overton wrote to the overseer of Billington, noting in September 1818 that: Application has been made here for Relief for John Shawe, of your Township who is confined to his bed through illness, and has been so nearly a fortnight which is certified by Dr Dixon your Dispensary by whom he is attended; his wife is unable to weave much, by her attendance on her husband; I trust, Sir you will see the purpose of augmenting his weekly allowance 1s. during his illness Which will save us the expense of Removal under and Suspending.33

This narrative is evidence of the crucial importance of female earnings in some family economies, but what is really significant about the letter is that it asks for an augmentation of allowances. In other words, the poor law was subsidising the work activities of man and wife even before the current illness. Once again, the overseer plainly saw nothing wrong with this situation, and the fact that he viewed the inability of the wife to work as an important knock-on effect of the illness of the husband could be read as suggesting that there was an ingrained appreciation of the importance of supporting women’s work as a way of supporting household economies more generally. A letter to the overseer of Billington from the overseer of Horwich (Lancashire) in 1819 provides further evidence of the work–poor law connection for married women, noting that: It is the request of James and Nanny Ormerod that I write to the overseer of Billington to inform him that Nanny has been very poorly for a month and four days so that she has not been able to wait of herself and is poorly yet and they hope you will have the goodness to relieve them at this time as they are very ill of at present and are sorry that they have to trouble you but it is necessity that makes them apply to you and they hope you will help them at this time as they hope not to be regular paupers but will be able to do for themselves if Nanny gets better. 34

In this letter, the complete inability of the wife to ‘wait of herself’ and, as the last few words suggest, to work, is the key justification for the application for support. Unlike the other two cases, there is no evidence that the poor law was

33 34

PRO, PR 2337/10, ‘Letter’. My italics. LRO, PR 2391/18, ‘Letter’. My italics. 127

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supporting the family prior to the illness of Nanny. However, the phrase ‘they hope not to be regular paupers’ suggests clearly that the possibility or threat of low-level engagement with both relief and work was there in the minds of both pauper applicant and overseer donor. It is also important to recognise that a link between women’s work and relief payments existed for other women at different life-cycle stages. Thus a letter to the overseer of Billington from Mary Dewhurst, the sister of Ann Dewhurst (whose letter we analysed above), shows a single mother creating such a link in the eyes of the overseer. She wrote: Gentlemen, I am under the necessity to solicit your aid at this time for I am in great distress having no bed to lie on but obliged to lay on the bare ground this gentlemen is a bad case But gentlemen I hope you will seriously consider my case and allow me a bed and some money I have some money to pay and I want a little money to pay my debt and some while I can set up my looms But Gentlemen I want a pair of stays and a shuttle If I get these things I shall want little of you for I do not like coming to crave your assistance If I can help it now.35

Dewhurst, then, wished to be subsidised while getting back into employment (she already had her looms) and requested that the overseer also buy her the crucial missing equipment to allow such employment to happen. Whether or not the overseer responded positively on this occasion we cannot tell, but it says much about the connection between work and poor relief in the mind of Dewhurst herself that she should make the requests in this letter in the first place. Evidence for women in other circumstances and at other life-cycle stages is considered below. Of course, men too applied for and received nonresident relief payments of the sort requested by women in these letters. However, evidence from the town of Hulme in Lancashire suggests that the applications of men received less favourable consideration and had to offer a wider range of justifications than was the case for women.36 Moving from individual narratives such as these to say anything concrete about the generalised experiences of northern women is a difficult proposition. However, as Sokoll has argued in a different context, there is little to suggest that the experiences and sentiments of individual pauper letter writers would have differed very much from those of the silent pauper majority that we can trace through overseer accounts or vestry books.37 Indeed, using eighteenthand nineteenth-century Essex pauper letters, we can trace an emphasis on linking the capacity to work/availability of work to applications for poor relief

35

LRO, PR 2391/46, ‘Letter’. My italics. See the unique collection of letters to and from the overseers of Hulme. Manchester Archive Service, M10, ‘Overseer correspondence’. My thanks to Keith Snell for his perceptive comments on this section of the chapter. 37 T. Sokoll, Essex Pauper Letters, 1731–1837 (Oxford, 2001). 36

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that is as clear as that found in Lancashire. However, whereas the Essex poor law came to concentrate its resources on men, the Lancashire poor law continued to prioritise women, creating links between the female labour market and communal welfare that we ought to explore and explain. In particular, several important questions suggest themselves. Did failings in the labour market keep female wages low, sticky and intermittent, forcing women into partial dependence on the poor law; or were poor relief levels so low that women had to accept any opening in the labour market to make ends meet? Alternatively, did poor law officials in some northern communities plan and execute a seamless relationship between work and welfare as the cornerstone of a policy to support fragile household economies much as some southern poor law officials supported male wages for the same reason? In other words, should we regard poor relief and work (plus exploitation of other areas of the makeshift economy) for women as largely alternative or as complementary resource avenues in the north of England?38 In addition, if work and welfare did form a seamless web, were female workers simply wage and welfare ‘takers’, as Mendelson and Crawford and other contributors to the historiography suggest, or could they make choices about deployment of effort in that web, influencing the significance that welfare and gender historians should attach to the level and form of ‘the wage’?

Women, work and welfare To begin to address these questions we must move from the individual stories highlighted in pauper letters to the more general issue of poor law policy as demonstrated in vestry minutes and poor law accounts – from potential recipients to policy makers. In doing so, it is important to acknowledge that Lancashire communities, in common with those from all other counties, could demonstrate wide long- and short-term variations in poor law policy and tone. Some communities were consistently generous and liberal, some persistently parsimonious and harsh, and others veered between the two extremes depending upon the composition of the vestry, the vociferousness of local ratepayers or the constraints of the rate base.39 Such intra-county variation in the sentiment and local economics that lay behind the relief process makes it more difficult to reconstruct the relationship between work and poor law policy, to make generalisations and to place work and relief in the wider makeshift economy. However, by drawing on vestry books from communities

38 Such a question has precedence in the relationship between male work and welfare that underpinned the Speenhamland system in many southern and Midland counties. 39 In terms of the generosity of allowances or the subgroups of the needy recognised by the poor law, the spectrum of experience in Lancashire was much narrower than in southern counties such as Bedfordshire. See King, Poverty and Welfare, ch. 7.

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across the liberal–parsimonious spectrum we can at least begin to open the window on women, work and welfare between the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. At the generous end of the spectrum we find the community of Tarleton. By the early decades of the nineteenth century, the overseers and vestrymen of this rural Lancashire township had been giving allowances which were out of line in scale and extent compared to other parishes in the area for the previous twenty years.40 Richard Smith identifies the township as one of the most generous in Lancashire, and it was to remain so despite periodic attempts to pare back allowances.41 The poor law here engaged with the female labour market in complex ways. It offered employment to women, both poor law recipients themselves or those in other paid work of various sorts. In 1813, Hannah Hesketh, an outworker for the Clayton merchant John Savage, was given the task of caring for ‘Ellen Hunter, a poor delirious girl belonging to the township for the sum of 2s. 6d. per week’.42 The Tarleton pauper Michael Sefton and his wife Margery also needed care, and their situation provided parish-paid work for three other women, all at very different life-cycle stages. Alice Fairclough was paid for mending their clothes, Ann Caddick for washing for the couple over a year and Ann Leatherbarrow was paid as a home help for ‘assisting Margery to and from bed 16 weeks’.43 Men, even poor men, were never employed in this manner, suggesting perhaps that women workers could go on being useful for longer than men, and encouraging the poor law to foster a gendered relationship between work and poor law payments. The Tarleton poor law also provided sick pay to young working women. In January 1815, the vestry noted that: Betty Dickinson is at this time very sick and incapable of pursuing a livelyhood [sic] – it was agreed to allow her 2s. per week till such time as she is capable of providing for herself.44

Some thirty-five women were provided with sick pay in the period covered by the vestry book, though relief was sometimes given in kind rather than cash, with Ellen Tyrer, for instance, having her worsted ‘reeled’ when sick. Men were also given relief when sick, but more grudgingly, less generously and in fewer numbers. Most obviously, though, the vestry sought either to keep women at work on a self-employed basis, or to put them to work where they had none. This they 40

LRO, PR 3168, ‘Tarleton poor law records’. Smith, ‘Pension trends’. 42 LRO, PR 3168, ‘Tarleton poor law records’. Twenty-three further children were also boarded out in the period from 1800 to 1830, mainly to working women. 43 Ibid. 44 Ibid. 41

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did irrespective of the life-cycle position or residential arrangements of the women, something that we might have expected on the basis of the pauper letters quoted above. Thus on 5 July 1811 the vestry agreed to buy Elizabeth Edmondson (a married woman) a set of looms. Margaret Dawson (a widow) had looms purchased for her in October 1812, and in February 1812 the vestry lent Alice Leigh (a young mother) 4s to equip her basket. Helen Ashcroft periodically had her basket replenished and her debts paid off by the vestry. In December 1814, meanwhile, Helen Fazackerly had a new winding machine purchased for her, Catherine Wilcock was given ‘wheels and a swift’, while Betty Marsh had fifty-four baskets of coal at 6d per basket given to her so that she could sell in the surrounding countryside. However, the case of Anne Leigh demonstrates most forcefully the thinking of the vestry on the issue of work and relief. We first hear of her in February 1813 when (aged about 32, to judge from later evidence in the vestry book) she applies for 1s 6d temporary pension to cover a shortfall in her work income. In April 1813 she comes back to the vestry, and the minutes note that ‘Anne Leigh’s shop windows to be repaired; Alice Leigh, shuttle and cock allowed’.45 By 5 May, her self-employment ambitions were grander. She went to the vestry ‘wanting a weaving shop built’. The vestry agreed to investigate costs and later noted: Richard Cooke states that he will compleat the building of a weaving shop, 5 yards square for the sum of seven pounds (with the only exception of daubing the walls) he will find timber, nails, straw for thatch and also thatch the same and make the building in readiness for daubing.46

With apparently little dissent, the vestry agreed to fund the costs of building at its meeting of February 1814. There is no evidence that the costs of building were regarded as a loan and it is clear that the vestry had consciously set out to subsidise self-employment. It would be wrong to say that Leigh was typical, and the evidence is not compelling enough at this stage to suggest that subsidising self-employment was a systematic policy. It is also important to note that men too had tools purchased for them by Lancashire townships as well as those elsewhere in the north. However, it is true that women were relieved more regularly in this manner than men, that the cost of supporting female employment was greater than that for men and that payment to support self-employment for men often involved them leaving Tarleton.47

45

Ibid. Alice is the sister. Ibid. 47 The vestry was not always willing to subsidise self-employment, however. When Betty Hodson applied to them in November 1813 for a set of looms they declined, noting that ‘she is a large, healthy young woman’. When Mary Robinson applied for 24s in the form 46

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Similar stories emerge from a consideration of the records of another of Lancashire’s more generous vestries, Garstang, north of Preston.48 As in Tarleton, the township made efforts on several fronts to find or maintain work for poor and marginal women across the life-cycle. Ann Salisbury was one of sixteen (mostly married) women who boarded children on behalf of the parish between 1815 and 1825, and the parish also employed nurses and were consistent in buying supplies of clothing and cloth from female suppliers. These are familiar themes, and such opportunities were not afforded to men. What Garstang did not do was to try and set women up in independent work. There was little in the way of weaving in the town and settlements around it were sufficiently dispersed to make hawking with a basket a limited proposition. Instead, they sought to find paid employment with local firms, for both men and women. Thus Hannah Noble was one of six women between 1815 and 1817 for whom the overseer found work at the calico printing mill in Catterall, just outside the town. Presumably the intervention of the overseer with local employers eased the path of getting a job, but it is significant – a point to which we return below – that the women involved should apply to the vestry for aid rather than seek work of this sort independently. The vestry also encouraged the occasionally poor (up to 50 per cent of the population in this area by the early nineteenth century) to seek work further afield, paying substantial sums to finance journeys as far as Leeds or Liverpool. However, as the previous case of Anne Leigh emphasises, women were not only passive actors in the work–relief nexus. Another good example is that of Alice Balderstone, who came to the vestry in 1815 seeking to make a bargain. She said, If the town will furnish her with articles of wearing apparel for herself and children and also with a bed and bolsters . . . with these articles found her she can get 1s 6d. a piece . . . at Roach Bridge.49

Work and independence, in other words, had become a bargaining tool. A further, speculative, reading of this statement, however, might be that at the time of her application Balderstone felt that her efforts were more likely to be rewarded in applying for relief than seeking work in the locality. Ann Taylor (married, 33 years of age) similarly used work as a bargaining tool. She applied ‘for an allowance of 2s. per week towards supporting her child and some trifle for herself until she gets into work’.50 of a loan to equip her basket she was declined because she had not previously repaid debts to the township. Both decisions carry moral overtones, suggesting unseen reasons for breaking the ‘normal’ work–relief nexus. 48 LRO, DDX 386/3, ‘Garstang vestry book’. 49 Ibid. My italics. 50 Ibid. My italics. 132

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The vestry agreed, but on the issue of work said that ‘she must spare no effort in this respect’. Yet, the vestry continued to subsidise her income. In 1816, Ann Taylor wants relief – she has 2s., with child 2s 6d.. She winds for Thos Gregson. Mr Seed, overseer, to find her another person to wind for. No further allowance to be made.51

In short, she must work harder, but her labour was still subsidised by the poor law and she chose to deploy effort not in finding additional work for herself but in applying for relief. It says much about the expectations of the vestry that they assumed work would be available, but also that they continued to subsidise the work of this woman. Even in 1825 ‘The overseers have the authority to give Hannah Balderstone and Ann Taylor each 5s. the latter being to reside at Preston to work’. Some men also sought to bargain in this way with the Garstang vestry, but they were few in number and were regarded more suspiciously by the vestrymen. Moreover, while it is clear that both men and women in Lancashire townships were enjoined to find work, men were much more likely to have relief withdrawn if their efforts failed. There are important distinctions between the operation of the old poor law in the north and the south here. Officials in both regions subsidised employment, but Lancashire townships focused resources on women rather than on men. Yet there is also a more important distinction to make. In effect the southern poor law subsidised farmers by supporting male wages, and the allowance systems with which we are familiar were really all about community-level labour markets. In the north, the poor law subsidised individual household economies and focused on individual labour patterns. Supporting women’s work rather than men’s made sense in this context, allowing small and relatively inexpensive support to the wider household economy at the same time enforcing moral discipline on male breadwinners. Meanwhile, the Garstang vestry, in common with Tarleton, also recognised unemployment or unemployability among women as a justification for relief much more frequently than was the case with men. In April 1824, they resolved that ‘the overseers have the authority to send Ellen Ribchester to Alston workhouse and to give an order to the governor of the same that she be taught to weave’.52 Such retraining opportunity was rarely afforded to adult men in Lancashire parishes, though it was more common in London and other southern urban areas. Meanwhile, in 1816, Jane Gardener attended to say that she had been under obligation from want of employment to pawn her clothing to the sum of 18s. 9d. which she wants the

51 52

Ibid. Ibid. 133

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town to redeem for her. She says if her clothing be redeemed she will trouble the town no more having a promise of work.53

They agreed. One reading of this episode is that women’s work was forward in the minds of vestrymen. Nor did it seem unusual for them to be asked in 1818 to give her more relief, or to receive ‘a testimony from Mr Tyson saying she is unable to work’. As with the vestry in Tarleton, then, Garstang vestrymen expected, and clearly were expected by paupers themselves, to underwrite women’s work and to subsidise employment in ways that were not fully duplicated for men. In the south, by contrast, the expectation was increasingly that male work patterns would be subsidised in this way. The concentration on supporting women’s work with poor law funds becomes more intense in the less generous Lancashire vestries. In November 1824, for instance, the Bispham-with-Norbreck vestry recorded the case of Mary Badger who ‘having had the misfortune to fall from the effects of a fit into her yarn in her loom and so much damaged the same that it cannot be woven we the undersigned do allow her 2s. and agree to pay the damages caused by the misfortune’.54 It was unheard of here, and rare elsewhere in Lancashire, for the poor law to adopt similar positions in respect of men. At the Clitheroe select vestry of November 1828 it was: Resolved that before Catherine Ormerod and her family be relieved, Mr Hacking to visit the family and see how they are situated and ascertain what their earnings are and report.55

This vestry was more cautious than that of Tarleton, but it is clear that even though the vestry did not know the circumstances of Catherine Ormerod they expected her to be working and there is an implicit expectation evident here that they would dispense relief. Support for an active work–relief nexus is provided by the case of Jane Whittle. Her situation was considered by the Clitheroe select vestry of April 1830 in the following terms: Jane Whittle family 6 children. 16 years old eldest William, 3s. 9d. per week as sick; 14 second Joseph 3s. per week; 11 third 2s. 6d. per week; 8 fourth Nancy 1s. per week; 6 fifth Ann nothing; 4 sixth Jane nothing. Jane the mother earns 1s. 6d. per week, parish 4s. 15s. 9d.56

The Clitheroe vestry clearly balanced the makeshift economy in which this woman and her family were engaged, applying relief on what must have been a sliding scale. 53 54 55 56

Ibid. My italics. LRO, DDX 1/6, ‘Bispham with Norbreck vestry book’. LRO, DDX 28/257, ‘Clitheroe select vestry minutes’. Ibid. 134

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One of the best documented of the Lancashire vestries is that of Chorley, where policy and allowances fluctuated wildly according to the changing composition of the vestry. Here we see a facet of the work–relief nexus not observed in Tarleton or Garstang, with the vestry seeking to force women to work, giving them the choice between limited outdoor relief (and by implication either intense poverty or some combination of work and relief) and the workhouse. In December 1800, for instance, the vestry resolved ‘That William Gillibrand’s widow of the New Street be allowed 1s. 6d. a week and if that is not sufficient she must go to the workhouse’.57 Sometimes they dispensed with the relief part of the equation, ordering in December 1804, for instance, that ‘Mr Tootell must endeavour to procure employ for Betty Holding and if she cannot get employ she must be admitted (with her child) into the workhouse’.58 This said, even the Chorley vestry worked on the expectation that they would be supporting women who actually were in work. In December 1817, for instance, they considered the case of ‘Mary Crook, widow and 4 children eldest 17 years, second 13 years youngest 7 years. Earnings 12s. Refused relief but promised them clothes’.59 In short, there was an appreciation that 12s might not be enough to buy clothes, though this was somewhat above the family earnings of an agricultural labourer in the south. However, Crook disputed the decision and asked again for regular relief. In 1818 the case came to a head when ‘Mary Crook widow not having given an account of earnings and ye family be refused relief’. What vexed the vestry was not the thought of supporting a woman in work, but of not being able to judge the appropriate level of support given this imperfect information. For the majority of female applicants, however, the Chorley vestry (in common with all of those mentioned here) made a series of direct links between work and relief. Thus, in March 1801 the vestry resolved that ‘Alice Leyland, widow, who earns about 1s. 6d. a week be allowed a shilling a week’. They responded to sickness in similar fashion, noting the case of Ann Bannister in July 1805 who was to ‘have 2 flannel shifts or waistcoats allowed her and also 1s. a week while she is incapable of work’. Pregnancy too attracted vestry support. In September 1809, the vestry resolved that ‘William Felton’s widow be allowed 5s. a week until after her confinement and until she is able to work’. Above all, the Chorley vestry sought to support labour force participation through indirect means. In January 1801, for instance, it was resolved ‘That the overseer pay for the hiring of a pair of looms for Betty Derbyshire’s child (if she can have a pair of looms herself)’, while in August 1807 Ellen Ormerod of Brinscall was to ‘have a pair of looms bought for her if a pair can be bought at a reasonable price’. Sometimes extra support was

57 58 59

Chorley Public Library, ‘Chorley workhouse and vestry minutes, 1800–1818’. Ibid. Ibid. 135

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forthcoming. In May 1816, for instance, it was resolved that ‘Isabel Grundy be allowed 4s. a week to commence from this week, to have a pair of looms hired and also to have a bushel and a half of potatoes from the workhouse’.60 The vestry also authorised the purchase of spinning-wheels, stocks and smithying equipment for local women, and supported the self-employment aspirations of Nancy Ainscow by buying her coal to hawk and lending her the town donkey to carry it! As allowances rose and fell depending upon the composition of the vestry, one of the most consistent parts of poor law policy in Chorley was the support of working women in these diverse ways. Men, by contrast, were more imperfectly and inconsistently supported, partly reflecting high local wage levels but also perhaps conscious choices on the part of vestrymen. The rich records for the township of Halliwell, in the south-east Lancashire parish of Deane, show that even the harshest of Lancashire poor law authorities recognised and financed a link between work and welfare for women through the life-cycle.61 Thus, between March 1788 and April 1793, Ellen Southern applied to the Halliwell vestry no less than eighteen times, asking for regular allowances, one-off payments, clothing and payment of rent. Rental payments were particularly prominent in this relief history, as in the relief histories of other male and female pauper applicants. One reading of such histories would be that the vestry recognised that low-level male or female engagement with the labour market made it impossible for people to afford lump-sum payments like rent. An alternative reading, however, might be that applicants saw rental payments as part of the welfare–relief contract and shaped their working time accordingly. The frequency and scale of this sort of payment on behalf of women, and the language used in applications, certainly suggests more agency than an explanation simply rooted in wage levels would allow. Meanwhile, it is clear from other evidence that an otherwise harsh Halliwell vestry was as proactive as the more generous Tarleton vestry in making connections between work and welfare. Thus, in December 1814, Molly Moscrop, the widow of the late Saml Moscrop applies for relief and says she has six children and the eldest is 7 years of age and the youngest is 7 months, she says she can get 3/6 per week and her eldest has had 3/6 a week as a tear boy at Kirkalls print works, so that she has only 7/-per week for the support of herself and six children. . . . Resolved that the Overseer be ordered to pay the said widow 10/6 per week for the present support of the family.62

In other words, the poor law appears to have underwritten a work–relief contract that underpinned a family income considerably above that offered by 60 61 62

Ibid. W. Billington, Vestry Books of Halliwell (Privately Published, 1979). Ibid. 136

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many southern allowance systems in the closing decade of the eighteenth century. They did this for men too, but working men were more likely to be turned down. John Boardman’s July 1788 application for relief, for instance, was turned down because ‘his sons are able to mentain him’, a comment that would not have been made in relation to women. The work–relief nexus was also likely to be terminated later in the life course of women given their ability to remain economically useful. Moreover, applications for support for working families were more likely to be successful where they came from women. Such was the case of Margaret Greenhalgh, who applied for relief (instead of her husband) in February 1788. The vestry carefully elaborated the circumstances of the family as follows They have 7[sic] children. 23, 12, 10, 8, 6, 4, 2, 1 years of age. Man gets 8 shillings 23 gets nothing 12 gets nothing 10 gets 2s. 6d. 6 gets 9d. Woman gets 3s. 14s. in all; paid for the present 5s. but not to be continued. Again, the work–relief contract underpinned a substantial nominal income, and while the elaboration of circumstances ends with ‘not to be continued’, female Lancashire paupers knew very well that such terms were more flexible for them than for men. It is not surprising, therefore, that some women workers sought every means possible to make sure that these benefits were perpetuated. Betty Crook is a particularly good example. In January 1788, she applied for (and received) an increase in her regular weekly pay from 8d to 3s. By April 1788 she was apparently sick, but instead of applying in person to the vestry, Margaret Grimes, the wife of the local merchant John Grimes, and apparently the employer of Crook, applied for 5s on her behalf. Faced with such implicit support from a prominent local family, the vestry had little choice but to agree. In July 1788 she applied again, this time in her own right, and was given a further 5s and had the continuance of her weekly pay confirmed. By August 1788, the vestry were clearly concerned about this pauper, turning down a request for more relief but noting ‘Nothing – she threatens to apply to a Justice [of the peace]’. As we see with pauper letters, this pauper used a careful blend of appeal and threat in her attempts to underpin her allowance applications.63 The vestry clearly reacted in a way that she did not expect, removing her weekly allowance in November 1788. By December, however, Crook was the subject of third party applications once more, with the Grimes family applying for (and getting) ‘4d. per week, and old pay’. As ever, there are several potential readings of this series of events; one 63

See Sokoll, Essex Pauper Letters. 137

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would be that paupers actively recognised the value of the work–relief nexus, and invested energy in maintaining that value. Interestingly, both in Halliwell and the other vestries dealt with here, men in work appear to have had a much more limited range of options when presenting before the vestry. These stories from vestry books are rich examples. We should not lose sight of the fact, however, that such evidence presents several key problems. In terms of the attitude of paupers and officials, the vestry narratives are capable of supporting several different interpretations. Moreover, there is a conflict between picking the individual cases that have underpinned this chapter and making wider generalisations about policy which can only be substantiated through an appreciation of the general tenor of the vestry minutes. In addition, these particular examples are clustered between the end of the eighteenth and the opening decades of the nineteenth century, conveying little impression of change over time even if we accept the general lessons which flow from the vestry narratives. Such problems perhaps explain why vestry minutes have been used so little in welfare historiography. That said, Mendelson and Crawford are right to suggest that women’s work (and even more the relationship between women’s work and poor relief policy) can be approached only through the careful use of ‘tiny glimpses’ and a ‘multitude of examples’, and that we must offer general interpretations rather than definitive lessons. Working on such a basis, and coming back to the questions with which I started this analysis, one reading of the vestry evidence is that it was not necessarily low wages or family incomes that forced women into the arms of the poor law. On the contrary, some of the individual wages and family incomes cited from this vestry evidence were quite good, both for Lancashire and certainly when compared to individual and family incomes in other parts of the country. The evidence to address the issue of whether meagre poor law relief was the mechanism by which women in particular were forced into whatever paid work they could find is more illusory. The fact that in some places vestries ordered their overseers actively to find work for women, as opposed to giving them relief or in supplement of that relief, is certainly confirmed by some of the vestry evidence. It is also true that the majority of regular payments granted by Lancashire poor law authorities tended to be towards the lower end of the spectrum of per capita amounts. However, and as we have begun to see with some of the individual stories from the vestries, it may be the case that poor law allowances were low because they did not have to be larger, given remuneration from work or – the preferred interpretation of this chapter – because vestries were making subtle connections between work and poor relief within a wider local and regional framework of makeshifts. Certainly it is logical to assume that both paupers and poor law authorities would have had an interest in connecting welfare and work: paupers because these were cornerstones of the Lancashire makeshift economy, and vestries because such a connection gave flexibility to local welfare policy but prevented the rise of a dependency culture of the sort that 138

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one arguably sees in some southern rural communities by the early nineteenth century. This connection was made for both men and women, the former particularly at times of trade depression; but the concentration upon support for female work and the female labour market (and hence the contribution of women to the household economy) had the particular advantage of keeping Lancashire vestries out of the pockets of major employers.

Conclusion The significance of these arguments for the way in which we should think about female labour force participation and the meaning of the female wage is twofold. First, the poor law in these northern communities engaged significantly with the female labour market. It created labour (and thus income) where there would otherwise have been none; it subsidised selfemployment and thus the garnering of work income, albeit at low levels; and it actively and passively subsidised employment for selected female workers in more regular employment. One reading of the evidence, in fact, is that by the later eighteenth century there was a definite work–relief nexus in place in some Lancashire (rural and urban-industrial) communities, the effect of which may well have been to increase overall labour–market participation rates among Lancashire women across their life-cycles. Second, if this sort of nexus did exist, then it might explain the existence of low and/or sticky female wage rates even in counties such as Lancashire or the West Riding. Female wage rates in key occupations failed to move up and down, we might argue, not because such wages were marginal in the overall household economy nor because of active discrimination, but because for some women variable income from the poor law was one of the key strands of their makeshift economy, removing part of the pressure for women to garner a living wage through labour. Given highly segmented labour markets for women in many Lancashire communities, the poor law only had to relieve a few women to have such an effect. In practice, relief to support work was certainly on a sufficient scale to produce alterations to female labour market architecture. Work in this sense may be seen as a passport to other areas of the makeshift economy, including the poor law, rather than as an end in itself. The level and flexibility of the wage might be seen as less important than its presence in the makeshift economy in the first place. Accepting such suggestions would have consequences both for our appreciation of the poor law and the female labour market. Thus it would be difficult to accept the contentions of scholars such as Mendelson and Crawford that women receiving poor relief ‘were forced to comply with the expected norms of female dependence, to be content with little, conform to patriachal authority and be grateful’.64 In practice, women may have been 64

Mendelson and Crawford, Women, p. 300. 139

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much more skilful manipulators of the makeshift economy than such comments allow. In terms of the female labour market, rather than regarding low and sticky wages as an indicator of the weak bargaining position of women, it might be more appropriate to regard this situation as a positive indicator of female success in the makeshift economies of Lancashire. Of course, I have dealt here with only one side of the equation. The chapter has not dealt directly with the issue of female wage rates in general or wage rates at particular stages of the life-cycle. This, as I implied at the outset, is a deliberate strategy, arising from my belief that it is important not to start in the middle of a story and that wage rates are dependent rather than independent variables. Crudely, I believe that many Lancashire women across the lifecycle saw work as just one of their resource accumulation options and that historians have concentrated too much on labour force participation and remuneration, and not enough on the wider framework within which decisions on these matters were made. These conclusions take on more force when we realise that for individuals and families in counties such as Lancashire, a connection between work and poor relief was only one strand, albeit an important one, in making ends meet. Formal and informal charity remained important in the county, as did self-help in the form of clubs and societies, kinship and exploitation of semi-legal earning opportunities. Working women, either as household heads in their own right or as part of male-headed households, probably exploited several of these avenues at once. More than this, the tone of pauper letters and vestry applications suggests that women were adept (and more adept than men) at identifying and exploiting the easier options in their resource acquisition strategies. Low and sticky wages, at least in this part of England,65 may thus reflect female success in resource accumulation rather than their failure and an ability to ‘choose’ to work rather than simply having to take whatever work and wages were on offer. We perhaps need a new language to describe the problem of identifying and interpreting the deployment of female effort, and we definitely need a different language to characterise their engagement with the poor law.

65

But probably also in the West Riding and Cumberland and Westmorland. 140

6

Caring for the sick poor Poor law nurses in Bedfordshire, c. 1770–1834 SAMANTHA WILLIAMS1

For many of the poor, in the rural south and east of England in particular, provision of poor relief under the old poor law was generous and widely encompassing.2 The keystone of the poor law was the provision of weekly or monthly pensions to the aged, unmarried mothers, widows, the sick, the disabled and the orphaned. Allowances were available to those with large families or whose wages were too low for subsistence. Occasional sums of cash and gifts in kind, such as fuel, bedding, clothing, food and alcoholic beverages, and rent or lodging payments, were given to a wide variety of people.3 Medical poor relief was an integral part of this provision. Such assistance encompassed institutional relief in hospitals, lunatic asylums, private madhouses and workhouses, and assistance at home from doctors, midwives, bone-setters, inoculators and nurses. The poor could consult the local doctor, who, by the late eighteenth century, was increasingly paid for under an annual contract to provide most of the medical needs of the poor. Doctors provided assistance and medicines, such as mixtures, ointments, draughts, drops, powders and blisters. The parish also provided domiciliary care; when they were too sick or infirm, paupers were helped in a range of tasks, from housework and laundry to skilled nursing and assistance at childbirth, and were nursed, either back to health or in their final days, by parish carers and nurses.4

1 I would like to thank the Wellcome Trust for their financial support. I also owe thanks to those who commented on this chapter in Nottingham and Cambridge, and to the editors of this volume for their invaluable assistance, particularly Keith Snell. 2 K.D.M. Snell, Annals of the Labouring Poor: Social Change and Agrarian England, 1660–1900 (Cambridge, 1985), p. 105. 3 J.R. Poynter, Society and Pauperism: English Ideas on Poor Relief, 1795–1834 (London, 1969); Snell, Annals of the Labouring Poor; S. Ottaway, ‘Providing for the elderly in eighteenth-century England’, Continuity and Change, 13 (1998), pp. 391–418. 4 S.K. Williams, ‘Poor relief, welfare and medical provision in Bedfordshire: the social, economic and demographic context, c. 1770–1834’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of Cambridge, 1998).

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During the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the poor law was the main source of local medical assistance for the poorest part of society, both in the short term and the long term. Sickness and accidents usually involved increased outlay on food, medicines and care, while the associated unemployment meant a temporary loss of income, and many labouring families were unable to cope without parish assistance. Medical relief was also extended to those whose savings might have seen them through a short illness but did not amount to the payment of doctors’ bills.5 For others, chronic illness or prolonged infirmity necessitated a much longer period of dependency upon the poor law.6 However, while there is ample evidence from hospitals and infirmaries, little is known about medical provision for paupers in their own homes. Margaret Pelling, in her monograph on sickness and medicine in early modern England, comments that nursing has not been a point of reference for the earlier period as it has for the later.7 In comparison with the extensive history of nursing in the nineteenth century, and, in particular, hospital nursing, there has been very little research on what came before. There has been some interest in what may be regarded as the definitive form of nursing in the early modern period, namely that of wet-nursing, monthly nursing and infant care.8 However, there is little on sick nursing. The chapter on nursing in Pelling’s book goes some way towards addressing the issue of ‘nurses and nursekeepers’ in the early modern period, but there is still the lucana of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.9 There has been some research into the character of poor law nurses under the new poor law, working in poor law infirmaries and workhouses. In such institutions, direct care was provided by other pauper inmates, who received extra privileges in the form of food, liquor or token cash payments. At the Strand workhouse in the 1860s, pauper nurses were given a glass of gin ‘for laying out the dead and other specially repulsive duties’. As a result, ablebodied nurses left as soon as they could get other employment and the burden of care fell on to the least infirm of those who remained. These pauper nurses were also employed to care for those receiving outdoor relief.10 These women 5 G.W. Oxley, Poor Relief in England and Wales, 1601–1834 (Newton Abbot, 1974), pp. 65–73. 6 M. Fissell, ‘The “sick and drooping poor” in eighteenth-century Bristol and its region’, Society for the Social History of Medicine, 2, (1989), pp. 35–58; idem., Patients, Power and the Poor in Eighteenth Century Bristol (Cambridge, 1991). 7 M. Pelling, The Common Lot: Sickness, Medical Occupations and the Urban Poor in Early Modern England (London, 1998), ch. 8. 8 Pelling, The Common Lot, ch. 8; V. Fildes, Wet-nursing: History from Antiquity to the Present (Oxford, 1988). 9 Abel-Smith’s history of nursing does not begin until 1800. B. Abel-Smith, A History of the Nursing Profession (London, 1960). 10 R. Dingwall, A.M. Rafferty and C. Webster, An Introduction to the Social History of Nursing (London, 1988), ch. 1.

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were usually seen as the worst offenders and the main reason for reform; however, Rosemary White has done much to rehabilitate the image of the poor law nursing service by showing that its members were not necessarily drunken incompetents, but often achieved relatively high standards of nursing care.11 It has been recognised that both before and after 1834 a great deal of nursing care was provided as outdoor relief. Relatively poor women provided a service to other poor people. It has also been noted that their payments from the poor law might well have functioned, in effect, as a form of outdoor relief for themselves. It is likely that sometimes they would work for paupers, while at other times they would work for people who were poor but not so impoverished as to qualify for poor relief.12 However, there has been very little research into nursing before the new poor law and outside of institutions. Abel-Smith, in his authoritative book on the history of nursing, complained that the provision of nursing care by village women, and, we can add, working-class women in towns and cities, has been largely ignored by historians of the occupation.13 Janet Foster and Julia Sheppard, in their article on ‘Archives and the history of nursing’, argue that this is largely because ‘records of nursing outside regular institutions before the nineteenth century are scarce, to say the least’.14 For the ealier period, Margaret Pelling comments that nursing as an occupation remains ill-defined, largely due to the paucity of sources. In the early modern period, nursing is of course affected by the problems which face conventional analysis of all forms of women’s work. Pelling has found that guild or company records, apprenticeship indentures and freemen’s rolls are of limited relevance, as are wills and inventories.15 The history of women and medicine reveals a strong role for women as healers in the early modern period. Women were expected to practise medicine and surgery mainly as domestic arts, and to care and cure the family and those who worked for the family. A housekeeping manual of 1700 stressed that women should ‘have a competent knowledge of Physick and Chyrugery that they may be able to help their maimed, sick and indigent Neighbours: for Commonly all good and Charitable Ladies make this a part of their housekeeping business’.16 Most care was given on a relatively informal basis by other members of the sick person’s household, including servants.17 Outside of the household women were involved in many aspects of medicine: women were employed by the Corporation of the Poor in

11

R. White, Social Change and the Development of the Nursing Profession (London, 1978). Dingwall et al., Social History of Nursing, ch. 1. 13 Abel-Smith, History of the Nursing Profession; Dingwall et al., Social History of Nursing, ch. 1. 14 J. Foster and J. Sheppard, ‘Archives and the history of nursing’, in C. Davies (ed.), Rewriting Nursing Histories (London, 1983), pp. 200–14, on p. 202. 15 Pelling, The Common Lot, ch. 8. 16 A. Clark, Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century (London, 1919), p. 255. 17 Dingwall et al., Social History of Nursing, ch. 1; Pelling, The Common Lot, ch. 8. 12

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seventeenth-century Norwich and by the parish authorities in seventeenthcentury St Bartholomew’s Exchange.18 In Elizabethan Hadleigh, Suffolk, most of the care was provided by other local people, who came to the patient’s house or boarded them in their own homes. In local almshouses, younger women were obliged to attend to their older and more frail neighbours.19 Women were almost exclusively midwives until the late eighteenth century, and even then they continued to be employed in very large numbers.20 Dingwall, Rafferty and Webster argue that what they call ‘handywomen’ were probably the largest group of paid carers operating throughout the nineteenth and well into the twentieth century. The historiography of women and medicine recognises that we need to get away from any preconception with healing as waged work. Some women went unpaid, while others were paid in cash and in kind. Wise-women provided nursing care in small communities and within networks in return for payments in cash and kind. Care within and between families was built on a system of reciprocity. The history of nineteenth-century nursing is preoccupied with skills and training within an institutional framework and does not recognise apprenticeships and more informal modes of training in the early modern period. The writer of popular medical books, the widow who carried on craft skills in surgery or pharmacy, the wise-woman and the midwife, acquired expertise within her surroundings and worked from there.21 This is pertinent with regard to more recent debates about women as unpaid ‘carers’ and how this should be recognised and accounted for. With the decline in institutional care, many present-day welfare policies depend in large measure upon the unpaid work of women in their own homes or in the homes of relatives. There is a real need to provide a historical context to such contemporary social policy debates and this chapter seeks to do just that.22

18 M. Pelling, ‘Healing the sick poor: social policy and disability in Norwich 1550–1640’, Medical History, 29 (1985), pp. 115–37; A. Wear, ‘Caring for the sick poor in St. Bartholomew’s Exchange: 1580–1676’, in W.F. Bynum and R. Porter (eds) Living and Dying in London (London, Medical History Supplement, 11, 1991), pp. 41–60. 19 M.K. McIntosh, ‘Networks of care in Elizabethan English towns: the example of Hadleigh, Suffolk’, in P. Horden and R.M. Smith (eds) The Locus of Care: Families, Communities, Institutions, and the Provision of Welfare since Antiquity (London, 1998), pp. 71–89. 20 A. Wilson, The Making of Man-Midwifery: Childbirth in England, 1660–1770 (London, 1995); I. Loudon, Medical Care and the General Practitioner 1750–1850 (Oxford, 1986). On midwives in England and Europe, see H. Marland (ed.), The Art of Midwifery: Early Modern Midwives in Europe (London, 1993). 21 J. Geyer-Kodesch, ‘Woman and medicine’, in W.F. Bynum and R. Porter (eds) Companion Encyclopaedia of the History of Medicine (New York, 1993), vol. 2, pp. 888–914, on p. 892. 22 See, for instance, J. Lewis, ‘Family provision of health and welfare in the mixed economy of care in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries’, Social History Of Medicine, 8 (1995), pp. 1–16, and P. Horden and R.M. Smith, ‘Introduction’, in Horden and Smith, Locus of

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It has been suggested that developments in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries extended the employment of women as nurses in the public and private sphere. The formal exclusion of women from the male ‘empirics’ guilds reduced their opportunities in these spheres, but the development of hospitals and a substantial middle class in the eighteenth century meant an increase in work as institutional and private nurses.23 This did not mean that women were necessarily pushed into nursing; there was still a role for women as healers. It was not until the nineteenth century that rigid distinctions were made between ‘curing’ and ‘caring’ roles, which were allocated to male doctors and female nurses respectively.24 Thus, in effect, Versluysen argues, nursing only emerged as a separate occupation at all because women lost to men their traditional control of the healing task.25 There has been a limited amount of research into the nursing provided by the voluntary hospitals, which proliferated in the eighteenth century. Bristol Infirmary, Devon and Exeter Hospital and Northampton Infirmary all record salary payments to matrons and nurses.26 The Bristol Infirmary paid both regular full-time nurses and occasional nurses, and patients were also nursed by family members and fellow patients, the latter being bound by the rules to assist staff nurses.27 However, voluntary hospitals were extremely selective in who they would admit: the majority of in-patients were men of working age and suffering from a curable ailment, accident or disease. This reflected the hospitals’ policy of restoring productive members of society to health so that they might return to work. Hospitals explicitly excluded the very young, pregnant women, and those suffering from infectious diseases and chronic

Care, pp. 1–18. The 2001 census asked about the provision of unpaid care for the first time. The question enquired whether care was given to family members, friends, neighbours or others, due to long-term physical or mental ill-health or disability, or problems related to old age. The responses show that 5.2 million people are providing unpaid care, which accounts for one in ten of the population. The majority of caring duties are for substantial amounts of time per week. Sixty-eight per cent (3.56 million) of carers provide care for up to nineteen hours a week, 11 per cent (0.57 million) for twenty to forty-nine hours and 21 per cent (1.09 million) for fifty hours or more. Summaries of the main findings at present do not break down unpaid carers by gender, but we may assume that the vast majority of them were women. www.statistics.gov.uk/census2001/profiles/commentaries/ health.asp. 23 M. Versluysen, ‘Old wives tales? Woman healers in English history’, in Davies Rewriting Nursing Histories, pp. 175–99, on p. 188. 24 Versluysen, ‘Old wives tales?’ 25 Ibid., pp. 175–99. 26 A. Berry, ‘Patronage, funding and the hospital patient, c.1750–1815: three English regional case studies’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of Oxford, 1995), ch. 5. Bedford Infirmary, established in 1803, also records salaries to a matron and nurses, Bedfordshire and Luton Archives and Records Service (hereafter BLARS) HO: B/V19. 27 Fissell, Patients, Power and the Poor, pp. 67, 84. 145

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complaints.28 Yet despite this selectivity, parishes were increasingly subscribing to infirmaries: for example, there was a threefold increase in parish subscriptions to Northampton Infirmary between 1765 and 1814.29 However, there has been virtually no research on the profile of the patient who was sponsored by the parish; and in light of this it is reasonable to assume that pauper-patients were also men of working age; that is, men who were unlikely to be receiving poor relief other than for illness or disability. Many individuals had no access to a voluntary hospital, either because they lived too far away or because they did not fall within the accepted categories. They could turn to the local wise-woman or private nurse, but we know virtually nothing about the private medical market in nursing care. Jane Austen’s Nurse Rooke in Persuasion (1818) gives us a glimpse of what the private duty nurse for the middle and upper classes might have been like: Nurse Rooke was employed as a live-in servant for particular episodes of illness. Such nurses were more likely to be working for a client with the resources to purchase medical services so that her work was at least partly defined by orthodox medicine, although it has to be remembered that members of the elite and the labouring poor employed both cheap and expensive, low- and high-status practitioners.30 Working-class texts such as John Castle’s diary give us a tiny snippet of information on the private nurse. Castle, who worked in the silk industry in Essex throughout his life, tells us of how his family fared after his father died in 1824. His widowed mother received a parish pension of 7 shillings a week, but the weekly sum was intended as support for the children. His mother was expected to work, and, in John’s words, ‘My mother, to get a living, went out as [a] Nurse’.31 Studies of the medical services offered by the poor law do provide us with a wealth of information about nursing care for the poor in the early modern period, out of an institutional context. Furthermore, it seems reasonable to assume that many of the services which were paid for from the parish rates could also be bought privately.32 In the correspondence between the Hall family and the

28

Berry, ‘Patronage, funding and the hospital patient’, abstract and ch. 1; M. Fissell, ‘Charity universal? Institutions and moral reform in eighteenth-century Bristol’, in L. Davidson, T. Hitchcock, T. Keirn and R.B. Shoemaker (eds) Stilling the Grumbling Hive: the Response to Social and Economic Problems in England, 1689–1750 (Stroud, 1992), pp. 121–44. 29 Berry, ‘Patronage, funding and the hospital patient’, ch. 4. 30 Dingwall et al., Social History of Nursing, ch. 1. 31 John Castle’s diary in J. Burnett (ed.), Destiny Obscure: Autobiographies of Childhood and Family From the 1820s to the 1920s (London, 1994), p. 262. 32 For the seventeenth century, see Pelling, ‘Healing the sick poor’, and Wear, ‘Caring for the sick poor’; for the eighteenth century, see Fissell, Patients, Power and the Poor, and H. Marland, Medicine and Society in Wakefield and Huddersfield, 1780–1870 (Cambridge, 1987). See also Loudon, Medical Care; A. Digby, Making a Medical Living: Doctors and Patients in the English Market for Medicine, 1720–1911 (Cambridge, 1994); and J. Lane, 146

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parish overseer of their settlement parish, which has been explored by Pamela Sharpe, Thomas Hall complained in 1826 that his wife had a bad breast and was unable to look after the family, ‘for my wife expects to be confined every day and I cant Get a nus [nurse] for les then 4 shilen a weak’.33 Part of the attraction of the work in hospitals, argue Dingwall, Rafferty and Webster, was the acquisition of skills which would be useful in seeking positions in private households upon marriage. The Salisbury Infirmary in 1796 advertised the value of nursing to ‘young respectable women who would be taught how to look after sick people’.34

Poor law nursing: definitions of ‘nursing’ and the characteristics of nurses Although the history of nursing is a remarkably under-researched area, from the findings of a number of studies of the old poor law and medicine we do know that payments to carers and nurses to attend the sick poor were a common form of expenditure in the overseers’ accounts. This chapter will discuss the role and remuneration of such carers and nurses in two communities in particular, in Campton and Shefford, for the period between the final third of the eighteenth century and the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834. Campton and Shefford are contiguous parishes which lie in the east of Bedfordshire, nine miles south-east of Bedford and forty-one miles from London.35 Bedfordshire was located in the cereal-growing belt of the southeast. Arable agriculture was the mainstay employment in the county, and lacemaking and straw plaiting the dominant domestic industries. Campton was a small parish of just over 300 inhabitants, dominated by agriculture, while Shefford was the neighbouring small market town of over 500, with a more diverse occupational structure. Shefford was described in a trade directory of 1839 as: clean and well paved, the streets wide, and its general appearance indicative of comfort. The trade is chiefly in corn, timber, coal and iron, transmitted by means of the navigation to and from [King’s] Lynn; straw plat, also, in the making of

‘The provincial practitioner and his services to the poor, 1750–1800’, Bulletin for the Society for the Social History of Medicine, 28 (1981), pp. 10–13. Another source of medical aid was the Church. Mary Fissell found that the Unitarian Church hired a nurse on a contract for several years. Fissell, Patients, Power and the Poor, pp. 90–1. 33 P. Sharpe, ‘ “The bowels of compation”: a labouring family and the law, c. 1790–1834’, in T. Hitchcock, P. King and P. Sharpe (eds) Chronicling Poverty: The Voices and Strategies of the English Poor, 1640–1840 (Basingstoke, 1997), pp. 87–108, on p. 98. 34 Dingwall et al., Social History of Nursing, ch. 1, p. 11. 35 BLARS, Bedfordshire Directory, 1847. 147

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which many women and children are employed, is brought in great quantities to the market.36

Each week agricultural produce and straw plait were bought and sold at the Friday market, and three times a year cattle fairs were held in the town.37 There are only a few local studies which consider nursing under the old poor law in Bedfordshire. Jan Walmsley’s work examines provision for all the non-able-bodied poor in the villages of Aspley Guise, Marston Morteyne and Northill, while most historians of the period are familiar with F.G. Emmison’s study of the poor in Eaton Socon, and medical and nursing care forms only one section in each of these works.38 Patricia Bell’s article on ‘Early health care’ in the towns of Luton and Dunstable is the only study to focus primarily upon provision for the sick poor.39 These three studies are largely descriptive. The primary source for the research presented here is overseers’ account books for Campton (1767–1834) and Shefford (1794–1828), which give lists of sums spent weekly on the poor, the name of the pauper, the amount given, and sometimes the reason for the payment. These account books have been nominally linked to the existing family reconstitution for the two communities, and more probing, analytical questions have been asked of the data.40 Family reconstitutions link together the baptisms, marriages and burials recorded in the Anglican parish registers for a parish for each family and across generations.41 The methodology of linking poor law accounts with family reconstitutions is extremely time-consuming but ultimately remarkably rewarding, and permits a depth of analysis not allowed by a study of account

36

Pigots Commercial Directory, 1839. The Universal British Directory, 1785; Pigot and Co.s National Commercial Directory, 1830; Pigots Commercial Directory, 1839; Robson’s Directory, 1839; Bedfordshire Directory, 1847. For a discussion of the socio-economic structure of Campton and Shefford, see Williams, ‘Poor relief, welfare and medical provision in Bedfordshire’, ch. 2. 38 J. Walmsley, ‘Provision for the non able-bodied poor in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: some evidence from three Bedfordshire parishes’, The Local Historian, 20 (1990), pp. 9–19; F.G. Emmison, The Relief of the Poor at Eaton Socon (Bedfordshire Historical Record Society, XV, 1933), pp. 71–6. Emmison comments that the local ‘goodwife’ was a constant feature of the Eaton Socon overseers’ accounts, Bedfordshire, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. 39 P. Bell, ‘Early health care in Luton and Dunstable’, The Bedfordshire Magazine, 19, 150 (autumn 1984), pp. 229–36. 40 Overseers of the Poors’ account books for Campton and Shefford: BLARS, P18/12/1–2, X514/1–3, P70/12/1–2; family reconstitutions for Campton, Shefford and Southill are held at the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure, University of Cambridge. For further details on linking poor law sources with family reconstitutions, see S.R. Ottaway and S.K. Williams, ‘Life course and lifecycle: reconstructing the experience of poverty in the time of the Old Poor Law’, Archives, 23 (1998), pp. 19–29. 41 See E.A. Wrigley, ‘Family reconstitution’, in E. A. Wrigley (ed.) An Introduction to English Historical Demography (London, 1966), pp. 96–159. 37

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books alone. The technique produces detailed ‘pauper biographies’ of recipients’ poor law careers and their family circumstances, for both patients and their carers, and enables us to explore the features of a community at the level of the individual and the family. This study exploits these detailed histories of carers and paupers in order to examine the type of care given to the sick poor, the gender, marital status and family circumstances of carers, the extent to which the poor law facilitated care between kin, and the remuneration, skill and status of different groups of carers. Comparison is made between care work and other employment for women. The role of care work for women in terms of their place within their household economies and their wider role as practitioners of medical care will also be of major consideration. The provision of care by the parish is placed within the context of the ‘crisis’ of the old poor law in this period, with rapidly escalating poor relief expenditures in the south and east. How did such financial pressure affect the parishes’ commitment to care for the sick poor? Nursing as an occupation in the past is ill-defined. For the period after 1800, Christopher Maggs has defined nursing as ‘providing care to those who are ill or suffering’.42 It appears that, before the mid-seventeenth century, ‘nursing’ did not include sick nursing, but rather nurses were wet or dry children’s nurses. It is only from the mid-seventeenth century that nursing came to incorporate sick nursing. The term ‘nursing’ is used in some poor law records from the early eighteenth century.43 Robert Dingwall, Anne Marie Rafferty and Charles Webster have offered a more inclusive definition: ‘Then, as now, the greater part of the care required by the sick involved some kind of assistance with activities of daily living that they were unable to carry out for themselves.’44 This definition is far more appropriate for the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Care work in Campton and Shefford encompassed skilled nursing and more general forms of care and help with practical tasks, such as washing. Overseers of the poor did not make hard and fast distinctions between different forms of care, and often simply referred to someone ‘doing for’ someone else – the term ‘doing for’ covered helping with household chores, doing the laundry and nursing. Within this context the use of the terms ‘carers’ and ‘nurses’ has been largely interchangeable. In the two parishes the vast majority of care work was for ‘doing for’, ‘attendance’, ‘looking after’, ‘care’, ‘nursing’, ‘washing’ and ‘cleaning’.45 Other tasks were nursing women after childbirth, sitting up through the night with those acutely ill or dying, laying out the dead and helping with the funeral,

42 C. Maggs, ‘A general history of nursing: 1800–1900’, in Bynum and Porter Companion Encyclopaedia of the History of Medicine, vol. 2, pp. 1309–28, on p. 1313. 43 Pelling, The Common Lot, ch. 8. 44 Dingwall et al., Social History of Nursing, ch. 1. 45 In the Norwich Census of the Poor, 1570, nursing came under the terms ‘keeping’ and ‘helping’; see Pelling, The Common Lot, ch. 8.

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and boarding out children. The local studies by Walmsley, Emmison and Bell all found similar forms of nursing and care work in Aspley Guise, Marston Morteyne, Northill, Eaton Socon, Luton and Dunstable. Moreover, care work had a seasonal feature, with the least spent on it in the summer months, and the most from October through to April.46 In this chapter, medical men have been excluded, since they were never employed in care work, but rather carers and nurses were employed by the parish to assist medical men. From the late eighteenth century surgeon-apothecaries were employed, being contracted by the parish authorities to provide most of the medical needs of the poor.47 In prominent histories of nursing, both Abel-Smith and Versluysen assert that in early modern England, the nursing task belonged to women.48 It has been pointed out by Pelling, on the other hand, that male servants were as likely to have taken on a nursing role.49 In the Bedfordshire parish of Campton, overseers employed seventy carers between 1767 and 1834, the majority of whom were women, but a small number of men were also employed. Of these carers, fifty-three (76 per cent) were women, eleven (16 per cent) were men, and the gender of the remaining six (8 per cent) was unknown, since they were referred to in the account books only by surname or simply as ‘nurses’, ‘sitters up’ and ‘layers out’. In Shefford thirty-two carers were employed by the parish between 1794 and 1828. Again, the majority were women – twenty-four (75 per cent) – and the minority were men – five (16 per cent) – while three (9 per cent) were unknown. Walmsley found in her study of three Bedfordshire parishes that ‘the carers were almost invariably women’.50 In Campton and Shefford, while women carers undertook the full range of task work, most of the male carers were paid on odd occasions just to attend other men. John Godfrey, for instance, was paid three shillings for ‘Attendg Edw Hargrave’ in 1816. Jennifer Hawker, in an unpublished local study into the patterns of care in two rural parishes in Dorset during the eighteenth century, found that only 6 per cent of carers in Dorset were men.51 These men were employed in this capacity for only short periods of time and only undertook basic caring jobs. Hawker argues that during the seventeenth century Dorset overseers had employed men to a far greater degree, but that during the eighteenth century caring jobs became more feminised. This is an interesting argument, but one for which Hawker gives us no evidence. In

46

BLARS, P18/12/1–2, X514/1–3, P70/12/1–2. Williams, ‘Poor relief, welfare and medical provision in Bedfordshire’, ch. 6. 48 Abel-Smith, History of the Nursing Profession; Versluysen, ‘Old wives tales?’ 49 Pelling, The Common Lot, ch. 8. 50 Walmsley, ‘Provision for the non able-bodied poor’, p. 13. 51 These were basic, rather than status, carers (see main text, below). J. Hawker, ‘An investigation into the patterns of care in two Dorset parishes, 1700–1799’, unpublished local study. S. Ottaway also found that the vast majority of carers were women: ‘The “decline of life”: Aspects of ageing in eighteenth-century England’ (Ph.D. thesis, Brown University, 1997), ch. 4. 47

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Campton, three of the male carers looked after the same man, Rowel, for three weeks in January 1777. Another carer, William Randall, was paid a shilling ‘for Candals and Siting up with’ William Burrows in his last illness. In Campton and Shefford it was always women who laid out the dead, but on William Kilby’s death in January 1808, John Caurdell was paid one shilling for the specific purpose of shaving the corpse. Mary Barker-Read, in her unpublished thesis on the elderly poor in eighteenth-century Kent, found that the role played by male care workers was similar. She gives only three examples of male carers, but in all these cases they were employed to care for heavy and bedridden old men.52 In the two Bedfordshire parishes, men were also occasionally paid as pallbearers, and in April 1821 five Shefford men were paid nearly two shillings each to ‘hold Jem Smith till he got sober’. When children were boarded out, the male head of household’s name was given. One of the carers in Campton, Thomas Rogers, was somewhat of a special case because he was the only pauper paid to cure, rather than just care for, another pauper. In August 1832 he was paid 2s 6d ‘For Cureing Barbers Itch’. There is a similar example for the Bedfordshire parish of Eaton Socon in 1712, where one George Fisher earned half a crown when he treated Goody Sheperson for the itch and a further £1 4s for board.53 It is likely that, even when men engaged in caring tasks, they did not wash linen or scrub floors. This gendered division of labour probably pertained even where men carried out other parts of the nursing task.54 Research has established that many of those who cared for the sick poor were often themselves in receipt of poor relief.55 It is possible that, by employing one pauper to care for another, the overseer could reduce the amount paid in poor relief to those providing caring services and that these paupers were thereby earning their keep.56 However, the details of such arrangements remain largely unexplored. It is still generally unknown whether pauper nurses were paid on top of their regular pensions, whether pension sums were cut in line with earnings from care work, or whether nurses were paid at all to perform these services. This would also be one way of putting the poor to work. In both of the Bedfordshire parishes, about half of the carers received poor relief at some point in their lives – in Campton the proportion was a little over half, at 60 per cent, and in Shefford the number of carerpaupers was a little under half, at 47 per cent. However, the proportion of

52

M. Barker-Read, ‘The treatment of the aged poor in 5 selected West Kent parishes from Settlement to Speenhamland (1662–1797), (Ph.D. thesis, Open University, 1989), p. 106. 53 Emmison, Relief of the Poor at Eaton Socon, ch. 37. 54 Pelling, The Common Lot, ch. 8. 55 Fissell, ‘The “sick and drooping poor” ’, p. 43; J. Hawker, ‘Patterns of care in Dorset’; Walmsley, ‘Provision for the non able-bodied poor’. 56 This is an argument made by Jan Walmsley, although without presenting relevant evidence. Walmsley, ‘Provision for the non able-bodied poor’, p. 13. 151

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carers who were in receipt of poor relief at exactly the same time as they were employed in care work was far smaller – fifteen or one-fifth of carers in Campton, while in Shefford the figure was slightly higher at 27 per cent, or eight carers out of thirty-two. Hawker, in her study of nurses in Dorset, found that 73 per cent of carers who could be identified were also in receipt of parish assistance, assumably not simultaneously.57 Did employment mean a corresponding cut in parish pay? For the minority of paupers who were employed in parish care work concurrently with the receipt of poor relief, the answer would appear to be a resounding no, since in the vast majority of cases such employment did not alter the amount paid to them for their weekly pensions. In 1807, for instance, Ann Collip was paid to care for Mary Ingram for four weeks. Ann was paid 2s 6d for nursing Mary and 3s 9d for doing the family’s laundry. These payments were in addition to her weekly pension of 1s 6d. In nearly all cases, care work was paid in addition to the weekly pension payment – the pension sum was never reduced by the amount earned in caring jobs. It is significant that pensions were not adjusted to take into account the amount earned in care work, and this means that these carers were not earning their keep. We can put the carers in these two parishes into several different groups. Many carers were employed only once or twice, while others received a mixed bag of payments for care work and poor relief over the years, while a third group of needy women were allocated caring jobs so that they might earn a little more in some weeks. Clearly some nursing was between neighbours. Ardleigh, in Essex, has a surviving household listing which indicates where everyone was living. There are two cases of neighbours nursing one another: ‘Paid Frostick’s wife for nursing dame Deeves 2/-’ and ‘Paid dame Death for nursing dame Hiskey 1/6d.’, where in each case they lived in adjoining households on the list.58 In Campton and Shefford, a number of carers were paid to undertake a variety of work. Widow Bland, for instance, was paid at times for nursing, attending and sitting up, for helping with the funeral arrangements for Thomas Smith’s child, and for washing and mending for Austin Bowers, Young’s family and Elizabeth Richardson, while she received a parish pension of between three and six shillings a week. Sene Madde, the mother of four illegitimate children, also received a pension for a long period of time, sixteen years, but was also paid on occasion to attend the sick, help with funeral arrangements, and, in 1796, she was paid a shilling a week for ‘Doin for the Work House’. Her role was slightly different to that of workhouse nurses under the new poor law, where able-bodied women in the workhouse were employed as ‘pauper nurses’, since it is highly likely that

57

These were basic, rather than status, carers (see main text, below). Hawker, ‘Patterns of care in Dorset’. 58 F.H. Erith, Ardleigh in 1796: Its Farms, Families and Local Government (East Bergholt, 1978), pp. 12–15. 152

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Madde was living outside the workhouse. Nevertheless, it seems likely that the overseers chose Madde because she was a poor and needy woman of the parish.59 In 1796 the parish of Dunstable, south Bedfordshire, placed the provision of nursing care on a more formal footing, when nursing care was included in the workhouse contract. John Cudd received £108 for the year of 1763 to act as workhouse master and provide ‘good and wholesome food’ as well as ‘Discharge all Doctors and Surgeons Bills and find and provide Nurses for all Sick persons under his care (Small Pox, Broken Bones Excepted) and to pay for the Burying of all such poor people as shall Depart this Life in the said Workhouse’. Later the Dunstable overseers had a different system, by which the workhouse master was paid so much per head, but this did not include medical care. In 1804 nurses were paid 1s for their services, but in April 1805 ‘Mead’ was paid the large sum of 10s for ‘Nussing E. Green Poor House’.60 While research has shown that the majority of poor law carers were women, there has been limited research showing their marital status and family circumstances. The pauper biographies assembled for this study facilitate such research. The marital status and family circumstances of fifty of the seventy-seven women carers could be ascertained either by record linkage or by the title they were given in the overseers’ accounts. Twentyfive of the women were married, sixteen were widowed, and four moved between these categories – they were employed as carers while they were married and continued to undertake care work after they were widowed. Of the remaining five women, Rhode Merryweathers was a spinster, Jane Gaunt, Mary Smith and Sene Madde were mothers of illegitimate children, and Lucy Townsend was pregnant with a bastard.61 It appears that parish overseers believed that these women fell into two groups – married women who performed the odd neighbourly duty, and widows and unmarried mothers who needed the money paid for care work. The pauper biographies also facilitate a study of nurses and their kin. It was common for relatives to be paid by the parish authorities to care for sick members of their family, but we know little about the family relationships between these carers and their patients. In Campton, the majority of carers were unrelated to those they cared for, but on occasion a woman was also paid to assist a sick member of her family, and some carers were employed only to care for a relative. In most of the cases, married daughters were employed

59 M. Dean and G. Bolton, ‘The administration of poverty and the development of nursing practice in nineteenth century England’, in Davies, Rewriting Nursing Histories, pp. 76–101, on p. 84; Dingwall et al., Social History of Nursing, ch. 1. 60 Bell, ‘Early health care’, p. 230. 61 Campton: of fifty-three women eighteen were married, ten were widows, three were married then widowed. Shefford: of twenty-four women seven were married, six were widowed and one was married and then widowed.

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to nurse or wash for their sick or infirm mothers, such as Ann Whittemore, who was paid 4d a week for washing for her mother, Widow Devereux, for twenty months. But there were other instances where assistance was given to sisters and grandmothers.62 Susannah Ottaway found in Terling, Essex, that where kin were paid to care for one another, daughters nursed mothers, while in Puddletown, Dorset, sisters, mothers and nieces as well as daughters were paid by the overseers to look after their family members.63 Likewise in Luton and Aspley Guise in the 1820s, women were paid to care for mothers and sisters.64 Care between relatives has implications for the wider debate on household formation and the amount of assistance given by kin. In the case of the elderly, David Thomson has argued that in the long term, English society has been positioned near to the collective end of the ‘welfare continuum’; that is, the community has provided care for the aged rather than the family.65 But in the case of daughters being paid by the parish authorities to care for their mothers, the two poles of the collectivity and the family meet. Once married, daughters were no longer legally obligated to support their parents, but we have clear evidence here that they were doing just that.66 A married woman’s obligations were to her husband and children, and it is likely that the married women caring for their relatives in Campton were at that stage in their lifecycles when their children were small and the costs of childrearing were at their greatest. The dilemma of responsibility for children and elderly parents is neatly expressed in a letter from the collection of Essex pauper letters analysed by Thomas Sokoll. In 1810 Rachel Shoregh from Bethnal Green wrote to the overseers in her parish of settlement, in Essex, that ‘my children are all married and got familys which these dear times they have as much as they can do to support and therefore are not able to assist me’.67 Parish

62 The two examples Sharpe gives of care between relatives in Colyton are daughters caring for mothers. P. Sharpe, ‘Gender-specific demographic adjustment to changing economic circumstances: Colyton 1538–1837’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of Cambridge, 1988), p. 186. 63 Ottaway, ‘The “decline of life” ’, ch. 4. 64 Bell, ‘Early health care’, p. 231; Walmsley, ‘Provision for the non able-bodied’, p. 13. 65 D. Thomson, ‘Welfare and the historians’, in L. Bonfield, R.M. Smith and K. Wrightson (eds) The World we have Gained: Histories of Population and Social Structure (Oxford, 1986), pp. 355–78, on p. 365. See also R.M. Smith, ‘The structured dependence of the elderly as a recent development: some sceptical historical thoughts’, Ageing and Society, 4 (1984), pp. 409–28, on p. 424; idem., ‘Some issues concerning families and their property in rural England, 1250–1800’, in R.M. Smith (ed.) Land, Kinship and Life-Cycle (Cambridge, 1984), pp. 68–85. 66 R. Wall, ‘The responsibility of kin’, Local Population Studies, 19 (1977), pp. 58–60; and D. Thomson, ‘I am not my father’s keeper: families and the elderly in nineteenth century England’, Law and History Review, 2 (1984), pp. 265–86. 67 T. Sokoll, ‘Old age in poverty: the record of Essex pauper letters, 1780–1834’, in T. Hitchcock et al., Chronicling the Poor, p. 138.

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overseers recognised this and paid them the going rate for caring for their kin. The sums paid to those caring for relatives did not differ markedly from the sums given for the care of non-kin. The evidence is suggestive that relatives were paid to go into the homes of their kin to care for them, rather than their elderly or sickly kin living with them, and, if so, this would indicate support between households, which is far more difficult to assess than support within households.68 It is entirely possible though that some of the sick were living with their married children; without a household listing for Campton and Shefford, we can never be sure who was residing with one another. In the Essex pauper letters, there are cases where the elderly lived with their relatives and the parish supported this. Elizabeth Reilly in London wrote that her 80-year-old-mother had lived with them for ten years but had now become so infirm that they could no longer keep her, unless they were assisted by the parish. Similarly, the daughter of Elizabeth Philbrick, a 68-year-old widow, wrote from Wivenhoe that she would take in her mother when she was given a small weekly allowance towards her keep.69 In Shefford’s vestry minutes, allowances were paid to relatives on behalf of their dependants. In April 1809, for instance, it was agreed that ‘Prudence Adams, in consequence of her Age and Infirmity is to be Allowed 3/6 pr Week. Mr Ibbs (her Son) promising that no further incumberance shall attend this Parish.’ Likewise, it was resolved in June of that year that ‘the relatives of Ann Bird, shall be Allowed 18d pr Week providing they keep her under there Care’.70 Mary Fissell has argued, for the rural parish of Abson and Wick, that overseers of the poor sought to reinforce family obligation through cash payments and to substitute for it where it was missing. She contends that Abson’s overseers realised that financial responsibility between kin was difficult to maintain.71 Payments by the poor law for care between relatives has been interpreted by a number of historians as a means of enhancing the extent of familial support; this is an argument made by Richard Smith in his Sir John Neale Lecture and is also made in the context of the later nineteenth century by Janet Finch and Michael Anderson.72 All these cases would suggest that publicly funded

68 P. Laslett, Family Life and Illicit Love in Earlier Generations (Cambridge, 1977). See also D. Cooper and M. Donald’s work on kin and social networks for the residents of the Old Tiverton Road, Exeter, in ‘Households and “hidden” kin in the early-nineteenth-century England: four case studies in suburban Exeter, 1821–1861’, Continuity and Change, 10 (1995), pp. 257–78. 69 Sokoll, ‘Old age in poverty’, pp. 135–6. 70 BLARS, P70/8/1. 71 Fissell, ‘The “sick and drooping poor” ’, p. 43. 72 Ibid., p. 43; R.M. Smith, ‘Charity, self-interest and welfare: reflections from demographic and family history’, in M. Daunton (ed.) Charity, Self-interest and Welfare in the English Past: The Neale Colloquium in British History (London, 1996); J. Finch, Family Obligations and Social Change (Cambridge, 1989), ch. 2; M. Anderson, Family Structure in NineteenthCentury Lancashire (Cambridge, 1971).

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domestic care of the elderly poor by their relatives was far more widespread than has hitherto been assumed. Moreover, we could speculate that in cases where individuals were cared for by non-kin, their family was for one reason or another absent. Mary Fissell argues that dependency rather than disease defined an individual’s claim for assistance from the poor law. In her study of eighteenth-century Bristol and its region, the truly dependent either had no local kin or their relatives were unable to help them.73 In Shefford it was far rarer for relatives to be paid to care for one another. In only one instance does this appear to have taken place, namely in March 1820 when Eleanor Seamour and Mary Seamour were paid 14s 10d for ‘doing for Wid Elizabeth Seamour in her illness and after decease’. It is not known if these women were related; it can only be speculated upon because they shared the same surname. Shefford was a small market town and it seems likely that the turnover of population was more rapid here than in Campton, leaving fewer kin available to care for their relatives. It is also possible that Campton’s vestry was dominated by local farmers, who were paternalistic in their outlook towards the poor. They may have seen poor relief for care between families as necessary support for such care. In the market town of Shefford, on the other hand, farmers may have had less influence on the parish vestry, and this could go some way towards accounting for the differences between the two communities.

Earnings for care work, women’s work and the ‘economy of makeshifts’ Were there important status distinctions and remuneration differences between carers? And how does care work fit in with other work available to women in Campton and Shefford, within Bedfordshire and in the agricultural counties of the south more generally?74 Only a few carers were paid very high sums for their services. Nursing lying-in women and assisting during epidemics were the only tasks that were highly paid. Alice Arnold, for instance, was paid £2 1s in 1781 for nursing Sarah Briant for a month following the birth of her son, and Thompson earned two guineas for around three weeks’ attendance on those afflicted with the smallpox during an outbreak of the disease in Campton in 1832. Boarded-out children brought in sizeable sums to the receiving households, approximately 4s a week: Ann Herbert earned 4s a week for sixty-four weeks in 1796–97 boarding out Lansberry’s children. The going rate for other care work was far less. Only small sums could be earned by sitting up with the ill and dying, generally 6d per night. Washing was even more

73

Fissell, ‘The “sick and drooping poor” ’. Although I appreciate that many women were adept at ‘kitchen physic’. I owe this point to Sarah Pennell.

74

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poorly paid at between 3d and 9d a week. More substantial sums could be made ‘nursing’ and ‘attending’, up to 8s, but payments for these tasks fluctuated between 1s to 2s and 7s to 8s per payment; it is unclear from the account books how many weeks’ work these larger payments were intended to cover. It is possible to compare these earnings with the day wage rates for nursing and charring recorded for sixteen Norfolk and Suffolk parishes in the 14th Report of the Select Committee enquiring into the workings of the Poor Law Amendment Act, 1837–38.75 It is not clear who was the employer – whether it was the parish or a private employer – and we might assume these jobs were undertaken for both. Payments for nursing varied from as little as 4d to 1s a day, with payments up to 1s 3d in Swaffham. The parish of Docking records paying nurses 5s a week. Nursing often also included board. Thingoe records payments of 1s 6d for sitting up, which, if it was paid per night, is substantially more than was paid in Campton and Shefford where 6d per night was the going rate. Charring was paid at between 6d and 1s, including board. It is not clear from most of these day rates, however, the length of time spent in these jobs. Their duration would determine remuneration.76 The labouring poor pieced together a living through a multiplicity of sources, an ‘economy of expedients’ and ‘multiple makeshifts’ through a combination of waged work, by-employments and seasonal work, poor relief and non-income-producing sources, such as gleaning and turf collecting.77 This is the most appropriate context within which to place women’s earnings, including parish nursing. We can also assume that many of the tasks in which women were employed by the overseers of the poor, such as caring and nursing, washing and clothes making, and household tasks, provided private incomes. Laying-out continued to be a job done by freelance nurses at least into the nineteenth century, and was still being undertaken by nurses in and outside of hospitals in the twentieth century.78 In one of the Essex letters from 1826 in the collection analysed by Tom Sokoll, Benjamin Brooker writes, ‘my wife have Bean very Bad for some weaks and i have Bean forst to have a porsson to se after har’.79 In Bocking in 1831 old Mary Elvin was so ill

75

PP 1837–8, XVIII, Part I, 14th Report, ‘Reports from the Select Committee to Inquire into the Administration of the Relief of the Poor, under the Orders and Regulations issued by the Commissioners appointed under the Provisions of the Poor Law Amendment Act; with Minutes of evidence and appendices’, Appendix G. 76 PP 1837–8, XVIII, Part I, 14th Report, Appendix G. 77 These terms were coined by Olwen Hufton, The Poor of Eighteenth-Century France, 1750–1789 (Oxford, 1974). 78 Pelling, The Common Lot, ch. 8. 79 T. Sokoll (ed.), Essex Pauper Letters, 1731–1837 (Oxford, 2001), letter 521 from Benjamin Brooker (in Ipswich) to Robert Alden, Overseer of St Peter, Colchester, April 1826, p. 467. 157

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that she was ‘obliged to have the assistance of her neighbours & too pay for it as far as she is able’.80 It appears that the connection between washing and nursing goes back many centuries.81 Pelling has found for Norwich in 1570 that outside help was often brought in even by relatively poor families, even if only for the major task of washing.82 In the budgets of agricultural labourers published by David Davies in 1795, the report from Surrey records several families who ‘take in lodgers which lessens their rents, and for whom the wives wash and mend’.83 Laundry work could provide a short-term contingency to tide women over difficult economic times, although such work was seasonal, with the bulk of the work in the summer. Women who washed, or helped neighbours and wives to wash, comprised one of the largest groups in the Norwich Census for the Poor of 1570, particularly since this was a common secondary occupation.84 Much later, David Davies described this patchwork of sources of income in 1787. In Barkham, a rural parish in Buckinghamshire, ‘The woman earns, as she believes by washing and needlework, by breeding poultry, and at harvest work when she has no child to nurse about 1s a week’.85 Likewise, William Howitt, writing in 1838, described the ways in which wives of labourers could contribute to the maintenance of their families ‘by taking in washing, helping in harvest fields, charring in more affluent peoples houses’.86 Peter Earle’s research comparing women in the labour market in 1700 with the 1851 census for London found no differences in the type of work in which women engaged, the most common four areas being domestic service, making and mending clothes, charring, and laundry. Many women’s occupations in the eighteenth century were ‘casual, intermittent or seasonal’.87 It seems likely that only a few women made a full-time living by caring, nursing, healing and helping with midwifery. While some women acquired a reputation as a highly competent nurse or healer, most women were carers part-time, along with jobs as cleaners and laundresses.88 It appears that some women were regarded as full-time nurses to the extent that they were recorded as ‘nurses’ in the 1841 census; there was one nurse in Campton and five in Shefford. In addition, four women

80

Quoted by P. Sharpe, Adapting to Capitalism. Working Women in the English Economy, 1700–1850 (London, 1996), p. 127. 81 Pelling highlights this connection in the early modern period; see The Common Lot, ch. 8. 82 Ibid. 83 D. Davies, The Case of Labourers in Husbandry (London, 1795), p. 181. 84 Pelling, The Common Lot, ch. 8. 85 Quoted by Sharpe, Adapting to Capitalism, p. 125. 86 Quoted by B. Hill, Women, Work, and Sexual Politics in Eighteenth-Century England (Oxford, 1989), p. 161. 87 Quoted by Sharpe, Adapting to Capitalism, p. 128. 88 Dingwall et al., Social History of Nursing, ch. 1. 158

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were recorded as ‘charwomen’ in Shefford, and there were three ‘laundresses’ in Campton and one in Shefford.89 The Select Committee’s Report of 1837–38, which we considered above for the day wage rates for women’s work in charring and nursing in Norfolk and Suffolk, also lists the female occupations of stone picking, gleaning, haymaking, dropping and gavelling. ‘Gleaning’ in this context was collecting fallen corn for the farmer, rather than gleaning as a common right; ‘gavelling’ was when women were employed to rake or gather mown corn or hay into heaps or rows (a gavel being a sheaf of corn/hay before it is bound); while ‘dropping’ was when women dropped seeds into holes made by the dibbler.90 Gleaning paid well in comparison with the other jobs, at least 1s, and it included beer in Bosmere, Claydon and Hartismore. Haymaking paid around 8d per day, often including beer, while dropping and gavelling paid more, at between 9d and 1s 6d; but only 6d to 8d could be made per day for stone picking.91 Many of the answers to the Rural Queries, which are published as part of the Report of the Royal Commission on the Poor Laws of 1832, however, make it quite clear that women were rarely employed in agricultural tasks in Bedfordshire, except for gleaning after the harvest.92 At Southill, a parish contiguous with Campton-with-Shefford, for instance, it was said that, ‘The women and children are very little employed in field work but engaged generally in straw-plat and a little lace-making’.93 It appears that women’s work in agriculture had not diminished entirely, however, since three women were recorded as agricultural labourers in Campton and two in Shefford in the 1841 census.94 Women were employed in lace-making and spinning in the north of Bedfordshire. The listing from 1782 for the parish of Cardington, which is 89 Census Return, 1841. The number of females recording an occupation in Campton in 1841 was 104 out of 271 (38 per cent) and 170 out of 462 in Shefford (37 per cent). On the recording of women’s work in the census, see E. Higgs, ‘Women, occupations, and work in the nineteenth century censuses’, History Workshop Journal, 23 (1987), pp. 59–80; idem., Making Sense of the Census: The Manuscript Returns for England and Wales, 1801–1901 (London, 1989). 90 I owe this information to Nicola Verdon, Rural History Centre, University of Reading, and Richard Smith and Leigh Shaw-Taylor, both of the Cambridge Group, University of Cambridge. 91 PP 1837–8, XVIII, Part I, 14th Report, Appendix G. 92 PP 1834, XXX, Royal Commission on the Poor Laws, Rural Queries. On using the Rural Queries for information on women’s work, see N. Verdon, ‘The rural labour market in the early nineteenth century: women’s and children’s employment, family income, and the 1834 Poor Law Report’, Economic History Review, LV, 2 (2002), pp. 299–323. On the decline of women’s work in agriculture, see K.D.M. Snell, Annals of the Labouring Poor, ch. 1. For women’s work in nineteenth-century Bedfordshire, see N. Verdon, Rural Women Workers in Nineteenth-Century England: Gender, Work and Wages (Woodbridge, 2002), ch. 5. 93 PP 1834, XXX, Rural Queries. 94 Census Return, 1841.

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only seven miles from Campton and Shefford, reveals that there were high levels of women and children working in this parish. Of women aged 20 to 39, 82 per cent are described as working, 51 per cent of those aged 40 to 59, and 60 per cent of those aged 60 and above. The majority of women who worked were employed in textiles: 34.9 per cent in lace-making, 11.9 per cent in spinning linen and 11.1 per cent in spinning jersey.95 Spinning, however, collapsed towards the end of the century.96 Despite lace-making being extremely poorly paid, large numbers of women were occupied in the trade.97 By 1832, the Rural Queries record that sums of just 1s 6d to 3s were paid per week for lace-making and the north of Bedfordshire was renowned in the county for its poverty.98 Straw-plaiting was the predominant occupation in the middle and south of the county. Straw-plait and straw-hat manufacture was centred in the south of Bedfordshire in Luton and Dunstable. Straw-plaiting was well established in the county in the early eighteenth century, and experienced its heyday during the protection afforded by the Napoleonic Wars.99 Earnings dropped at the end of the Wars when the superior Italian leghorn hats, and later plait, was imported.100 The plait work of wives and children, in contrast to lace-making, could provide a substantial boost to the household economy of poorly paid agricultural labourers. In the 1790s, Frederick Eden recorded for Dunstable in south Bedfordshire: In the straw work, which is the staple manufacture of the place, a woman can earn from 6s to 12s a week; children from 2s to 4s a week. This business has given employment, for the last 20 years, to every woman who wished to work; and, for 10 years back, straw has sold well, particularly in the spring. Earnings in this line have, for the last four years, been exceedingly great.101 95

D. Baker, The Inhabitants of Cardington in 1782 (Bedford, 1973), Introduction, pp. 1–71. O. Saito, ‘Who worked when: life-time profiles of labour force participation in Cardington and Corfe Castle in the late eighteenth and min-nineteenth centuries’, Local Population Studies, 22 (1979), pp. 14–29, and discussed by Richard Wall, ‘Some implications of the earnings, income and expenditure patterns of married women in populations in the past’, in J. Henderson and R. Wall (eds) Poor Woman and Children in the European Past (London, 1994), pp. 321–35, at p. 326. 97 Saito, ‘Who worked when’, pp. 22–23; Baker, The Inhabitants of Cardington. 98 PP 1834, XXX, Rural Queries. Forty per cent more was spent in lace-making parishes in comparison with straw-plaiting parishes. See Grey, ‘The pauper problem in Bedfordshire from 1795–1834’ (M.Phil. dissertation, University of Leicester, 1975), ch. 6. See also P. Horn, ‘Child workers in the pillow lace and straw plait trades of Victorian Buckinghamshire and Bedfordshire’, Historical Journal, 17 (1974), pp. 779–96, at p. 782. 99 Horn, ‘Child workers’; P. Sharpe, ‘The women’s harvest: straw-plaiting and the representation of labouring women’s employment, c. 1793–1885’, Rural History, 5 (1994), pp. 129–42; J. Godber, History of Bedfordshire (Bedford, 1984), pp. 330–1. 100 Sharpe, ‘The women’s harvest’. 101 F. M. Eden, The State of the Poor: or an History of the Labouring Classes in England, 3 vols (1797), vol. 2, p. 2. 96

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Earnings for plait work, however, fluctuated by season, by the year and with fashion. The seasonal aspect of plait work meant that its value fell considerably during the winter when income was needed most.102 Eden noted the seasonality of the trade with regard to the Bedfordshire parish of Houghton Regis: wages for straw work varied between 2s 6d and 12s a week according to demand.103 Fluctuations in demand meant that women, such as Lucy Luck, a Bedfordshire straw-plait worker in the second half of the nineteenth century, had to piece together a living from many sources: The straw-work is very bad, as a rule, from July up to about Christmas. During that time I have been out charring or washing, and I have looked after a gentleman’s house a few times, and I have taken in needlework.104

The Rural Queries of 1832 record that earnings in the trade were still considerable. Single women could earn between 7s and 10s a week, while married women earned between 5s and 7s. These sums are larger than many of the sums paid for parish care work.105 In the 1841 census, the biggest single occupation for women in the two parishes was straw-plaiting: in Campton, fifty-six women, or 54 per cent of women recording an occupation, and fortyseven women, or 25 per cent, in Shefford, were straw-plaiters.106 Despite the reference to women undertaking ‘a little lace-making’ in Southill in 1832, only one woman was recorded as a lace-maker in Campton and two in Shefford in the 1841 census. The other occupation which employed a large number of women was service: the number of female servants was much higher in Shefford than in Campton, with thirty-nine servants in the town (23 per cent) as compared to only four in the rural village (4 per cent). The other occupations recorded, with only small numbers of women employed, included dressmaking and housekeeping.107 Despite the high involvement of women in wage-related employment, their contribution to family income was relatively limited, although it would still be crucial. In Davies’ and Eden’s household budgets, on average, women contributed about 10 per cent of the total earnings of the family; rather it was children who made the greatest difference.108 Care work for the parish was one source of income for women. The average annual sum women carers

102

Snell, Annals of the Labouring Poor, pp. 59, 125. Eden, The State of the Poor, vol. 2, pp. 4–5. 104 Burnett, Useful Toil, p. 77. 105 PP 1834, XXX, Rural Queries. 106 Census Return, 1841. The number of females recording an occupation in Campton in 1841 was 104 out of 271 (38 per cent) and 170 out of 462 in Shefford (37 per cent). 107 For a fuller discussion of the 1841 census for Campton and Shefford, see Williams, ‘Poor relief, welfare and medical provision in Bedfordshire’, ch. 2. 108 T. Sokoll, Household and Family Among the Poor: The Case of Two Essex Communities in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries (Bochum, 1993), p. 42. 103

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earned from the parish of Campton in the 1780s and 1790s was 17s 5d, although many women actually earned far less, and only a few earned far more. If these women were married, earnings from caring jobs in Campton could have represented around one-third of their annual contribution to the household income, based on Jane Humphries and Sara Horrell’s analysis of the budgets of low-wage agricultural households.109 Without a male wage, the amount earned by an unmarried mother, deserted wife or widow would have represented a larger contribution. In Campton and Shefford at least, however, this declined over time; by the 1820s many of these caring jobs had disappeared, as the parishes spent less and less on care.110

Status and skill In terms of status and skill, Mary Barker-Read identified three groups of nurses in Kent: the experienced nurses who worked for the poor law on a full-time basis and assumed responsible positions in times of epidemics; those who attended their neighbours or relatives for short periods of time; and a third group who acted as ancillaries, as watchers on the dying or as assistants to the full-time nurses.111 The groups of carers in Campton do not fit exactly into Barker-Read’s categories, but are similar in a number of respects. None of the carers in Campton were employed in a full-time capacity, but a number of women were employed regularly and so we could regard these women as experienced nurses. Mary Barber and Jemima Johnson fell into this category. Mary Barber was employed on many occasions between 1792 and 1803, for ‘doing for’, washing and attending, and she was also employed by the parish overseer for other tasks, such as mending sheets and cleaning the town house. Jemima Johnson was also employed regularly between 1803 and 1809 for washing, nursing and mending clothing. Jemima even appears to have been in charge of a team of sitters-up for Sarah Lansberry when she was acutely ill in 1806–07, and Jemima was also responsible for the last few weeks of William Kilby’s life: she cared for him up to his death, arranged his funeral and washed his things. Likewise in Luton there is at least one example of a nearly full-time nurse, Mrs Plummer, who received many payments for her nursing

109

The sum of £0.87 would have represented 3.5% of household income, based on an average income of £24.59 for married couple households between 1787 and 1795 from Jane Humphries and Sara Horrell’s analysis of household budgets. Humphries and Horrell inform us that married women contributed 9 to 12% to the annual household income, which means that earnings from caring jobs in Campton could have represented around one-third of their contribution. J. Humphries and S. Horrell, ‘Old questions, new data, and alternative perspectives: families’ living standards in the industrial revolution’, Journal of Economic History, LII (1992), pp. 849–90, Table 3 on p. 859. 110 Williams, ‘Poor relief, welfare and medical provision in Bedfordshire’, ch. 6. 111 Barker-Read, ‘The treatment of the aged poor’, ch. 3. 162

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work.112 It was these women, who were employed regularly, who made the most money from care work, and they should be regarded as of higher skill and status than many of the other carers. Historians have found that in times of infectious disease, full-time, experienced nurses cared for the sick. Women plague ‘nurses’ were appointed during epidemics in seventeenth-century London, Cheshire and Manchester.113 Indeed, Pelling contends that the stereotypical plague nurse, the predatory ‘nightcrow’, long antedates Dickens’s Mrs Gamp and foreshadows many of her characteristics.114 Pelling believes that the circumstances in which nurses were most needed were also those which aroused the most fear and distaste and that this accounts for these negative stereotypes.115 Barker-Read argues that this was true of the five parishes in Kent during outbreaks of smallpox.116 In Campton and Shefford, we know very little about who was employed during epidemics; there were three smallpox epidemics in Campton, in 1787, 1808–09 and 1832; and in Shefford in 1796, 1799 and 1824. The overseers’ accounts give few details, except that large sums were paid for attendance on those who were infected. It would be reasonable to assume that payments were high because such nurses were experienced. Certainly, during an outbreak in the Warwickshire parish of Tysoe in 1817, a trained nurse was fetched from Banbury to attend the sick.117 In Eaton Socon early in the eighteenth century smallpox nurses were paid high sums; in October 1712, for instance, the nurse was paid 10s for nursing for nine days and an additional £1 12s for a further month. The outbreak persisted for exactly two years, until September 1714, and the total cost to the parish, including food, goods and burial costs, as well as for the doctor’s fee and nursing, was £74, which accounted for nearly one-fifth of the entire cost of relief for that period. When a parishioner contracted the disease in the winter of 1718–19 the nurse is named as one Widow Bleatt, who was paid £1 10s for six weeks’ nursing – a rate of 5s a week – as well as an additional smaller sum for house room.118 Likewise, when in 1763 George Bowstead, his wife and five children all contracted smallpox in Luton, the total cost was £17 13s 21⁄2d, £6 5s of which went on nursing care.119 Many of the carers in Campton and Shefford do fall more neatly into

112

Bell, ‘Early health care’, p. 231. P. Slack, Impact of Plague in Tudor and Stuart England (London, 1985), pp. 271, 282; Pelling, The Common Lot, ch. 8. 114 Charles Dickens, Martin Chuzzlewit (1843–44). See also the orphan ‘nurse’ and the women who lay out the dead in Dickens’ Oliver Twist (1837). 115 Pelling, The Common Lot, ch. 8. 116 Barker-Read, ‘The treatment of the aged poor’, ch. 3. 117 A.W. Ashby, ‘One Hundred Years of Poor Law Administration in a Warwickshire Village’, in P. Vinogradoff (ed.) Oxford Studies in Social and Legal History (Oxford, 1912), pp. 129–36. 118 Emmison, Relief of the Poor at Eaton Socon, pp. 71–6. 119 Bell, ‘Early health care’, p. 234. 113

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Barker-Read’s second and third categories; many carers did attend their neighbours and relatives for short periods of time, and others were paid as assistants and sitters-up. There is growing evidence to suggest that while the keeping and curing roles were combined in early modern society, at some point during the eighteenth century women were marginalised from skilled positions. For the earlier period, Pelling has found that in sixteenth-century Norwich the keepers of the lazarhouses were responsible for serious, contagious and incurable cases.120 Jennifer Hawker, in her study of carers in eighteenthcentury Dorset, also found many instances of women as curers as well as carers. Hawker found evidence of what she terms ‘status carers’ and ‘basic carers’.121 The former offered a variety of services, including ‘curing’, nursing, dressing wounds, bleeding, providing physic and performing surgery, and were paid substantial fees, while the basic carers were paid for watching, cleaning, caring, and for the laying out of the dead and fetching the affidavit, and were paid much smaller sums. In the two Bedfordshire parishes, there were women who were paid substantial sums for services which were of higher status, such as Alice Arnold who nursed lying-in women. But the majority of the tasks performed in Campton and Shefford came under the ‘basic care’ category. Many of the tasks Hawker categorises as identified with ‘status carers’ were never mentioned in Campton’s overseers’ accounts. Most of Hawker’s evidence comes from the first half of the eighteenth century, whereas my study focuses upon the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. This is slight evidence, but it could suggest that there was a declining role for women as skilled carers, nurses and practitioners between the mid-eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. It seems at least likely that since surgeon-apothecaries were employed ever more frequently by parishes, especially as contracted medical attendants, they were effectively displacing fringe practitioners from poor law medical services. Certainly there is evidence from Eaton Socon, Bedfordshire, of many instances of women curing in the early eighteenth century, and, moreover, these dwindle from the second quarter of the eighteenth century, as those relating to medical men increase.122 Other research has established that the eighteenth century witnessed the decline and virtual extinction of the female surgeon, the surgeoness.123

120

Pelling, ‘Healing the sick poor’. Hawker, ‘Patterns of care in Dorset’. 122 Emmison, Relief of the Poor at Eaton Socon, pp. 71–6. 123 A.L. Wyman, ‘The surgeoness: the female practitioner of surgery 1400–1800’, Medical History, 28 (1984), pp. 22–41. 121

164

POOR LAW NURSES IN BEDFORDSHIRE

The ‘crisis’ of the old poor law It has long been recognised that the years after about 1790 in the south and east witnessed a worsening of the standard of living for the labouring poor and, more specifically, those dependent to some extent upon poor relief. This was a period characterised by rapid population growth, harvest failures, price inflation, the collapse of domestic industry, and agricultural depression after the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Structural unemployment and underemployment in agriculture were serious problems and out-of-work men were offered a series of allowances and work schemes, ranging from Speenhamland allowances, allowances in aid of wages, the labour rate and the roundsman system.124 In Campton and Shefford, poor relief expenditure increased rapidly, with a fourteenfold rise between the 1770s and the late 1820s, a trend which broadly paralleled the rise in the south-east as a whole.125 Allowances and work schemes were resorted to periodically, and Bedfordshire was one of the counties which erupted into violence in the Swing Riots of 1830–31.126 Keith Snell has argued that economic pressure produced reassessments of earlier relief. During the high price years of 1795–96 and 1800–01 in Ardleigh, Essex, for instance, relief in kind, which included nursing, was greatly minimised, and such payments virtually ceased altogether after 1815.127 In Berkshire, the proportion of expenditure allocated to nursing, washing and ‘doing’ fell continuously between 1764 and 1800, from 1.7 per cent to just 0.006 per cent respectively.128 In Campton and Shefford, the sick received proportionately more and more cash benefits but less and less care. Cash payments to those who were ill increased over the period: in Campton from 0.03 per cent of expenditure in the 1790s to between 4 and 5 per cent in the 1820s and 1830s, and in Shefford from 0.4 per cent of overall spending in the 1790s and 1800s to between 1.5 and 2 per cent in the 1810s and 1820s. Meanwhile, payments for care work were falling. In Shefford the proportion of spending allocated to care and nursing fell, from 4.8 per cent of total expenditure in the 1790s to just 1 per cent by the 1820s. In Campton the picture is far less clear (see Table 6.1), with the amount spent on care falling from 2 per cent

124 M. Neuman, ‘Speenhamland in Berkshire’, in E.A. Martin (ed.) Comparative Development in Social Welfare (London, 1972), pp. 85–127; M. Blaug, ‘The myth of the old poor law and the making of the new’, in M.W. Flinn and T.C. Smout (eds) Essays in Social History (Oxford, 1974), pp. 123–53; G.R. Boyer, An Economic History of the English Poor Law, 1750–1850 (Cambridge, 1990). 125 Williams. ‘Poor relief, welfare and medical provision in Bedfordshire’, ch. 4. 126 Ibid., ch. 4; E.J. Hobsbawm and G. Rudé, Captain Swing (London, 1969). 127 Snell, Annals of the Labouring Poor, ch. 3. 128 S.W. Taylor, ‘Aspects of the socio-demographic history of seven Berkshire parishes in the eighteenth century’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of Reading, 1987), Table 9.4, on p. 397. The figures are: 1764, 1.7%; 1777, 1.4%; 1790, 0.75%; 1800, 0.006%.

165

WOMEN, WORK AND WAGES IN ENGLAND, 1600–1850

Table 6.1 Proportion of total expenditure on care in Campton and Shefford by decade

1770s 1780s 1790s 1800s 1810s 1820s 1830s

Campton %

Shefford %

2.0 0.6 3.3 0.7 0.5 1.5 0.2

– – 4.8 2.7 1.8 1.0 –

in the 1770s to 0.6 per cent in the 1780s, only to increase rapidly to 3.3 per cent in the 1790s. Thereafter, however, spending was far lower and fell to just 0.2 per cent in the early 1830s. Figure 6.1 plots total poor relief expenditure and sums expended on carers per annum for Campton and Shefford. The lack of much correlation between the two expenditures is clear. All the very high sums spent in Campton and Shefford in specific years are accounted for by the usual range of care work in the two parishes, except for a smallpox epidemic in Campton in 1808, which

350 300

40.0 250 30.0

200 150

20.0

100 10.0

Total expenditure (£)

Sums expended on care (£)

50.0

50 0.0 1831

1827

1823

1819

1815

1811

1807

1803

1799

1795

1791

1787

1783

1779

1775

1771

1767

0

Year

Campton – care

Shefford – care

Campton – total expenditure

Shefford – total expenditure

Figure 6.1 Poor relief expenditure and sums spent on carers in Campton and Shefford, 1767–1834 Source: BRO P18/12/1–2, X514/1–3, P70/12/1–2 166

POOR LAW NURSES IN BEDFORDSHIRE

cost the parish £4 6s 8d in payments to carers. The very high cost of care in Campton in 1826, of over £19, was due to care for ‘Old’ James Ingram, which totalled £18 17s. In Shefford nearly all the years of high spending are accounted for by the costs of boarding out one family, Downman’s children. Between 1808 and 1820 the overseers of Shefford paid £79 19s 2d on bringing them up ‘on the parish’. The decline in the amount spent by the parish on care work and nursing must have meant a reduction in the availability of this type of work for women, in addition to their marginalisation from skilled and higher status medical and nursing attendance, and at a time when their work in much southern agriculture and domestic industry was also being eroded.129

Conclusion We have found that parish care work was allocated to several groups of carers, two of whom also received poor relief, although care work rarely supplanted poor relief. These women were extremely poor and parish overseers allocated care work to them preferentially. It appears that in these Bedfordshire parishes at least, nurses were not earning their keep. There is also evidence that women were marginalised from skilled care work during the eighteenth century and that by the early nineteenth century, under pressure from escalating poor rates, there were fewer caring and nursing jobs on offer by the parish. In the case of payments for care between relatives, overseers realised that poor households needed payment for this work and that such payments bolstered familial support. In the majority of cases carer and patient were not related, and yet the system had the advantage of poor people being cared for in intimate ways by people of a similar class and outlook. The provision of parish care, along with the provision of medical assistance by surgeonapothecaries, indicates a significant role for the community in the provision of medical and nursing care in the time of the Old Poor Law, which was, after all, still a system based overwhelmingly on the parish, in which local inhabitants often had to be self-subsistent.130

129

Snell, Annals of the Labouring Poor, ch. 3. I wish to thank Jane Humphries and Keith Snell for encouraging me to think along these lines of argument. 130

167

WOMEN, WORK AND WAGES IN ENGLAND, 1600–1850

Appendix Biographies of the poor: Poor law nurses in Campton and Shefford, Bedfordshire The following pauper biographies summarise the poor law careers of nurses, both when they were employed as nurses and when they were recipients themselves.131 Mary Barber was married to William, a labourer, and the couple had a growing family. They received occasional relief in 1781 and 1792. Between 1792 and 1803 Mary was regularly employed for help with housework and for attending the sick and infirm. She was also employed by the parish overseers of Campton for other tasks, such as mending sheets and cleaning the town house. She received very little poor relief, until her last illness and death. The burial was paid for by the poor law, at a cost of £1 18 41⁄4d. Jemima Johnson performed the vast majority of her caring duties on a widow’s pension. She received a regular pension of 6s a week following her husband Cornelius’ death in 1805, which was intended to cover her and her eight children. Jemima was employed regularly over the next four years for washing, nursing and mending clothing, and she was in charge of other carers, such as the sitters-up for Sarah Lansberry when she was acutely ill in 1806–07. Jemima was also responsible for the care of William Kilby in the last few weeks of his life, while after his death she arranged his funeral and washed his things. In return, during her illness in 1806, Jemima was attended by Anna Lansberry. During the same year, Jemima was given straws to begin teaching her children straw-plaiting. Jemima is exemplary in illustrating the ‘economy of makeshifts’ of women’s work. Jemima put together a livelihood from the forms of income we can see in these sources – poor relief, parish care work and the strawplaiting done by her children, and probably from other sources which are not visible to the historian. Mary Clarke’s biography shows her receiving relief and nursing paupers. She and her husband, Henry, received poor relief for the first time in 1800–01, when they were allocated a family allowance payment. Some years later, in December 1808, Henry disappeared from the relief lists and Mary was allocated a regular pension, and coals and faggots for the winter, although there is no funeral date for her husband and she was not referred to as a ‘widow’ until 1814. The pension was large, at between 5s and 7s 6d, and presumably this was to cover their five young children. £4 13s 3d, a very large sum, was also spent on the family for ‘Clothing Beding &c &c’. The pension

131

BLARS, P18/12/1–2, X514/1–3 and P70/12/1–2. 168

POOR LAW NURSES IN BEDFORDSHIRE

increased over time, to the point where she was receiving 8s a week, and on many occasions in the winter months these dole payments were supplemented with coal. The pension began to fall, to 4s, 3s, 2s 6d, as the children grew up. Mary continued to receive a pension up to 1834, when she was described as ‘age 63’. Throughout her time on poor relief, Mary also earned extra income from parish care work. She nursed William Burrows, Keziah Williams and Steven’s family, was employed sitting up with Old Ingram, and nursed and washed for William Randall over many years.

169

7

A ‘humbler, industrious class of female’ Women’s employment and industry in the small towns of southern England, c. 1790–1840 NEIL RAVEN

A survey of recent research confirms that comparatively few studies have been undertaken into the urban economies of southern England’s towns during the Industrial Revolution.1 Indeed, it is now widely assumed that by the late eighteenth century this region consisted of little more than slow-growing market towns. Some of these towns had once possessed manufactories, as the observations of early eighteenth-century commentators such as Daniel Defoe testify. However, their association with industry is generally considered to have come to an end by the start of the Industrial Revolution. By this time, according to Clark, their old industrial specialities were ‘draining away’.2 Various explanations have been advanced to account for this decay. According to Jones, the decline of southern manufactories was the consequence of forces of comparative advantage. The topography, labour supply conditions, lighter soils and milder climate of the region made agriculture a more attractive commercial proposition than manufacture. As a result of these changing terms of trade, labour and capital shifted out of industry and into land.3 Meanwhile, Clark has emphasised the role played by London. The 1

This assessment is confirmed by a consideration of entries appearing under ‘urban economic activity’ in R.G. Rodger, A Consolidated Bibliography of Urban History (Aldershot, 1996), and in the ‘Current bibliography of urban history’, Urban History, 23 (1996), pp. 402–43; 24 (1997), pp. 388–441; 25 (1998), pp. 430–1; 26 (1999), pp. 470–2; 27 (2000), pp. 460–2; and 28 (2001), pp. 491–3. For details see N. Raven, ‘Manufacturing and trades: the urban economies of the north Essex cloth towns, c 1770–1851’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Leicester, 1999), pp. 240–3. 2 P. Clark, ‘Conclusion’, in P. Clark (ed.), Cambridge Urban History of Britain, Vol. II, 1560–1840 (Cambridge, 2000), p. 836. 3 E.L. Jones, ‘Agriculture and economic growth in England, 1660–1750: agricultural change’, Journal of Economic History, 25 (1965), pp. 1–18; E.L. Jones, ‘De-industrialisation as economic adjustment: the case of south-west England’, Economic Discussion Papers, 13 (1987); E.J.T. Collins, ‘Servicing and processing industries’, in G.E. Mingay (ed.) The Agrarian History of England and Wales, 1750–1850, Vol. VI (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 384–97. 170

WOMEN’S EMPLOYMENT IN SOUTHERN ENGLAND

capital’s high prices and labour costs spread into the surrounding counties and encouraged industry to migrate to cheaper areas.4 Yet, to earlier generations of historians the depiction of late eighteenthand early nineteenth century southern England as a region devoid of industry would have seemed rather incredulous. Warner’s study, published in 1921, describes how the silk industry had become firmly established across much of southern England by the early 1800s.5 Meanwhile, Edwards has shown that, far from being in rapid decline after 1818, Norwich’s ancient textile industry remained a large employer and one able to enjoy periods of prosperity into the 1860s.6 Similarly, Coleman’s work on the Courtaulds offers a detailed insight into a highly successful southern manufacturing enterprise whose origins date back to the early nineteenth century.7 However, while important in helping to restore a more balanced impression of southern England’s economy during the industrial age, such studies reveal little about the full extent of urban manufacturing in the region.8 In addition, no explanation readily emerges from these works of how southern manufactories were able to defy the principles of comparative advantage and transaction–cost theory, as outlined by Jones and Clark respectively.9 Moreover, there remains the question of why the discoveries of Warner, Edwards and Coleman have been neglected in recent years.

4 P. Clark, ‘Small towns in England, 1550–1850: national and regional population trends’, in P. Clark (ed.) Small Towns in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 90–120. 5 F.W. Warner, The Silk Industry of the United Kingdom: Its Origins and Development (London, 1921), esp. chs 27 and 29, which examine the silk industry in Essex, Suffolk, Buckinghamshire, Hertfordshire, Berkshire, Oxfordshire, Gloucestershire, Surrey, Hampshire, Wiltshire, Dorset, Somerset and Devon. 6 J.K. Edwards, ‘The decline of the Norwich textiles industry’, Yorkshire Bulletin of Economic and Social Research, 15–16 (1964), pp. 31–41. 7 D.C. Coleman, Courtaulds: An Economic and Social History, Vol 1, The Nineteenth Century, Silk and Crape (Oxford, 1969), chs 4, 5 and 6. 8 Warner’s substantial volume, for instance, deals with the origins and development of one industry only and does not provide a comprehensive survey of urban production centres. Warner, The Silk Industry. 9 For a discussion of transaction–cost theory see S. King, ‘Towns, industries and regions: a European perspective on theoretical and practical relationships’, in J. Stobart and N. Raven (eds) Towns, Industries and Regions: Urban and Industrial Change, c. 1700–1840 (forthcoming, Manchester, 2004). Although, as will be seen, the work of Warner, Edwards and Coleman does offer valuable clues in formulating an explanation of how southern manufactories defied the principles of comparative advantage and transaction–cost theory. In this respect, both Coleman and Edwards discuss the ‘cheapness and abundance of labour’, while Warner and Coleman refer to links between these newer industries and ancient manfactories, as well as connections between provincial southern manufactures and London. Edwards, ‘The decline’, p. 36; Coleman, Courtaulds, pp. 60–5, Warner, The Silk Industry, pp. 333–4 and p. 318.

171

WOMEN, WORK AND WAGES IN ENGLAND, 1600–1850

Urban industry in southern England Trade directories, whose objective was in part to afford a register of manufacturing in each city and town, have been used to determine the extent of industrial activity in the small towns of seven southern counties, comprising Essex, Berkshire, Oxfordshire, Berkshire, Hampshire, Dorset and Devon. The presence of industry was identified either from directory settlement descriptions, or the lists of traders where reference was made to a manufacturing establishment. Parliamentary papers, including reports on the handloom weavers, the silk trade and the employment of children, supplemented this information.10 Figure 7.1 identifies the small towns in each of the counties examined that possessed industrial concerns throughout the period under investigation. These industries varied in the products they manufactured. Silk manufactories operated in the north Essex towns of Halstead, Braintree and Bocking, and Coggeshall, along with Chesham in Buckinghamshire, Andover and Whitchurch in Hampshire, Ottery St Mary in Devon and Sherborne in Dorset.11 Meanwhile, lace was manufactured in a number of Buckinghamshire towns, included Amersham and Newport Pagnell, along with Honiton and Tiverton in Devon, and Coggeshall in Essex. Sack manufacturing featured in Abingdon, Berkshire, and in Newbury, while blankets were produced in Witney and sailcloth in the Hampshire town of Fordingbridge and at Beaminster in Dorset. Moreover, these were significant undertakings. At Abingdon in the early 1820s sack-making and biscuit-bagging comprised the ‘most considerable manufacture of late years’, while at Chipping Norton, a ‘considerable manufacture of horse cloth’ employed ‘many persons’.12 In Witney ten blanket manufacturers were identified among the town’s traders; in total these were said to employ ‘more than 2,000 hands’.13 In Hampshire, bed-ticking and sailcloth were judged the ‘staple manufactories’ of Fordingbridge, with nine manufacturing establishments listed in these two activities.14 Moving further west, lace was considered the ‘principal manufacture’ of Honiton, where five lace manufacturers were recorded, while one of Sherborne’s silk manufacturers in the 1820s was said to employ 600 people.15 10

For a discussion of these sources see J. Norton, Guide to National and Provincial Directories of England and Wales, excluding London, Published before 1856 (London, 1950), and Raven, ‘Manufacturing and trades’, pp. 205–69. 11 These centres were also identified by Warner, with the exception of Chesham, Andover and Ottery St Mary. Warner, The Silk Industry, pp. 297–342. 12 Pigot & Co, London and Provincial New Commercial Directory, 1823–24, pp. 123–5, Pigot & Co, National and Commercial Directory, 1844, pp. 14–16. 13 Pigot, Directory, 1844, pp. 36–8. 14 Pigot, Directory, 1844, pp. 19–20. 15 Pigot, Directory, 1844, pp. 67–70; Report from the Select Committee on the Present State of the Silk Trade, Parliamentary Papers (PP), 1831–32, XIX, p. 278. 172

Dorset

Wiltshire

Gloucestershire

Bucks

Northants

Hampshire

Berkshire

Oxford

Warks

Sussex

Surrey

London

Herts

Beds

Essex

Cambridge

Hunts

Figure 7.1 Small towns possessing manufacturing concerns located in seven southern counties, c. 1790–1840

Cornwall

Devon

Somerset

Hereford

Worcs

Kent

Suffolk

WOMEN, WORK AND WAGES IN ENGLAND, 1600–1850

There is also evidence that much of this production took place in factories. At least one of Witney’s blanket manufacturers was operating from a mill by the 1840s.16 Likewise, the Report on Children’s Employment in Factories identified Thomas Shute, silk throwster, to have operated from a steampowered factory in Chesham by the early 1830s. 17 Meanwhile, among the silk factories located in the north Essex towns was one owned by John Hall at Coggeshall. According to the title deeds and a plan of 1838, this was a steam-powered establishment of 180 by 45 feet, with two stories and some of the earliest cast-iron window frames and sashes. This factory complex also comprised a packing warehouse, along with picking and washing rooms.18 However, perhaps the largest establishment was that of J. Heathcoat and Co at Tiverton. The directory describes this as a ‘very large manufactory’. The Report on Children’s Employment in Factories, 1833, considered it to be ‘[o]ne of the largest factories in the West of England’, employing over 800.19 This said, less centralised forms of production also existed. Lace manufacturing in the Buckinghamshire towns of Stoney Stratford and Newport Pagnell was organised on a domestic basis. Here production was centred on lace schools run by ‘mistresses’.20 Likewise, there were instances of the two forms of industrial organisation coexisting in the same settlement. Evidence given by Thomas Willmott to the Select Committee on the Present State of the Silk Trade, 1831–32, shows that, while silk throwing was performed in his mills, the winding was ‘done in their [the workers’] own houses’.21 Although Jones and Clark concede that some industry continued in southern England into the early nineteenth century, it is portrayed as primitive and limited in character and duration. The evidence from the directories and parliamentary papers offers a different impression. A number of these manufactories witnessed expansion from the 1790s. In Abingdon in the 1790s six sackcloth-makers were listed; by 1823–24 twenty sacking manufacturers were recorded, a number that had increased to thirty-two by

16

Pigot, Directory, 1844, pp. 36–8. Supplementary Report on the Employment of Children in Factories, Western Division, PP 1834, XX, pp. 133–6. 18 Covering letter by John Hall, referring to his title deeds to freehold property consisting of a silk mill situated at Coggeshall. Essex Record Office (hereafter ERO), D/DC 27/685. Estimated valuation of John Hall’s Orchard Mill, Coggeshall, with ground plan of the building and adjacent property. ERO, D/DC 27/285. For a more detailed discussion of the scale of silk manufacturing in the north Essex towns of Halstead and Braintree and Bocking, as well as Coggeshall, see N. Raven, ‘Trade directories and business size: evidence from the small towns of north Essex, 1851’, The Local Historian, 31 (2001), pp. 83–95. 19 Pigot, Directory, 1844, pp. 145–8, First Report into the Employment of Children in Factories, Western Division, PP 1833, XX, pp. 69–70. 20 Second Report into the Employment of Children in Trades and Manufactures, PP 1843, XIV, p. 12, pp. 50–5. 21 Silk Trade, PP 1831–32, XIX, p. 280. 17

174

WOMEN’S EMPLOYMENT IN SOUTHERN ENGLAND

1844 with some also being described as carpet manufacturers.22 Likewise, certain firms witnessed considerable growth. While Courtauld’s production of silk in Braintree and Bocking began in a humble way, with a converted water mill in 1819, this was followed by the construction of further mills in 1825, 1826, 1830 and 1832, with steam power being applied from 1826.23 There is also evidence of innovation. In 1833, John Heathcoat of Tiverton was described as the successful patentee of bobbin net, a process that was adopted subsequently by many of the region’s other lace manufacturers.24 Jones’ claim that remnants of manufactories remained in the south because they were ignorant of developments in the industrial heartland of the north can also be challenged. John Hall, silk manufacturer of Coggeshall, began his industrial career in Coventry. Likewise, asked whether he had ‘ever seen any of the new throwing mills?’ Thomas Willmott of Sherborne replied, ‘Yes, I have, at Congleton.’ However, he did not consider any to have been ‘erected on a construction superior’ to his own, adding that his mills were modified whenever any improvements had taken place.25

The industrial labour force Contrary to the claims of Jones and Clark, the labour market in these southern towns appears to have been influential in the operation and success of these manufactories. Most noticeably, females were employed extensively. Those occupied in lace-making at Stoney Stratford, for instance, were described as the town’s ‘humbler, industrious class of female’.26 Likewise, girls and women comprised the majority of the workforce at Shute’s silk mill in Chesham and Willmott’s in Sherborne, while of the 390 silk workers whom John Hall employed by 1851, only fifty-eight were men.27 22

Universal British Directory (hereafter UBD), Vol. II (1797), pp. 10–12; Pigot, Directory, 1823–4, pp. 123–5; Pigot, Directory, 1844, pp. 2–7. 23 Handloom Weavers: Assistant Commissioners’ Reports, PP 1840, XXIII, p. 288. Coleman identifies the period from 1830 to 1848 as one of rapid growth for Courtaulds. Coleman, Courtaulds, ch. 5. 24 First Report, Children in Factories, PP 1833, XX, p. 69. 25 Silk Trade, PP 1831–32, XIX, pp. 279–84. Certainly, the levels of manufacturing activity recorded in these southern towns contrasts with the situation found in the small towns of the North Riding of Yorkshire. Here, the directories present evidence of industrial decline. N. Raven, ‘De-industrialisation and the urban response: the small towns of the North Riding of Yorkshire, c. 1790–1850’, in R. Weedon and A. Milne Aspects of English Small Towns in the 18th and 19th centuries (Centre for Urban History, University of Leicester, 1993), pp. 46–69. 26 Pigot, Directory, 1844, pp. 28–9. 27 Supplementary Report, Children in Factories, PP 1834, XX, pp. 133–6; Silk Trade, PP 1831–32, XIX, pp. 279–84; Census enumerators’ schedules for Coggeshall, Essex, 1851, ERO, HO 107/1783. Likewise, Coleman discusses how Courtaulds were large employers of girls and young women. Coleman, Courtaulds, pp. 40–4. 175

WOMEN, WORK AND WAGES IN ENGLAND, 1600–1850

One reason for the employment of females, particularly girls, in the manufactories of southern England was outlined by Thomas Shute. In his evidence to the Report on Employment of Children in Factories, 1834, Shute argued that, since the work performed in his Chesham mill was ‘light and not strenuous’, it was suitable for children, adding that ‘young hands were better at performing the delicate tasks’ involved in silk throwing.28 A second reason has been suggested by Berg. Applying this female workforce to new industrial techniques enabled manufacturers to ‘bypass traditional artisan customs and arrangements’ which were likely to have been resistant to their introduction.29 Indeed, this seems to have been a motivating factor behind Hall’s decision to establish his silk manufactory at Coggeshall. Asked by the select committee on the silk trade, 1831–32, what advantages in manufacturing he possessed over Coventry, Hall replied: ‘I should prefer working these looms in Coventry to any other place if they could be introduced with safety; but I have a letter from a friend there, stating that he dare not attach his name to that advertisement least they should injure his person or destroy his property.’30 Similarly, Heathcoat appears to have moved production to Tiverton in order to avoid the riots and frame smashing he had experienced in the Midlands.31 Yet arguably the most important reason for the use of female labour in these southern manufactories was its cheapness. In this regard, the wages paid by Shute to the females employed in his mills ranged from three or four shillings per week, to six or seven shillings for the ‘young women’ who had ‘commenced [work] in infancy’. Women earned up to five or six shillings a week at Heathcoat’s lace factory in Tiverton, although the little ‘winders back’ were said to be in receipt of a mere 1s 9d to two shillings.32 Likewise, wages at John Hall’s mill ranged from 1s 6d for girls of nine, to five shillings for older females.33 The comparative lowliness of wages paid in the Essex silk industry was commented upon by James Mitchell in surveying female factory employment in 1833. Indeed, Mitchell judged these wages to be so low that, ‘but for much unquestionable evidence, we could scarcely believed it possible’.34 Moreover, these wages appear to have been low in real terms. The Assistant Commissioners’ Report into the Handloom Weavers, 1840, observed that, while silk wages in Essex were much lower than in London, bread was cheaper in the

28

Supplementary Report, Children in Factories, PP 1834, XX, pp. 133–6. M. Berg, ‘What difference did women’s work make to the Industrial Revolution’, in P. Sharpe (ed.) Women’s Work: The English Experience, 1650–1914 (London, 1998), pp. 149–72. 30 Silk Trade, PP 1831–32, XIX, p. 380. 31 First Report, Children in Factories, PP 1833, XX, p. 69. 32 Children in Trades, PP 1843, XIV, appendix section d, p. 10. 33 Silk Trade, PP 1831–32, XIX, pp. 372–7. 34 Supplementary Report, Children in Factories, PP 1834, XX, p. 229. 29

176

WOMEN’S EMPLOYMENT IN SOUTHERN ENGLAND

capital, while ‘meat could generally be had on [more] advantageous terms in London’.35 The smaller wage bill appears to have constituted the principal cost advantage southern manufacturers possessed over their northern rivals. John Hall observed that he paid rates at two-thirds of those awarded in Coventry.36 Similarly, commenting on the wages paid to females working for Courtaulds in the mid-nineteenth century, Lown noted that they ‘compared unfavourably with those of their counterparts in other branches of the textile industry in the north of England’.37 Although labour was only one factor in production costs, Hall informed the select committee on the silk trade that a labour bill onethird less than that in Coventry could make a crucial ‘five per cent difference upon the goods when manufactured’.38 Indeed, Rendall claims that the presence of cheap female labour was the main reason industrial entrepreneurs established production in Essex.39 The supply of cheap female labour also proved influential in the distinct form these manufactories came to adopt. Many were not indigenous to these southern towns but instead derived predominantly from London. Before settling in Coggeshall, John Hall had been in partnership with a Mr Sawer, whose warehouse was located in the capital.40 Similarly, the handloom weavers’ report of 1840 noted that Hawkes and Fielder, ribbon weavers in Newbury, was originally a London-based firm.41 Moreover, many of these manufacturers maintained their metropolitan associations. The recording of second, London addresses is evidence of this. One of Tiverton’s lace manufacturers, for instance, was returned with a second, Cheapside address, both in 1823 and 1844.42 Moreover, London was a major market for the goods manufactured in these towns. Pigot’s 1844 directory observed that large quantities of Honiton’s lace were sent to the capital.43 Similarly, Gerhold shows that among the products transported to London by Thomas Russell & Co, an early nineteenth century carrying firm, were sailcloth manufactured in Beaminster, carpets from Axminster, buttons produced in Blandford and silk thrown in Sherborne.44

35

Handloom Weavers, PP 1840, XXIII, pp. 285–8. ’Are you at all acquainted with the manner in which the same kind of work is got up at Coventry? I pay two-thirds of the Coventry prices.’ Silk Trade, PP 1831–32, XIX, p. 377. 37 J. Lown, Women and Industrialisation: Gender at Work in Nineteenth Century England (Oxford, 1990), pp. 47–8. 38 Silk Trade, PP 1831–32, XIX, p. 377. 39 J. Rendall, Women in an Industrialising Society: England, 1750–1880 (Oxford, 199), p. 24. 40 Silk Trade, PP 1831–32 XIX, pp. 378–9. 41 Handloom Weavers, PP 1840, XXIII, p. 299. 42 Pigot, Directory, 1823–4, pp. 254–7; Pigot, Directory, 1844, pp. 145–8. 43 Pigot, Directory, 1844, pp. 67–70. 44 See D. Gerhold, Road Transport before the Railways: Russell’s London Flying Waggons (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 90–126. 36

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One of the chief reasons for retaining these metropolitan links was that London played a role in the actual production process. In a number of instances this meant that the raw materials were sent out to these small-town manufactories and the semi-finished goods returned to London.45 In this respect, the Report on Wages of Persons Employed in the Manufacture of Silk, 1823, mentioned a Mr Smith, ‘who resided in White Lion Street, Spitalfields, and carried on a Manufactory at Coggeshall’.46 Similarly, in describing the role of various towns in Essex, Suffolk, Berkshire and Hampshire, including Braintree and Bocking, Newbury, Andover and Whitchurch, the Assistant Commissioners’ Report into the Handloom Weavers, 1840, suggested that they functioned as ‘merely out-posts or dependencies of London as far as their silk manufactures are concerned’.47 Supplies of cheap female labour, therefore, appear to have encouraged metropolitan-associated manufacturers to integrate these southern towns into a system of production that began in the metropolis, proceeded along the country roads to places such as Coggeshall and Sherborne and then returned to the city.48 As a result of such metropolitan associations, the industrial structure found in these southern towns was quite distinct from that displayed by their northern counterparts, with a noticeable absence of ancillary trades among the former. A comparison between the north Essex silk towns and their southwest Pennine counterparts of Macclesfield, Leek and Congleton illustrates this. Although Pigot’s 1839 directory identified 180 different trades operating in the three Essex towns, only six, or 3.3 per cent, were in silk-related activities. Of these, only one, that of dyer, could be considered a business ancillary to silk manufacturing. By contrast, of the 219 different businesses listed in the three south-west Pennine silk towns, thirty-four, or 15.5 per cent, were involved in silk production. While a number of different silk manufacturers were included, they were accompanied by an array of ancillary businesses comprising bleachers, bobbin turners, fringe-makers and silk printers, silk agents, silk brokers, silk-men, small ware dealers and silk waste dealers, as well as silk dyers. What is more, most of these ancillary trades were located in Macclesfield, which acted as the urban centre for the south-west Pennine silk industry, as Figure 7.2 illustrates. Indeed, the only allied trades

45

Thomas Willmott, for instance, acquired silk from the London house of Vere & Co. Silk Trade, PP 1831–32, XIX, p. 282. 46 Report on Wages of Persons Employed in the Manufacture of Silk, PP 1823 (HL. 86), CLVI, p. 167. 47 Handloom Weavers, PP 1840, XXIII, p. 285. 48 Gerhold describes such an arrangement for the glove-making industry of Stoke and Yeovil in Somerset. The skins were sent from London and once made into gloves were returned to the capital. Gerhold, Road Transport, pp. 99–100. Similarly, Warner notes that William Willmott of Sherborne [father of Thomas] was ‘totally engaged in throwing silk for two London firms’, adding that ‘[t]he silk was all carried down from London by wagon’. Warner, The Silk Industry, pp. 333–4. 178

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20

Percentage

15 10 5 0 Coggeshall

Braintree

Halstead

Leek

Congleton Macclesfield

Figure 7.2 The range of silk-related trades in north Essex and south-west Pennine towns Sources: for north Essex, Pigot, Directory 1839, pp. 86–90 [Braintree]; 101–2 [Coggeshall]; 115–19 [Halstead]; for the south-west Pennines, Pigot, Directory 1841, pp. 40–3 [Congleton]; 71–80 [Macclesfield]; Pigot, Directory 1835, pp. 412–14 [Leek].

listed in the two other Pennine silk towns were those of dyer at Leek and dealer in small ware at Congleton. In contrast, no such urban centre existed among the north Essex silk towns. In Halstead, which returned the highest percentage of different silk businesses, only one ancillary silk trade was recorded – a dyer. Instead, London acted as the urban focus for the north Essex silk industry. In this respect, Barnett shows the capital to have housed a range of allied silk trades, including dyers, bleachers, calenders, hot pressers, dressers and silk printers. Similarly, with regard to other southern manufactories, London also possessed a range of businesses connected with the manufacture of sailcloth, carpets and rugs, hair cloth and lace.49 Given these observations, how should the relationship between London and the industrial towns of southern England be described? The theory of comparative advantage, used previously by Jones to explain the demise of southern industry, offers the best fit. The towns of southern England possessed a comparative advantage over London in the cost of their labour. Moreover, this advantage was sufficient to overcome costs of transport to and from the capital, as made clear by Thomas Willmott of Sherborne. Although Willmott’s raw silk was sent from a London house, which also received the thrown article, he stated: ‘I never found that our distance was considered a disadvantage on the part of our friends who sent us the silk.’50

49

D. Barnett, London, Hub of the Industrial Revolution: A Revisionary History, 1775–1825 (London, 1998), pp. 54–62. 50 Silk Trade, PP 1831–32, XIX, p. 282. The same also applied in the West Country, as Gerhold’s examination carrying trade makes clear. Gerhold, Road Transport, pp. 90–126. 179

WOMEN, WORK AND WAGES IN ENGLAND, 1600–1850

Origins of the industrial labour force Snell has offered an explanation for the generation of the labour market conditions found in these southern towns. This suggests that a decline in female agricultural employment occurred in southern England during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In the south-east its origins may be traced back to the period before 1793, and ‘almost certainly between 1750 and 1790’. The reasons for this development were explained in terms of ‘a continuing transition to greater concentration on grain production’, in which female employment was of less importance.51 Using farm estate accounts Sharpe has challenged this interpretation, suggesting that the availability of female farm work in the south-east altered little during the course of the eighteenth century. However, in one respect at least, Sharpe does acknowledge that female farm employment, certainly in Essex, was in decline. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries hops were grown throughout the county. The cultivation of this crop constituted an important source of female employment between March and September. By the late eighteenth century a substantial decline in hop growing had occurred, as more land was devoted to grains. 52 Moreover, both Snell and Sharpe agree that by the early nineteenth century opportunities for women and girls to work in the fields of southern England were very limited. Indeed, employment prospects for individuals would have been further reduced as a consequence of rapid population growth. Between 1801 and 1841, the population of Essex increased by more than 50 per cent, from 228,000 to 345,000; with similar rates of increase recorded in the other six surveyed counties.53 While undoubtedly significant, both limited female employment opportunities on the land and population growth fail to account for the specific geography of southern urban industrial development.54 However, the Report from Commissioners for Inquiring into the Administration and Practical Operation

51

K.D.M. Snell, ‘Agricultural seasonal unemployment, the standard of living, and women’s work in the south and east, 1690–1860’, Economic History Review, 34 (1981), pp. 407–37. 52 P. Sharpe, ‘The female labour market in English agriculture during the Industrial Revolution: expansion or contraction?’, Agricultural History Review, 47 (1999), pp. 161–81; P. Sharpe, Adapting to Capitalism; Working Women in the English Economy, 1700–1850 (London, 1996), pp. 71–100. 53 Berkshire’s population increased by 46 per cent between 1801 and 1841, Oxfordshire’s by 45.5 per cent, Hampshire’s by 62 per cent, Dorset’s by 53.5 per cent and Devon’s by 56.7 per cent. B.R. Mitchell and P. Deane, Abstract of British Historical Statistics (Cambridge, 1962), p. 20. 54 Although it can be noted that north Essex, and particularly the parish of Halstead, was recognised by eighteenth-century observers as an important hop-producing area. Raven, ‘Manufacturing and trades’, pp. 230–1. 180

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of the Poor Laws, 1834, does afford an answer. The ‘very dense population’ found around the towns of Coggeshall, and Braintree and Bocking was explained by ‘a considerable woollen manufacture’ which had ‘ceased’ but whose workforce remained.55 Analysis of two occupational censuses for the parish of Bocking, the first dated 1793, the second 1807, confirms the locality’s recent industrial past and the retention of its manufacturing population. In the early 1790s, over 40 per cent of Bocking’s population was occupied in woollen textiles; by 1807 this figure had fallen to less than 20 per cent. However, of those with occupations in 1793, woollen cloth workers were the least likely to have abandoned the settlement by 1807, although many had lost their old occupational label by this time.56 The poor law report of 1834 also indicates that much of this manufacturing population would have been female, in observing that the aged poor recalled a time when wives and children were engaged in spinning.57 In accounting for the high rates of female labour force participation consideration also needs to be given to male wages. Low male wages were likely to have increased the desirability for wives and children to work in order to boost the family income. Accordingly, the poor law report of 1834 described the northern division of the Hinckford Hundred, in which Coggeshall and Braintree and Bocking were located, as ‘a district of low wages’, and one in which labourers were ‘frequently out of employ’.58 While population growth and changes in agricultural practice afford an explanation for a generally overstocked agricultural labour market, the impact of the old woollen industry accounts for the particularly severe situation found in the Hinckford Hundred. Here, ‘the whole employment and maintenance of the poor’, including former wool workers, had become heavily ‘dependent on the soil’. This appears to have been a predicament made worse following the cessation of hostilities in 1815 when ‘[a] more than unusual number of discharged soldiers’ were returned on to the parishes ‘probably owing to their

55 Report from Commissioners for Inquiring into the Administration and Practical Operation of the Poor Laws. Appendix (A.), Part 1: Assistant Commissioner’s Reports, PP 1834, XXVIII, pp. 229–30. 56 N. Raven, ‘Local experiences of de-industrialisation: the decline of manufacturing in a north Essex township, c. 1790–1810’, Paper presented at the Local Population Studies Society ‘Changing Communities’ conference, September 1998. Similarly, the supply of cheap labour was also used by Edwards to account for the durability of the Norwich textile industry, ‘The decline of the Norwich textiles industry’, pp. 31–41. 57 Poor Law, PP 1834, XXVIII, p. 229. 58 Here 8s per week was judged ‘the rate of day-work in many parishes’ (Poor Law, PP 1834, XXVIII, p. 230). See also L. Richardson, ‘Agricultural labourers’ wages and the cost of living in Essex, 1790–1840: a contribution to the standard of living debate’, in B.A. Holderness and M. Turner (eds) Land, Labour and Agriculture, 1700–1920 (London, 1991), pp. 69–90.

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having been induced to enlist by the failure of the woollen manufacture at a time when men were wanted for the service’.59 The other towns in this study also appear to have possessed recent industrial pasts. Elsewhere in north Essex, three say-makers, a wool-stapler, a bay-maker and a manufacturer of bays and says appeared in Halstead’s Universal British Directory entry for the 1790s. All evidence of the industry had disappeared by 1823. Furthermore, Vancouver identified Halstead as a low wage area.60 In Berkshire, Pigot recorded that Newbury had been a place where ‘formerly great quantities of broad cloth [were] made’.61 Similarly, in its coverage of Barford, the Universal British Directory mentioned three woollen cloth produces; by 1823 all had disappeared. Likewise, for Andover in Hampshire, a shalloon-maker and three clothiers were recorded in the 1790s. Again, no mention is made of any wool-related trades in Pigot’s directory thirty years later.62 A similar transition appears to have occurred in the south-west, although evidence suggests that, in some instances at least, this process was still in train during the 1810s. Honiton possessed four sergemakers in the 1790s along with two lace manufacturers. Three serge manufacturers were still in business in 1823, although none remained by 1844. Similarly, among Beaminster’s traders of 1823 was a bay manufacturer. By 1844 no business from the town’s woollen manufacturing past remained.63 Moreover, a strong correlation exists between the districts in which many of these towns were located and the low wage areas identified by Hunt in his exploration of regional wage variations.64 The operation of the poor law may have been a further factor contributing to labour market conditions in these towns being favourable to the establishment and development of industry. First, the poor law may have helped to retain the former manufacturing population. This appears a likely explanation for the comparatively low rates of out-migration among Bocking’s 59

Poor Law, PP 1834, XXVIII, p. 229. See pp. 187–8 for a discussion on the potential contribution the employment of wives and children could make to the earnings of households headed by male agricultural labourers. 60 UBD, Vol. III (1794), pp. 231–2; Pigot, Directory, 1823–4, pp. 294–5; C. Vancouver, General View of the Agriculture in the County of Essex, with Observations on the Means of its Improvement (London, 1795), pp. 27–115; Richardson, ‘Agricultural labourers’ wages’, pp. 69–90. 61 Pigot, Directory, 1823–24, pp. 129–32. 62 UBD, Vol. II (1797), pp. 47–8; Pigot, Directory, 1823–24, pp. 307–8. 63 UBD, Vol. III, pp. 388–93; Pigot, Directory, 1823–24, pp. 226–8; Pigot, Directory, 1844, pp. 67–70. Indeed, since the transition from old textiles to new industries often occurred within a working lifetime, some manufacturers employed former woollen textile workers. In the Second Report into the Employment of Children in Trades and Manufactures, 1843, Mary Watt from Tiverton, aged 45, recalled that she had ‘worked in the old woollen factory before the lace mill was established by Mr. Heathcoat’. Children in Trades, PP 1843, XIV, appendix, section d, p. 10. 64 E.H. Hunt, Regional Wage Variations in Britain, 1850–1914 (Oxford, 1973). 182

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wool workers between 1793 and 1807, particularly when many reappeared in the later census without an occupational designation. Over a similar period there was a steep rise in Bocking’s poor rate. By 1804, 48 per cent of the settlement’s population were in receipt of permanent or occasional poor relief.65 Asked by a parliamentary commission to account for the high increase in rates, Josias Nottidge junior, himself a former woollen manufacture, remarked succinctly, ‘[f]rom the loss of the Woollen Trade in our Part.’66 One explanation of such dependency upon the poor law has been advanced by Boyer. He suggests that with the demise of cottage industry in the south and east from the 1760s, the poor law was employed by farmers as part of an ‘implicit contract’ to ensure an adequate supply of peak-season labour.67 It is also feasible that parish authorities used money derived from the poor rates to encourage the establishment of industry. Although he had not heard of ‘any parish in Essex lending money to London manufacturers to assist them in building a mill in which their pauper poor might be employed’, the Coggeshall silk manufacturer John Hall knew of such a case in Suffolk. ‘I have heard they [the authorities at Glemsford] gave him [Messrs Duff & Co], the ground, and carted the material to build his [silk] mill, in order to find employment for the poor of the parish.’68 Such assistance may also have been influential in the establishment of the silk manufactories in Sherborne, where a witness to the committee on the silk trade, 1831–32, recalled how ‘there came hither a silk-thowster from London, and made proposals for employing the poor, which were encouraged’.69 Certainly, there is evidence that once these new manufactories had settled in the towns the poor law was used to subsidise the cost of labour. In visiting silk factories in Essex, Suffolk and Hertfordshire, Daniel Fraser observed the common practice of ‘the silk people [being] paid out of the poor rates’.70 Although, as the poor law commissioners for Braintree and Bocking discovered, there was a certain reluctance to divulge such information: ‘[t]he difficulty of ascertaining the earnings of the manufacturers is great; at some factories wages are communicated, at others the information is kept back, lest allowances should be affected.’71

65

Excluding the children of those in receipt of occasional relief, for which no figures were offered. Abstract of the Answers and Returns Made Pursuant to Act 43 Geo.3, Relative to the Poor in England, PP 1803–4 (175), XIII. 66 Minutes of Evidence Relating to the Woollen Manufactory, Lords Papers, 1799–1800: 11.65, 38. 67 G.R. Boyer, An Economic History of the English Poor Law, 1750–1850 (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 31–49. 68 Report to Regulate the Labour of Children in Mills and Factories, PP 1831–32, XV.1, p. 535. 69 Gerhold, Road Transport, pp. 101–2. 70 Children in Mills, PP 1831–32, XV. 1, p. 535. 71 Poor Law, PP 1834, XXVIII, pp. 229–30. 183

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The poor law also appears to have been used to facilitate reductions in wages. John Hall informed the select committee on the silk trade that he had reduced the wages of the children he employed by ‘[a]bout twenty per cent the last two years’, with the consequence that the parents of these children were in many instances in receipt of parochial relief.72 Similarly, a 30 per cent wage reduction was reported in 1831–32 to have been instigated by Thomas Willmott since 1829, resulting in increased ‘distress among the poor people’.73 Finally, there is evidence to suggest that some overseers as small-scale manufacturers tried to use the poor relief system to their commercial advantage. John Hall, one of four overseers for Coggeshall, informed the select committee on the silk trade of his employment of some parish orphans, who ‘reside in the poor-house, and are sent to me by the overseers’.74 Whatever the detail of the arrangements made by parish authorities, the small towns of southern England afford examples supporting Berg’s assertion that the poor law was used to encourage the employment of women and girls in the new industries of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.75

The neglect of southern England’s industrial history Besides a tendency to exclude women’s labour from accounts of the industrialisation process,76 there may be a further reason why urban industry in southern England during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries has been overlooked. For urban historians, much of the interest in considering industrial development in places such as Bradford and Macclesfield derives from its association with unprecedented demographic growth.77 Certainly, there is evidence that the arrival of new manufactories initiated some growth in the towns of southern England. The enumerators for 1831 referred to the ‘increased manufacture of silk and crape’ in accounting for Braintree and Bocking’s growth during the previous decade.78 However, like the other towns considered in this study, Braintree and Bocking’s growth was comparatively

72

Silk Trade, PP 1831–32, XIX, pp. 372–84. Ibid. 74 Ibid., p. 376. Similarly, in Hanwell during the 1790s a glove factory owner who was also a vestry officer employed poor parish women and children. P. Carter, ‘Poor relief strategies – women, children and enclosure in Hanwell, Middlesex, 1780 to 1816’, The Local Historian (1995), pp. 164–77. 75 Berg, ‘What difference’, pp. 149–72. 76 Ibid. 77 It may be argued that this agenda for urban historians was, in part, set by the pioneering work of A.F. Weber. This encouraged researchers to investigate the rapidly growing towns and cities of the nineteenth century. A.F. Weber, The Growth of Cities in the Nineteenth Century (1899, New York, 1963 edn), pp. 1–2. 78 Census 1851, Population Tables, Vol. I. 73

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modest. Indeed, over the first fifty years of the nineteenth century the town’s mean annual growth rate was less than a quarter of that experienced by Bradford. In 1801 the West Riding town was only sixteen per cent more populous than Braintree and Bocking; by 1851 it was over 540 per cent larger.79 In seeking an explanation for the modest growth rates experienced by southern manufacturing towns, it may be suggested that a low-wage policy would have curtailed urban demographic growth due to the limited quantities of labour available to it. Once local reserves of this labour had been used up manufacturers would have been faced with a decision. They could expand production by raising wages by an amount sufficient to attract non-local labour. In doing so, however, they would have undermined one of the cost advantages they possessed over manufacturers further north. The alternative was to establish additional production outlets in other centres where supplies of low-wage labour were to be found. There is clear evidence of this policy being practised in the north Essex towns. By 1838 Courtaulds possessed mills in both Braintree and Bocking parishes, as well as in Halstead. Similarly, although principally based in Coggeshall, John Hall had constructed additional mills in four other north and mid-Essex towns by the middle of the century.80 Explicit evidence that this policy was driven by local reserves of labour is gained from evidence given by John Hall to the committee on the silk trade. Hall explained that, while he would like to erect another mill at Coggeshall, he was unable to do so because the supply of hands ‘was not sufficient for my demand’.81 A similar comment was made by Thomas Shute, who ran a silk mill at Chesham, along with mills at Richmansworth and Watford in Hertfordshire. The former was erected in 1831, the latter, which constituted the main mill, dated from 1760, with an additional storey added in 1814. The reason why, after this extension to his main mill, Shute established mills at the two other sites was made explicit in an answer to the committee on the silk trade: ‘As this town [Watford] will not supply hands sufficient, I have two other small factories at Rickmansworth and Chesham.’82 Differences in levels of industrial concentration between southern towns and their northern counterparts may be seen by comparing the south-west Pennine silk towns with those of north Essex. Figure 7.3 illustrates the proportion of each town’s businesses involved in silk production, as recorded in Pigot & Co’s directories for 1835, 1839 or 1841. Halstead, which possessed the highest percentage among the north Essex towns, listed only five silk businesses. By contrast, twenty were recorded in Leek, twenty-eight in Congleton and 130 in Macclesfield. 79

Raven, ‘Manufacturing and trades’, p. 38. Ibid., pp. 218–19; J. Booker, Essex and the Industrial Revolution (Chelmsford, 1974), p. 58. 81 Silk Trade, PP 1831–32, XIX, p. 376. 82 Supplementary Report, Children in Factories, PP 1834, XX, pp. 133–6. 80

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Percentage

15 10 5 0 Coggeshall

Braintree

Halstead

Leek

Congleton Macclesfield

Figure 7.3 Silk business concentration in north Essex and south-west Pennine towns (expressed as a percentage of all businesses) Sources: for north Essex, Pigot, Directory 1839, pp. 86–90 [Braintree]; 101–102 [Coggeshall]; 115–9 [Halstead]; for the south-west Pennines, Pigot, Directory 1841, pp. 40–3 [Congleton]; 71–80 [Macclesfield]; Pigot, Directory 1835, 412–14 [Leek].

There may have been two further ways in which a low-wage policy would have impinged upon southern urban growth. First, low-wage workers were unlikely to have contributed much to urban finances, in their capacity as ratepayers. Second, the high poor rates that helped subsidise some of their labour acted to restrain the development of businesses not employing that labour. Businesses tended to be the principal ratepayers in these towns – in consequence high poor rate payments diverted resources away from possible commercial investment which, in turn, reduced levels of growth and, ultimately, employment creation.

Industrial employment and women’s welfare What impact did industry in these southern towns have on women’s welfare? A consideration of working conditions appears to support a pessimistic assessment, with exposure to long hours and severe discipline. Investigating the situation in the silk mills of Essex, Suffolk and Hertfordshire, Daniel Fraser commented upon the ‘reduced and degraded’ state of the workforce. Representative of the hours worked were those at Braintree, where he noted that work commenced at ‘half-past 5 in the morning till half-past 6 in the evening with the intermission for meals of one hour’. In some mills, including one in Hertfordshire and John Hall’s in Coggeshall, work was also undertaken at night, although, according to William Beckwith, another Coggeshall silk manufacturer, no additional wages were paid.83

83

Children in Mills, PP 1831–32, XV.1, pp. 534–7. 186

WOMEN’S EMPLOYMENT IN SOUTHERN ENGLAND

Fraser also commented on the treatment of children in these establishments: ‘[t]he children all bear the marks of confinement and fatigue; they are tender-eyed and pale-faced.’ They also appear to have been fined or beaten for lateness or absence. At Duff’s mills in Glemsford, Fraser noted: ‘the children are beaten and harshly treated if they are behind the bell-time but a little.’84 Meanwhile, Beckwith’s report to the committee on the silk trade offers an insight into the impact of trade depression on his silk workers at Coggeshall. They are, he noted, employed ‘[v]ery badly indeed’. Many depended upon the parish rates, as well as ‘begging, thieving, poaching, &c.’, while ‘the poor girls’ were resorting to prostitution by the ‘dozen’.85 Indeed, Sokoll has claimed that ‘in the long-run the silk industry did not improve the situation of the labouring classes in and around Braintree’. By the late 1830s, the industry was having a ‘negative net employment effect’, as silkweavers found themselves increasingly underemployed and the factories ‘offered only little additional employment’.86 Similarly, Berg has discussed the relatively short period of success enjoyed by these new southern industries, including silk production in Essex and lace in Devon and Dorset. Emphasis is also placed upon the limited extent of production, even at its peak. These industries, it is argued, were far ‘smaller and poorer than their great [woollen cloth] predecessors’ of the early modern period.87 There is a need to balance such views against the potentially vital contribution that these new industries made to household earnings, even if only for a limited period. This can be illustrated by considering the household headed by William More, a farm labourer of Braintree and Bocking, whose details were recorded in the 1851 census enumerator’s returns. More’s wife, aged 43, and his daughter of 18, worked as silk throwers, while his son, aged 16, was a farm labourer. The household also included a female visitor, whom, it is assumed, would not have contributed to household earnings. According to the poor law report of 1834, agricultural labourers in Braintree earned an average of nine shillings per week, with boys in their early teens earning between two and three shillings.88 Guided by the average wages recorded for females in the silk factories of East Anglia, More’s wife could have earned up to six shillings a week and his daughter 3s 101⁄4d.89 The females in this household may therefore have added some 40 per cent to family earnings. The claim that employment in the silk mills was limited in extent needs to be judged against the findings from a broad household survey of the census

84

Children in Mills, PP 1831–32, XV.1, pp. 534–7; Silk Trade, PP 1831–32, XIX, pp. 844–5. Silk Trade, PP 1831–32, XIX, pp. 844–5. 86 T. Sokoll, Household and Family Among the Poor (Bochum, 1993), pp. 201–2. 87 M. Berg, The Age of Manufactories, 1700–1820: Industry, Innovation and Work in Britain (London, 1994), pp. 98–115. 88 Poor Laws, Appendix, Part 1, 1834 (44), Vol. XXVIII, pp. 167–190. 89 Supplementary Reports on the Employment of Children in Factories, PP 1834, XX , p. 287. 85

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enumerators’ returns. This suggests that More’s household was not untypical of a large number found in Braintree and Bocking. Indeed, over 26 per cent of households in the town contained at least one female silk worker.90 Furthermore, outside the silk mills the poor law report suggests that there was little employment available for women and girls in the Braintree area. Even harvest was considered to be ‘of little benefit on account of the parish being small, and our population large’.91 Under such circumstances, the industrial employment of wives and daughters may have made the difference for many families between ‘destitution and getting by’.92 Certainly, one does not have to delve into the realms of counterfactual history to consider a likely situation without the presence of these industries. In discussing the devastation brought to the north Essex towns by the decay of the woollen cloth industry, Lown quotes from a biography of William Pitt. Visiting Halstead at the end of the eighteenth century, the then Prime Minister found the town so depressed that he had not realised such a place could exist in England.93 The age of these new industries in the southern counties may have been relatively short-lived,94 but when consideration is given to the employment of women and children and the operation of the household economy, these industries may be seen to have played a vital role in helping communities adjust to the loss of their old woollen manufactures.

Conclusion This chapter has discovered manufactories in a number of towns across the southern counties of England during the period of the classical Industrial Revolution. Only seven counties were explored and the true extent of such

90

Census Enumerators’ Schedules, 1851, ERO, HO 107/1785. The figure was even higher for Halstead. Here more than 38 per cent of households returned at least one female relative who was a silk worker. ERO, HO 107/1784. Similarly, recollecting her experience of factory life in early Victorian Halstead, Mary Merryweather observed how agricultural labourers were drawn to the town in large numbers ‘on account of the employment given to the women and girls of their families’. M. Merryweather, Experience of Factory Life (London, 1862), pp. 6–7. 91 Poor Laws, PP 1834, XXVIII, pp. 167–90. In this respect, the presence of industrial employment may account for the high participation rates found among married women in low-waged agricultural counties including Berkshire, Buckinghamshire and Devon. S. Horrell and J. Humphries, ‘Women’s labour force participation and the transition to the male-breadwinner family, 1790–1865’, Economic History Review, XLVIII (1995), pp. 89–117. 92 This phrase is taken from Berg, ‘What difference’, p. 166. 93 Lown, Women and Industrialisation, pp. 21–5. 94 Certainly, by the second half of the nineteenth century many of these activities were on the wane. Sharpe, Adapting to Capitalism, pp. 69–70. 188

WOMEN’S EMPLOYMENT IN SOUTHERN ENGLAND

urban industry in the region was considerably greater.95 This is a field of historical research that requires further investigation. Two interconnected reasons have been offered for the current state of neglect of southern English industries. The first relates to the tendency to ignore female and child labour in accounts of industrialisation; the second bears upon the specific circumstances in which this labour force was employed in southern industries. Here female and child labour formed a low-waged workforce, found most noticeably in the region’s old woollen textile towns. The distribution of such workers led merchants and manufacturers to establish units of production over a number of settlements. Experiencing modest rates of population expansion, with each settlement acquiring only a few of the trappings of industrialisation, and with their workers relatively inconspicuous in the national picture, these towns have traditionally attracted little attention from economic and social historians. That said, there are indications that the industrial towns of southern England are beginning to receive the research they deserve. Trinder has argued recently for the need to break away from the ‘traditional taxonomy’ between ‘old’ industrially ‘undeveloped’ towns and ‘new’ dynamic industrial places. 96 Likewise, in a recent survey of Britain’s small towns, Clark acknowledges the revival of industrial activity in north Essex and Bedfordshire following the decline of the old woollen textile industry.97 Yet there is still some way to go. Trinder’s consideration of textile towns is dominated by examples from the north and Midlands, while Clark suggests that the extent of this new industrial activity was very modest. It is arguable that until the role of the small industrial towns of southern England is recognised, with their predominantly female workforces, it will not be possible to appreciate fully the regional character of industrialisation. While in terms of overseas trade,the impact of these southern manufactories was modest,98 their real importance is likely to be discovered in the numbers employed and the impact they had on the lives of thousands of families and hundreds of communities. Not only does the inclusion in this agenda of women’s work help to revive concepts of an industrial revolution, it also suggests the need to see late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century southern England as something more than simply an agrarian backdrop to industrial developments occurring elsewhere. 95

See N. Goose, Population, Economy and Family Structure in Hertfordshire in 1851. Vol. 2: St. Albans and its Region (Hertfordshire, 2000), pp. 50–75. 96 There are a few references to industrial activity in Exeter and the south-west, as well as Bethnal Green. B. Trinder, ‘Industrialising towns 1700–1840’, in P. Clark (ed.) The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, Vol. II, 1560–1840 (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 805–29. 97 P. Clark, ‘Small towns, 1700–1840’, in Clark (ed.) The Cambridge Urban History, pp. 748–63. 98 P. Sharpe, ‘De-industrialisation and re-industrialisation: women’s employment and the changing character of Colchester, 1700–1850’, Urban History, 21 (1994), p. 95. 189

8

A diminishing force? Reassessing the employment of female day labourers in English agriculture, c. 1790–1850 NICOLA VERDON

The years between the beginning of the Napoleonic Wars and the onset of mid-Victorian prosperity were ones of fluctuating fortunes for the agricultural labour force in England. Wartime contingency gave way after 1815 to increasing casualisation and immiseration for large sections of the rural workforce. A surfeit of labour following demobilisation encouraged farmers to dismiss their annually hired servants and look to the benefits of enlargement, enclosure and arable production. These shifts were regionally distinct, being felt most severely by labourers in the southern English counties. The consequences of such changes also had specific ramifications for rural female labourers, although the nature and extent of these is not fully understood by historians. Did wartime male conscription necessitate farmers to employ women in large numbers only to dismiss them after 1815? Did women find it increasingly difficult to procure remunerative farm work over the early decades of the nineteenth century? Were female work patterns and wages dictated solely by economic forces or did ideological and customary factors also impinge on women’s workforce participation? These issues will be explored here through an examination of a number of farm labour and wage accounts from southern England between 1790 and 1850. The focus of the chapter will be female labourers – women who were hired mostly by the day, and paid a daily rate for their work. The regional and seasonal nature of female day labour in agriculture will be investigated, alongside trends in women’s earnings.

Perspectives on women’s work in agriculture Any discussion of women’s employment in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century agricultural labour force owes a debt to Ivy Pinchbeck’s meticulous survey of contemporary printed sources, published in her 1930 book Women Workers and the Industrial Revolution, 1750–1850. Her analysis 190

FEMALE DAY LABOUR IN ENGLISH AGRICULTURE

of the female day labour force in agriculture identifies two peaks in the level of women’s work. The first, which began in the late eighteenth century and continued throughout the course of the French Wars, was linked to changes in agrarian production (new crops and methods of cultivation) and shortages of male labour (wartime conscription). However, Pinchbeck believed that evidence for this ‘gradual increase’ in women’s work was incomplete, with ‘no statistics available to show the proportion of women employed or the amount of work they were able to obtain’.1 The second high point came in the 1830s and 1840s, following years of post-war depression and impoverishment, and was stimulated by the economic necessity of both labouring families and farmers.2 The increase in female work was most noticeable in the eastern counties as the gang system expanded.3 It was only after the mid-nineteenth century, according to Pinchbeck, that female agricultural day labour began to decline irreversibly. This chronology has more recently been superseded by K.D.M. Snell’s research based on settlement records, which places the origins of reduced demand for women agricultural workers in parts of southeastern England in the later eighteenth century.4 After about 1760 changes in the use of agricultural technology and other changes relating to demographic growth, male unemployment, farm enlargement, and sometimes enclosure, altered the seasonal basis of female labour, with women increasingly more likely to be engaged in spring and early summer tasks (such as weeding and haymaking) rather than in separately remunerated harvest work or in the wintertime. This trend towards sexual specialisation may have been temporarily delayed during the Napoleonic Wars, but continued after 1815, and was reinforced by Victorian attitudes in the mid- and later nineteenth century. In more western and northern areas, especially in regions of pastoral and small-farm agriculture, Snell argued that women’s work was much more continuous in the nineteenth century and indeed often quite well paid. Both accounts have been questioned because the evidence on which they are constructed – printed literature and settlement records – may not be ideal in detecting trends in women’s agricultural day labour. Contemporary published sources such as government enquiries, the General View of Agriculture, and other pamphlet and periodical writing are infused with biased reporting,

1

I. Pinchbeck, Women Workers and the Industrial Revolution, 1750–1850 (London, 1930, 1981 edn), p. 63. 2 Pinchbeck claims that a desire to keep the wage bill low led farmers to employ more women labourers, while the continued inadequacy of the male wage and the abolition of outdoor relief in 1834 made female labour a necessity for many families. More recent research however, has suggested that outdoor relief persisted after the implementation of the new poor law. See G.R. Boyer, An Economic History of the English Poor Law, 1750–1850 (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 206–12, for an overview of this debate. 3 Pinchbeck, Women Workers, pp. 86–90. 4 K.D.M. Snell, Annals of the Labouring Poor: Social Change and Agrarian England, 1660–1900 (Cambridge, 1985), ch. 1. 191

WOMEN, WORK AND WAGES IN ENGLAND, 1600–1850

while it has been argued that settlement records refer mainly to farm and domestic servants rather than to agricultural day labourers.5 These problems can be circumvented through the use of an alternative and fairly plentiful source: farm labour and wage books. There are considerable advantages in using farm records to detect changes in the composition of, and payments received by, the agricultural workforce. While wage books only record names and payments made to workers, labour books document the annual employment record of individual labourers in more detail: the number of days worked, the per diem rate and the tasks performed. These records present an overview of the annual labour costs of the farm, the seasonal pattern of farm work, the gendered division of agricultural labour and the distinction between the regular workforce and occasional or casual labour employed by the farmer. Where a sequence of labour books have survived over several decades, they can reveal much about the changing nature of the farm workforce over time. Farm records are not a problem-free source, however. The majority of labour and wage books that remain extant originate from large estate collections. Estate farms were not necessarily representative of the average English farmstead in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with records from smaller enterprises and family-run farms less likely to have survived or even been kept in the first place.6 Wage books alone do not necessarily provide a complete record of all work carried out on the farm: details of days worked and wages received for task work, including the harvest, plus any perquisites, were sometimes kept in general accounts rather than the weekly wage book.7 Although labour books tend to avoid such omissions, farmers were still more likely to record the details of male labourers than female: women (and sometimes children) are often bunched together under one heading at the bottom of a full list of male workers, with only a note of the payment given to women as a group recorded. Moreover, the majority of farm labour and wage books only record information on labourers engaged by 5

See P. Sharpe, Adapting to Capitalism: Working Women in the English Economy, 1700–1850 (Basingstoke, 1996), pp. 73–8; P. Sharpe, ‘The female labour market in English agriculture during the Industrial Revolution: expansion or contraction?’, Agricultural History Review, 47 (1999), pp. 161–81, and H.V. Speechley, ‘Female and child agricultural day labourers in Somerset, c. 1685–1870’ (University of Exeter, Ph.D. thesis, 1999), pp. 72–5, for a critique of evidence taken from settlement records. For a discussion of the uses and limitations of primary printed material see N. Verdon, Rural Women Workers in Nineteenthcentury England: Gender, Work and Wages (Woodbridge, 2002), ch. 2. 6 A farm of under 100 acres would generally not employ sufficient workers from outside the family to require labour books: the smaller the farm, the less likely records were kept. See M.E. Turner, J.V. Beckett and B. Afton, ‘Taking stock: farmers, farm records and agricultural output in England, 1700–1850’, Agricultural History Review, 44 (1996), pp. 21–34; R. J. Colyer, ‘The uses of estate home farm accounts as sources for nineteenthcentury agricultural history’, The Local Historian, 7 (1975), pp. 406–13. 7 M.E. Turner, J.V. Beckett and B. Afton, Farm Production in England 1700–1914 (Oxford, 2001), p. 52. 192

FEMALE DAY LABOUR IN ENGLISH AGRICULTURE

the day (or by the week for some workers). How many farm servants were employed, and the types of work they performed, is unknown. Although farm servants, boarded in the farmhouse and engaged on long-term contracts (usually a year), were declining in numbers in many south-eastern counties in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, servants remained important to the farm labour force in other areas, particularly south-west counties such as Devon. Where female servants continued to be employed, this had an impact on the need for women day labourers.8 Despite these ambiguities, farm labour and wage books are a valuable and underused source, revealing much about the regional and gendered nature of the farm workforce in the period between 1790 and 1850.9

Female participation rates and tasks A remarkably detailed snapshot of the gendered pattern of farm labour in the early nineteenth century is captured in the accounts of a farm near Stockbridge in Hampshire for the year 1816. 10 The farmer (or more likely the farm bailiff) kept a meticulous week-by-week journal, entering the work records for men, boys and women (noted under those headings). Each labourer is individually named with the number of days per week worked, the daily rate paid to them, the total weekly wage received and the tasks performed all documented throughout the year. In addition, task work payments, the number of rats killed and expenditure on other farm-related sundries are noted. The composition of the labour force on this substantial farm, seven miles from Winchester, raises some interesting questions about the participation rates of different groups of labourers and deserves to be examined in some detail.11

8

See A. Kussmaul, Servants in Husbandry in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 1981). Where male farm servants continued to be employed, this also affected the male day labour force. 9 For studies which use farm labour records to investigate the pattern of female agricultural employment in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries see J. Burnette, ‘Labourers at the Oakes. Changes in the demand for female day-labourers at a farm near Sheffield during the agricultural revolution’, Journal of Economic History, LIX (1999), pp. 41–67; J. Gielgud, ‘Nineteenth-century farmwomen in Northumberland and Cumbria: the neglected workforce’ (D.Phil. thesis, University of Sussex, 1992); C. Miller, ‘The hidden workforce: female fieldworkers in Gloucestershire, 1870–1901’, Southern History, 6 (1984), pp. 139–55; Speechley, ‘Female and child day labourers’, and Verdon, Rural Women Workers, ch. 4. 10 Museum of English Rural Life, University of Reading (MERL), LIN P332/1. This is a microfilm copy of the original account book, which is held at the University of London Library (MS 659). 11 It is difficult to trace the precise location and acreage of this farm, although the accounts suggest it was a large mixed holding of several hundred acres. The main cultivated crops were wheat, barley, potatoes, turnips and beans, with sheep and pigs also being kept. 193

WOMEN, WORK AND WAGES IN ENGLAND, 1600–1850 700

Men Women

600 Number of days

Boys 500 400 300 200 100 0 Dec

Nov

Oct

Sept

Aug

July

June

May

April

Mar

Feb

Jan

Month

Figure 8.1 Days worked by men, boy and women labourers at Stockbridge in 1816 Source: MERL, LIN P332/1.

Figure 8.1 shows the number of days worked by men, boys and women labourers each month in 1816. Women labourers account for 27 per cent of total ‘man-days’ (that is, the number of days worked by all labourers that year); boys worked 38 per cent and men 35 per cent. Immediately it is apparent that the role played by women workers on this farm was considerable and parallels the extent of female labour on some mixed farms in Somerset in the years following the French Wars.12 As in Somerset, women’s work at Stockbridge was liable to seasonal change however. From January to May between nine and ten women were engaged on this Hampshire farm. One woman was employed by the day to milk cows and look after the pigs, and she worked seven days a week. The other female labourers performed a wide range of tasks: assisting in the barn, loading and unloading muck, pulling turnips for consumption by the livestock, sorting, cutting and planting potatoes, and in April and May picking couch grass and stones off the land. Some weeks these women were employed for one or two days each; other weeks they worked six days each. By June, eighteen different women are recorded. Some worked for only a handful of days weeding corn, but nearly half laboured for twenty days or more in that month. The months of July, August and September witnessed the peak of female employment on the farm.

12

See Speechley, ‘Female and child agricultural day labourers’, ch. 4. On the Poulett estate, for example, women worked 27 per cent of the total ‘man-days’ worked in 1818. The proportion of days worked by women on Dunster Castle Home Farm was also comparable. In 1801–03 women worked 35 per cent of total ‘man-days’ and in the 1830s they worked 26 per cent. 194

FEMALE DAY LABOUR IN ENGLISH AGRICULTURE

At the height of this input – August – twenty-three women worked 5931⁄2 days between them, an average of twenty-six days each, or 42 per cent of total ‘man-days’ worked in that month. The vast majority of women were engaged in these three months in haymaking, weeding and hoeing turnips, and in harvesting wheat and barley (although the specific harvest tasks performed by women are not recorded). After the completion of the harvests, the employment of women lessens. Yet even in November and December fourteen women are named in the accounts, being employed to pick potatoes and turnips, as well as in barn work and tending smaller animals, working on average three or four days a week each. Most female day labourers, then, were not employed on a continuous basis throughout the year. Two-thirds of the women entered the farm workforce on a casual basis, working for less than 100 days each across the year. But there were exceptions. Eight women were present in the accounts each month of the year, and although they were not employed every day, they worked between 225 and 281 days each in 1816. However, no matter how many days they worked, or the tasks carried out, all the women were paid a flat rate of 8d a day throughout the year. Occasionally labourers noted under the heading of ‘women’ were paid only 5d or 6d a day, most likely the daughters or younger siblings of women working more regularly on the farm. Women were also paid for three-quarter, half and quarter days, but they were not singled out in this practice: the same method of payment applied to male and boy labourers. Despite the lack of movement in the female daily rate for seasonal work, women on this farm could accrue a substantial annual wage: the regularly employed women earned between £7 10s 0d and £9 7s 2d, a not inconsiderable addition to the family income in the early nineteenth century.13 In general, the employment of boys on the farm was more consistent over the year than women: between thirteen and sixteen boys were engaged throughout the year, working around twenty-four days per month each. Day rates paid to boys also show more division. Labour and wage books do not include the age of workers, although it is assumed that those boys who were paid the lowest daily rates – at Stockbridge 3d or 5d a day – were the youngest in age. They were engaged mainly in keeping birds off the crops and serving the pigs. Other boys received 6d to 9d a day attending the working beasts, driving the ploughs, pulling turnips and shifting dung, while at the top of the scale, some boys were paid 1s 2d a day. The engagement of male labourers was also fairly constant, with nine men working 300 days and more on the

13 For a discussion of women’s contribution towards the family income see S. Horrell and J. Humphries, ‘Women’s labour force participation and the transition to the male breadwinner family’, Economic History Review, XLVIII (1995), pp. 89–117; N. Verdon, ‘The rural labour market in the early nineteenth century: women’s and children’s employment, family income, and the 1834 Poor Law Report’, Economic History Review, LV (2002), pp. 299–323.

195

WOMEN, WORK AND WAGES IN ENGLAND, 1600–1850

farm in 1816. In addition, a number of casual workers were employed alongside the regular male workforce in July, August and September. Although men were often engaged in similar contexts to women – in preparing and dressing the land, haymaking and harvesting, for example – the division of labour was quite distinct. Men were in charge of livestock and technology; they ploughed, threshed and winnowed, farrowed, cut, stacked and carted hay and corn, as well as repaired hedges and roads. Men were usually paid 1s 6d a day and received additional sums in task work (most notably during the summer harvests). Thus, although men worked only 35 per cent of labour days for 1816, in fact their labour was more extensive than Figure 8.1 suggests, as days spent on task work operations were not recorded separately. The contribution made by women workers to the agricultural operations on this farm was undeniably sizeable. A number of women were engaged yearround, probably the wives of male labourers on the farm, and were assisted by other women who joined the labour force on a more casual basis during the summer harvest months. Although male and female labourers were employed on gender-specific tasks, and women were paid between one-third and a half of the male daily wage rate, women workers were not marginal or peripheral but an essential element in the successful completion of work on the farm. It is unfortunate that the labour accounts from this farm have only survived for one year, offering a tantalising glimpse into the formation of the agricultural workforce at a particular juncture. It is impossible to ascertain whether the degree of female employment in 1816 had begun to decline from wartime levels, or how the post-war depression modified the gender and age specificity of the labour force. However, it would be imprudent to suggest that the trends from one farm in isolation were representative of the agricultural employment market in southern England in the early nineteenth century, since there was much regional variation. Indeed, although the involvement of women on this farm correlates with evidence from Somerset, farm records from other counties intimate that this Hampshire farm was exceptional, both in the clarity of its account-keeping and in the high participation rate of women workers. Records from the Chippenham estate in Cambridgeshire reveal the composition of the labour force on a large arable farm in the eastern region of the county.14 These accounts are not as detailed as the Stockbridge example and only record payments made to women workers as a group for a specific task. It is therefore not possible to analyse the pattern of days worked by labourers on this farm, but wage payments do indicate the seasonal nature of women’s work. In 1810 women were rarely employed outside the months

14 Cambridge Record Office (CRO), R55.7.8/23, Labour book of Chippenham park and farm. The main crops grown were wheat, oats and clover. These accounts clearly differentiate between payments made for work on the farm and work in the park. Although women were occasionally employed for casual tasks in the park, the analysis here focuses only on their farm employment.

196

FEMALE DAY LABOUR IN ENGLISH AGRICULTURE

of June to October. In March, April and May female labourers spent a few days weeding and stone picking (often it seems working alongside their daughters and paid as a unit), but expenditure on women represented only 1 to 2 per cent of total farm payments on labourers in those months. In June women were paid £5 10s 21⁄2d – or 9 per cent of the month’s payments on labourers – for weeding and thistling, and in July – the peak of female employment levels – women were engaged for weeding and haymaking, accounting for 12 per cent of the months’ day labour bill. Although the farmer employed women in September for gathering oats, there is no evidence to indicate that they participated in the corn harvest. Instead, the accounts record that task men were contracted to bring in the harvest. After September the presence of female workers was negligible, with only a few days’ work weeding and couching being found for women in November and December. A decade later – 1821 – the employment of women day labourers was largely unchanged on the Chippenham estate farm, although casual employment after the completion of haymaking had vanished entirely. Thus women (again with the help of girls) were paid 8d a day for topping turnips, weeding, stone picking and haymaking between March and July, but found no work in the harvest or the winter months at the end of the year.15 On this Cambridgeshire farm, the engagement of female labourers in wartime and post-war years was analogous. The labour accounts for 1810 suggest that during the Napoleonic War period farmers ensured that key agricultural operations – most notably the corn harvest – were completed by task men. After the war, the seasonal pattern of female labour continued, with May, June and July the only months when expenditure on women reached 10 per cent or more of outgoings on labourers. Moreover, evidence from a farm at Littleport, around ten miles north of Chippenham, suggests that this model of farm labour was well established before the nineteenth century.16 Accounts from the 1780s and 1790s reveal that women were not widely engaged on the Littleport farm until the late springtime for cleaning the land, followed by a wider participation in haymaking. In June and July 1791, for example, women and girls account for 14 per cent and 17 per cent of payments on day labourers. After July women’s work was extremely casual and they took no part in the cutting or gathering of the corn harvest. In eastern Cambridgeshire therefore, such a seasonal pattern of women’s farm work was a feature of the rural labour force from at least the last decades of the eighteenth century and it persisted into the nineteenth century. Pinchbeck argues that labour shortages, coupled with the increasing conversion to arable production in the south-east, ‘was responsible for a further increase’ in the employment of female day labourers in agriculture

15

CRO, R55.7.8/31, Chippenham park and farm. CRO, R83/22, Thomas Gotobed’s accounts for Henry Hoare esq., on account of their farm at Whelpmore, Littleport, in the Isle of Ely.

16

197

WOMEN, WORK AND WAGES IN ENGLAND, 1600–1850

during the Napoleonic Wars.17 So far farm records from the arable fenlands of Cambridgeshire do not support this. Other farms in the eastern counties appear to endorse evidence of the seasonal, casual employment of female day labourers during the French Wars. At Ickworth Home Farm, part of the Hervey estate in West Suffolk, accounts for 1807 reveal a familiar pattern: women and girls were employed for specific tasks between March and October, although it was only in April, May and June that their labour was appreciable. Again, men were contracted to complete the hay and corn harvests, and women’s role – even in haymaking – was minor.18 At Great Waltham in central Essex in the same decade, women’s participation in the fields was confined to a few days topping turnips and weeding in May followed by a larger presence in the haymaking fields in July and early August at 9d a day.19 In fact, just under one-third of the labour wage bill for July was expended on female haymakers at Great Waltham. But, once again, after the hay harvest was completed, women’s involvement on the farm was minor. The greater survival rate of farm records in Essex enables a broader exploration of the shifts in female day labour participation rates in that county. Table 8.1 shows the percentage of labour payments that can be attributed to women workers on certain farms over the first half of the nineteenth century. One set of records, from the Audley End Estate near Saffron Walden, remains extant for the whole period and reveals some intriguing and dramatic changes in the employment of women.20 At the turn of the nineteenth century women day labourers feature infrequently in the accounts: in 1802, for example, four women were engaged in April and May in the typical springtime activities of stone picking and weeding, for which they were paid 8d a day. Women were not employed again on the farm in that year until October and November when their services were required for picking and cleaning carrots. By the following decade – in 1810 and 1815 – the employment of women had become more evenly distributed over the course of the year. It is improbable that the farmer was employing female workers in response to wartime male shortages, however. The tasks women were performing – picking stones,

17

Pinchbeck, Women Workers, p. 62. This claim is repeated in other texts. See C. Emsley, British Society and the French Wars (London, 1979), p. 111, and A. Armstrong, Farmworkers: A Social and Economic History, 1770–1980 (London, 1988), p. 51. 18 Suffolk Record Office (Bury St Edmonds branch), HA507/3/679, Ickworth Home Farm; receipts and payments book, 1806–10. Although this is only an account of wages paid, and not a complete labour book, all task work including haymaking and harvest work seems to be recorded alongside weekly labour expenditure. However, it may have been the case that women were involved in haymaking but their wages were included under male teams. 19 Essex Record Office (ERO), D/Dtu, 299, Farm accounts of Tufnell family of Langleys Estate, Great Waltham. 20 ERO, D/Dby/A264–267A. Audley End Estate accounts 1790–1851. Unfortunately the accounts for 1818–35 (A267) are missing. Because these accounts exist for several decades, only sample years have been analysed. 198

FEMALE DAY LABOUR IN ENGLISH AGRICULTURE

Table 8.1 Percentage of farm labour payments made to female labourers on Essex farms, 1800 to 1850 Farm Audley End Estate, 1802 Great Waltham, 1805 Audley End Estate, 1810 Audley End Estate, 1815 Littlebury Green Farm, 1834–35 Audley End Estate, 1836 Audley End Estate, 1841 South House Farm, Maldon, 1844–45 Audley End Estate, 1850

Jan Feb Mar April May June July Aug Sept Oct Nov Dec 0

0

0

15

14

0

0

0

0

2

9

0

0

0

0

0

4

0

27

12

0

0

0

0

3

3

5

5

7

12

6

2

0

7

0

0

0

1

6

10

9

14

0

6

0

0

7

0

1

2

2

7

13

17

11

8

0

2

1

1

5

5

3

7

19

22

2

11

4

12

5

0

6

7

7

11

19

10

0

3

7

8

10

4

0

0

0

0

2

14

13

1

1

1

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

2

0

6

0

0

0

0

Sources: ERO, D/Dby/A264–267A; ERO, D/Dtu/299; ERO, D/Dby, A307, Littlebury Green Farm, Michaelmas 1834 to Michaelmas 1835; URL, ESS P302/1, South House Farm, Maldon, Essex, October 1844 to October 1845.

weeding and stubbing thistles in the first half of the year and picking root crops in the late autumn – were those typically associated with female agricultural day labour. Pamela Sharpe also found that women who worked on Essex farms during the French Wars were engaged in work traditionally considered ‘women’s work’.21 Sharpe argues that more women were brought into the labour force at the beginning of the Wars in response to increased arable cultivation, although this process seems to have happened slightly later on the Audley End Estate. However, no Essex farms seem to have used female ‘petticoat’ workforces to bring in the harvest crops. Other sources of male labour were employed during the harvest seasons including militiamen and home-based regular soldiers.22 In Sharpe’s words: During the Wars farmers in the Essex heavy clay area, which so benefited from inflated wheat prices, appear to have made efforts to ensure that they had a male

21 22

Sharpe, Adapting to Capitalism, p. 89. Ibid., p. 86. 199

WOMEN, WORK AND WAGES IN ENGLAND, 1600–1850

labour force available, and to have continued to employ some women, generally the wives and families of their own agricultural labourers, in their traditional roles as casual labour at certain points in the agricultural year.23

At Audley End, the trend towards greater year-round employment persisted, and even expanded, in the years following the end of hostilities in 1815, although the employment of female day labourers was still relatively small. By the mid-1830s and early 1840s women accounted for 8 per cent of the annual farm labour expenditure, double the figure twenty years earlier.The range of tasks women discharged was also slightly more varied: in addition to cleaning ground and picking crops, women were also recorded as knocking and spreading manure, raking up moss, carrying out faggots and turning clover and corn.24 The peak in women’s work still occurred in the late spring and early summer months (May to July) when women weeded corn, grass and mangle wurzel in addition to spreading manure. In both 1836 and 1841, a notable number of women were also visible in October and November for taking up potatoes, mangolds and parsnips. However, by the mid-1840s records indicate that the demand for women day labourers was lessening on this farm and by 1850 women found only a few days’ work weeding in June and ‘assisting in harvest’ in August. How can these shifts in the involvement of women day labourers on the Audley End Estate farm be explained? The most plausible explanation lies in the changing cultivation practices on the farm. At the turn of the nineteenth century, the acreage of pasture lands on the estate outweighed the arable ground by almost 4:1. As a result, the need for casual women labourers was slight. However, as the farm began to increase its arable production – particularly root crops – during the Napoleonic War period the labour bill expanded and the use of cheap female day labour became more warranted. This process continued into the 1820s and 1830s. It is more difficult to account for the rapid decline in the employment of women on the Audley End estate farm in the 1840s. The records indicate that women were pushed out of the farm labour force and replaced with an increased quota of boy workers. This trend is consistent with other farms in the East Anglian region. On the home farm at Earsham (on the Norfolk–Suffolk border), for example, women’s day labour force participation during the 1820s and 1830s declined significantly from early nineteenth-century levels and became more seasonally

23

Ibid., p. 89. There is no mention in the Audley End Estate accounts of women being engaged in haymaking. However, this apparent exclusion from a task traditionally associated with women workers in this area may be an anomaly in the record keeping. Although the total labour expenditure for the farm rises in the summer months as expected, the increase does not seem appreciable enough to include all payments for haysel, which could have been recorded separately and lost. 24

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specific (with work confined mainly to the summer months by the 1830s). The employment of male children rose as that of women declined.25 The dominant pattern emerging from the accounts of various farms in the eastern counties indicates that women were engaged for a limited range of gender-specific tasks in springtime, early summer and autumn, linked to cleaning the land of weeds and stones, haymaking and picking root crops. The peak in female participation occurred between May and July. A pattern whereby women participated in haymaking but not the later corn harvest in counties such as Essex, Cambridgeshire, Suffolk and Norfolk has emerged from the records.26 This model of women’s agricultural work was established before the Napoleonic War period and remained a consistent feature of the early decades of the nineteenth century.27 Farm account books do not largely endorse a suggestion that female work became more widespread during the French Wars: instead they show that task men were contracted to ensure the swift and successful completion of the harvests with women participating in their usual seasonal tasks. At Audley End, the demand for female day labour increased after the Napoleonic Wars as more root crops were grown, but by the mid-1840s the desirability of women workers had declined and they were replaced by the labour of boys. Similarly, at Earsham Home Farm the use of women workers had diminished significantly by the mid-1830s. Thus on farms where labour accounts exist for a run of decades over the first half of the nineteenth century, the evidence indicates that women were a diminishing

25 Norfolk Record Office, MEA 3/27–51, Farm accounts of Meade of Earsham, 1807–1838. Trends on Earsham Home Farm are discussed in more detail in Verdon, Rural Women Workers, ch. 4. 26 Although women’s involvement in the harvest process was minimal in these counties, women participated in gleaning the fields after the crop had been gathered in. Gleaning was a central aspect of the non-waged economy of rural labouring families in south-eastern counties in the nineteenth century and was viewed as a valuable addition to the household income. See P. King, ‘Customary rights and women’s earnings: the importance of gleaning to the rural labouring poor, 1750–1850’, Economic History Review, XLIV (1991), pp. 461–76; Sharpe, Adapting to Capitalism, pp. 80–5. 27 It has been suggested that the sexual division of agricultural labour was established well before the mid-eighteenth century. A. Hassell-Smith’s analysis of the farm books of Nathaniel Bacon of Stiffkey, for example, unearthed clear distinctions in men’s and women’s farm work in late sixteenth-century Norfolk. A. Hassell-Smith, ‘Labourers in late sixteenth-century England: a case study from north Norfolk [part 1]’, Continuity and Change, 4 (1989), pp. 11–52. Other regional studies indicate that gendered labour patterns were a feature of farm work in past centuries. See E. Gilboy, ‘Labour at Thornborough: an eighteenth-century estate’, Economic History Review, 1st ser., III (1932), pp. 388–98; P. Sharpe, ‘Time and wages of west country workfolks in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’, Local Population Studies, 55 (1995), pp. 66–9; C. Shammas, ‘The world women knew: women workers in the north of England during the seventeenth century’, in R.S. Dunn and M. Maples Dunn (eds) The World of William Penn (Philadelphia, 1986), pp. 99–114.

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feature of the agricultural labour force in certain south-eastern counties by the 1830s and 1840s. Even away from the south-east, records suggest that the demand for female day labourers was casual and seasonal, with women being engaged mainly for tasks associated with arable agriculture. On the Northwick estate in Blockley, Gloucestershire, a medium-sized mixed farm on the northern edge of the Cotswolds, the employment of female day labourers replicates that already discussed for the arable eastern counties.28 Between March 1809 and February 1810, men and boys – most of whom were consistently engaged across the year – carried out the vast majority of the farm work. In June women were paid £2 10s 8d for weeding the corn, but their greatest input was again in haymaking. During July and early August eighteen women worked 597 days in haysel (hay harvest), together earning £28 19s 2d (the daily rate varied between 8d and 12d). Two women and two girls also participated in the corn harvest, the women working the whole month (at 1s 6d a day) but the girls only very casually engaged for four days each (at 7d and 8d a day). The farmer did not engage any women labourers for the rest of the year. Once more this pattern was firmly established before the Napoleonic War period, as accounts for the farm from the middle decades of the eighteenth century show.29 By the mid1830s, labour records at Blockley reveal that women’s work had contracted, with women engaged only during July and August for haymaking.30 Speechley also found that the mixed farms of Somerset required women day workers for haymaking and harvesting, weeding and stone picking, planting and picking root crops, alongside some other regionally specific tasks, although the amount of work they performed was generally much greater than at Blockley.31 Women as day labourers, then, were mainly engaged to perform tasks associated with arable farming, essentially restricting their participation in the day labour force across the south to a fairly limited range of seasonal tasks. The amount of day labour women performed varied, but the types of work they performed, with some notable regional exceptions, were fairly uniform. But where pastoral farming predominated, and dairying was a central element of farming profits, women may have found more security of employment. Although milking was often performed by (married) day workers (both male and female), the processes of making of cheese and butter were usually performed by female servants – single women, hired by the year, boarded in the farmhouse and overseen by the farmer’s wife. One such woman, Mary

28

Worcester Record Office (WRO), 705:66, BA4221, 13 (ii), Northwick Estate account book, March 1809 to February 1810. 29 WRO, 705:66, BA4221, 13 (i), Blockley Farm account book, 1747–53 and 1753–76. 30 WRO, 705:66, BA4839, 1 (i), Estate account book, Northwick, 1828–35. 31 These included the cultivation of flax, woad, withies and strawberries. Cider-making also engaged women within the farmhouse. Speechley, ‘Female and child day labourers’, pp. 101–7. 202

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Ledbeater, was engaged as the dairy maid on the Blockley Estate in 1831 on an annual wage of £9 9s. Speechley found that where ‘specialist dairying activities’ were located in Somerset, ‘the hired farm servants and dairymaids . . . maintained their importance beyond the early nineteenth century’.32 Similarly both Ann Kussmaul and Snell detect the survival of farm service in western and northern English counties into the mid-nineteenth century.33 The nature of female farm labour in counties where service continued diverged in many respects from south-eastern corn-specialising areas. In pastoral, dairying districts, the regularity of work, and the age-specificity of the female workforce (servants being unmarried), altered the character of women’s work. The need for casually employed day labourers (both male and female) also differed on such farms, emphasising the regional differences in work practices between the south-west and south-east.

Levels of remuneration The amount which women agricultural labourers were paid by the day on various farms between 1790 and 1850 is presented in Table 8.2. Day rates given for participation in haymaking and harvesting (where applicable) are also included. These data are interesting for several reasons. First, the usual daily rate which women received remained fairly consistent over the first half of the nineteenth century, at between 6d and 8d a day. Rates for day labourers in western counties such as Somerset and Gloucestershire reflect those found in south-eastern counties such as Essex and Cambridgeshire. The usual female per diem rate on Earsham Home Farm in 1807 and Stody Hall Farm in 1828, both in Norfolk, was also 8d.34 On some farms women were paid the flat daily rate across the year, no matter what task they performed. For example, at Chippenham in 1810 and 1821 and Stockbridge in 1816, women were given 8d a day even for working in the hay and corn harvests. But other farms indicate that the demand for women at peak times pushed up their daily rates. Between June and October 1810, women employed on the Poulett Estate in Somerset received a daily wage of 10d. The majority of women who worked in the hayfields at Littleport in 1791 received either 12d or 10d a day, rather than the usual per diem rate of 8d at other tasks. As already discussed, the Littleport example shows that wage variations between individual women were more apparent at crucial times of the agricultural year. Similarly, on the Northwick Estate in Gloucestershire in 1810, most female

32

Speechley, ‘Female and child day labourers’, p. 86. Kussmaul, Servants in Husbandry, pp. 19–22; Snell, Annals of the Labouring Poor, pp. 94–5. See also M. Bouquet, Family Servants and Visitors: The Farm Household in Nineteenth and Twentieth-century Devon (Norwich, 1985), ch. 2. 34 Verdon, Rural Women Workers, ch. 4. 33

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Table 8.2 Women’s wages by the day, at haymaking and harvest Farm

Day

Hay

Harvest

Littleport, Cambridge, 1791 Dunster Castle Farm, Somerset, 1800 Audley End Estate, Essex, 1802 Great Waltham, Essex, 1805 Audley End Estate, 1806 Northwick Estate, Gloucestershire, 1809–10 Chippenham, Cambridge, 1810 Poulett Estate, Somerset, 1810 Audley End Estate, Essex, 1810 and 1815 Stockbridge, Hampshire, 1816 Chippenham, Cambridge, 1821 Dunster Castle Farm, Somerset, 1830 Northwick Estate, Gloucestershire, 1831 Littlebury Green, Essex, 1834–35 Audley End Estate, Essex, 1836 Audley End Estate, Essex, 1841 Maldon, Essex, 1844–5 Radley, Berkshire, 1849–50 Audley End estate, Essex, 1850

8d 6d 8d 8d 8d 8d 8d 8d 8d 8d 8d 8d 8d 6d 7–8d 7–8d 6d 7d 7d

8d–12d 6d – 9d – 8d–12d 8d 8d – 8d 8d 8d 12d 6d – – 8d 7d –

– 6d – – – 18d – 10d – 8d – 8d – – – 10d – 7d 12d

Sources: CRO, R83/22; ERO, D/Dby/A264–267A; ERO, D/Dtu, 299; WRO, 705:66, BA4221, 13 (ii); CRO, R55.7.8/23; URL, LIN P332/1; CRO, R55.7.8/31; WRO, 705:66, BA4839 (i); ERO, D/Dby/A307; URL, ESS P302/1; URL, BER 13/5/3, Labour book, Radley, Berkshire, October 1849-October 1850; Speechely, ‘Female and child day labourers’, p.116.

haymakers were paid 12d a day, although one woman received 10d and two women 8d a day. Women on the higher rate tended to be those who worked most consistently (thirty to thirty-five days each). The two women who worked in the corn harvest in 1810 at Blockley were paid more than double their usual daily rate. Although the evidence is limited to a few farms, Table 8.2 suggests that by the 1830s and 1840s female day rates appear to have depreciated. On the Audley End Estate in Essex, the usual day wage of 8d begins to fall to 7d from the mid-1830s, although women who turned the corn in August received more. On other Essex farms – Littlebury Green Farm in the mid-1830s and South House Farm at Maldon in the mid-1840s – women were paid just 6d for a typical day’s work.35 In both cases haymaking – together with weeding – represented the only significant openings for women workers to find paid work in agriculture at all. At Maldon, a 290-acre farm, the accounts record nine women present in June for weeding, and in July eight women worked for sixty-

35

ERO, D/Dby/A307; URL, ESS P302/1. 204

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two days in haymaking and sixty-six days in weeding. Again there was an upward movement in the daily rate of 2d for female haymakers at Maldon (with 3d a day more if a son or daughter worked alongside them). As these accounts only survive for a single year, it is not possible to detect whether wage levels had experienced a downturn since the earlier decades of the century. The same also applies to the farm at Radley in Berkshire for 1849–50, where female labourers were paid a uniform 7d a day across the year. The low level of female wages on some farms in the 1830s and 1840s may be linked to the increasing casualisation of the agricultural workforce in southern England at this time (particularly south-eastern England): in an overstocked rural labour market low female wages were a reflection of minimal opportunities women had to find permanent and secure work as agricultural day labourers. The decline of alternative means of rural female employment (such as spinning) in counties such as Essex, Norfolk and Cambridge also depressed women’s agricultural wages as farmers no longer had to compete for female labour.36 How do these trends in female rates of pay correspond to those for male and child farm workers? First, men and (male) children were more likely to be subject to variation in wage rates according to their skills, the work they were hired for, or their age and strength. At Stockbridge in 1816, for example, the shepherd earned 1s more per day (at 1s 7d) than the other non-specialist male day labourers (1s 6d). As we have seen, on the same farm boys were paid from 3d to 1s 2d a day. The youngest were hired mainly for bird scaring, while the eldest lads assisted with the ploughing and looking after the farm animals. Towards the end of the year one of these lads moved into the ranks of the male labourers, receiving the adult rate of 1s 6d. Second, higher rates of pay were more usually given to male labourers at certain times of the year. The Northwich estate accounts from 1809–10 are a good illustration of this. Between March and June 1809 men received 1s 6d a day, apart from one man, John Milburn, who was given 2s per day. In July and August the daily rate rose to 2s 6d for all regularly employed men. For the harvest month, men were contracted at £4 14s 6d, with extra days worked during September paid at either 2s 6d or 1s 6d according to the task. In October wages fell to the presummer rates, but from November (and continuing into 1810) all men apart from Milburn received a 2d pay rise, taking them to 1s 8d a day. However, payments for male children employed on the Northwick Estate Farm (from 3d up to 10d a day) did not alter across the year. Finally, men were more likely than women to be engaged in piecework, which could considerably boost their annual earnings. On only two farms included in this study is there evidence of women being engaged to perform work by the piece. At Stockbridge in 1816 women drew reeds at 4s 2d per 100 in the winter months, and in June one woman was paid £2 2s 0d for

36

Sharpe, ‘Female labour market’, p. 176. 205

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‘flatcutting 12 acres pease’. Men, though, received piece rates for threshing, hoeing turnips, coppicing ground, cutting thistles, cutting grass, and cutting wheat, barley and peas at harvest time. Similarly at Littlebury Green Farm, Essex, in 1834–35 women were paid by the piece for picking turnips in the winter months while men were engaged in a wide range of piecework operations across the whole year. However, caution is needed: women’s involvement in some piecework may be disguised by the way wages for such labour were recorded in the accounts. Where a man was contracted for a certain task (such as hoeing or harvest work), he may have used the labour of his wife and children, but their presence is obscured because the male head of the group received all payments for the work. Women employed by the day on farms in southern England between 1790 and 1850 were paid around one-third to a half of the usual male labourers’ rate. This wage gap is consistent with other studies of farm records in the nineteenth century.37 While men often worked on gender-specific tasks such as ploughing, hedging and ditching, even when working on the same tasks as women, a significant difference in the usual daily rate is evident. At Stockbridge in 1816, for example, men employed by the day to take up potatoes and pull turnips in the winter months were paid 1s 6d while women engaged on the same tasks were paid 8d a day. Women’s earnings were also more likely to remain unchanged across the year than men’s. Is this because women were given a customary rate of remuneration, their consistently lower wage rates reflecting the fact that women’s work outside the home was deemed to be unskilled, subordinate to male labour and secondary to domestic and familial responsibilities? Or were women paid a market rate for their agricultural labour, their lower levels of productivity being expressed in lower wages than men? Joyce Burnette has recently reinstated the latter hypothesis.38 She argues that the difference between female and male wages is a reflection of the contrasting productivity rates of the two sexes. In agriculture, women’s productivity was marginal and dependent on a number of variables including age, marital status and family circumstances. Burnette contends, ‘women workers in more competitive industries such as agriculture . . . received market wages based on their marginal productivity, not simply a customary “women’s wage” ’.39 Women labourers tended to work fewer hours than men (because of household duties), were unreliable (moving in and out of the labour market due to reproduction and childrearing) and were

37

See Gielgud, ‘Nineteenth-century farm women’, ch. 3; Miller, ‘Hidden workforce’; Speechley, ‘Female and child day labourers’, ch. 5, and Verdon, Rural Women Workers, ch. 4. 38 J. Burnette, ‘An investigation of the female–male wage gap during the industrial revolution in Britain’, Economic History Review, L (1997), pp. 257–81. 39 Ibid., p. 261. 206

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physically weaker. According to Burnette, ‘differences in strength led to differences in productivity, and thus differences in market wages’.40 It is well known that women’s ability to perform agricultural work was restricted by their reproductive functions: childbirth, lactation and childrearing all impinged on women’s labour force participation.41 Other evidence to support the contention of lower female productivity in agriculture in the first half of the nineteenth century is also prevalent. In particular, a shorter working day for adult women than for men seems to have been a widespread practice. Using the 1843 Report on the Employment of Women and Children in Agriculture, Burnette calculated that women on average worked 9.66 hours a day, whereas men laboured for 12 hours.42 This pattern is also verified by farming diaries, contemporary literature such as the General View of Agriculture and later nineteenth-century reports.43 The shorter female working day was designed largely to enable married labourers to fit their household duties around a day’s work, yet there is little evidence to suggest that different regulations applied to single or widowed women (if they worked in the fields) in the nineteenth century. So, if the difference in the length of the male and female working day is taken into account, the wage gap in agriculture lessens, although it does not entirely dissipate. Burnette also highlights the distinction between piece rate wages (by the task) and time wage rates (by the day), with piece rate wages showing less discrimination than day rates. Piecework was viewed as an advantageous system for both farmers and workers as ‘the labourer has the opportunity, by greater exertions, of earning more money; and the master has more business executed by the same hands’.44 However, farm labour books are not ideal sources when attempting to unravel the relationship between male and female rates on piecework. Most accounts only record the task performed and the sum paid for the job; they do not indicate the length of time taken over the work. Moreover, as we have already seen, the employment of women in piecework

40

Ibid., p. 275. For a full discussion of this issue see Speechley, ‘Female and child day labourers’, ch. 7. 42 Burnette, ‘Female–male wage gap’, pp. 268–9. 43 In Middlesex in 1813, for example, women were reported as working from 8 a.m. until 6 p.m. in the summer and from 8a.m. until dark in winter, whereas men worked from 6 a.m. until 6 p.m. in summer and light until dark in winter: J. Middleon, General View of the Agriculture of the County of Middlesex (London, 1813), pp. 496–8. Similarly, E. Stanhope, writing in the 1860s, found that women in the East Midlands worked from 8 a.m. to 5.30 p.m., while men laboured from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m., or from light to dark. See PP 1867–8, XVII, Royal Commission on the Employment of Children, Young Persons and Women in Agriculture. Report by Hon. E. Stanhope on the counties of Lincoln, Nottingham and Leicester, p. 81. See also Speechley, ‘Female and child day labourers’, p. 124; Gielgud, ‘Nineteenth-century farmwomen’, p. 102. 44 J. Boys, General View of the Agriculture of the County of Kent (London, 1813 edn), p. 194. 41

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on the farms examined in this study was relatively unusual or hidden in the accounts. However, turning to alternative contemporary sources such as the General Views, no distinction is made between piece rate payments for men and women.45 Where the evidence exists, then, the lower wages which women received for work on piece rates points to lower female productivity: men were physically stronger and were able to complete tasks far more quickly than women.46 This conclusion has recently been restated for the medieval period, where male reapers in the mid-fourteenth century were paid higher rates than their female counterparts, with ‘productivity rather than gender discrimination’ the main rationale behind the disparity: A large number of jobs on the medieval farm involved hard manual labour, the performance of which depended on brute strength and often also on stature. Strength and reach are attributes possessed in greater abundance by men, and because of this they are able to accomplish such tasks with greater average speed than women.47

In nineteenth-century southern agriculture, the jobs performed by women engaged by the day were, on the whole, less physically demanding than maleonly tasks such as ploughing, hedging and ditching. The use of heavier hand technology in the corn harvest has been seen as one factor in pushing women out of primary roles in the harvest.48 Tasks such as weeding, hoeing and stone picking were seen as requiring concentration, flexibility and agility rather than brute strength, and were therefore thought to be more suitable for women labourers. William Stevenson, author of the General View of the Agriculture of the County of Surrey, believed that the substitution of broadcast turnips for drilled turnips was beneficial, not least because it ‘would set free many men, and give employment to the women and children on a farm’.49 Broadcast turnips required ‘the skill and experience of a man’ whereas drilled turnips ‘may easily be well hoed by women and children’.50 Yet although

45

Speechley also found no distinction between male and female piecework rates in Somerset, although she admits ‘there is very little piece rate data in the farm records’. Speechley, ‘Female and child day labourers’, p. 127. 46 Speechley, ‘Female and child day labourers’, p. 129. Burnette quotes the evidence of a Kent farmer to reinforce this point: ‘a man would be reaping three-quarters of an acre in the same time [two days], and a woman half an acre, if she worked as many hours as the man.’ Burnette, ‘Female–male wage gap’, p. 275. 47 J. Hatcher, ‘Women’s work reconsidered: gender and wage differentiation in late medieval England’, Past and Present, 173 (2001), p. 193 and see pp. 191–8. 48 M. Roberts, ‘Sickles and scythes: women’s work and men’s work at harvest time’, History Workshop Journal, 7 (1979), pp. 3–28; Snell, Annals of the Labouring Poor, pp. 49–51. 49 W. Stevenson, General View of the Agricultural of the County of Surrey (London, 1809), p. 588. 50 Ibid., p. 540. 208

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women were seen as being more dextrous and capable of certain tasks than men, their adroitness did not translate into higher wages for such work. In fact the evidence from farm accounts from across the southern counties suggests that women were paid at a uniformly low rate for such work: because it was largely carried out by women it was deemed unskilled. Thus, despite the availability of persuasive data to indicate the link between lower productivity and lower female wage rates in nineteenth-century agriculture, the evidence is not wholly convincing. Inflexibility in female wage rates over time and across counties implies that the notion of a customary element in women’s earnings should not be dismissed. Although female wages were a reflection of their lower productive capacity in agriculture, customary forces also played a part in preserving women’s meagre earning capacity. Moreover this interplay of economic and customary forces persisted through the nineteenth century. When Arthur Savory began farming in the Vale of Evesham in the late nineteenth century, he believed women labourers were adept at certain types of farm work suited to their physical capacity and domestic circumstances: Women are splendid at all kinds of light farm work whenever deftness and gentle touch are required, such as hop-tying and picking or gathering small fruit like currants, raspberries and strawberries; but I do not consider them in the least capable of taking the place of men in outwork which demands muscular strength and endurance and the ability to withstand severe heat or bitter cold or wet ground underfoot, through all the varying seasons. Village women have, too, their home duties to attend to, and it is most important that their men-folk should be suitably fed and their houses kept clean and attractive.51

For an eight-hour day Savoury paid his female workers ‘the time-honoured wage of tenpence a day’.52

Conclusion Recent research on female day labourers in agriculture has attempted to establish how far women were a marginal aspect of the agricultural labour force in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Farm labour and wage books are a particularly useful way of exploring this issue as they provide information on the level of female employment, the nature of that work, and the sums women were paid to work on farms. The evidence presented here permits some broad conclusions to be suggested about the involvement of female day labourers in southern English agriculture between 1790 and 1850. Women’s participation as day labourers in agriculture was limited to certain operations

51 52

A.H. Savory, Grain and Chaff from an English Manor (Oxford, 1920), pp. 75–6. Ibid., p. 74. 209

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related to arable production. In fact, women’s work was largely confined to three areas: cleaning the land by weeding and stone picking; planting, picking and sorting a range of root crops; and haymaking. This meant that the peak of women’s employment was in the spring and early summer months, with some work also available in the autumn months. Women’s involvement in the harvest was sporadic, although their labour at that time of the year may be hidden in the records, since women worked as part of a family team on task work. Moreover, their participation in gleaning made a valuable contribution to the family income at that time of the year. The sexual division of farm labour was a persistent feature of the period, but it was not new: men’s and women’s roles in arable production in southern England were established prior to the period under investigation here. The French Wars did little to disrupt this pattern of work: on the whole, women’s farm work remained highly casual and seasonal throughout the war years, but where farms extended their arable production, some increase in the employment of women took place. However, by the 1830s the size of the female day labour force was contracting on many farms, where the usual practice was to substitute the labour of women with that of boys. Finally, the level of remuneration for a typical day’s work by women in the fields shows consistency across counties and the female–male wage gap was upheld. The uniformity of women’s pay suggests that although market forces were a key determinant of wage levels, customary ideas about the nature and status of female agricultural labour were also significant. While generalisations enable historians to understand broad regional trends in female farm labour in the nineteenth century, they can mask the complex local nuances of rural women’s labour force participation. Farms such as Stockbridge in Hampshire and Dunster Castle in Somerset should not be dismissed merely as anomalies. They suggest that the interaction of economic and social factors at the local level continued to produce significant regional differences in the level of agricultural labour performed by women in southern England between 1790 and 1850. Thus in Somerset, although the level of women’s agricultural work declined between the 1790s and the 1840s, Speechley argues that across the period as a whole, ‘women constituted a far higher proportion of the agricultural day labour force than has been previously acknowledged’.53 Although the evidence is limited, records from Hampshire imply that a similar conclusion may apply to that area. Even in the period after 1850, some farm records point to the continued – and in some areas increasing – reliance upon women labourers for certain farm tasks in the south.54 Thus although many features of women’s agricultural employment after 1790 were a product of developments in earlier periods, regional distinctions persisted

53

Speechley, ‘Female and child day labourers’, p. 76. Miller’s research shows that some farms in Gloucestershire in the last quarter of the nineteenth century continued to use the labour of women to a large extent: Miller, ‘Hidden workforce’. 54

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into the nineteenth century, and the relationship between changes in the agrarian and industrial economy, the impact of new ideological and cultural ideas, and shifts in women’s agricultural employment at the local level all have to be recognised.

211

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232

Index Abel-Smith, B. 143, 150 Abingdon (Oxfordshire) 172, 174 Abson and Wick (Gloucestershire) 155 agricultural labour 3, 5, 12, 68–101, 106, 159, 165, 190–211 hand tools 10, 12, 68–101, 109, 119 visual representations 68, 77, 78, 81 see also apprenticeship, to husbandry; labour productivity; wages; women’s work, agriculture; work, general agriculture 2, 3, 5, 12, 30, 147, 165, 170, 191, 202, 206 land use 119 productivity 82, 85, 88, 97, 98 Aldenham (Hertfordshire) 57 Allerton (Yorkshire) 35 Amersham (Buckinghamshire) 172 Anderson, Michael 155 Andover (Hampshire) 172, 178, 182 apprenticeship 6, 8, 10, 12, 13, 15–46, 50, 90, 143 age when bound out 20, 20 n.17, 34 n.88, 35–7, 41–2, 45 boarding out system 20 n.17, 27, 30, 42 gender 33–9 to husbandry 17, 22, 28, 37 to housewifery 17, 20, 37, 42 pauper apprenticeship 12, 13, 15–46 premiums 22–4, 27, 28 n.48, 37–8 see also children’s work Ardleigh (Essex) 152, 165 Arkwright, Richard 115 Arundel (Sussex) 36 Ashby de la Zouch (Leicestershire) 110 Ashendon Hundred (Buckinghamshire) 29 Asia 50 Austen, Jane 146 Axminster (Devon) 177 Bardsley, Sandy 72 n.13, 75, 77, 85 Barker-Read, Mary 151, 162, 163, 164 Barkham (Buckinghamshire) 158 bastard bearing see under illegitimacy

Beaminster (Dorset) 172, 177, 182 Bedwellty (Wales) 7 begging 19, 20 n.17, 44, 187 Berg, Maxine 176, 184, 187 Berkshire 86, 165, 171 n.5, 172, 178, 182, 204–5 Best, Henry 69, 71, 73, 74, 97–8 Billington (Lancashire) 120, 126–8 Bispham-with-Norbreck (Lancashire) 134 Blackwall (London) 51–2, 58–62 Blandford (Dorset) 35, 177 blanket manufacture 172, 174 Blockley (Gloucestershire) 202–4 Bocking (Essex) 157, 172, 174 n.18, 175, 178, 181–5, 187–8 Bolney (Sussex) 38 Bolton 123 Books of Hours 78 Bosmere (Suffolk) 159 Bradford 184, 185 Braintree (Essex) 45, 172, 174 n.18, 175, 178, 181, 183–8 Brill (Buckinghamshire) 45 Bristol 145, 156 Brueghel, Peter (the elder) 78 Brunner, Karl 81 Buckinghamshire 26, 26 n.43, 29, 40, 45, 158, 171 n.5, 172, 174, 188 n.91 Burnett, John 121 Burnette, Joyce 103, 107–9, 112–13, 114, 117, 122, 193 n.9, 206–7, 208 n. 46 Cambridgeshire 31, 33, 36, 37, 40, 196–8, 201, 203 Campton (Bedfordshire) 147–68, 153 n.61, 159 n.89, 161 n.105, 162 n.109 carers see under nurses Caroline Book of Orders 17, 22, 88 Chapel-en-le-Frith (Derbyshire) 115 Chapman, S. 115 charity 6, 25, 27, 39, 46 n.139, 59, 140 Charmouth (Dorset) 45 Chartres, John 83 Chaudhuri, K.N. 47, 50 233

INDEX Chesham (Buckinghamshire) 172, 174, 175, 176, 185 Cheshire 107, 163 Chester 80, 83 children’s work 5, 7, 9, 11, 13, 18, 76, 86–8, 94, 112–13, 136, 148, 159–61, 168, 172, 176, 181, 182 n.59, 184, 184 n.74, 187–8, 192, 201, 206, 208 see also apprenticeship ages of working children 134–7, 195, see also apprenticeship, age when bound out boys 5–6, 37, 136, 187, 193–5, 201–2, 205, 210 girls 6, 34, 37, 111, 113, 175–6, 175 n.27, 180, 184, 187–8, 188 n.90, 197–8, 202 reduction in wages 184 China 51 Chipping Norton (Oxfordshire) 172 Chorley (Lancashire) 135–6 Clark, Gregory 82, 83, 103 Clark, Peter 170, 171, 174, 189 Clarke, Alice 13 Claydon (Suffolk) 159 Clitheroe (Lancashire) 134 Coggeshall (Essex) 172, 174–9, 181–7 Coleman, D.C. 171 n.9, 175 n.23 and n.27, 183 Colyton (Devon) 27, 29, 32 n.73, 34, 34 n.88, 35, 40, 45, 154 n.62 common rights 10, 18, 84, 105 comparative advantage theory 171, 179 Congleton (Devon) 175, 178–9, 185–6 Corfe Castle (Dorset) 123 Cornwall 34, 35, 93 cottage industry 2, 183 see also proto-industry cottagers 91, 94 Courtaulds 171, 175 n.23 and n.27, 177, 185 Coventry 23, 175–7 Cowpe (Lancashire) 125 craftsmen 36, 37, 81, 94 Crawford, Patricia 121, 122, 124, 129, 138, 139 Creighton, Margaret 60 Cripplegate (London) 37 Cumberland 122 custom 5–6, 9–12, 14, 75–6, 81, 89, 94–5, 99, 102–18, 121–2, 122 n.17, 124, 176, 190, 206, 209, 210 Dalton, Michael 19, 25, 39, 89

Davies, David 158, 161 Davies, Mark 95 Defoe, Daniel 170 Denbighshire 91 Deptford (London) 52, 62 Derbyshire 7, 12, 39 n.111, 40, 66, 79, 109, 112, 115, 135 Devon 27, 30, 35, 171 n.5, 172, 180 n.53, 187, 188 n.91, 193 Dickens, Charles 163 diets 5 Dingwall, Robert 144, 147, 149 Docking (Norfolk) 157 doctors 141, 142, 145, 153 Dorchester (Dorset) 34, 35 Dorset 34, 35, 45, 123, 150, 152, 154, 164, 171 n.5, 172, 180, 187 Doveridge (Derbyshire) 39 n.111, 40 Dutch East India Company 49 Dutch landscape painting 78 Earle, Peter 48, 158 Earsham (Suffolk) 200, 201, 203 East Anglia 187, 200 East India Company 47–67 financial paternalism of 57–61 women’s business in the company 61–3 Eaton Socon (Bedfordshire) 27, 29, 39 n.111, 45, 148, 150, 151, 163, 164 economy of makeshifts 126, 156–62, 168 Eden, F.W. 114, 160, 161 Edgeworth, Maria 96 education 38, 39, 44, 65, 94 n.114 Edwards, J.K. 171, 171 n.9, 181 n.56 Elizabethan poor laws 15, 15 n.1, 19–20, 22, 24, 43 Elmstead (Essex) 27 enclosure 10, 84, 87, 98–9, 190, 191 epidemics 156, 162, 163 Essex 27, 40, 45, 89, 111, 128–9, 146, 152, 154–5, 157, 165, 171 n.5, 172, 174–80, 180 n.54, 182–3, 185–9, 198–9, 201, 203–6 Evans, Hugh 78, 91, 92, 92 n.106, 93, 95 Eynsford (Norfolk) 39 factories (manufactories) 13, 45, 112, 119, 121, 170–2, 174–9, 183–5, 187–9 see also factory system; mills labour see lace industry; mills, silk industry; textile industry; wages; women’s work; woollen trade factory system 50, 109 234

INDEX family economy 3, 8, 9, 10, 18, 124, 127 see also household economy; women’s work Fawsley (Northamptonshire) 30, 33 Feinstein, Charles 104 Felkin, William 112, 113 female labour 70, 75, 77, 103, 106, 108, 120–1, 176–8, 191, 191 n.2, 194, 197, 205 female labour market 12, 121, 124, 129, 130, 139, 140 see also women’s work, labour force participation feminism 74, 81 fertility 1, 76 Finch, Janet 155 Fissell, Mary 147 n.32, 155, 156 Flavell, John 90 Flegg (Norfolk) 35 folklorists 76, 77 Fordingbridge (Hampshire) 172 Foster, Janet 143 framework knitting 7, 11, 107, 114, 122 Frampton (Lincolnshire) 39 n.111, 40 Frazer, James 76, 95 French Wars see under Napoleonic Wars Frome (Somerset) 35 Garstang (Lancashire) 132–5 Gartree (Lincolnshire) 35 gender 2, 4–6, 8–10, 9 n.17, 12, 14, 18, 33, 34, 42, 48, 70, 75, 77, 80, 111, 118 n.68, 129, 145, 149–50, 196, 201, 206, 208 Gerhold, D. 177, 178 n.48, 179 n.50 Gilboy, Elizabeth 106 Gissing (Norfolk) 29 Glemsford (Suffolk) 183, 187 Gloucestershire, 171 n.5, 202–4, 210 n.54 Gnosall (Staffordshire) 39 n.111, 40 Great Bentley (Essex) 27 Hadleigh (Suffolk) 27, 35, 144 Hall, John 185, 186 Hall Car (Lancashire) 125 Halliwell (Lancashire) 136, 138 Halstead (Essex) 172, 179, 180 n.54, 182, 185, 186, 188, 188 n. 90 Hampshire, 35, 171 n.5, 172, 178, 180 n.53, 182, 193, 194, 196, 204, 210 Hardy, Thomas 4, 73 Hartismore (Suffolk) 159 Hawker, Jennifer 150, 152, 164 Heath, Chief Justice 23–5, 24 n.33, 28

Heathcoat, John 174, 175, 176, 182 n.63 Henfield (Sussex) 38, 39 n.111 Henley (Oxfordshire) 27 Herefordshire 122 Hertfordshire 22, 24, 27, 28, 30, 30 n.58, 36, 40, 44, 45, 46 n.139, 171 n.5, 183, 185, 186 Hey, David 79 Hinckford Hundred (Essex) 181 History Workshop movement 68 Hitchin (Hertfordshire) 36 Honiton (Devon) 172, 177, 182 hop growing 180 Horrell, Sarah 42, 104, 123, 162, 162 n.109 hospitals 141, 142, 145–6, 147, 157 Hostettler, Eve 68, 68 n.1, 70 house of correction 23, 25 households 10, 18, 19, 32, 38, 43, 46, 94 n.114, 124, 140, 147, 152, 155, 156, 162, 162 n.109, 167, 182 n.59, 188, 188 n.90 budgets 106, 122, 161, 162 n.109 economy 18, 43, 107, 123, 127, 129, 133, 139, 149, 160, 188 see also family economy Hufton, Olwen 47, 71 Hulme (Lancashire) 128 Humphries, Jane 42, 74, 104, 105, 121, 123, 162, 162 n.109, 167 n.30 Hunt, Margaret 56 illegitimacy 3, 4, 141, 152, 153 see also women, unmarried mothers India 50, 52, 53, 57, 64 industrial revolution 1, 10, 13, 103, 104, 106, 108, 117, 118, 170, 188, 189 industrial techniques 176 industrialisation 1, 2, 13, 40, 65, 79, 104, 120, 121, 139, 184, 189 see also urban, industry infirmaries see under hospitals Ingold, Tim 82 Isle of Dogs 52 Jacobean and Caroline judiciary 17 Jenkins, Geraint 90, 91 Jones, E.L. 170, 171, 174, 175, 179 Kelsall, Richard 122 Kenilworth (Warwickshire) 38 Kent 24, 27, 29, 35, 40, 151, 162, 163 Kettering (Northamptonshire) 4 King, Peter 123 235

INDEX Kirkham (Lancashire) 36, 37 Kussmaul, Ann 84, 203

Monmouthshire 32, 36 Montagu, Chief Justice 21, 22 Muldrew, Craig 72

labour costs 110, 171, 192 labour discipline see work, discipline labour markets 13, 105, 113, 126, 139 discrimination in 9, 103, 117–18, 118 n.68, 139, 207–8 see also female labour market; women’s work, labour force participation labour productivity 9, 74, 75, 82, 83, 85, 88, 102–18, 206–9 lace industry 11, 34, 49, 122, 159–61, 172, 174–7, 179, 182, 182 n.63, 187 lace schools 174 Lacock (Wiltshire) 27, 34 n.86, 40 Lamplugh (Westmorland) 123 Lancashire 21, 25, 28, 33, 36, 37, 68, 79, 119–40, 129 n.39 Layston (Hertfordshire) 44 Ledstone (Yorkshire) 109 Leek (Staffordshire) 177, 179 Leicester 112, 113 Leicestershire 31, 36, 38, 66, 111, 116 Leigh (Lancashire) 125 Lenches (Lancashire) 125 Le Roy Ladurie, Emmanuel 79 life-cycle 10, 22, 124, 125, 128, 130, 131, 132, 136, 140 Limehouse (London) 52, 59 Lincolnshire 34, 35, 39 n.111 London, 21, 39 n.111, 40, 41, 47–66, 83, 133, 147, 155, 158, 163, 170, 176–8, 178 n.48, 179, 183 Lown, J. 177, 188 Macclesfield (Cheshire) 178, 184, 185 McRae, Andrew 17 Maggs, Christopher 149 magistrates 17–20, 23–5, 28–34, 28 n.53, 36, 38–40, 43, 77, 93, 99, 122 Manchester 163 Mannhardt, Wilhelm 76 medical poor relief 141–69 see also nurses Melville, Herman 65 Mendelson, Sara 121, 122, 124, 129, 138, 139 Midlands 12, 80, 84, 97, 106, 109, 118 n.68, 119, 122, 176, 189, 207 n.43 mills 12, 45, 109, 112, 115, 174–6, 185–8 miners 94 Mitchell, James 76 mobility 75

Napoleonic Wars 86, 160, 165, 190, 191, 201 New Poor Law 11, 11 n.20, 142, 143, 152, 191 n.2 Newbury (Berkshire) 172, 177, 178, 182 Newgate Prison 104 Newhallhey (Lancashire) 125 Newport Pagnell (Buckinghamshire) 172, 174 Nicholas, S. 104 Norfolk 23, 28–33, 35–8, 41, 157, 159, 200–1, 201 n. 27, 203, 205 Norling, Lisa 48 Northamptonshire 4, 30, 32, 33, 46 n.139 Northaw (Hertfordshire) 45 Norwich 144, 149 n.45, 158, 164, 171, 181 n.56 Nottinghamshire 31, 32 nuptiality 1 see also women, marriage nurses 12, 13, 14, 141–69 characteristics of 142–3, 150–6, 158 earnings 147, 151, 152, 153, 156–62 status and skill 144, 162–4, 167 see also medical poor relief occupational censuses 181 Old Poor Law 11, 12, 13, 16, 133, 141, 147–9, 165–7 Oldknow, Samuel 115 orphans 19, 20, 27, 32 n.73, 38, 141, 184 see also apprenticeship; children’s work Ottaway, Susannah 150 n.51, 154 Ottery St Mary (Devon) 172 overseers see under parish officers Overton, Mark 83 Owen, Trefor 91 Oxfordshire 84, 85, 171 n.5, 172, 180 n.53 Oxley, D. 104 Paris 85 parish officers 13, 17–20, 20 n.17, 22–3, 26–8, 27 n.47, 28, 28 n.48, 29–30, 32–4, 36, 36 n.96, 38, 40, 43–5, 44 n.132, 46, 123–4, 128 n.36, 130, 133, 138, 147–50, 153–5, 157, 163–4, 167–8, 184 parish vestry 124, 128–38, 131 n.47, 140, 155, 156, 184

236

INDEX Parliament 20 n.17, 177 Parry-Jones, Daniel 93, 94, 95 patriarchy 2, 89 paupers 119–40, 141–69 see also apprenticeship Pelling, Margaret 142, 143, 150, 158, 158 n.81, 163, 164 Pennell, Sarah 89, 156 n.74 Pepys, Samuel 41 Pinchbeck, Ivy 1, 107, 191, 191 n.2, 197 Pitt, William 188 poor law allowances 138 see also medical poor relief; poor rates and poor relief expenditure Poor Law Board 5, 6 Poor Law Commission 5, 6 Poor Law Report 181, 187, 188 poor rates and poor relief expenditure 19, 22–3, 26–7, 33, 38–9, 43, 45, 129, 165, 166, 167, 183, 186 Popham, Chief Justice 20, 21 n.19 Potterne (Wiltshire) 35 poverty 22, 44, 47, 124, 125, 126, 135, 160 prices 30, 92, 92 n.106, 116, 171, 199 privy council 17, 22, 23, 28, 29, 33 prostitution 3, 187 proto-industry 7, 119 Puddletown (Dorset) 154 Pyder (Cornwall) 35 Rafferty, Ann Marie 144, 147, 149 Ratcliffe (London) 59 ratepayers see under poor rates and poor relief expenditure Ravenstonedale (Cumbria) 125 Rediker, Marcus 52, 56 Rendall, Jane 177 Rickmansworth (Hertfordshire) 185 Rogers, Thorold 78 Rose, Mary 42 Rutland 29 Rye (Sussex) 37 Saffron Walden (Essex) 198 sailors 48, 52–3, 56, 65 St Helena, island of 53, 61 Sayer, Karen 73 Schwarz, Leonard 105 Segalen, Martine 77 settlement laws (1662 and 1691) 16, 16 n.4, 20, 23, 39, 39 n.111 sexual division of labour 68, 69, 70, 71, 106, 118, 151, 196

Shadwell (London) 59 Sharpe, Pamela 103, 111, 121, 147, 154 n.62, 180, 199 Shaw-Taylor, Leigh 159 n.90 Sheepy Magna (Leicestershire) 111 Shefford (Bedfordshire) 147–53, 153 n.61, 155–9, 159 n.89, 160–1, 161 n.106, 162–8 Sheppard, Julia 143 Sherborne (Dorset) 172, 175, 177, 178, 179, 183 shipbuilding 3, 51, 52 ships 49, 50–2, 56, 61 shipyards 50, 61, 63, 63 n.76 Shorne (Kent) 27, 35 Shropham (Norfolk) 35 Shropshire 84, 92 Shrowley-in-Hatton (Warwickshire) 45 Shute, Thomas 174, 176, 185 silk industry 3, 48, 146, 171–2, 171 n.5 and n.9, 174–9, 174 n.18, 178 n.45 and n.48, 183–8, 188 n.90 Slack, Paul 16 Smith, Adam 96 Smith, Bonnie 73 Smith, Richard 125, 130, 155, 159 n.90 Snell, Keith 180, 191, 203 social policy 17, 21, 25, 39, 144 soldiers 64, 181, 199 Sokoll, T. 128, 154, 157, 187 Solihull (Warwickshire) 26 Somerset 24, 25, 34, 35, 45, 171 n.5, 194, 196, 202, 203, 204, 208 n.45, 210 South Erpingham (Norfolk) 38 Speechley, Helen 202, 203, 208 n.45, 210 Speenhamland 6, 129 n.38, 165 Staffordshire 25, 39 n.111, 40, 79, 80 standard of living 1, 43, 103–4, 105, 105 n.15, 118, 165 see also wages steam power 175 Stoney Stratford (Buckinghamshire) 174, 175 Strassman, Diana 74 Street (Somerset) 45 Sudbury (Suffolk) 27 Suffolk 27, 35, 144, 157, 159, 171 n.5, 178, 183, 198, 200, 201 Surrey 29, 36, 158, 171 n.5, 208 Sussex 29, 36, 37, 38, 39 n. 111, 88 Swaffham (Norfolk) 157 Tarleton (Lancashire) 130–6 237

INDEX technology 3, 5, 10, 12, 107, 119, 191, 196, 208 see also agricultural labour, hand tools Terling (Essex) 45, 154 textile industry 3, 22, 34, 106, 112, 119, 122, 171, 177, 181 n.56, 182 n.63, 189 Thingoe (Suffolk) 157 Thirsk, Joan 58, 61, 79, 88 Thomson, David 125 n.28, 154 Thornborough (Yorkshire) 111 Tiverton (Devon) 172, 174, 175, 176, 177, 182 n.63 Torrington (Devon) 35 towns see under urban trading ports 50, 64 transaction-cost theory 171, 171 n.9 Tredegar (Wales) 7 Trinder, B. 189 Troutbeck (Westmorland) 123 truck 6, 6 n.8 Tysoe (Warwickshire) 163 urban 2, 13, 45, 75, 79, 86, 105, 125, 133, 143 economies 139, 170–89 growth 83, 185–6 industry 170–89, see also industrialisation Usk (Monmouthshire) 33 vagrants 21, 38 Valenze, Deborah 73 Vardi, Liana 75, 75 n.24 Verdon, Nicola 70, 159 n.90 Versluysen, M. 145, 150 Vickery, Amanda 69, 72 Victorian literature and art 8 Victorian values 3 Voth, Hans-Joachim 42, 112 wages 1, 4–10, 12, 14, 68, 70, 72, 74, 74 n.19, 77, 85, 87, 89, 99–100, 102–18, 121–4, 122 n.17, 123 n.23, 138–41, 145–7, 152, 157, 161–3, 165, 167, 176–8, 183–7, 190, 192–3, 196–209, 196 n.14, 198 n.18, 200 n.24 see also standard of living children’s 184 difficulty of measuring 103–4, 110 female–male wage gap 103, 109–11, 115, 210 male 7, 9, 52–3, 56–8, 60–1, 70, 77,

83–5, 89, 99–100, 102, 106, 108–9, 111–18, 129, 133, 165, 181, 206–9 non-monetary payments 5–7, 10, 19, 89, 114–15, 125, 130, 141, 144 ‘prices’ 4, 5 regulation of 17, 84 Wakefield (Yorkshire) 45 Wall, Richard 123 Wapping (London) 59 Warner, F.W. 171, 171 n.8 and n.9, 172 n.11, 178 n.48 Waswo, Richard 93 Watford (Hertfordshire) 185 Wattisfield (Suffolk) 27 Webster, Charles 144, 147, 149 West Indies 51 Whitchurch (Hampshire) 172, 178 White, Rosemary 143 Whitleigh (Somerset) 35 Willmott, Thomas 174, 175, 178 n.45 and n. 48, 179, 184 Wiltshire 27, 31, 32, 33, 34, 34 n. 85, 35, 40, 171 n.5 Witney (Oxfordshire) 172, 174 Wivenhoe (Essex) 27, 155 Woodward, Donald 69, 102, 110 women deserted 124, 162 married 2 n.2, 17 n.20, 56, 59, 61, 65–6, 104, 111, 113–14, 122, 124, 127, 131–2, 153, 153 n.61, 154–5, 161–2, 162 n.109, 168, 188 n.91, 202, 207 remarriage of 48, 59 single 47, 63, 64, 87, 90, 111, 115, 122, 124, 161, 202–3, 207 unmarried mothers 141, 153, 162, see also illegitimacy widowed 47, 59–61, 63, 65, 111, 141, 153, 153 n.61 women’s work in agriculture 3, 4, 5, 12, 68–101, 159, 190–211 in business, see under East India Company, women’s business in company casualisation 205 contributions to family income 18, 85, 161, 181, 195, 195 n.13 day labour 92, 97–8, 108, 110, 111–13, 118, 157, 190–211 in domestic service 3, 10, 105–6, 116–17, 158, 161, 192, see also apprenticeship, to housewifery 238

INDEX farm servants 5, 77, 114, 117, 193, 193 n.8, 203 gender divisions see under sexual division of labour gleaning 42, 87–8, 97 n.123, 123, 157, 159, 201 n.26, 210 haymaking 97, 108, 159, 191, 195–8, 198 n.18, 200 n.24, 201–5, 210 hours of 1, 7, 103, 106, 108, 109, 111–13, 115, 122, 145 n.22, 186, 206–7, 208 n.46 labour force participation 2 n.2, 104, 119, 121, 123, 124, 129, 130, 135, 139, 140, 181, 200, 207, 210, see also labour markets, discrimination midwives 14, 141, 144 restricted by reproductive functions 18, 71, 135, 207 seasonality of 1, 6, 10, 31, 37, 70, 73, 77, 94, 96, 100, 150, 157, 158, 161, 180, 190–2, 194–5, 200–2, 210 spinning 11, 33, 34, 36, 36 n.96, 42, 43, 52, 109, 112, 136, 159, 160, 181, 205 unpaid 8, 144, 145 n.22

see also agricultural labour; factories; lace industry; mills; nurses; poor law allowances; silk industry; textile industry; wages; woollen trade woollen trade 3, 33, 181–3, 182 n.63, 187–9 Worcestershire, 24, 79 work, general discipline 32, 40, 43 migrant workers 75, 75 n.21 and n.23, 78 piecework 57, 87, 205–8 underemployment 104, 165 unemployment 10, 70 n.5, 104, 133, 142, 165, 180, 191 see also wages; women’s work workhouses 11 n.20, 114, 117, 133, 135, 136, 142, 152–3 Wrightson, Keith 18, 18 n.10 York 83 Yorkshire 29, 30, 34, 35, 40, 45, 101, 109, 111, 175 n. 25 Young, Arthur 84, 85, 88, 95, 114

239