Adam Smith began his Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations by arguing that the division of labour was the key to the prosperity of advanced economies. It made the production of goods far more efficient, allowing the creation of cheap commodities that could be enjoyed by everyone. ‘The woollen coat,’ he writes, ‘which covers the day labourer, as coarse and rough as it may appear, is the produce of the joint labour of a great multitude of workmen.’ He listed the shepherds, wool sorters, carders, dyers, spinners, weavers, fullers and dressers who ‘must all join their different arts in order to complete even this homely production’. The division of labour wove all these people together in unknowing co-operation, such that ‘the very meanest person in a civilised country’ had at their disposal better stuff than ‘many an African king, the absolute masters of the lives and liberties of ten thousand naked savages’. Civilisation itself consisted in the miracle of specialisation.
Smith was far less interested in what the division of labour looked like in practice. His breezy lists of workmen elide the generations of clever hands and centuries of folk knowledge required to make that coarse woollen coat. To begin with, you needed to know a shearling from a gimmer lamb, or hire someone who did. In 1611 Henry Bankes employed two shepherds, Durington and Blackwell, to value some lambs in Yorkshire; it turned out he was overpaying by sixpence a head. Then you had to set your sheep in a pasture, and send someone, perhaps a young servant like Jacob Jackson of Hurworth in County Durham, to mark their ears so that you knew which were yours (theft was common), and paint them with tar to keep them warm through the winter and spring. In June they would be brought down from the pastures and washed in a river before being sent to the shearing men. If you couldn’t afford sheep of your own, you could go into the fields after the clip and gather the leftover scraps.
Once the wool was off, it needed to be washed. Christine Cooper had to cull ‘about seven todds of very coarse and feeble tarry’ wool from tegs, scouring off the tar and sorting it for carding. The wool wasted in the process was called ‘twickings’ – another chance for the gleaners. Once carded and the fibres smoothed into a fluffy substance known as ‘batt’, the wool could be spun into yarn. Spinning was women’s labour, and women were doing it constantly: in street doorways, while chatting to their neighbours, in the back rooms of their houses while they watched over their infants and kept cauldrons of ale from boiling over. Low-status and badly paid, spinning was so ubiquitous it was simply called ‘work’; the distaff was a symbol of womanhood. Twenty-year-old Joanna Pittman of Cullompton in Devon earned sixpence a week spinning at a neighbour’s house. She was paid by the week ‘but may go from them at every week’s end if she please’. Historians have estimated that between 50 and 65 per cent of the labour required to turn wool into cloth was made up of carding and spinning.
Only after the wool became yarn could it be entrusted to male artisans, and even then with some misgivings. Women were rarely involved in the relatively well-paid labour of weaving, but after hours at the distaff, they knew their stuff. Mary Dawdon of Masham in Yorkshire gave eleven pounds of yarn to James Thompson in August 1695, but when he returned the finished product she was sure he had cheated her. ‘[It] being fine wool she did expect to have again eight yards of fine cloth, the list of the said run web being all white, but … Thompson did bring [her] a much coarser woollen web with a black list, [she] being very certain that it was not her web.’ Once woven, the cloth had to be ‘litted’ or dyed – the spinster Jane Browne was hired to dye some wool green, blue or white in 1630 – and if it was one of the loose-woven ‘old draperies’ such as kersey, it had to be fulled (or ‘tucked’) to draw the fibres closer together, and napped to remove loose hairs from the surface of the cloth, ready for cutting.
Like weaving, tailoring was learned through apprenticeship and consolidated through craft guilds. As such, it was the near exclusive preserve of men. Women often mended clothes and made undergarments such as hose and stockings for their own families, but like spinning, this work was considered lowly and wasn’t well-paid. Tailors could be found everywhere, but they mostly worked in towns. Sometimes they travelled to the homes of their customers, especially the wealthier ones, to fit them in situ. John Read worked ‘at one goodman Mann his house at Thorpland’ in Norfolk in February 1661, where he accidentally left some taffety ribbon and an ounce of silk on the hall table. The poor had to make do with a quick job done in the tailor’s workshop. Joan Cowling sent ‘shag and stuff … to one Edward Manley a tailor in Tiverton to make into a coat for her child in 1660’. It wasn’t much to look at, perhaps, but at least the child was warm.
If Smith brought the woollen coat into the history of economic thought, it was Marx who made it famous. As the literary historian Peter Stallybrass has pointed out, there were good materialist reasons for this. Living in penurious exile in London during the 1850s and 1860s, Marx often had to hock his greatcoat for cash when his credit with the greengrocer ran out. In February 1852 he wrote to Engels: ‘A week ago I reached the pleasant point where I was unable to go out for want of the coats I have in pawn.’ When he had to explain commodities in the first chapter of Das Kapital, it was a coat that came to mind. The garment was not what it seemed. Its value wasn’t defined by its use in keeping someone warm, or in making them appear respectable enough to enter the reading rooms of the British Museum. Under capitalism, a coat was defined by its exchange value – the equivalent of ten pounds of tea, two ounces of gold, half a tonne of iron. The labours of the many dozens of people who had produced it had been abstracted, appropriated and ultimately obscured in the commodity form.
Marx was a keen student of early modern English history – he was reading John Fortescue, Thomas More and Francis Bacon in the British Museum – and it was in this period that he located the decisive shift towards an economy organised around the production of commodities. The many women spinning yarn on their porches may not have regarded themselves as paragons of unalienated labour, but for Marx they and other pre-capitalist workers enjoyed a relative degree of autonomy. Labour was once an organic part of the peasant household, done in the interest of subsistence. Certainly many people in early modern England worked for wages and everyone bought things at market. But most grew at least some of their own food, gathered their own wool and made their own clothes. They had a much more direct stake in the means of production.
In Marx’s telling, this old order began to break down in the 16th century. The sheep were to blame. More had complained in Utopia that they ‘eat up and swallow down the very men themselves’. High wool prices induced a greedy new class of landlords to convert arable lands to pasture, enclose the commons and drive the peasants from the countryside, transforming them into a class of landless labourers. Marx agreed, acerbically, with Smith and other political economists that the peasantry had been liberated from the shackles of protectionist feudal society: it was indeed now ‘free from the old relations of clientship, bondage and servitude’ – and also ‘free of all belongings and possessions’ and ‘dependent on the sale of its labour capacity’. Capitalist society, for Marx, was organised by wage dependence. The threat of starvation was the only way to force people to work – ‘freely’ – under conditions of alienated labour.
For the past century and more, wage labour has been central to the way historians have charted economic development in early modern England. This is not only due to Marx’s influence. As far as premodern sources go, it is relatively easy to get information on wages. They appear in financial accounts and other sources pre-packaged as hard numbers. They can be tabulated and graphed to demonstrate trajectories of change. One of the earliest empirical studies of English economic history, conducted by the Liberal politician J.E. Thorold Rogers in the 1860s, attempted to compare wages and prices across six centuries, in order to trace the way ‘the labourer’s condition’ had changed over time. He saw the 15th century as a ‘golden age’ when workers were better off, relatively, than they had been before or since. ‘Would that we could unite the opulence of the 15th century to the civilisation of the 19th,’ he lamented.
Since the 1960s, historians have continued to gather and refine ever more data on wages and prices to pursue hypotheses about England’s precocious march towards capitalist modernity. Recent estimates have found that GDP per capita marched in step with low population growth between 1500 and 1650, before jumping by 90 per cent between the 1650s and 1770s – a rapid surge in the productivity of labour. The historian Jan de Vries identified an ‘industrious revolution’ taking place across Europe at this time, following on the heels of a consumer boom in the Renaissance. As people became increasingly obsessed with buying nice stuff, they were willing to spend much more of their time working for the wages required to buy it, driving up productivity and stimulating the take-off to industrial capitalism. It is Marx backwards: people driven to labour because of a new fetish for commodities.
Yet there remain significant problems with using data on wages and the organisation of labour to understand the surge in economic growth in the 17th and 18th centuries. This is partly because the data itself is not as sound as it first appears. Premodern records are often incomplete, so historians must make assumptions. In order to calculate annual wages that can be used as the basis for measures of productivity or living standards, for instance, it has often been assumed that people worked a five-day week. Yet we also know that work patterns varied a great deal by season and there was no strict dichotomy between days for labour and days for leisure. Most servants, living in the homes of their employers, were given only half a day off at most. Sunday was a day of rest, but not for everyone: Benjamin Hooper, a shoemaker’s apprentice in Somerset, ran away in 1650 ‘because his master did make him work upon the sabbath days’, cleaning shoes, ‘packing of wares’ and managing the shop. There is a mismatch between the clean threads of modern econometrics and the rough batt of 17th-century labour relations.
A great deal of work, moreover, yielded compensation in forms other than money wages. In 1669 John Corker, a cobbler in Rotherham, was receiving pieces of scrap iron in exchange for ‘mending shoes for the workmen’ and their wives at a forge. He took the iron three miles down the road to a blacksmith in the village of Whiston, whose servant and apprentice weighed and ‘presently wrought [it] up’ in the shop. Fishermen of South Huish in Devon were accustomed to receiving their payment in the form of the catch itself: as many as forty men stood on the shore to haul in the seines of mackerel, and each received his share. The time of year when most rural people worked for wages was the autumn harvest, when every spare hand was needed to reap, gather and bind the crop: customary forms of payment were honoured, as labourers received food and drink from their employers.
Wage data, naturally, only tells us the kinds of labour that were done for wages. And yet in a premodern economy organised around household production, a vast portion of work – most of it done by women – was never compensated and only occasionally recognised. In the 1680s John Wood’s neighbours noted archly that his wife had been entrusted with very few duties: ‘only with the necessary affairs of housekeeping incumbent of a wife to look after … as the taking care to provide meat and other necessaries for the family and the making of butter and cheese and such like’ – the small matter of countless hours at the dairy churn. Anthony Fitzherbert wrote in 1523 of ‘an olde common saying, that seldom doth the husbande thrive without leve of his wyf’.
Historians concerned with measuring growth haven’t been generous in their recognition of women’s work (even today the UN refuses to include housework and care work in its calculations of GDP). In 2015 a research team conducting a study into English economic growth between the 14th and 19th centuries estimated that women were able to spend only about 30 per cent of their time on income-generating labour, and adjusted their estimates of productivity accordingly. Gary Becker, who won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 1992, wrote that married women ‘traditionally have devoted much of their time to childbearing and other domestic activities’ while their husbands were out developing markets. Such devotion: women were simply too busy with the babies to pitch in with the transition to capitalism. Reproductive labour could not be part of any narrative of economic progress because it was supposed to be timeless. Writing in the 1960s, E.P. Thompson suggested that ‘despite school times and television times … the mother of young children has … not yet altogether moved out of the conventions of “pre-industrial” society.’ Without the labour of social reproduction – nursing infants, caring for children, cooking meals, laundering clothes, making beds, tending to sickness – there could be no wage labourers marching off to the fields and the workshops. Unwaged and often unrecorded, ‘women’s work’ has proved too difficult to measure.
It is the great originality of The Experience of Work, a research project led by Jane Whittle and now published with her research team Mark Hailwood, Taylor Aucoin and Hannah Robb, to have found a solution to this problem. Rather than looking at financial records that yield data on wages and prices, they have turned to oral testimonies given before law courts, in which witnesses narrated the circumstances leading up to a crime or conflict. These sources don’t tell us much about wages or prices – they contain relatively few figures – but reveal a great deal about everyday life. By mimicking a modern time-use survey, Whittle and her colleagues have developed a methodology that accounts much more accurately for the texture of early modern work. A young woman testified that she was milking her father’s cows when she observed a suspected thief up to no good; a carpenter described his part in reaping the corn harvest for a dispute over tithes; a housewife on an errand encountered a man so drunk he had fallen off his horse (he was later slandered by an alewife). Using such testimonies, the research team has assembled a database of thousands of ‘work tasks’ that were mentioned in passing by witnesses.
Witness testimonies have long been used by social historians to uncover aspects of life that otherwise went unrecorded. A deposition in a Cheshire theft case from 1662 has a rural butcher’s wife describing a visit to a nearby village before dawn to fetch a light for her husband; the candle she took was ‘about an inch longer than her middle finger’, she said. Such incidental details speak quietly of a world that has passed forever out of being, but it’s often hard to know what to make of them. The pointillist ingenuity of The Experience of Work has transformed them into a composite portrait of working life in early modern England. People were born ‘to lyve in labour and pain, and the most parte of their tyme with the swete of ther face’, Edmund Dudley wrote in The Tree of Commonwealth in 1509. But what a thing to see the sweat glistening on the brow.
This project must have been an absurdly difficult undertaking. Testimonies are complex, unwieldly sources. They are written in abbreviated forms of Latin and English in a ‘secretary’ script that was designed for speed; single letters often stand in for whole words; sometimes the ink has faded or blotted to the point of illegibility. Between them, the team read forty thousand testimonies. For each one they had to decide whether any work had been mentioned, and if it had, to note down names, ages, locations and numerous other pieces of identifying and circumstantial evidence. They are wryly aware of the irony of labouring on labour: the conclusion opens with a story from 1637 about another Jane Whittell. It took two large funding grants and nearly a decade of work for the researchers to compile all their data. I don’t know how many ounces of gold or yards of linen that makes, but it was certainly worth the expenditure.
Rather than defining ‘work’ crudely in terms of wages, the research team adopted the more expansive definition developed by the Canadian economist Margaret Reid in the 1930s. Reid argued that any unpaid domestic labour that could have been hired or otherwise purchased ought to be included within calculations of productivity. The hour spent watching a child or doing the laundry now had a value: it was the same as the cost of paying a childminder or using a laundromat. With this ‘third party criterion’, as Reid called it, Whittle and her team could quantify work such as Cicely Large collecting fuel to heat the lye that she would use to ‘buck’ – bleach – her household linens; or Agnes Pople going to the fields after dark to gather thistles and teasels for brewing, ‘having no fit time to go by day for that one of her children was sick in an ague’; or Isabel Ballard taking her one-year-old daughter to a malthouse, leaving her on the straw in front of the kiln while she stirred the grain.
The data from the testimonies isn’t perfect. There were fears that some witnesses were paid to testify. It was said of Robert Stuckye in 1604 that he was a ‘very poor man … that doth use now and then to cut a stick out of other men’s hedges’ – his word could not be trusted. Some had ulterior motives. In 1585 a fuller called Edward Potter acted as a witness in a defamation case and claimed he had been working in his shop when an argument took place in a nearby garden; it was later pointed out that he couldn’t possibly have seen it from that angle. Few people came before a court willing to mention sex work or other illicit forms of labour, while legal records generated a disproportionate number of mentions of clerical work. More problematic still is that male witnesses were less likely than their female counterparts to mention women’s work. As women testified relatively less frequently before the courts, a systematic gender imbalance emerges in the data: only 27.8 per cent of the recorded work tasks were performed by women. Whittle’s team makes a conservative estimate that they did half of all work – this is a little less than what we know to be the case in present-day non-industrialised economies – and adjust their figures accordingly.
The results are startling. While women certainly undertook vastly more of the recorded tasks for housework (85.8 per cent) and care work (82.9 per cent), these two categories of labour took up less than 40 per cent of the total time they spent working. They were more often engaged in agricultural work – especially milking cows but also other forms of animal husbandry, along with weeding, sowing and harvesting crops – than they were in care work; they were more often engaged in crafts and construction (7.7 per cent) than they were in food processing (3.9 per cent). It is clear that economic historians have vastly overestimated the amount of time that women spent on domestic labour. This is not because men were doing it: their contributions to care work and housework made up just 6.5 per cent of their total work time. But there was not so much domestic work to do as previously assumed, and women combined what there was with other forms of labour – all that spinning – both inside and outside the household.
Perhaps most strikingly of all, the data demonstrates that women were far more often engaged in paid employment than historians have tended to assume. Although the work-task methodology doesn’t capture wage rates, the research team counted instances of work done ‘for another’. This is a clever workaround, because it doesn’t make a distinction between work done for money wages and for other forms of compensation. Housewives often undertook odd jobs for their neighbours – cooking meals, providing healthcare and doing laundry to make a little extra money on the side. The majority of work done ‘for another’ on Sundays fell to women, and the majority of housework ‘for another’ was done by female servants, whose wages (such as they were) are hard to track and measure, as they were often paid partly in the food, clothes and lodgings they received from their employers.
They were worked fearfully hard. In 1637 Lucretia Harward of Bale in Norfolk was accused of pilfering from a fellow servant. She gave a lengthy testimony to the Quarter Sessions explaining, in essence, that she was too busy to steal:
She was employed in tending the copper, the other maid being then busy in the same room; she further saith that she went into the house to fetch the maid her dinner and forthwith returned again with the same and then without any intermission set on liquor for the mixing of paste which took her about one hour’s time, that done she forthwith gave attendance upon the heating of the oven and also in helping the maid to save her beer which was in danger to be lost, about the house next she repaired instantly into the kitchen again which she dressed up … attended upon the children, and then by reason of the other maid’s employment, went a-milking.
Lodging young women – the work-task data includes girls of ten – in other people’s homes and expecting them to work for almost nothing often led, unsurprisingly, to abuse by their employers. Margaret Hargreaves had gone to work as ‘a spinster and servant or wet nurse’ for John Shakleton, and had been in service for less than a year before she became pregnant by him. She moved back in with her sister and John sent gifts: thirty shillings and some packages of butter. But he would not agree to provide maintenance for the baby, so Margaret left it to be cared for by the parish.
The data reveals much about children’s work. Thomas Britten, at four years old, was trusted to carry messages from his mother to his aunt, sent to fetch her so that she could come and buy a parcel of yarn. Anne Saunders was the same age, or perhaps younger, when she was given a goose and a gander by her father, for ‘the keeping and increase of the said geese’. Children were often tasked with fetching water, and the records of coroners’ inquests are strewn with the consequences. Elizabeth Wilkinson, aged four, was sent to fill a cup of water from the pond at the back of the house and drowned; William Kembold, six, to draw water from the River Brett; and on and on, in a long roster of sorrow. Older children were bidden to do more obviously dangerous work. Thomas Hubbard, aged ten, was given a whip and told to conduct a horse-drawn plough at Dennington in Suffolk; he stumbled on a clod and the colt started, kicking him in the head. If they survived these early experiences of work, adults seem to have looked back on them with a hint of nostalgia. William Selleck, a Somerset labourer, recalled in 1575 that 45 years past, ‘when he was but a little boy able to carry into the field a bottle and a bag with provision for work folks … [he] carried bread and cheese to the workmen at mowing of the corn that was then grown there.’
Though Whittle’s team has drawn on sources from 1500 to 1700, the data doesn’t show much variation over time. It’s surprising to find a basic continuity in work done ‘for another’ over the period (it actually fell slightly, from 36 per cent to 35 per cent) when we might expect a large increase concomitant with the emergence of a more productive wage-working proletariat. The authors disclaim the data’s value for tracking economic development, as any change is more likely to reflect the shifting patterns of lawsuits that came before the courts. Theft cases, for example, seem to give particular prominence to work-tasks associated with commerce and food-processing, but they can be collected only from the late 16th century because fewer Quarter Sessions records survive from other periods. Yet if the data has relatively little to say about when the productivity of work began to change, it does suggest this is not the only question to ask – and perhaps not even the best one.
For one thing, the work-task method helps to suggest something that historians have long suspected, which is that few individuals – even those male artisans apprenticed into a particular craft – practised just one kind of work. In 1600 a 21-year-old in Wiltshire called William Ricketts told a church court that he was ‘a carpenter, and doth that way wholly employ himself’ before going on to testify in some detail about the work he had done at the previous harvest, setting hay to dry, making it up into haycocks and putting aside the right amount for tithe collection. Although there was a degree of overlap, occupational titles could be misleading about the work someone actually did. Craftsmen may have been specialist artisans, but they tended to spend at least as much of their time buying materials and selling their products as they did making them. Rural labourers spent just over a third of their time on agricultural tasks, and were disproportionately involved in transport and logistics. The work of carrying things around has always been precarious. In June 1652 Katherine Singard told of walking eight miles home to Great Budworth, Cheshire, carrying a sack of meal on her head. She stopped off in an alehouse to ‘beg some small drink’.
The Experience of Work is valuable precisely because it offers a view of the early modern economy that isn’t defined by productivity and growth but in the terms conceived by the ‘great multitude of workmen’ themselves. Wages weren’t always at the forefront of their minds. In 1720 Malcolm McGibbon completed a ditching job in exchange for the cancellation of a debt, half a cow, a mixture of English and Scottish coins and a pine board ‘for his son’s coffin’. What does grief contribute to GDP? If there is a risk that we can become too sentimental about premodern work, that is the price of a focus on experience. The authors conclude with an injunction against romanticising the pre-capitalist world, before suggesting that ‘we should remember what has been lost as well as gained over the centuries.’
In 1887, the year that Volume 1 of Das Kapital was first translated into English, William Morris finished writing The Dream of John Ball, in which he imagined himself trying to explain the emergence of capitalism to the radical leader of the 1381 revolt. ‘England [shall] see a new thing, for whereas hitherto men have lived on the land and by it, the land shall no longer need them, but many sheep and a few shepherds shall make wool grow to be sold for money.’ But Ball can’t get his head around the idea of a proletariat. A villein might not be free, but at least he was protected by his lord; a freeman had his own land to live from. ‘Wonderful is this thou tellest of a free man with nought whereby to live!’ Morris has to explain it all again: one day there would be no serfdom and men would sell their labour without any guarantee of subsistence. Ball accuses him of talking in riddles, and laughs. ‘The man may well do what thou sayest and live, but he may not do it and live a free man.’ Morris concedes the point. ‘“Thou sayest sooth,” said I.’