The significance of printed primary sources such as Royal Commissions to the study of rural women's work and wages has long been recognised. The scarcity of archival and personal records directly relating to poor labouring women bestows further value to documentary evidence. Early historians of rural England such as William Hasbach relied heavily on published sources, and we saw in Chapter 1 the results of Ivy Pinchbeck's comprehensive scrutiny of material pertaining to women's employment printed between 1750 and 1850. Historians continue to make use of such documents today. One prominent example is Karen Sayer's cultural critique of the representations of rural women in nineteenth-century Parliamentary Papers.

This chapter, then, does not introduce any new or unworked sources. It does however offer a fresh approach to the way historians can use such material. I have chosen a number of key printed sources to analyse, beginning with an examination of the household budget accounts of the labouring poor collected by David Davies and Frederick Eden in the 1790s. The General Views of the Agriculture of each of the counties of England will then be assessed for the possible insights they offer into the subject of female employment at the beginning of the nineteenth century. A number of well-known parliamentary commissions form the basis of the remainder of the chapter: specifically the 1834 Poor Law Report, the 1843 and 1867 to 1870 Royal Commissions on the employment of women and children in agriculture will be considered in detail.