In 1626 Stephen Morvell, a chapman from Colne in Lancashire, travelled to Preston fair to purchase linen. Having bought a large quantity, he returned to the inn where he was lodging to measure it and noticed that he had lost his purse. Margaret Slater, the wife of an alehouse-keeper from Ribchester, from whom he had purchased linen earlier that day, was present in the same room. Stephen’s purse contained three particularly distinctive foreign coins, known as ‘cardecus’, and later the news that these coins were circulating in Ribchester led Stephen to suspect Margaret had stolen his purse.Footnote ¹ Margaret’s neighbours testified that she had spent an unusually large amount of money at the fair, and by her own admission ‘she paid for flax 12s, for a jerkin-cloth 2s, for exchange of a pewter flagon 18d, for 2 geese 18d and lent 12d to Henry Dewhurst’. She explained that she had brought some of her spending money from home, ‘and sold yarn for the rest’. However, this did not account for the foreign coins. Christopher Norcrosse recalled that Margaret’s husband, John, had come into Thomas Ireland’s alehouse in Ribchester with a cardecus, which he had exchanged for 13.5d. Another cardecus was received by George Rawcliffe of Ribchester for butcher’s meat sold to Margaret.Footnote ²

As well as recording information about work tasks, depositions are rich in evidence about spatial locations. From the case of Stephen Morvell’s lost purse, we learn that Morvell travelled 27 miles to Preston from the Pennine town of Colne to attend the fair. The journey was far enough that he needed to lodge at an inn overnight. As a chapman, it is likely his trip was to purchase cloth that he could then retail closer to home. Margaret Slater travelled 10 miles from Ribchester to Preston, a return journey that could be accomplished in a day, to sell yarn and cloth and buy flax and other goods. Thus, fairs drew people in from the wider region, and commerce caused people to travel from town to town, and from smaller settlements such as Ribchester to larger towns such as Preston. Although no one in the case is described spinning or weaving, the prominence of flax, yarn, and linen cloth in this case is distinctive to Lancashire, an important region for English linen production.Footnote ³ The case also offers glimpses of interior spaces where work was carried out: the public room in the inn where Stephen Morvell measured his cloth, and the alehouses of Ribchester which not only sold beer but allowed coins to be exchanged along with gossip. This chapter looks at all these themes, exploring regional differences, contrasts between rural and urban work, transport and travel, inside and outside workspaces, and privacy.

Spatial location is an essential element of the experience of work. Although not always explicitly acknowledged, location is also essential to how historians view work and economic change in early modern England. Industrialisation and urbanisation from the late eighteenth century onwards involved the creation of specialist workspaces which separated work and home. These included not only factories but banks, offices, hospitals, workhouses, and non-residential retail shops. The growth of towns and industry, and the relative decline in agricultural work, reduced the proportion of work taking place outside. Specialisation in industry and agriculture reduced the extent of by-employment. New modes of transport revolutionised the business of moving goods and people. But what did the economy look like, in spatial terms, before these changes took place? Both urbanisation and regional specialisation caused work to be gradually relocated even before the upheavals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but the extent and impact of these changes has been difficult to measure. We know that people from rural settlements must have travelled to market towns to engage in commerce, but the extent and means of this movement has rarely caught historians’ attention. Transport is more often studied as a technology or network, rather than as work and time-use.

The work-task data offers insight into all these issues and the findings are not always what we might expect. It is commonplace to state that people worked at home in preindustrial economies, but very few historians have explored, let alone measured, the actual location of work in the period before 1700. This chapter does just that. Gender historians have paid more attention to workspaces, responding to the assertation of an inside/outside division between women’s and men’s work that was frequently reiterated in early modern didactic literature. Amanda Flather’s detailed study of Essex court depositions has shown that while women did work inside more than men, the locations of women’s and men’s work also overlapped a great deal.Footnote ⁴ Here, we use our wider sample to quantify gendered work patterns. The chapter begins by exploring regional contrasts: the work-task data shows remarkably few differences at the level of general categories although some regional differences in farming regimes, diet, and specialist industries are evident. The contrasting patterns of work between large towns, market towns, and villages are more clearcut, as shown in Section 3.2. Section 3.3 turns to the topic of transport, examining the distances travelled and methods of movement. This is a reminder of the often time-consuming and difficult task of moving things, people, and information around the early modern landscape. The final two sections address the spatial dimension of workplaces, first examining the division between inside and outside tasks and the house as a place of work, before in the final section considering the lack of privacy experienced in all locations.

3.1 Regions

When Dorothy Tottle sat by a window making bone lace in a house at Luppitt near Honiton in east Devon in 1614, or Robert Arcle drew ‘coals at the coal pit in East Brandon’ in County Durham in 1633, or Thomas Browne grew and sold ‘six acres of turnips in a close called maypole close in Horning’ in Norfolk in 1693, they were all undertaking regionally distinctive forms of work related to local specialisms.Footnote ⁵ The work-task data was collected from three regions chosen to represent England’s contrasting economies: the north, the south-west, and eastern England. Figure 1.1 and Table 1.2 in Chapter 1 show the counties from which evidence was collected. Ann Kussmaul’s General View of the Rural Economy provides an overview of England’s early modern economic regions. She used the seasonality of marriage to map parishes that were dominated by arable agriculture, with October marriages after the harvest; pastoral agriculture, with April, May, or June marriages after spring lambing and calving; and industrial parishes, with no strong seasonality. Her data shows that by the early eighteenth century, the south-west was dominated by a mixture of pastoral and industrial parishes, the east by arable parishes, and the north by industrial parishes.Footnote ⁶ However, Kussmaul also demonstrated that there was significant change over time. Her maps for the late sixteenth century show far fewer contrasts, with arable parishes spread across the whole of England.Footnote ⁷ Historians have also suggested that the gender division of labour varied regionally, again using evidence from the eighteenth century and later. For instance, Snell argued that women found more agricultural work in south-west England than in the east, while studies of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries show that women found more agricultural work in northern England.Footnote ⁸

The work-task data shows a notable lack of regional differences for 1500 to 1700 in both the gender division of labour and work repertoires more generally. Table 3.1 demonstrates that the proportion of agricultural work done by women varied by less than one percentage point between the three regions, ranging between 35.6 per cent in the east, and 36.5 per cent in the south-west. The proportion of secondary sector work done by women in the crafts and construction and food processing categories was also quite stable regionally, although somewhat higher in the south-west than elsewhere. The biggest differences appear where least expected, in commerce, housework, and transport, as discussed in more detail below.

Table 3.1Gender division of labour by region

Table 3.1 Long description

The tables present a regional comparison of gendered labor distribution across nine occupational categories. The first column gives the labor activities, followed by four columns South-west, North, and East. They have two subcategories as F tasks adjusted and M tasks. The last column represents three regional divisions that are South-west, North, and East. Each region has a subcategory of percent by F adjusted.

1. 1. South west dataset:

   • For Agriculture and land, the corresponding values are 586 and 1018.

   • For Carework, the corresponding values are 290 and 72.

   • For Commerce, the corresponding values are 886 and 867.

   • For Crafts and construction, the corresponding values are 271 and 341.

   • For Food processing, the corresponding values are 183 and 230.

   • For Housework, the corresponding values are 551 and 88.

   • For Management, the corresponding values are 178 and 161.

   • For Transport, the corresponding values are 239 and 381.

   • For Other, the corresponding values are 12 and 38.

   • For Total, the corresponding values are 3196 and 3196.

2. 2. North data set:

   • For Agriculture and land, the corresponding values are 275 and 482.

   • For Carework, the corresponding values are 369, and 64.

   • For Commerce, the corresponding values are 236 and 357.

   • For Crafts and construction, the corresponding values are 133 and 204.

   • For Food processing, the corresponding values are 60 and 92.

   • For Housework, the corresponding values are 251 and 60.

   • For Management, the corresponding values are 142 and 146.

   • For Transport, the corresponding values are 181 and 262.

   • For Other, the corresponding values are 58 and 36.

   • For Total, the corresponding values are 3196 and 1704.

3. 3. East data set:

   • For Agriculture and land, the corresponding values are 365 and 659.

   • For Carework, the corresponding values are 297 and 60.

   • For Commerce, the corresponding values are294 and 335.

   • For Crafts and construction, the corresponding values are 127 and 193.

   • For Food processing, the corresponding values are 96 and 156.

   • For Housework, the corresponding values are 596 and 76.

   • For Management, the corresponding values are 124 and 166.

   • For Transport, the corresponding values are 108 and 386.

   • For Other, the corresponding values are 62 and 34.

   • For Total, the corresponding values are 2067 and 2065.

4. 4. Regional comparison dataset for south-west, north and east has subcategory of percentage by F adjusted. The corresponding data is as follows:

   • For Agriculture and land, the corresponding values are 36.5, 36.3 and 35.6.

   • For Carework, the corresponding values are 80.1, 85.2 and 83.2.

   • For Commerce, the corresponding values are 50.5, 39.8 and 46.7.

   • For Crafts and construction, the corresponding values are 44.3, 39.4 and 39.6.

   • For Food processing, the corresponding values are 44.3, 39.6 and 38.

   • For Housework, the corresponding values are 86.2, 80.7 and 88.7.

   • For Management, the corresponding values are 52.5, 49.3 and 42.7.

   • For Transport, the corresponding values are 38.6, 40.8 and 21.9.

   • For Other, the corresponding values are 24.0, 61.7 and 64.6.

   • For Total, the corresponding values are 50, 50 and 50.

Notes: adj. = adjusted. Female work tasks are adjusted using a different multiplier for each region to preserve a 50:50 overall division of tasks within each region: S. West (x2.44), North (x2.41), East (x3.09).

The large categories of work used in Table 3.1 hide some important differences in specific tasks. For instance, winnowing, the process of separating threshed grain from the chaff, was done by women in western England and men in the east. There are 29 examples of winnowing in the database. In Devon, Cornwall, and Cheshire, all winnowing was carried out by women; in Somerset, Wiltshire, Hampshire, and Lancashire some men were recorded but women outnumbered them; while in Norfolk, Lincolnshire, and Yorkshire only men undertook this task. Sheep shearing was another activity in which women’s participation was regionally specific. Of the 75 examples of sheep shearing recorded, 11 were done by women. Of these, 9 came from Devon and 2 from Somerset. Interestingly, medieval manorial accounts suggest that this form of women’s work had once been much more widespread.Footnote ⁹

The overall uniformity of the gender division of labour stemmed, at least in part, from the uniformity of work tasks more generally between regions as shown in Table 3.2. This reveals that the proportion of agricultural tasks was slightly lower in the north, and the proportion of crafts and construction slightly lower in the east, but the differences are minimal. As with the gender division of labour, larger differences are evident in categories that would not be expected to vary significantly, such as commerce, transport, and carework. Table 3.2 shows raw data, and some of these variations can be explained by the make-up of the samples.Footnote ¹⁰ A high proportion of work tasks in the eastern region were taken from coroners’ reports: 22 per cent compared to 11 per cent in the north and 5 per cent in the south-west. Coroners’ reports record a high number of transport tasks, because they led to accidents, particularly while driving carts. The percentage of transport tasks recorded in the coroners’ reports was almost identical in the east and the south-west, at 22.6 per cent and 22.4 per cent, respectively. This indicates that the difference between the regions is largely due to the larger proportion of tasks from coroners’ reports in the eastern region. A similar issue occurs with carework. Paternity cases brought to the quarter sessions, in which unmarried women were questioned about the identity of their baby’s father while giving birth, recorded many carework tasks relating to midwifery and childcare. In the east and south-west such cases contributed 10 per cent of carework tasks recorded, while in the north the percentage was 44 per cent. Most of the northern cases came from a single county, Cheshire, which provided two-thirds of the carework tasks from northern paternity cases, inflating the proportion of carework tasks in the north as a whole, as discussed in Section 1.1.

Table 3.2Work repertoires by region

Table 3.2 Long description

The table depicts various labour works for servants by region and their respective statistical values. The first column indicates labour work, followed by five columns labelled total tasks, all tasks repertoire in percent, South-west repertoire in percent, North repertoire in percent and East repertoire in percent. The data is arranged as follows:

• For agriculture and land, the corresponding values are 2631, 27.3, 27.9, 24.7, and 28.4.

• For care work, the corresponding values are 564, 5.8, 4.2, 9, and 5.7.

• For commerce, the corresponding values are 2115, 21.9, 27.3, 18.9, and 15.7.

• For crafts and construction, the corresponding values are 945, 9.8, 10, 10.7, and 8.6.

• For food processing, the corresponding values are 609, 6.3, 6.8, 4.9, and 6.8.

• For housework, the corresponding values are 747, 7.7, 7, 6.8, and 9.8.

• For management, the corresponding values are 645, 6.7, 5.2, 8.5, and 7.5.

• For transport, the corresponding values are 1237, 12.8, 10.6, 14, and 15.4.

• For other, the corresponding values are 157, 1.6, 1, 2.5, and 2.

• The numerical values for total are 99.9, 100, 100, and 99.9.

• The total tasks in all were 9650, 9650, 4506, 2401, and 2734.

To identify significant regional differences it is necessary to look within the larger categories of work, such as agriculture. There is an extensive literature on regional specialisation within early modern English agriculture, developing out of Joan Thirsk’s intricate maps based on evidence from probate inventories.Footnote ¹¹ The work-task methodology provides a more muted picture of regional difference in agriculture, as shown in Table 3.3. More agricultural work tasks were involved in livestock husbandry in the north, compared to the south-west or east: in both the south-west and east arable work tasks outnumbered pastoral ones, but the balance was switched round in the north where pastoral work tasks were more common. There were also differences within each type of agriculture. In the south-west and east there were more work tasks mentioning wheat than oats, to a ratio of 2.5:1 in the south-west, and 2:1 in the east. In contrast, in the north there were more work tasks relating to oats, giving a wheat-to-oats ratio of 0.9:1. This is expected, given the difficulties of cultivating wheat in much of northern England and the dominance of oats in the northern diet.Footnote ¹²

Table 3.3Regional differences in agricultural work tasks

Table 3.3 Long description

The table indicates agricultural work categories and their corresponding statistical values for regional areas. The first column lists labor types, followed by three columns labelled South West, East, North, and all. They have data for subcategories of tasks and their percentage. The data is arranged below:

1. 1. Dataset for South-west region:

   • For arable farming, the corresponding values are 560 tasks and 35.8%.

   • For pastoral farming, the corresponding values are 367 tasks and 23.5%.

   • For other agriculture and food processing, the corresponding values are 636 tasks and 40.7%.

   • For all agriculture and food processing, the corresponding values are 1,563 tasks and 100.0%.

   • For sheep farming, the corresponding values are 175 tasks and 59.3%.

   • For cattle farming, the corresponding values are 54 tasks and 18.3%.

   • For horse farming, the corresponding values are 38 tasks and 12.9%.

   • For poultry farming, the corresponding values are 9 tasks and 3.1%.

   • For other animal husbandry, the corresponding values are 19 tasks and 6.4%.

   • For all animal husbandry, the corresponding values are 295 tasks and 100.0%.

2. 2. Dataset for East region:

   • For arable farming, the corresponding values are 291 tasks and 30.2%.

   • For pastoral farming, the corresponding values are 245 tasks and 25.4%.

   • For other agriculture and food processing, the corresponding values are 428 tasks and 44.4%.

   • For all agriculture and food processing, the corresponding values are 964 tasks and 100.0%.

   • For sheep farming, the corresponding values are 84 tasks and 36.7%.

   • For cattle farming, the corresponding values are 46 tasks and 20.1%.

   • For horse farming, the corresponding values are 61 tasks and 26.6%.

   • For poultry farming, the corresponding values are 16 tasks and 7.0%.

   • For other animal husbandry, the corresponding values are 22 tasks and 9.6%.

   • For all animal husbandry, the corresponding values are 229 tasks and 100%.

3. 3. Dataset for North region:

   • For arable farming, the corresponding values are 215 tasks and 30.1%.

   • For pastoral farming, the corresponding values are 254 tasks and 35.5%.

   • For other agriculture and food processing, the corresponding values are 246 tasks and 34.4%.

   • For all agriculture and food processing, the corresponding values are 715 tasks and 100.0%.

   • For sheep farming, the corresponding values are 93 tasks and 40.3%.

   • For cattle farming, the corresponding values are 57 tasks and 24.7%.

   • For horse farming, the corresponding values are 52 tasks and 22.5%.

   • For poultry farming, the corresponding values are 15 tasks and 6.5%.

   • For other animal husbandry, the corresponding values are 14 tasks and 6.1%.

   • For all animal husbandry, the corresponding values are 231 tasks and 100%.

4. 4. Dataset for all column:

   • For arable farming, the corresponding values are 1,065 tasks and 32.9%.

   • For pastoral farming, the corresponding values are 868 tasks and 26.8%.

   • For other agriculture and food processing, the corresponding values are 1,307 tasks and 40.3%.

   • For all agriculture and food processing, the corresponding values are 3,240 tasks and 100.0%.

   • For sheep farming, the corresponding values are 352 tasks and 46.6%.

   • For cattle farming, the corresponding values are 157 tasks and 20.8%.

   • For horse farming, the corresponding values are 151 tasks and 20.0%.

   • For poultry farming, the corresponding values are 40 tasks and 5.3%.

   • For other animal husbandry, the corresponding values are 55 tasks and 7.3%.

   • For all animal husbandry, the corresponding values are 755 tasks and 100%.

Notes: Arable includes fieldwork, gathering food (mostly gleaning), and threshing and winnowing; pastoral includes animal husbandry, milking, and dairying.

Less expected were the regional contrasts in the ratio of mutton to geese mentioned in work tasks, an indicator of both farming systems and diet. The term ‘mutton’ allows work relating to sheep flesh to be distinguished from the keeping of live sheep. No such precise distinction is possible with geese, although the majority of geese-related work tasks concern preparation for eating. The database contained 160 work tasks mentioning mutton, mostly relating to butchering, commerce, and food processing, in contrast to 188 that mentioned geese. In the north and east geese were prevalent: for every work task mentioning mutton, there were 4.8 mentioning geese in the north and 3.2 in the east. In the south-west the balance was reversed with 2.8 work tasks mentioning mutton for every one that mentioned geese. These differences highlight regional variations in animal husbandry that are not immediately obvious from Table 3.3, as geese were relatively easy to keep and so did not create large quantities of agricultural work, though they do appear in food processing and preparation tasks. Differences in keeping larger animals are more evident in Table 3.3. Sheep farming was most prevalent in the south-west, while in the north there was more of a balance between sheep, cattle, and horses. In the east, horse-related tasks were particularly common, likely because of their predominance as plough beasts in that region.Footnote ¹³

As noted at the start of the section, specialisms are evident in the places we would expect. Women making bone lace in the first half of the seventeenth century are found not only at Luppitt but at Trull outside Taunton and Kingsdon near Yeovil in Somerset, and at Amersham in Buckinghamshire.Footnote ¹⁴ The production of linen yarn and cloth is found in Lancashire, Cheshire, and the North Riding of Yorkshire, with another pocket of activity in Cambridgeshire. Hemp was cultivated most frequently in Cambridgeshire and Norfolk.Footnote ¹⁵ Work activities in fulling mills, used in the production of heavy woollen broadcloth, occur most frequently in Devon and the West Riding of Yorkshire. Tin mining was found at Calstock parish in Cornwall where a man was ‘working in a certain tinworks called Drakewalls’ in 1560, and at Ashburton on the edge of Dartmoor in Devon, where another man was ‘working in tin workings digging with a tin hook’ in 1571.Footnote ¹⁶ Coalmining is found in County Durham and across the West Riding of Yorkshire where it is documented by coroners’ reports at Whitkirk and Barwick in Elmet near Leeds, at Bradford, at Sandal Magna outside Wakefield, and at Darfield and Wath upon Dearne in southern Yorkshire.Footnote ¹⁷

However, regionally distinctive forms of production had a limited effect on overall work patterns because they took place alongside tasks that were commonplace to every community. An example is provided by Manchester. Early modern Manchester was a centre of the cloth industry, and an early producer of cotton cloth in the seventeenth century. There are 40 work tasks from Manchester in the database. Six come from a single case in 1627 involving a 5 lb sack of cotton wool taken from the warehouse of Henry Wrigley, a Salford chapman, and then pawned with the wife of a Manchester alehouse-keeper.Footnote ¹⁸ The only other case relating directly to the cloth industry describes Robert Brooke ‘being as a workman and weaving’ in the ‘dwellinghouse’ of Edward Dawson in 1666.Footnote ¹⁹ In contrast, the most common Manchester work tasks were agricultural, a reminder that this was still a rural area.Footnote ²⁰ Manchester’s status as a market town is evident from six tasks relating to buying and selling, and a further six relating to the transport of goods. There were three management tasks, all relating to borrowing goods and arranging delivery. The remaining six tasks were housework and carework. Thus, Manchester’s distinctive manufacturing profile is drowned out by a plethora of work tasks commonly found in other places.

The lack of regional differences, particularly in agriculture and secondary sector activities, is an important finding. When Kussmaul observed marked regional differences in the seasonality of marriage in the early eighteenth century, she suggested this was the consequence of increased regional specialisation. The work-task data shows less difference between regions. It is particularly striking that south-west England seems to have been as arable as eastern England: a pattern also shown by Kussmaul’s map for the late sixteenth century. The same map shows more industrial parishes, or parishes with little seasonality in marriage patterns, in the north of England, and particularly the north-west.Footnote ²¹ Figure 3.1 explores regional differences in the seasonality of work tasks, and reveals a similar pattern. The north had less seasonality with multiple peaks and work evenly spread across the summer months, indicative of a pastoral/industrial economy.Footnote ²² In contrast, the east and south-west show an arable-farming pattern with clear peaks of work in the harvest months of August and September.

Figure 3.1

Regional seasonality: distribution of monthly tasks compared.

Notes: 100 = monthly average; Integral excluded. The monthly task totals have been subject to a series of weightings and other adjustments explained in Section 4.1 and Appendices C and D. F adjusted = the female multiplier differs from the standard multiplier as it is designed to give an equal number of male and female tasks for each region with monthly data attached, and therefore varies by region: south-west (x2.30), east (x2.81), north (x2.03).

Figure 3.1 Long description

The vertical axis is labeled index and ranges from 40 to 160 in increments of 20. The horizontal axis presents the months of the year. Three lines are marked for North, South West, and East. The approximate values are as follows. For the North region, January, 70, February, 90, March, 132, April, 76, May, 102, June, 130, July, 114, August, 136, September, 82, October, 96, November, 88, and December, 84. For the South-west region, January, 46, February, 102, March, 88, April, 94, May, 100, June, 104, July, 138, August, 146, September, 152, October, 82, November, 68, and December, 114. For the East region, January, 80, February, 92, March, 68, April, 90, May, 98, June, 104, July, 112, August, 138, September, 148, October, 98, November, 80, and December, 74. The North and South-west lines follow an increasing trend and the East line follows and decreasing trend, with major fluctuations.

Overall, the work-task data shows few marked regional differences. Regional economic differences were more muted in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries than they became in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as shown by Kussmaul.Footnote ²³ There were important differences in local and regional economies, especially in agriculture, as historians such as Thirsk have demonstrated.Footnote ²⁴ However, these differences did not necessarily lead to contrasting patterns of work. The plethora of commonplace tasks drowns out those that were regionally distinctive, as the example of Manchester shows. Some important regional differences do emerge from the work-task approach: the south-west had more sheep farming, the seasonality of work suggests the north was more pastoral and industrial, and specialist industries were dotted across the country. Nonetheless, the importance of shared patterns of work is most evident, a feature of the early modern economy that is often overlooked.

3.2 Town and Country

Towns differed from other settlements not only by their size as centres of population but by their distinctive economic activities and patterns of work, particularly by the presence of weekly markets and the higher proportion of non-agricultural occupations.Footnote ²⁵ This section explores the different patterns of work in large towns, market towns, and rural parishes of villages or scattered settlements. Large towns are defined as having populations of 3,000 or more in 1522 or 5,000 or more in 1700.Footnote ²⁶ No specifically urban records were consulted to gather evidence of work tasks, but those collected approximately reflect the distribution of population between towns and smaller settlements. Of these, 8 per cent came from large provincial towns, slightly more than Wrigley’s estimates of their proportional population, which rose from 3 per cent in c.1520 to 6 per cent in 1700.Footnote ²⁷ Market towns were identified using the lists compiled by Everitt for 1500 to 1640.Footnote ²⁸ Glennie and Whyte estimate that if these smaller towns are included, 30–33 per cent of England’s population was urban in the period from 1540 to 1700.Footnote ²⁹ In the work-task database market towns contributed 32 per cent of work tasks. Defined in this way, urban work tasks are slightly overrepresented, making up just under 40 per cent of the total sample.Footnote ³⁰

Table 3.4 explores rural-urban differences in two ways. First, it looks at work tasks according to where the work took place, and, secondly, according to where the worker lived. The clearest differences in work patterns between towns and countryside are found in the categories of agriculture, commerce, and crafts and construction. More agriculture took place in the rural parishes, as would be expected. Nonetheless, it is also clear that agriculture took place in urban parishes.Footnote ³¹ For instance, there were more agricultural tasks than tasks involving crafts and construction in market towns, as we saw in the case of Manchester discussed above. On the other hand, large towns and market towns were more than twice as likely to be locations of commerce than rural parishes. Interestingly, however, if we look at where the people engaging in commerce lived, there was relatively little difference between settlement types. This is because many people conducting commerce in towns travelled in from surrounding villages, as in the case of Margaret Slater from Ribchester doing business in Preston, discussed at the beginning of this chapter. The opposite effect was evident for crafts and construction. By location of task, market towns differed little from rural parishes in the proportion of crafts and construction activities, yet looking at the residence of workers shows that people engaged in crafts and construction were twice as likely to be resident in large towns as rural parishes, and somewhat more likely to live in market towns too. As discussed in Section 7.2, building craftsmen and tailors often travelled out from their urban places of residence to undertake work in the surrounding areas.

Table 3.4Rural and urban work repertoires by task location and worker residence

Table 3.4 Long description

The table indicates labor task distributions by geographic location. The first column lists task categories, followed by two columns namely by location of task, and by residence of worker. They have four subcategories: percentage repertoires for all locations, large towns, market towns, and rural areas. The data is arranged below:

1. 1. By location of task dataset:

   • For agriculture and land, the corresponding values are 27.4%, 12.8%, 17.2%, and 34.7%.

   • For carework, the corresponding values are 5.9%, 6.8%, 6.0%, and 5.7%.

   • For commerce, the corresponding values are 21.6%, 31.2%, 32.4%, and 14.8%.

   • For crafts and construction, the corresponding values are 9.8%, 12.0%, 9.7%, and 9.6%.

   • For food processing, the corresponding values are 6.2%, 2.6%, 4.9%, and 7.3%.

   • For housework, the corresponding values are 7.8%, 7.8%, 6.8%, and 8.4%.

   • For management, the corresponding values are 6.8%, 10.4%, 7.8%, and 5.7%.

   • For transport, the corresponding values are 12.8%, 14.7%, 13.4%, and 12.3%.

   • For other tasks, the corresponding values are 1.6%, 1.8%, 2.0%, and 1.4%.

   • For totals, the corresponding values are 99.9%, 100.1%, 100.2%, and 99.9%.

   • For total tasks, the corresponding counts are 9,358, 734, 2,954, and 5,670.

2. 2. By residence of worker:

   • For agriculture and land, the corresponding values are 27.4%, 15.3%, 19.8% and 31.2%.

   • For carework, the corresponding values are 5.9%, 7.6%, 7.0%, and 5.6%.

   • For commerce, the corresponding values are 21.6%, 21.8%, 26.6%, and 20.6%.

   • For crafts and construction, the corresponding values are 9.8%, 16.0%, 11.7%, and 8.4%.

   • For food processing, the corresponding values are 6.2%, 3.4%, 6.0%, and 7.1%.

   • For housework, the corresponding values are 7.8%, 7.9%, 7.2%, and 7.3%.

   • For management, the corresponding values are 6.8%, 11.2%, 7.8%, and 6.6%.

   • For transport, the corresponding values are 12.8%, 13.9%, 12.1%, and 11.8%.

   • For other tasks, the corresponding values are 1.6%, 2.9%, 1.9%, and 1.3%.

   • For totals, the corresponding values are 99.9%, 100%, 100.1%, and 99.9%.

   • For total tasks, the corresponding counts are 7,850, 555, 2,311, and 4,984.

Notes: See text for definition of large towns and market towns. ‘Rural’ contains work tasks in all other parishes. Totals differ because not all tasks can be located by parish, and not all workers have place of residence recorded.

Exeter provides an example of the range of work observed in large towns. With a population of around 8,000 in the 1520s, growing to 14,000 in 1700, Exeter was among the largest cities in England.Footnote ³² It was smaller than London, Norwich, and Bristol but had a similar population to other regional centres such as York and Salisbury in 1500, and Newcastle and York in 1700.Footnote ³³ A total of 103 work tasks were collected from Exeter, of which 43 related to commerce, 15 to crafts, and 14 to transport. Commonplace tasks such as agriculture and housework could take on a particular local complexion. For instance, in 1633 Alice Hingston deposed that while she was a servant resident in St Edmunds parish in Exeter she milked the three cows belonging to her employer ‘all the summer time’ while they grazed in the urban commons by the river Exe; ‘sometimes they did pasture below the bridge in the ground called the Shillows, and sometimes in the Bonay, and sometimes in other ground adjoining there called the shooting marsh’.Footnote ³⁴ These locations correspond to Shilhays, Bonhay, and the Shooting Marsh, all of which survive as modern street names close to the historic Exe Bridge in modern Exeter. Similarly, Agnes Morell alias Wheaten testified that she did laundry, rinsing clothes in ‘the tail of the mills situate near Exe Bridge’ in 1619, drawing attention both to the mills that clustered in the area near the bridge, and the types of location used for urban laundry work.Footnote ³⁵

While many of the commercial transactions recorded for Exeter, such as buying and selling foodstuffs like meat, cheese, and bread, were found in large and small towns across the country, others were more distinctive. Three different cases mention visiting goldsmiths to have items valued, to sell gold and silver, and make purchases. The only other place in the work-task database where a goldsmith was recorded was King’s Lynn, another port city. Also distinctive to Exeter was the sale of fresh sea fish within the city. When a dispute arose among the fish-sellers with stalls ‘a little above the Guildhall’ in Exeter High Street in 1674, two of the sellers who gave evidence came not from Exeter but from Teignmouth on the coast, one described as an ‘agricola’ or farmer, and another as the wife of a sailor.Footnote ³⁶ They were among the many people working in Exeter who did not live in the city but came there to buy and sell goods at the markets, fairs, and shops. People also came seeking work. Peternell Bowden, a servant, ran away from her employer in Bishopsteignton and headed for Exeter where she was apprehended at the city’s Westgate in 1610. Similarly, Christopher Tooker, accused of stealing a shirt in Topsham, also made his way to Exeter looking for work in 1620.Footnote ³⁷

Women outnumbered men in early modern towns. Souden found a sex ratio of 83 men for every 100 women in large towns, compared to 90 in small towns, and 100 in villages in the late seventeenth century.Footnote ³⁸ This difference was reflected in the work tasks collected. In the raw unadjusted data 28 per cent of work tasks were carried out by women overall, but the proportion was 26 per cent in rural settlements, 30 per cent in market towns, and 35 per cent in large towns. This pattern is also found in the residence of workers. Women were 26 per cent of workers living in villages, 32 per cent in market towns, and 36 per cent in larger towns. Souden suggested the high numbers of women in towns resulted from their employment as urban domestic servants, while male servants were employed in the countryside in agriculture.Footnote ³⁹ Table 3.5 compares the work repertoires of women who lived in rural settlements with those who lived in towns. There is no suggestion that urban women did more housework; in fact, housework was more common in the countryside. Instead, urban women did less agriculture and food processing, and more commerce and management, as well as slightly more of all other types of work. Souden also found that women who migrated to towns were more likely to be unmarried.Footnote ⁴⁰ The work-task data provided no evidence that unmarried women predominated amongst women working in towns: the proportion of female work tasks undertaken by never-married women was marginally higher in the countryside at 22 per cent, and lowest in large towns at 19 per cent.Footnote ⁴¹

Table 3.5Women’s rural and urban work repertoires compared, by residence of worker

Table 3.5 Long description

The table depicts female rural and urban repertoire and their respective statistical values. The first column indicates labour work, followed by two columns, namely F rural repertoire in percent and F urban repertoire in percent. The data is arranged as follows:

• For agriculture and land, the corresponding values are 21.2 and 11.4.

• For care work, the corresponding values are 14.1 and 15.5.

• For commerce, the corresponding values are 18.7 and 23.9.

• For crafts and construction, the corresponding values are 7.7 and 9.2.

• For food processing, the corresponding values are 5.5 and 3.4.

• For housework, the corresponding values are 18.8 and 16.9.

• For management, the corresponding values are 5.9 and 8.7.

• For transport, the corresponding values are 7 and 8.9.

• For other, the corresponding values are 1.2 and 2.1.

• The numerical values for total are 100 and 100.

• The total tasks in all were 1293 and 890.

Notes: Integral excluded; large towns and market towns combined as urban settlements.

Patterns of work differed between towns and the countryside. Unsurprisingly, the higher proportion of agriculture characterised rural settlements while higher proportions of crafts and commerce characterised towns. Women’s work was more evident in towns, indicating they made up a higher proportion of urban populations, as other studies have found. Distinguishing between where work tasks were performed, and where workers lived shows that although towns were sites of commerce, many of those engaged in that commerce lived in the countryside. Conversely, while those engaged in crafts and construction were more likely to live in towns, a significant proportion of their work was conducted in the countryside.

3.3 Transport and Travel

In June of 1652, Katherine Singard was walking the 8 miles home from Cranage Mill to Great Budworth, Cheshire, carrying some meal on her head. Understandably, she stopped off at an alehouse in Cranage to ‘beg some small drink’ for refreshment.Footnote ⁴² If moving stuff was thirsty work, it was also absolutely central to the experience of working life in early modern England. Histories of transport have concentrated on technologies, speed, and cost, while studies of people’s movement have focused on permanent migration, vagrancy, and the culture of travel.Footnote ⁴³ The most comprehensive study is offered by Mark Brayshay, who explores ordinary and elite users of highways through a range of sources.Footnote ⁴⁴ Our approach is different: it contextualises transport and travel as an essential element of people’s working lives.

Moving goods, animals, and occasionally people from A to B was far more time-consuming in the preindustrial past than in recent centuries. Horses and carts played some part in the process, but in the majority of cases these journeys were undertaken on foot. At a good pace Katherine Singard’s trip to the mill would have taken two hours each way; with a load of meal on her head, it likely took longer than that. The overall proportion of working hours taken up by moving things is not fully captured by our transport category, even though it is the third-largest category of work tasks in the database, accounting for 13 per cent of all tasks. The ubiquity of movement activity means that many tasks placed in other categories had an element of transportation attached to them: carrying thatch up a ladder to thatch a roof was treated as a buildings task (crafts and construction); coming home from the woods with a bundle of firewood was classified as collecting fuel (agriculture and land); taking crops from a field to a nearby barn as farm transport, and moving animals within a farm as animal husbandry, to name but a few. Many other activities that were recorded, such as going to reckon a debt, or to check on a flock of sheep, also involved travel but not necessarily the transportation of anything but the self, and these were not classed as transport tasks either.Footnote ⁴⁵

In other words, tasks involving an element of moving things were both extremely numerous and one of the most difficult things to neatly classify. This section analyses a sub-section of such tasks, whilst recognising that we cannot easily provide a comprehensive picture of all transport activity. As a general rule of thumb, the tasks that were classified as transport activities were those where moving something was the main purpose of the task, rather than a subsidiary part of it and where the distance involved took the actor beyond their immediate environs: 97 per cent of all tasks included in the analysis below took the actor ‘outside the household’, where their own household was defined as including barns, outbuildings, and gardens.Footnote ⁴⁶ To preserve this focus, the analysis here does not include all tasks that were placed in the large transport category. The subcategory of loading, which involved moving goods but onto carts or horses rather than over distances, was excluded, as were some of the tasks from the horses subcategory, where they related to the care of horses rather than their movement. In addition to the remaining transport subcategories – boats, carry goods, carting, droving, messages, and passengers – the analysis also incorporates the commerce subcategory of go to market. Whilst the transportation of goods bought or to sell was not always explicit in such cases, it is reasonable to assume it was commonly part of a trip to market, and such cases do provide interesting insights into everyday movement activities. This produces a total of 1,212 transportation tasks which form the basis of the analysis here.Footnote ⁴⁷

One way to examine these tasks is to compare the number that took place within a single parish (intra-parish) with those that involved crossing at least one parish boundary (inter-parish). As Table 3.6 shows, there is a fairly even split between movement tasks that took place within a single parish, such as in 1598 when John Bech of Redbourn, Hertfordshire, went to collect some chaff that he had previously bought from a neighbour, and those that took actors into a different parish, as when Alice Yeomans went in 1618 from her home in Frome, Somerset, to Wells, 14 miles away, to deliver to a clothier a bundle of yarn she had spun.Footnote ⁴⁸

Table 3.6Intra-parish tasks vs inter-parish tasks, by gender

Table 3.6 Long description

The table depicts a comparative analysis of task distribution by gender across different geographical scopes. The table is divided into 7 columns that includes total tasks, female and male task allocations, and their respective percentages, along with adjusted female participation rates. The data is arranged as follows:

• For intra-parish, the corresponding values are 480, 47.4, 128, 59, 352, 44.2, and 48.5.

• For inter-parish, the corresponding values are 533, 52.6, 89, 41, 444, 55.8, and 34.2.

• For total, the corresponding values are 1013, 100, 217, 100, 796, 100, and 41.4.

Notes: adj. = adjusted (x2.59). Totals reflect tasks where intra or inter-parish data is known.

There were some gender differences apparent here, with a higher percentage of women’s transport tasks taking place intra-parish, whereas men’s activities were more likely to take them inter-parish, but these should not be overstated: both women and men undertook a significant proportion of both types of journeys. Where gender differences are more pronounced is in the types of transport tasks that took actors across a parish boundary, as shown in Table 3.7. Subcategories were defined partly by the form of transport – boats, carts, horses – and partly by what was being transported – goods, messages, passengers, livestock. Travel on foot was rarely specified, but it can be assumed that the majority of carrying goods and carrying messages involved foot travel as other modes of transport were rarely mentioned, and the same is true for going to market. Given the size of these categories, foot travel made up the majority of transport.

Table 3.7Intra-parish and inter-parish repertoires

Table 3.7 Long description

The table depicts intra-parish and inter-parish repertoires and their respective statistical values. The first column indicates transport tasks, followed by four columns namely intra-parish F repertoire in percent, inter-parish F repertoire in percent, intra-parish M repertoire in percent and inter-parish M repertoire in percent. The data is arranged as follows:

• For boats, the corresponding values are 0.8, 0.0, 6.0, and 4.5.

• For carry goods, the corresponding values are 79.7, 41.6, 55.7, and 27.3.

• For carting, the corresponding values are 2.3, 0.0, 10.5, and 14.2.

• For droving, the corresponding values are 3.1, 5.6, 9.7, and 19.6.

• For go to market, the corresponding values are 2.3, 40.4, 2.8, and 16.7.

• For horses, the corresponding values are 2.3, 4.5, 6.3, and 10.4.

• For messages, the corresponding values are 9.4, 5.6, 7.1, and 4.1.

• For passengers, the corresponding values are 0.0, 2.2, 2.0, and 3.4.

• For total, the corresponding values are 99.9, 99.9, 100.1, and 100.2.

• For total tasks, the corresponding values are 128, 89, 352, and 444.

For both women and men, intra-parish activities were dominated by the subcategory of carry goods. This encompassed a wide variety of tasks – taking grain to and from mills, collecting purchased crops or other goods, fetching wool, or returning yarn – as well as others such as taking shoes to a shoemaker to be mended, taking linen to be washed, or fetching pans lent to neighbours. This kind of small-scale haulage was not always confined to short journeys though, and carry goods was also the largest category in the repertoire of inter-parish tasks for both women and men alike. It did, however, represent a smaller percentage of the total repertoire of inter-parish tasks for both. For women, inter-parish activity was overwhelmingly, and more or less equally, comprised of just two subcategories: carrying goods and going to market. For men, their repertoire was more diverse, with these two subcategories part of a mixed portfolio alongside carting, droving, and transport involving horses. If men and women crossed parish boundaries with similar frequency, the transport tasks they were undertaking when they did so were often quite different.Footnote ⁴⁹

The comparison between men’s and women’s experiences of transport work can be extended by looking at the distances involved in these inter-parish tasks. For 85 per cent of inter-parish tasks, it is possible to calculate the rough distance between the start and end parishes involved.Footnote ⁵⁰ Table 3.8 sorts these into three categories, which are informed by the timescales involved: the first, 1 to 8 miles, represents a journey that done at a purposeful average walking speed of 4 miles per hour would take up to 2 hours to complete. All distances are for one-way trips, so to complete a task would likely have involved a return trip, and thus taken up to 4 hours of the day. Such journeys were time-consuming, but could comfortably be completed within a working day, only taking up part of it. The average distance travelled to a market, 7.4 miles, sits just within this category.Footnote ⁵¹ This is remarkably similar to the 6.7 miles that the medieval lawyer, Bracton, suggested was a reasonable day’s journey to market.Footnote ⁵² The second category, 9 to 20 miles, represents journeys that would have taken at least 2 and up to 5 hours each way, and would therefore have been likely to have eaten up most of the working hours in a given day, especially if walking pace dipped below 4 miles per hour, which would be a fairly brisk speed when carrying goods. The third category, 21 miles and above, contains journeys of a minimum of 5 hours each way, and usually more, and would therefore have been difficult to complete both ways in a single day; in short, they would often have necessitated an overnight stay away from home as part of the task. Walking speeds would of course have varied from person to person, and across seasons and terrains. A small proportion of these tasks were done on horseback, with 7 per cent of tasks in the sample of 1,212 used in this section explicitly stating involvement of a horse. However, broadly speaking, these categories relate to part-day, full-day, and multi-day transport tasks, respectively.

Table 3.8Inter-parish task distances (one way)

Table 3.8 Long description

The table indicates work distances and their corresponding statistical values. The first column lists distance ranges, followed by six columns for all tasks, percentage, F tasks count, percentage, M tasks and percentage. The data is arranged below:

• For 1 to 8 miles, the corresponding values are 291, 64%, 53, 71.6%, 238, and 62.5%.

• For 9 to 20 miles, the corresponding values are 112, 24.6%, 18, 24.3%, 94, and 24.7%.

• For 21 plus miles, the corresponding values are 52, 11.4%, 3, 4.1%, 49, and 12.9%.

• For totals, the corresponding values are 455, 100%, 74, 100%, 381, and 100%.

• For mean distance, the corresponding values are 10, blank, 7, blank,10.6, and blank.

• For mode distance, the corresponding values are 2, blank, 2, blank, 2, and blank.

• For median distance, the corresponding values are 5, blank, 6, blank, 6, and blank.

^a This average excludes the two longest journeys undertaken, 190 miles (by three male actors together) and 170 miles (by two male actors together) as these were exceptional but had a disproportionate impact on the average. If included the overall average would be 11.9, and for men 12.8. The next highest distance was 111 miles.

For both women and men journeys of between 1 and 8 miles were by far the most common, with the distance of 2 miles being the most frequently undertaken. Nonetheless, longer full-day transport tasks accounted for roughly a quarter of inter-parish activities for both: it is clear that women were not limited to only short-distance, highly localised haulage work, as shown by their average transport task distance of 7 miles. Return journeys that could be undertaken within a day dominated for both women and men, as the identical mode and median distances travelled indicate. In fact, if all intra-parish tasks are assumed to involve distances of 20 miles or less (one way), they can be combined with inter-parish tasks of under 20 miles to show that 98.5 per cent of women’s tasks and 93.3 per cent of men’s tasks could be undertaken within a day. It seems that this factor, what could be achieved without the need to stay away from home, dictated the typical upper distances involved in everyday travel tasks. This explains why there were not major regional differences in average task distances. For instance, the average distance travelled to market for each region was very similar: 7.3 miles in the south-west, 7.6 miles in the north, and 7.3 miles in the east. The averages for all transport tasks were slightly lower in the south-west at 8.5 miles, compared to 11.2 miles and 11.5 miles in the north and east, respectively.

Men undertook a higher proportion of longer distance, multi-day tasks than women, who did so only rarely, and this is reflected in men’s longer mean average distance travelled. Nonetheless, longer-distance tasks only represented a small proportion of men’s transport work. It was three men who undertook our longest recorded journey, sailing 190 miles from Norfolk to Newcastle in 1627, and two men who undertook the second longest, carting ‘sundry wares and goods’ from Prestbury, Cheshire, 170 miles to London in 1632.Footnote ⁵³ The longest distance recorded for a woman was in 1698 when the wife of Thomas Jackson went with her husband 50 miles from Sheffield to York to collect ‘hardware’ that they then took to the Thirsk fair.Footnote ⁵⁴ Gender differences were more pronounced when it came to the types of tasks undertaken, as Table 3.7 demonstrates. Why did this division of transport labour prevail? One hypothesis would be that because men undertook the majority of longer-distance journeys, this explains their use of carts and horses, both modes of transport that women were rarely recorded using. However, although horses were used for many longer distance trips, 89 per cent of all horse-related transport tasks still involved distances of 20 miles or less. For carting tasks, this figure was 95 per cent: carts were only occasionally used for long-distance travel. In other words, these technologies were primarily used for the short and mid-distance day journeys that made up the bulk of transport work; men’s domination of these subcategories was not a result of these tasks being intimately linked with the longer journeys.

Hierarchies of strength and skill are no more helpful in explaining men’s dominance of tasks involving vehicles and animals. Women’s carrying activities often involved them transporting goods on their heads over many miles, as we saw with Katherine Singard at the start of this section. In 1650 Joan Symonds bought three pecks of grain in Bridgwater, Somerset, a quantity that probably weighed about 45 lbs (20 kgs), and was recorded carrying it home on her head.Footnote ⁵⁵ Carrying activities were not without risk: Agnes Parker of Chilton Cantelo, Somerset, was crossing a bridge in 1592 with a measure of hay on her head and a pot for milking in her hand, when she was tragically blown off the bridge by a gust of wind and drowned in a ditch.Footnote ⁵⁶ Women were no strangers to physically demanding transport tasks; tasks that likely required more strength than driving a cart. It is clear women could and did have the necessary skills to cart, drove, or ride horses, as there are examples of them undertaking all of these tasks in the database. It is true that driving carts, riding horses, and droving livestock were all potentially dangerous activities: carting in particular features prominently in the coroners’ reports of accidental death. But so too did collecting water from rivers and ponds, where drowning was a real risk, a task mainly performed by women and children. Nor is it clear that the male-dominated subcategories necessarily conferred higher status on the actor than moving goods on foot. Horse-riding did confer status, but not carting. Carting was low-status male work, typically performed by young men, servants, and labourers.Footnote ⁵⁷ In short, whilst there was a clear division of labour by mode of transport, with women overwhelmingly moving goods on foot whilst men also employed carts and horses, and took responsibility for droving animals, there is no straightforward single explanation for why this was the case.Footnote ⁵⁸

3.4 Inside and Outside the Home

The spaces in which work took place are a neglected aspect of histories of work. We are currently experiencing a revolution in homeworking as digital technologies remove the need for co-locating workers in purpose-built offices. In this context, the wider implications of where exactly people work become apparent, including issues such as commuting times, the relationship between paid and unpaid work, and the supervision and motivation of workers. The work-task data allows a detailed examination of workspaces before purpose-built workplaces were widely adopted in the nineteenth century. It is a shorthand to say people worked at home in early modern England. In fact, the work-task data shows that the most common workspace was not inside the home or any other building, but outside. Further, many people worked in the homes of others, where they were often closely supervised. Thus, rather than people working ‘at home’, it is more accurate to say that work took place either at home, in some-one else’s home, or from home.Footnote ⁵⁹

Early modern advice literature repeatedly asserted that women’s work was located in the home, while men ‘went abroad’. For instance, Edmund Tilney stated that the husband should ‘go abroad in matters of profit’, while the wife should ‘tarry at home, and see all be well there’.Footnote ⁶⁰ Gervase Markham offered more detail when he introduced his book, The English Housewife, a sequel to The English Husbandman, by stating that:

The medieval terms ‘husbondman’ and ‘huswife’ both contained the ‘hus’ element, which referred to their responsibilities as householders. Only for huswives was this later modernised as ‘house’ and assumed to correspond with a duty of staying within the home as a housewife.Footnote ⁶² Yet women’s work in early modern England frequently took them beyond the house: the work-task data not only offers many examples of this but allows the spatial differences between women’s and men’s work to be measured.

Only a handful of studies have looked in detail at the spatial relations of work inside and outside the home in early modern England.Footnote ⁶³ Nonetheless, wider investigations into houses and the activities that took place within them have been exceptionally rich in recent decades. Matthew Johnson prompted a shift in the history of vernacular architecture away from typologies of surviving buildings and their construction techniques towards an appreciation of the wider social and cultural implications of the forms houses took.Footnote ⁶⁴ The objects recorded in probate inventories have been used to reconstruct room-use, and more ambitiously to examine the practice of domestic activities such as cooking and commensality by Anthony Buxton.Footnote ⁶⁵ Even more sophisticated is the approach taken by Tara Hamling and Catherine Richardson, combining evidence from surviving houses and objects with inventories, court depositions, and visual and literary sources to reconstruct the experience of living in early modern houses for people of middling status, including their work activities.Footnote ⁶⁶ The work-task data can add to these approaches by showing how work within the house related to the wider landscape of work. This section looks first at the division of work between inside and outside, before moving on to examine work activities in different rooms within the house. The following section explores issues of privacy and supervision.

Table 3.9 classifies workspaces into three main categories: inside, outside, and unknown. Inside workspaces are further divided between the worker’s own home, another person’s home, non-domestic buildings, and inside spaces for which there is no further information. Specialist rooms and outbuildings, such as shops and barns, are treated as part of the domestic house, but gardens and yards are treated as outside in order to draw a sharp distinction between indoor and outdoor work. Own home was defined as the house in which the person undertaking the work task lived, thus servants doing work in their employer’s house are counted as working in their own home, because most lived with their employer. As well as the raw figures, an adjusted average, in which women’s and men’s work is weighted equally, is provided because women’s and men’s work had different spatial profiles. The ability to identify workspaces varied according to the category of work task. Commerce and management tasks often had no details other than the transaction that took place, leading to particularly high proportions of unknown tasks; transport, on the other hand, typically took place outside, leading to very few unknowns.Footnote ⁶⁷

Table 3.9The proportion of work tasks located in different spaces

Table 3.9 Long description

The table depicts various labour works in different spaces and their respective statistical values. The first column indicates labour work followed by seven columns namely own home in percent, another’s home in percent, non-domestic building in percent, inside-no details in percent, outside in percent, unknown in percent, and total tasks. The data is arranged as follows:

• For agriculture and land, the corresponding values are 2.9, 1.7, 0.1, 0.3, 89.9, 5, and 2635.

• For care work, the corresponding values are 20.9, 42.6, 1.6, 3, 25.5, 6.4, and 564.

• For commerce, the corresponding values are 8.1, 11.8, 0.8, 0.2, 30.3, 48.8, and 2115.

• For crafts and construction, the corresponding values are 17.7, 16.2, 9.6, 10.4, 30.3, 15.8, and 942.

• For food processing, the corresponding values are 25.7, 19.1, 9.6, 6.1, 21.9, 17.6, and 607.

• For housework, the corresponding values are 39.3, 13.6, 0.5, 1.6, 37.3, 7.6, and 748.

• For management, the corresponding values are 13.3, 30.7, 1.6, 0.9, 18.3, 35.2, and 645.

• For transport, the corresponding values are 1.1, 1.9, 0.4, 0.2, 95.5, 1, and 1237.

• For other, the corresponding values are 15.3, 26.8, 3.8, 9.6, 33.8, 10.8, and 157.

• For average, the corresponding values are 11.5, 12.1, 2.1, 2.1, 53.9, 18.3, and 100.

• For adj. average, the corresponding values are 14.3, 13.1, 1.8, 2.3, 50.6, 17.9, and 100.

• For total tasks, the corresponding values are 1106, 1169, 201, 201, 5203, 1770, and 9650.

Notes: The adjusted average weights women’s and men’s work tasks at 50:50 using the x2.59 multiplier. These categories are more specific than those outlined in Section 1.2.3.

This analysis reveals three very distinctive features to the spatial distribution of work in early modern England. First, a high proportion of work took place outside. This is partly because two large categories, agriculture and transport, were heavily dominated by outside work. However, it is also because other categories that were mostly inside also contained substantial proportions of outside work. Carework, for instance, often involved going to fetch a caregiver, equipment, or medicine, as well as sometimes administering care to people outside. Housework, as discussed in Chapter 5, involved laundry and water collection by and from wells, ponds, and rivers beyond the house. Commerce involved open air transactions at markets and fairs, as well as travelling to market. Within the crafts and construction category, construction involved groundworks, building houses, and maintaining roofs and the external fabric of buildings: all outside activities. A second striking feature is that almost as much work took place in other people’s houses as in people’s own homes, even when we treat servants as members of a household working at home. Thus, inside work was not necessarily taking place ‘at home’ but rather ‘in houses’. Finally, very little work took place in dedicated inside workspaces. The non-domestic building category is largely made up of mills and churches. Mills were distinguished by the presence of large machinery for grinding corn or fulling cloth. Some mills were also homes, but the court evidence suggests most were not: for instance, a number of theft cases make it clear that no one slept at the mill.Footnote ⁶⁸

The differences between women’s and men’s workspaces are shown in Table 3.10. Men’s work was more likely than women’s to occur outside. Women were more likely than men to work in their own homes and in the homes of others. Yet there were also similarities. If the work tasks in unknown locations are discarded, 52.0 per cent of women’s work took place outside. Conversely, 28.4 per cent of male work tasks with a stated location took place inside. These findings support the conclusions of Amanda Flather, that there was considerable overlap between male and female workspaces, and indeed, women and men often worked alongside each other.Footnote ⁶⁹

Table 3.10Gender and workspaces

Table 3.10 Long description

The table depicts gender and workspaces. The first column indicates the gender, followed by data for subsequent seven columns namely own home, another’s home, non-domestic building, Inside no details, outside, unknown, and total number. The data is represented below:

• For F tasks, the corresponding values are 555, 412, 30, 72, 1159, 458, and 2686.

• For M tasks, the corresponding values are 551, 757, 171, 129, 4044, 1312, and 6964.

• For F in percent, the corresponding values are 20.7, 15.3, 1.1, 2.7, 43.1, 17.1, and 100.

• For M in percent, the corresponding values are 7.9, 10.9, 2.5, 1.9, 58.1, 18.8, and 100.1.

• For F, in percent of known only, the corresponding values are 24.9, 18.5, 1.3, 3.2, 52, no value, and 99.9.

• For Men, in percent of known only, the corresponding values are 9.7, 13.4, 3, 2.3, 71.5, no value, and 99.9.

Notes: These categories are more specific than those outlined in Section 1.2.3.

While court depositions often provide sufficient information to discern whether a work task took place inside or outside, more detailed descriptions of inside spaces were less common. When particular rooms are mentioned, they sometimes appear incidentally rather than as the location of a work activity. For example, John Okeford, employed as a sawyer by John Abbott of Semley in Wiltshire in 1600, noted that it ‘being about noon’ he was ‘called in to dinner’ and thus ‘he was sitting in the kitchen of the same house at dinner’ with three other people when defamatory words were exchanged.Footnote ⁷⁰ The four most common room types mentioned in depositions that also described work activities were chambers, kitchens, halls, and parlours, in that order. ‘Chamber’ typically denoted an upstairs room in early modern England. Probate inventories show that such rooms were used for sleeping and storage.Footnote ⁷¹ The work-task data confirms this: tasks taking place in chambers most commonly involved caring for the sick and doing housework. For instance, Mary Hawkings nursed Mary Beard ‘in the chamber where the said Mary Beard lay sick’ in Wolborough, Devon, in 1670, while Elizabeth Thompson Dobson went ‘into her master’s chamber to make her master’s bed’ in South Kirkby in Yorkshire in 1600.Footnote ⁷² However, their use for storage meant that chambers were also mentioned in a wide range of other work tasks concerned with storing and fetching agricultural produce, foodstuffs, and textiles. William Pine ‘going into a chamber at the house of Thomas Simpson his master to fetch down some apples’ found a bundle of stolen clothes in Hatfield, Yorkshire, in 1677.Footnote ⁷³

The hall, parlour, and kitchen were the main downstairs rooms. A case from Great Elm, Somerset, in 1682, catches the movement of Joan Hearse through her employer’s house, ‘for she being in Mr Higdon’s parlour she came from thence through the hall and was going towards the kitchen with a besom [broom] in her hand’ when she was called to witness the tithes being settled.Footnote ⁷⁴ In the medieval period and sixteenth century, the hall was the main living room. In small houses it might be the only room or exist alongside a buttery or kitchen. Many modest early modern houses that survive to the present day had three downstairs rooms, with the hall in the centre, and a parlour and kitchen or buttery on either side, as was evidently the case in Mr Higdon’s house.Footnote ⁷⁵ Architectural studies and probate inventories show that the hall almost always contained a hearth and was often used for cooking and eating. In the seventeenth century, however, cooking and eating increasingly took place in the kitchen.Footnote ⁷⁶ Interestingly, we found no examples of cooking taking place in halls; instead, the most common activities were eating, drinking, and working.Footnote ⁷⁷ Most of the work tasks, other than carrying and fetching, concerned textile work. Paul Dixon was engaged in his work as a tailor in the hall of Thomas Kennell’s house in Christchurch, Hampshire, in 1591, while Thomas Kennell lay sick in ‘an inner chamber within the hall of his house’. Oliver Eldridge was also present in Thomas Kennell’s hall ‘at breakfast’, before going out to plough.Footnote ⁷⁸ The hall was a location where female servants were found spinning, as in the case of Richorda Burden in Kenton, Devon, in 1617, and Maria Browning in Glastonbury in 1604.Footnote ⁷⁹ Joan Foxwill was carding wool beside the fire of the hall in her own house at Venn Ottery in Devon in January 1558.Footnote ⁸⁰ It seems that the hall provided a warm and relatively clean space suitable for these types of tasks.

In alehouses, the hall was the main drinking room. There is little indication that alehouses differed in internal structure and room nomenclature from other houses: the hall was used for eating and drinking, the kitchen or buttery for storing drink and preparing food, and the parlour for more select gatherings.Footnote ⁸¹ In normal dwelling houses, parlours were used to store items of value: cases mention items such as blankets, clothes, yarn, cloth, and a purse containing money being kept in chests or presses in the parlour from which they were fetched when needed. Mary Rawnforth went ‘into the said Ellen Lambes parlour to borrow 2 blankets’ in Malton, Yorkshire, in 1694.Footnote ⁸² Two cases, one from 1557 and one from 1693, refer to making beds and sleeping in the parlour, a reminder that it could also serve as a bedroom.Footnote ⁸³ Parlours were used for meetings of various kinds. A case from Lancashire in 1687 described several men gathering in the parlour of Chaddock Hall in Tyldesley to discuss issues relating to an inheritance.Footnote ⁸⁴ At Shingham, Norfolk, in 1645 a group of men were seen entering a neighbour’s parlour at night-time and meeting there by candlelight in suspicious circumstances; while in Wrington, Somerset, in 1551 the parlour was the location of a marriage proposal.Footnote ⁸⁵

Kitchens and butteries were used for storing and preparing food. The main difference between them was that butteries lacked a hearth, unlike kitchens where food was cooked in a fireplace. Architecturally, butteries predate kitchens as a common room in ordinary houses, but kitchens gradually became more dominant.Footnote ⁸⁶ This transition was not evident in the work-task data: activities in kitchens were more common than those in butteries throughout the period. The range of tasks observed in butteries was quite limited, and were connected to fetching beer, storing meat, and folding linen. Activities in kitchens were more varied and suggest it was a room where members of the household often congregated. Two cases concerned incidents with guns. John Gaylarde, a servant, ‘standing by the fireplace in his master’s kitchen’, was cleaning a fowling piece in Somerset in 1591 when it went off; while in Happisburgh, Norfolk, in 1684, Mary Gillam was in the kitchen of Thomas Chamberlaine, a yeoman, and while turned away, ‘to wash a pot in a kettle over the fire’, William Crow, a labourer, who had been standing holding a gun, shot her daughter-in-law, who was also in the kitchen.Footnote ⁸⁷ Several cases mention eating meals in the kitchen, such as when John Kerry, a male servant, got himself some breakfast and sat down to eat it in the kitchen in Wellow, Hampshire, in 1573, and the case where workmen were called into dinner in the kitchen at Semley, Wiltshire, mentioned above.Footnote ⁸⁸

The kitchen was also a place where children were often present. For instance, Martha Dowling was sitting in her kitchen with her children when her husband came through from the butcher’s shop adjoining to tell her about a defamation that had taken place, in Chewton Mendip, Somerset, in 1694.Footnote ⁸⁹ Lucretia Harward, a female servant, ‘dressed up [tidied] the kitchen, made a fire, and attended up the children’ in her employer’s house in Bale, Norfolk, in 1637.Footnote ⁹⁰ More traumatically, Elizabeth Balford, also a servant, was beaten by her master in the kitchen until his wife ‘being big with child and having one under her arms did set the child down’ and intervened, ‘moved by the fury and cruelty of her husband’, at Terrington St John, Norfolk, in 1621.Footnote ⁹¹ Other kitchen activities included storing and fetching cooking pots, pewter, and food; salting meat; and brewing. In terms of the work-task categories, chambers were generally spaces of carework, craftwork commonly took place in halls, parlours were used for management activities, and kitchens for food processing, while housework occurred throughout the house.

The evidence of work tasks disproves common generalisations about workspaces. Rather than work taking place at home, early modern work most commonly took place outside. This was true for women as well as men, although women were more likely to work inside than men. When working inside, people not only worked in their own houses but in the houses of others. Analysis of work inside houses shows that early modern room names related to distinct interior spaces where different types of activities were carried out.

3.5 Public and Private Spaces

Despite the much trumpeted ‘spatial turn’, the spatial dynamics of historical workplaces remain underexplored. The analysis of space is structured around several closely related binaries: the public and the private; outside and inside the home; openness and closure. Jurgen Habermas sparked the discussion of public and private, taking the public market places and private dwelling houses of Ancient Greece as archetypal examples.Footnote ⁹² Amanda Vickery laid the critical foundations for conceptualising public and private spheres in gender history, demonstrating that the idea of women being confined to the private sphere of the home while men were active in the public sphere was prevalent from at least the sixteenth century.Footnote ⁹³ Lena Orlin has focused on the presence and absence of privacy in early modern homes, while the terms ‘open’ and ‘closed’ have been applied to late medieval houses by Matthew Johnson and village topography by Stephen Mileson, and also much discussed in the context of European household economies.Footnote ⁹⁴ ‘Open’ and ‘closed’ do not map precisely onto public and private, being closer to ideas of community and individualism, but they share many common features.

This literature draws attention to the categories into which work is instinctively and sometimes lazily organised by economic historians. Thus, women’s work is assumed to take place mainly in the private sphere of the home and the dwelling house is assumed to be a private space visible (and audible) only to family members. A common reaction to the work-task data is to question whether housework and women’s work are under-recorded because they took place in the home and thus go unobserved. Yet historians such as Orlin and Johnson have demonstrated the openness of early modern houses, which enabled neighbours to observe much of what went on within them. This was particularly the case in the sixteenth century, when windows were often unglazed, but remained the case throughout the period: walls were flimsy, doors were left open, and neighbours frequently entered each other’s houses. For the poorer sections of society, houses were too small to offer much internal space, and activities spilled outside. Voices would have been more audible, inside and out, in the absence of the noise pollution that plagues modern industrial society.Footnote ⁹⁵ While early modern moralists liked the idea of women being confined to the home, there is no evidence that this was put into practice, nor were women necessarily doing housework when they did work at home. Not only is spatial location a vital dimension of work, but work is also an important dimension of early modern spatial relations. For instance, Mileson argues that in the fifteenth century yeomen farmers achieved greater privacy by building larger houses set back from village streets. Yet if we also consider the organisation of work, it might be observed that increased land and wealth meant that such yeomen were also surely employing more servants. These servants lived and worked in yeomen’s houses, undermining privacy on another level. Their economic functions made households permeable: the early modern home was not a private space in the modern sense.Footnote ⁹⁶

In modern society we assume a clear delineation between the private space of the home and commercial or public spaces such as shops and streets. In early modern England no such clear distinction existed. Houses could be places of commerce, as we see with alehouses, which are sometimes specifically referred to as dwelling houses despite offering hospitality to paying customers.Footnote ⁹⁷ Shops, which could be workshops or places of commerce, or a combination of the two, were typically part of people’s houses.Footnote ⁹⁸ In a case from Exeter in 1617, a group of people including four men, two boys, and a woman were ‘working on knives’ in ‘the shop of the house of George Rase’, while two women were waiting to buy knives ‘standing near the stall of the said shop’, who all overheard defamatory words spoken.Footnote ⁹⁹ This suggests a cutler’s workshop within a house, with a street-facing window or stall for selling goods. Examples of weaving in which the location was specified all described the work room as a shop. Thus, Henry Turner was weaving ‘in his own shop’ in Westbury in 1662, while in Leeds in 1625 Thomas Whittaker was described as a weaver ‘working of his hand’ in another man’s ‘shop’.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ A case from Ipplepen, Devon, in 1613 offers further detail about the domestic context of the weaver’s shop. Walter Turpyn gave evidence that he and his son were ‘in his shop weaving’ when Ann Turpyn ‘came unto this deponent’s door’. The son described how his wife ‘was sitting in the entry of the house’ talking with their relative Ann Turpyn. Both men heard all the defamatory words spoken by Ann Turpyn to the wife/daughter-in-law, suggesting the weaving shop was just inside the doorway in the main part of the house.Footnote ¹⁰¹ This corresponds to Jane Whittle’s reconstruction of a weaver’s house in early seventeenth-century Uffculme, Devon, where the looms were located in the buttery adjoining the cross-passage and front door.Footnote ¹⁰² Probate inventories confirm that retail shops were normally part of dwelling houses. This was occasionally confirmed in depositions, as in a case of tobacco theft from Yeovil, Somerset, in 1650, in which Robert Myer described ‘being at Mr French his house in Yeovil mercer he saw in his shop a roll of Virginia tobacco’, or the case noted above in which a butcher came from his shop through to the kitchen to talk to his wife.Footnote ¹⁰³

Another way in which the distinction between domestic and public spaces was blurred was by the extent to which people worked in doorways, streets, and backyards where they could be clearly seen by neighbours and others passing by. Spinning and other textile work was often done in the doorway, which offered the benefits of better light and sociability. Maria Tong and Elizabeth Watson ‘were sitting together at the good Mr Watsons door sewing’ along with Mr Watson’s servant Susan Dawson who was ‘sitting also there with spinning’ in Whittlesey, Cambridgeshire, in 1560.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Similarly, Joanna Edwardes was ‘spinning at her turn in the entry of her master’s house’ at Shebbear in Devon in 1575, and Ellen Kates was ‘sitting spinning at her mistresses door’ in Pilgrim Street, Newcastle, in 1632, while Agnes Adams was ‘sat carding wool at the door of Matthew Roberts’ in Farleigh Hungerford in Somerset in 1532.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Two cases from Norfolk, from Neatishead in 1600 and Norwich in 1683, record women knitting ‘in the street’, outside their houses.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ In addition, depositions often record women ‘working’ in their doorway, a term which was not specific enough to be included in the database: it is likely many were spinning or sewing.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Even those working inside saw activities in the street outside through open doors and windows. William Bishopp was looking out of the house ‘where he was at work being a tailor by his occupation’ in Seaton, Devon, in 1618 and witnessed a witchcraft accusation.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ John Poddarde was ‘working journey work with one Richard Care shoemaker dwelling in the Butcher Row in Salisbury’ and ‘sitting at his work in the shop of the said Richard Care’ when he witnessed a deponent entering the shop across the street in 1565.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

Thus, streets were not only conduits for transport but places of neighbourly interaction. People looked out from their houses, worked in doorways, and went backwards and forwards engaged in daily chores like collecting water and milking, which took them outside several times a day. As most journeys were undertaken on foot, or while travelling slowly with carts or horses, travel was also much less impersonal than modern transport, giving people time to interact and observe what was going on around them. John Northen was ‘going with seed corn of his master’s into Wishford field to sow’ along ‘the highway lying above the town’ when he witnessed a defamation in Great Wishford, Wiltshire, in 1588.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Anne Divine was ‘milking in a certain ground of her father’s … about 7 of the clock in the morning she saw a strange man’ on the nearby highway, who suspiciously washed a bag in a stream at ‘a certain place called Whistlebridge near Stoford’ in Somerset in 1638.Footnote ¹¹¹

Some encounters led to assault or theft, but others were more friendly. In Cheshire in 1682 John Cooper fell from his horse in a lane leading from Church Hulme to Middlewich. He claimed he was attacked by a man in a periwig, but his neighbour, Sarah Beswick, deposed ‘that she believes nothing but drink had hurt him’. A young man of 16 or 17 years of age, William Hulme, who did not know Cooper, had just passed him on horseback but looked back and saw Cooper’s horse without its rider. He went back and caught the horse and tethered him ‘upon a stoop at the pavement side’. At this point Sarah Beswick, travelling along the lane on her own errand, joined them and recognised Cooper, ‘and finding him then sitting in the dirt said (in the name of God) goodman Cooper where have you been? Seems you have been with no good company that would let you come forth in this order’. She then, using his knife, ‘scraped the dirt off his clothes’. With some difficulty he got to his feet, and with even more difficulty was helped back onto his horse, almost falling off the other side, before going off homewards down the lane swaying from side to side on his horse.

This case describes geographical locations in unusual detail, allowing the residence of all the actors, and the incident itself, to be identified on the modern map. John Cooper, a husbandman, lived at Bostock Hall, just north of Middlewich. He had argued with Robert Buckley of Wharton, who was also his tenant, and was slandered by Rebecca Saint, an alehouse-keeper from Cotton, just outside Church Hulme (now Holmes Chapel). William Hulme came from Church Hulme and was travelling to Middlewich. Sarah Beswick was a blacksmith’s wife from Kinderton, which was where Cooper fell from his horse, ‘in Sproston Lane over against Kinderton Park’, also described as ‘at the end of Kinderton Street and the lane end which goes towards Byley’s Bridge’.Footnote ¹¹² Despite the fact court depositions have disputes and crimes at their core, the world they depict is one of many-faceted interactions, involving people of all levels of wealth, engaged in an enormous range of activities. It is unlikely that the work-task data omits activities in private spaces for the simple reason that no space in early modern England – including domestic houses – was fully private. Despite the absence of large, specialist workplaces, work was typically carried out under the eyes of others – or at least with the likelihood it might be seen.Footnote ¹¹³ While people were often self-employed and might undertake tasks alone, they were nonetheless under observation and subject to the judgement of those around them.

3.6 Conclusion

By measuring and analysing the work tasks taking place in different locations this chapter has shown that the spatial distribution of work often confounds expectations. In aggregate, regional differences in work were muted, because the volume of commonplace tasks drowned out regional specialisms – although examples can be used to demonstrate that specialisms, such as coalmining in county Durham or lacemaking near Honiton in Devon – were present. Differences between work in towns and the countryside were more obvious. In this case, however, it is important to distinguish between the location where activities took place and where workers lived: there were higher rates of commerce in towns, but many of those engaged in commerce lived in the countryside; conversely, more workers engaged in crafts and construction lived in towns, but much of their work took place in the countryside. Travel was a significant form of time-use and integral to many forms of work. The great majority of journeys were short enough for people to undertake a return journey on foot in a single day, and the mode and median distances travelled by women and men were identical. Gendered differences of travel arose from men doing more of the comparatively rare multi-day journeys, and the fact men used a range of transport, while women typically travelled on foot. Both women and men were more likely to work outside than inside in early modern England. Despite exhortations in early modern literature for women to work in their own homes, only 25 per cent of their work tasks took place in this location. While domestic houses were by far the most common type of inside workspace, people almost as often worked in others’ houses as in their own home. This, as well as the material culture of early modern houses, meant that houses were not private spaces in the same way as modern homes: they were physically and socially open. While people often worked on their own, the openness of houses, the slow pace of travel, and the familiarity of neighbours in small communities meant that few activities, including work, took place away from the observation of others.