This book attempts to explain the development of the economic structure of a particular occupational group and to understand the relation of this to individual and collective values and behaviour. It has drawn on the historian's usual range of written sources but the understanding of those sources was greatly enriched by the intervention of another source of evidence, that of life history interviews with people who experienced this particular place, occupation and time. Anyone who has worked with a number of interviews will appreciate just how much the informant's insights contribute to the final analysis. That is not written to avoid responsibility for the interpretation which follows but to acknowledge a debt and to make a methodological point:

My informants' accounts of their situation revealed the importance of historical experience in their response to contemporary ‘real’ situations.