Much of the work on ‘sorts’ of people and their place in the social order has focused on contemporaries’ language of definition and identity – what individuals and groups meant by referring to themselves and others as ‘middling’, or as the ‘better sort’, ‘chief inhabitants’ or ‘vestrymen’. This reflected the so-called ‘linguistic turn’ of the 1980s, which focused on the importance of contemporary language to understanding the contours of society in the past, in reaction to anachronistic categorisations of people based on functionalist socio-economic groupings, or on modern concepts of class. The most comprehensive work on the nature of the middling sort, by Henry French, has concluded that there was most definitely a group of households upon whom we can look back and see that their relative wealth, material possessions, reputation and power in their communities marked them out. In contrast to their poorer neighbours, the middling sort resided in houses with more rooms, fireplaces and furniture, wore more expensive clothes, and occupied positions of authority. But despite these similar ways of living, and the associational business of involvement in local government and hospitality, French could find little evidence of a national as opposed to locally contingent self-identification.

Contemporaries were in fact mostly uninterested in defining themselves as members of national social groups below the level of ethnicity. They were far more concerned with keeping a sharp eye out for a wide range of forms of behaviour among people they knew, which indicated, among others, noble, genteel, fine, pleasing, brave, honest, painstaking, laborious, industrious, poor, mean, roguish or base qualities. (All of these characteristics being further refined, on occasion, with such descriptions as vain, quarrelsome, self-interested, idle or beggarly.) In terms of collective designation, phrases like ‘the better sort’ or ‘chief inhabitants’ were more common usages than ‘middling sort’. This was because the economic world they lived in made their status relatively precarious and difficult to maintain over time, and adjectives like ‘chief’ or ‘better’ defined current inclusivity more effectively.

Although Adam Smith chose to title his great work on the economic organisation of society An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, it is not about national power, but about the wealth of the people who happened to live in nations. The very first sentence in his introduction to the work describes how ‘the annual labour of every nation’ is the fund which ‘supplies it with all the necessities and conveniences of life’. The organisation of his book is evidence of what he considered to be most important. He began with the division of labour, and then moved on to the nature of money, exchange and capital formation, before finally dealing with systems of political economy and the revenue of a ‘Commonwealth’.

The subject of this book occurred almost accidentally. After finishing my first book, The Economy of Obligation, I intended to take the themes of that work forward into the eighteenth century, looking at the origin of local banking and networks of trust. While that work has continued, some years ago I became interested in the consumption of the labouring poor through my work into wage payments and research done for the chapter in The Economy of Obligation which examined household consumption and market transactions. There I was very surprised at the amount of meat consumed and the high numbers of butchers in early modern towns such as King's Lynn. I presented this information in a quite rudimentary form at a conference in 2000, where the argument for a relatively high level of meat consumption was met with scepticism, if not downright incredulity. Some years later, this spurred me on to do much more research into diets, which in turn led me to consider Robert Fogel's work on human energy. I then attempted to think of human energy in the same way as Tony Wrigley has analysed the input of animal energy into agricultural production.

The study of labourers' inventories also stemmed from work done for The Economy of Obligation using probate inventories. When researching in the Hampshire Record Office I noticed that there were much larger numbers of labourers' inventories than I thought existed. Subsequently I found out that Leigh Shaw-Taylor had discovered labourers' inventories in Northampton and Lincolnshire.

Since most labourers' work came from farming it is important to attempt to try to estimate how much demand there was for agricultural labour and how it changed over time. Labourers could only have worked more days, or increased the intensity of their work, if the demand for work was there. The earnings worked out in the last chapter represent fairly full employment, but many day labourers appear in account books working fewer days. Of course they might have been working on their own farms or moving between farms as labour was needed, but this cannot be reconstructed from accounts. However, a global estimate of demand for labour can be made by estimating the number of days of labour required per acre to produce crops and animal products, and then multiplying this by estimates of the number of acres devoted to pastoral and arable farming in England, as was done earlier for women.

We have seen that labourers had to consume a lot of calories to do their work, and also that English agriculture generally supplied enough food in most years to maintain this consumption. In addition to this, most families managed to increase the value of their household goods as the price of food rose in the early seventeenth century. We now need to consider how labouring families afforded to feed themselves at such levels on the wages labourers were paid, especially when there was such a marked preference for foods which were more expensive per calorie such as wheaten bread, beer and meat. This is especially problematic for the period from 1550 to 1650, when nominal wages lagged significantly behind rising food prices.

As we saw in chapter 1, the most important work on estimating changes in real wages has been done by Phelps Brown and Hopkins and more recently by Gregory Clark.

In this book I have argued that employed labourers ate more and better food than has previously been assumed. This made it possible to supply the economy with the necessary energy to produce enough food to feed the country and then to eventually feed an expanding number of people working in manufacturing as well as an increased number of workhorses. However, before this the country went through a very difficult period of high food prices and labour surplus before agricultural output and employment rose. This confirms much historiography which describes the period before the Civil Wars as one when it was hardest for day labourers to make ends meet. Although contemporary diets suggest that for those in employment, food remained sufficient and continued to contain a surprising amount of meat, for those day labourers searching for work conditions were hard, and in these years poverty and emigration increased.

But this was rapidly turned into a situation of potential labour shortage after 1650 as farm production expanded and other industries grew in size, attracting labour, while population growth remained sluggish. The evidence of probate inventories shows that this led to a general rise in standards of living for labourers, but, more importantly, that it led to a significantly widening gap between the poorest and wealthiest labourers. Thus I think it is fair to say that the evidence points to a more optimistic view of labourers' standards of living in the period from 1650 to 1770.

It makes sense to begin any discussion of labouring families' standard of living with food, since it formed the greatest part of their expenditure. Food generally comprised up to 70–75 per cent of a pauper or labouring family's yearly expenditure. In the mid-eighteenth century, for instance, food for a very poor family of five from Berkshire would have cost between £9 and £13 a year, and between £24 and £43 for a well-employed family of nine people. In contrast the median value of the household goods listed in labourers' probate inventories from the eighteenth century was only £9 12s, and the value of their farm equipment and stock only £3.

In the last chapter many examples were given of the amount of beer, meat and other foods eaten by labourers. Here I will focus specifically on contemporary examples of actual daily diets, and the number of calories they provided. This will be done in order to judge how much food was available to perform the work needed to power the agricultural economy. A wide range of household accounts from the mid-sixteenth to the end of the eighteenth century survive which have information on food served to servants and day labourers. These will be analysed to determine how many calories were eaten on a daily basis by labourers. In addition, prescribed institutional accounts for soldiers and for inmates in houses of correction, workhouses and hospitals will also be looked at. However, apart from the diet provided by Jacob Vanderlint for a London labourer and his family in the mid-eighteenth century there are no earlier diets for entire labouring families comparable to Eden and Davies.