Four depositions from Wiltshire offer a taste of the variety of housework and carework in early modern England. A fortnight after Midsummer in 1566, Katherine Imber, the daughter of John Imber of Chittern, prepared ‘a cream and posset’ and invited her friends to share the food and drink in the hall of her father’s house that evening and ‘make merry’.Footnote ¹ They included two women and a man who were servants in her household, and three men employed as servants by another wealthy farmer in the village. In a second case, from Leigh in 1632, Julianne Brookes reported how Alice, wife of George Burge, ‘being then in labour of a child came unto her door and entreated … [Julianne] presently to come unto her’ to help deliver the baby, which she did. Later that day, Alice Smyth, a midwife from the next village of Ashton Keynes, visited the mother and child.Footnote ² In a third case, from Salisbury in 1663, Mary Dyer heard that her neighbour’s son was ill and asked him if he would like some bacon. When he said he would, she went to another neighbour to get some firewood and cooked the bacon for him in her chamber.Footnote ³ While in 1652, Mary Wilton of Brooke by Westbury described how Francis Rogers, a clothworker, ‘did use to come diverse times to her house by reason she washed his clothes and the clothes of others that did work with him’.Footnote ⁴

In each case, the people carrying out the varied care and housework tasks were female. In the database, these were the categories of work most heavily dominated by women. Adjusted figures show women undertook 86 per cent of housework tasks and 83 per cent of carework tasks, while no other category was more than 54 per cent female: for this reason and because both types of work are often subject to the same misconceptions, they are considered together in this chapter. Carework often involved helping neighbours, as it did in the cases of Julianne Brookes and Mary Dyer. Housework was often carried out by servants, but in the case from the Imber household, it was Katherine, the householder’s daughter, who prepared the food to entertain a group of servants who were also her friends. Mary Dyer went to the trouble of lighting a fire to prepare food for someone outside her household: her neighbour’s son. Housework and carework were frequently undertaken to earn money. This was the case for servants, but also for a woman like Mary Wilton who took in men’s laundry. Some caregivers were skilled professionals, like Alice Smyth the midwife. Not one of these activities was carried out in private. Katherine shared her household with at least four other adults: her father and three servants. Tasks often spilled outside the boundaries of the house: Alice Burge had to call on a neighbour to get help when she was in labour; Mary Dyer left her house to get firewood; Francis Rogers took his clothes to another household to be washed.

Carework and housework are rarely studied as part of the preindustrial economy, yet these activities creep into historians’ assumptions about other types of women’s work. Thus, Broadberry et al. estimate that women carried out only 30 per cent of ‘the total number of days worked in the economy’ because ‘child-rearing and household duties’ took up the rest of their time.Footnote ⁵ Merry Wiesner-Hanks suggests that women worked closer to the home so that they could care for their children.Footnote ⁶ John Hatcher argues that female day labourers worked shorter hours than men because of ‘the need to care for their families and to work in the house’.Footnote ⁷ Our findings show that women did most, although not all, of carework and housework. Yet this work did not dominate their work repertoires, combined making up 40 per cent of women’s work tasks in the database.Footnote ⁸ However, the idea that such work was unpaid and undertaken only for family members should be challenged. Our evidence shows that it was often paid and frequently undertaken for people outside the immediate family.

Modern economic theory has created a raft of unhelpful assumptions about the place of housework and carework in the wider economy. In particular, unpaid housework and carework undertaken for family members are excluded from the definition of ‘labour-force participation’ and calculations of GDP.Footnote ⁹ In modern society such tasks have largely been the work of married women and take place within their own home, often as the only adult present. Historians frequently apply these assumptions to past societies. Where the economic importance of such tasks is acknowledged, it is often as wives’ unpaid ‘social reproduction’ or ‘productive consumption’ which allowed husbands to perform their income-generating work.Footnote ¹⁰ This chapter demonstrates that most of these assumptions are erroneous. It shows that a high proportion of early modern housework and carework was paid work or undertaken for people outside the family. It was not a specialism of married women: the amount of housework a woman did decreased after marriage. The carework women are recorded undertaking was more often skilled medical care than childcare. Early modern houses were rarely places of solitude or privacy in the same way as the modern home: walls were often flimsy, windows were not always glazed, doors were left open, and sound travelled further.Footnote ¹¹ Servants and lodgers lived alongside family members. People were expected to know each other’s business. Therefore, even a married woman undertaking housework and childcare in her own home was unlikely to have done so in solitude.

Housework and carework are modern terms. Meaning cleaning and tidying around the home, ‘housework’ did not come into common usage until the late eighteenth century.Footnote ¹² The term ‘carework’ is even more modern, with ‘careworkers’ first coming into usage in the 1980s.Footnote ¹³ Ågren et al. have no such categories in their analysis of work tasks in early modern Sweden, placing such tasks in the categories of ‘other specified work’ and ‘food and accommodation’.Footnote ¹⁴ We felt it was useful to create these categories precisely to address scholars’ assumptions about this type of work. Our housework category is based on modern ideas of housework as encompassing cooking, cleaning, and provision of basic amenities (water, light, heat) within the home.Footnote ¹⁵ Nonetheless, the activities involved in such work have changed substantially over time. In early modern England the provision of water, lighting, and fuel loom large, and many activities, such as laundry, were often undertaken outside. Housework should not be confused with the early modern term ‘housewifery’, which encompassed a much wider range of tasks.Footnote ¹⁶ Our carework category includes childcare, education, nursing, and medical care. Early modern carework occupied an ambiguous position straddling unpaid labour borne out of obligation and duty, and care undertaken by professional medical practitioners and teachers.Footnote ¹⁷ While carework undertaken by women is often overlooked and assumed to be unpaid or of little monetary value, carework by men, particularly as tutors and medical professionals, tends not to be discussed in terms of care. Our carework category deliberately ignores these divisions.

For historians and economists, key issues are whether housework and carework were paid or unpaid and undertaken within or outside the family unit. In early modern England servants were considered part of the family, which was commonly understood as a group of people living and eating together.Footnote ¹⁸ However, servants were also paid workers employed under contract. The overarching categories of work as located in ‘own household’ or ‘outside the household’ used in the work-task database include servants as part of the household.Footnote ¹⁹ In this chapter, however, finer distinctions are made to explore the relationship between housework, carework, and the labour market. As a consequence, in this chapter ‘family’ refers to co-residents related by blood or marriage excluding servants.

Studies of domestic material culture and technology emphasise the extent that housework has changed over time, particularly in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In her classic study, Ruth Schwartz Cowan argued that the adoption of labour-saving technologies such as cooking ranges, piped water, and eventually vacuum-cleaners and washing machines did not lead to a significant decline in the amount of time women spent on housework but instead higher standards of cleanliness and cookery were adopted.Footnote ²⁰ More recently, Harms and Gershuny have shown that across the twentieth century the time married women in rural America spent on housework did actually decrease substantially but was substituted with increased time spent on childcare rather than paid work.Footnote ²¹ Just as expectations about housework increased in the nineteenth century, so expectations around childcare rose significantly during the twentieth century, with increased focus on the child’s psychological and educational development. These studies demonstrate that housework and carework have changed significantly over time, due both to changes in domestic material culture and technology, and wider cultural expectations and norms. Consequently, modern assumptions should not be applied uncritically to the early modern world. The work-task data provides an opportunity to explore the nature of housework and carework in early modern England before the transformations that took place from the eighteenth century onwards.

The chapter is structured to address the three main misconceptions about early modern housework and carework. The first section explores the location of such work, showing that the majority was located outside or undertaken in other people’s houses. The second section looks at who performed housework and carework, in terms of not only gender and marital status but also age, social status, and occupation, demonstrating that workers varied according to task. The final section examines the balance between paid and unpaid housework and carework, and shows that paid housework was common and most carework was performed for people outside the family.

5.1 Location

Housework spilled outside the house and outside the family, showing that the conceptualisation of housework as a private, unpaid activity undertaken reciprocally within the family is inappropriate for early modern England. Table 5.1 details housework tasks that had locational information and shows that 41.1 per cent took place outside, while only 28.0 per cent took place in the worker’s own home, here defined as house or outbuildings belonging to husband, wife, or parents of children.Footnote ²²

Table 5.1The location of housework

Notes: ‘Own house’ includes stables and barns, work by nuclear family; ‘in master’s house’ includes work by servants or for a master or mistress; ‘another house or building’ includes other people’s houses and churches. These categories are more specific than the own household/outside the household distinction used elsewhere in the book: see Section 1.2.3.

Table 5.1Long description

The table examines the spatial distribution of domestic labor tasks. The first column lists specific household activities followed by six data columns with percentage of each task performed in own house, in master’s house, another’s house or building, outdoors, location not stated, and total tasks in number. The data reveals where different domestic chores are typically performed and overall location patterns for household work.

• To attend guests, the corresponding values are 53.8, 23.1, 0, 23.1, 0, and 13.

• For cleaning, the corresponding values are 14.3, 32.9, 21.4, 24.3, 7.1, and 70.

• To collect water, the corresponding values are 0.9, 2.7, 2.7, 79.6, 14.2, and 113.

• For Food or drink provision, the corresponding values are 39.6, 14.2, 19.2, 19.2, 7.9, and 318.

• For laundry, the corresponding values are 11.1, 4.3, 4.3, 61.5, 18.8, and 117.

• For light or fire provision, the corresponding values are 26.5, 23.5, 20.6, 29.4, 0, and 68.

• For locking doors or gates, the corresponding values are 29.5, 13.6, 18.2, 36.4, 2.3, and 44.

• For miscellaneous housework, the corresponding values are 40, 60, 0, 0, 0, and 5.

• For percentage of all tasks, the corresponding values are 25.4, 13.9, 14.2, 37.3, 9.2, and 748.

• For percentage of all tasks with known location, the corresponding values are 28.0, 15.3, 15.6, 41.1, 0.0, and 679.

• For total tasks in number, the corresponding values are 190, 104, 106, 279, 69, and 748.

Water collection and laundry work tasks had particularly high proportions of outdoor work. The great majority of water sources were outside, requiring trips beyond the house. Water collection undoubtedly took up a great deal of time in early modern society, with people making several trips each day to fetch water. However, 80 per cent of the water collection tasks recorded were associated with accidental death. This is a stark reminder that the chores of housework were not necessarily risk-free indoor tasks. People slipped or tripped and fell into wells or bodies of water. Of the 113 water collection work tasks recorded, water was most commonly fetched from a well or a pond.Footnote ²³ Only 10 work tasks recorded collecting water from a river or stream. Eight cases offered more various sources including a castle moat at Wressle in Yorkshire; a mill dam at Cranworth in Norfolk; ‘the town ditch’ at Fen Ditton in Cambridgeshire; a street conduit at Totnes in Devon; and a single case mentioning a water pump at Fakenham in Norfolk in 1637.Footnote ²⁴ Wells and ponds were often near houses, described as being ‘in the garden’, ‘in the messuage’, ‘by the house’, or ‘in the home close’. For instance, Dorothy Blakey of Mitton in Yorkshire in 1668 described how at ‘about nine of clock in the night, she being about to fetch water at a well before the house door where she dwelleth, heard a great noise in the street’.Footnote ²⁵ Many were explicitly public, such as the ‘town well’ at Hambledon in Hampshire, where Alice Benstead exchanged defamatory words in 1581.Footnote ²⁶ Very occasionally, a well was described as being ‘in’ someone’s house, such as when Dorothy Felder was ‘in the house of William Felder at Binstead taking a bucket of water out of a well’ in Hampshire in 1564.Footnote ²⁷ However, such phrasing leaves it unclear if the well was actually indoors, or in the backyard.

The need for substantial quantities of water and fresh air for drying meant that laundry work also often took place outside: 62 per cent of 117 laundry work tasks took place outdoors. Most laundry tasks recorded were concerned with washing and drying clothes, although a few relate to folding or putting away linens, preparing to wash, and starching. The term ‘wash’, as it was used in depositions, encompassed both washing clothes in heated water, and scrubbing and rinsing them in the cold water of ponds and streams, or next to wells. The large houses of wealthy owners might have specialist wash houses, such as the wash house of Mr Roger Fortescue at Buckland Filleigh in Devon, where two maids were busy washing in 1620.Footnote ²⁸ Less high status was the ‘backhouse’ where Katherine Newman was doing laundry when a man came and asked if she would wash his shirt, in Norfolk in 1661.Footnote ²⁹ More commonly, washing, presumably involving hot water, was done ‘in the yard’ or near the house.Footnote ³⁰ Cold-washing and rinsing was done by a source of water and was often a sociable activity. In 1600, Joanna Drew was ‘at the washing stock’ at Erlestoke in Wiltshire when she witnessed a defamation; similarly in 1596 Elizabeth Trees was with Maud Grove ‘washing at the well’ when she heard defamatory words spoken in St Germans, Cornwall.Footnote ³¹ Only very occasionally are details of the washing process described. Cicely Large was collecting fuel to ‘heat her lye’ in preparation for washing in Norfolk in 1625, lye being the alkaline solution used to wash linens.Footnote ³² The process of steeping and washing linens in lye was known as bucking. In 1653, Mary Smokeham of Brinkworth, Wiltshire, described how ‘having made an end of rubbing and bucking of clothes of her said masters’, some were then stolen.Footnote ³³

When the types of clothes being washed were specified, they were most commonly linens. Personal cleanliness in early modern England depended on linen underclothing being regularly washed.Footnote ³⁴ In contrast, woollen outer-clothing was more likely to be brushed down than laundered. There was only one example of an explicitly woollen item of clothing being washed, and that was newly acquired second-hand. In a 1682 case from Cheshire, Elizabeth Moores recounted washing a woollen waistcoat along with her linens, and incidentally describes how laundry was fitted in around her other work:

Like Elizabeth Moores, most people dried their washing on hedges. Of the 50 work tasks related to drying clothes, 32 described clothes being hung on hedges to dry. Others described clothes left in fields, gardens, and yards, which may also relate to hedges. Only one case described a cord or line being used to hang out washing, while another described a wood-rack being used, and a third ‘pales’ round the house yard – presumably a wooden fence. A single case referred to drying clothes by a fire, and those were wet stockings still being worn by their owner.

Other types of housework tasks were less likely to take place outside, but nonetheless surprisingly often took people beyond their own house. Rising early in the morning and going to bed after dark required the light of a candle, and both candles and the means of lighting them were sometimes in short supply. In the case from Handley in Cheshire, which introduced Chapter 4, Margaret Johnson had to walk from her house to the nearby village to get a light.Footnote ³⁶ Fuel was a precious resource, and fires were not necessarily kept alight overnight or during the day. Katherine Vinton conveyed this economy when she stated that ‘she usually maketh fire in one corner of the said chimney and that the chimney is very little’ in Devon in 1640.Footnote ³⁷ As a consequence, just as people sometimes went to light candles, they also went to their neighbours’ houses to fetch fire, as when Anne Boothe ‘went out of her own house to one William Sutton’s house being in distance from this informant’s house about two roods to fetch some fire’ in Lancashire in 1637.Footnote ³⁸ Cooking could take people beyond the home. Alice Glover declared that she ‘made two chaps of bread … and that they were baked at the house of Thomas Hawkins of this borough, baker’ in Devizes, Wiltshire, in 1632.Footnote ³⁹ Nor was food necessarily eaten indoors. In 1575 William Selleck recounted how ‘about some 45 years past when he was but a little boy able to carry into the field a bottle and a bag with provision for work folks … [he] carried bread and cheese to the workmen at mowing of the corn that was then grown there’ in a Somerset tithe case.Footnote ⁴⁰ When Gryffyn James was working at Limington in Somerset in 1607, his wife brought ‘bread and beer’ to him travelling approximately 1.5 miles from neighbouring Ilchester.Footnote ⁴¹

While the most common location of housework was outside, followed by a person’s own home, carework showed a different distribution. Carework most frequently took place in someone else’s house, accounting for 52 per cent of carework activities with known locations, followed by carework outside, accounting for 24 per cent. Only 16 per cent of activities took place in the worker’s own home, with a further 4 per cent carried out by servants.Footnote ⁴² The final 5 per cent took place in other types of buildings. None of the depositions recall care in institutional buildings such as hospitals. Non-domestic buildings included churches and a single instance of childcare in a nunnery but predominantly refer to school buildings. Deponents’ descriptions of schoolhouses demonstrate the blurred boundaries between schools and homes. The Smith family, Francis Smith Senior, his son Francis, and his wife Anne, all taught Latin grammar and testament from their ‘private house’ in 1678 in Devizes, Wiltshire, and when the schoolhouse in Kirkheaton closed for 12 weeks over winter in 1693, the schoolmaster Thomas Blyth taught the students in his own home.Footnote ⁴³

The location of carework varied by gender. A larger proportion of men’s carework, 40 per cent, was performed outside, compared to only 16 per cent of women’s. Men were more frequently noted fetching medicine and healthcare professionals, as well as aiding intoxicated individuals home. While travelling home to Tadcaster in Yorkshire in 1663, Hugh Davis encountered the priest, Mr Holt, who was so ‘much overtaken with drink … that he fell from his horse three several times’. Hugh helped Holt back onto his horse twice ‘whereupon he stayed about 30 yards and fell down again’.Footnote ⁴⁴ However, rather than women working mostly in their own homes, they most commonly performed carework in other people’s houses: this accounted for 58 per cent of their carework, compared to 38 per cent of men’s.Footnote ⁴⁵

The high percentage of female carework tasks undertaken in other people’s homes was influenced by the inclusion of paternity cases that record work connected to childbirth. Midwifery made up 35 per cent of the carework carried out by women in other’s homes. Midwives were expected to persuade unmarried mothers to name the child’s father during labour and report his identity to parish officials.Footnote ⁴⁶ Sheilagh Ogilvie excluded paternity suits from her work-task dataset in A Bitter Living to avoid it being overwhelmed by descriptions of midwifery.Footnote ⁴⁷ They are included in the work-task database because of the rich detail they provide about healthcare and childcare. Of the 124 midwifery work tasks recorded, 78 per cent came from paternity cases. These paternity cases were uneven geographically, and were particularly common in Cheshire, which provides 41 per cent of midwifery work tasks. It could be argued that midwifery is overrepresented because of its centrality in this particular type of case. It accounts for 32 per cent of women’s carework tasks recorded in the database, and is the largest carework subcategory for women, just higher than healthcare at 31 per cent.Footnote ⁴⁸ Nonetheless, it should be noted that between 100,000 and 150,000 children were typically born each year in early modern England, the great majority attended by a midwife of some kind.Footnote ⁴⁹ The diary of the Kendal midwife Elizabeth Thompson reveals the heavy workload of rural midwives. Elizabeth worked in and around the rural communities of Kendal in the mid-seventeenth century, servicing an area within approximately 10 miles of Kendal and delivering 81 babies in 12 months in 1672/3, as well as 89 the next year.Footnote ⁵⁰ The contested births in paternity suits only capture a fraction of the workload of midwives.

Depositions point to the longevity of care provided by midwives either side of birth. Elizabeth Walker in Hedgefield, Durham, in 1567 recalled care prior to the arrival of her baby when ‘a midwife came to her and drew her breath 2 or 3 days before her labour’.Footnote ⁵¹ The midwife Francesca Flower attended Mary Wyatt in her labour in Priston, Somerset, in 1693, and though she missed the delivery of the baby did ‘tend her in her child bed’ for six weeks, a prolonged period of carework for a mother and baby.Footnote ⁵² The birthing chamber was a significant female space of work. Though we do not include the emotional labour of those simply present as witnesses to the birth as ‘gossips’, paternity suits capture the perfunctory work related to births such as fetching healthcare, lighting candles, providing drink and food, and tending to the infant immediately after the birth.

In contrast, childcare is somewhat under-recorded but appears across all spatial categories. One important reason for this is likely to be that childcare was often undertaken in combination with other tasks. But secondly and related to this, it also reflects the fact that less time was dedicated to childcare in early modern England than we might expect. Young babies were left in cradles or carried in arms, and toddlers were watched while people engaged in other activities. From the age of five onwards, children were expected to engage in work of their own and quickly became relatively independent. Much of the childcare described in the database implies that childcare was in fact subsumed within other day-to-day work tasks and activities. Children were mentioned incidentally when carried in arms or strapped to the body. At Bishopstoke in Hampshire in 1564, Agnes Abram had attended a Lady Day supper with her husband and because she ‘had a child in her arms she could not go so fast as the rest’ and as a consequence witnessed a couple exchange marriage vows.Footnote ⁵³ Ann Wright was ‘working in a garden’ and ‘standing by with a child in her arms’ when a man attacked her with a rake, injuring her child, at Patrick Brompton, Yorkshire, in 1685.Footnote ⁵⁴ Judith Wilkinson, ‘a poor wandering woman’, carried a ‘little child’ upon her back in Prescot, Lancashire, in 1666.Footnote ⁵⁵

Childcare was often performed alongside other work activities. In 1532, Isabel Ballard of Stow Cum Quy, Cambridgeshire, took her one-year-old daughter Agnes to the malthouse where she placed Agnes on the straw in front of the kiln whilst she climbed the kiln to stir the malt. By misfortune, the fire in the furnace spread to the straw causing burns to Agnes’ arm and face.Footnote ⁵⁶ Alice Adam of Sawbridgeworth, Hertfordshire, was carrying a six-month-old boy as she fetched water from the well in 1564.Footnote ⁵⁷ In 1543 Elizabeth Crome of Norwich sat her one-year-old child in a small chair by the fire to stay warm whilst she ‘was busy around the house’.Footnote ⁵⁸ Children often appeared alongside their parents as they ran errands outside the home: 38 per cent of the childcare recorded in the work-task database was performed outside the household.Footnote ⁵⁹ Mrs Bradford ‘took up her child in her arms and went to a smith’s shop’ in Keynsham, Somerset, in 1682.Footnote ⁶⁰ Marion Symondes of Shipdham, Norfolk, was followed by her one-year-old daughter as she went to a neighbouring house to lend a shovel in 1564.Footnote ⁶¹ When it was not possible to combine tasks, women switched from one to the other. In 1618 in Huntspill, Somerset, Agnes Pople put her children to bed and then headed out to the fields to gather thistles and teasels for brewing, ‘having no fit time to go by day for that one of her children was sick in an ague’.Footnote ⁶²

Even when women worked in their own home, they were not necessarily caring for family members. Wetnursing and care of the sick provided money-earning opportunities. In 1570 in Marlborough, Wiltshire, Margaret Byde housed Elizabeth Ryves for four or five days to heal her of ‘the pox’. She was paid 20s ‘for her pains’ in healing Elizabeth and offered medical advice to Elizabeth’s husband who appeared to have contracted the illness himself after ‘sleeping with a strange woman’.Footnote ⁶³ In 1676 Marie Beere opened up her home in Bradford on Tone, Somerset, to a man named Holmes whom she ‘tabled’ for the course of his illness.Footnote ⁶⁴ Research on early modern healthcare has explored the place of the home in the wider healthcare economy. Strocchia has stressed the interconnectedness of domestic medicine with the wider medical economy; householders were required to purchase ingredients from the market and medical knowledge circulated from practitioners into the home.Footnote ⁶⁵ Medical knowledge was a key element in early modern definitions of housewifery. Elaine Leong has shown women to have engaged with medical texts and to have acquired and adapted knowledge to their own household use.Footnote ⁶⁶ The closeness of food preparation to medicinal preparation meant medical care and the production of medicines and remedies required similar skills and were both mastered by women; as Margaret Pelling notes, ‘in its double nature, sacred and profane, medicine resembled food and drink; there was no dividing line between medicines and nourishment’.Footnote ⁶⁷ The work-task database captures some female production of medicines: Ellen Holt was reported to ‘get savin at diverse places’ and to have ‘made medicines’ in Childwall, Lancashire, in 1626, and Christian Aske tended to her sick husband at their home in Ryther, Yorkshire, in 1593, and made him almond milk, a traditional remedy known for its medicinal properties.Footnote ⁶⁸

Medical knowledge was acquired in and percolated through rural communities. In 1619 Joan Whitfield of Watchet, Somerset, claimed ‘she could make a medicine that could cure the green sickness and that she was taught it of surgeons and physicians which came unto the house where she dwelt’.Footnote ⁶⁹ Women also appear giving medical advice from their own homes after being sought out by their neighbours. At Wallsend in Northumberland in 1565, Katherine Fenwike went to one Pereson’s wife seeking advice for her sick child ‘taken with the fever’. Pereson’s wife told her, ‘The child should be washed in the water … upon a Friday at night and that on the morrow the fever should be gone and the child should risen healthier’. Fenwike paid Pereson’s wife 3d ‘for her pains’.Footnote ⁷⁰ The home was permeable to the medical knowledge of skilled practitioners, shared book knowledge from wealthier households, and the ingredients and practices available through the marketplace. Where women performed carework within their own home, this was not always for their own family but often provided as a service for others.

Examining the location of housework and carework does not reveal what we might expect. Carework most often took place in other people’s houses. Housework and carework were commonly undertaken outside. Both activities frequently involved neighbourly cooperation: light, fire, fuel, and oven space were borrowed from other households nearby; neighbours were called on to provide medical help and advice. Rather than the provision of housework and care being the isolating experience it had become by the twentieth century, early modern descriptions of this work are full of social interactions.Footnote ⁷¹

5.2 Who Performed the Work?

Of the nine main categories of work task analysed in this book, housework and carework are the most heavily dominated by female workers. Housework was the only major category in which all subcategories were also female dominated.Footnote ⁷² However, a closer look at housework and carework reveals a more interesting story. The analysis in Chapter 2 demonstrated that housework made up a larger proportion of young women’s work repertoires than that of married women: it accounted for 59 per cent of the work tasks carried out by girls aged less than 15, and 30 per cent of those by young female adults aged 15 to 24, and only 14 per cent of women aged 25 to 44. For never-married women, housework accounted for 24 per cent of tasks compared to 18 per cent of married women’s. Carework shows an inverse pattern: it made up 8 per cent of the work repertoires of women and girls aged under 25, 22 per cent for women aged 25 to 44, and 38 per cent for women aged 45 and older.Footnote ⁷³ These profiles suggest that the performance of housework had more to do with age and power within the household than marriage, and that carework involved skills which were accumulated with age. This section looks in more detail at who carried out these work tasks, paying attention to the circumstances in which they were undertaken by men and the types of women who performed them. For housework it is argued that status was as important as gender. For carework, childcare in particular is examined, showing that only a third of childcare was performed by parents for their own children, mostly by mothers, and even this took up less time than is often assumed, and was frequently combined with other activities.

Figure 5.1 explores the type of people who did housework, divided according to gender and age. Girls and young women made up the largest group of workers carrying out housework. Women aged 25 to 44, who were most likely to be married and have young children–the group that some historians assume did housework–were responsible for only 22 per cent of tasks, while a similar proportion was carried out by older women aged over 44. Men’s participation was not insignificant, accounting for 14 per cent of the total. Age was even more important for men, with more than half of the housework done by men carried out by boys and young men under the age of 25. This means that in total, young people carried out more than half of all housework tasks. These findings show that rather than being the preserve of married women, housework was typically allocated to young people. This was partly because it was relatively unskilled work that nonetheless required energy and exertion, but it was also surely related to this work having little status. Householders, women as well as men, offloaded these tasks onto their subordinates: children and servants, most commonly to young women.

Figure 5.1 Who did housework: a breakdown by age and gender.

Notes: Age data was only available for 109 of the 523 housework work tasks carried out by women, and 36 of the 225 tasks carried out by men. The proportions falling into different age and gender groups where age was stated were applied to the remaining work tasks. The figures for women were then adjusted (multiplied by 2.59).

Amongst the subcategories of housework, laundry was the most female dominated. Only five work tasks out of 117 were done by men. Three of these are ambiguous: a man who hung up his clothes (possibly not because they had been washed, but just to store and air them), a case where a man stood by a fire to dry his stockings, and another case in which a man removed his stockings from a rack where they had been drying.Footnote ⁷⁴ Only two cases definitely relate to men doing washing. In a coroner’s report from Northamptonshire in 1552, James Nycols is described as ‘washing his clothes in a pond having soiled his shirt and breeches with his own excrement because of his illness, the great lax’, the unusual detail perhaps inserted to explain why a man was doing laundry in public.Footnote ⁷⁵ In the other, John Burwell ‘did hang out 4 flaxen shirts in a close not far from his house … and also a parcel of flaxen yarn in the garden belonging to his said house’ in Great Bowden, Leicestershire, in 1696. Given he was described as a ‘flax dresser’, it is likely these activities were connected to his occupation.Footnote ⁷⁶

There was more male participation in other cleaning activities than in laundry.Footnote ⁷⁷ The cleaning subcategory contains a wide range of tasks. Some are what could be considered classic housework: 16 related to making beds, 9 to washing and scouring dishes and pots, 9 to cleaning rooms, and 6 to sweeping. Other tasks included cleaning windows, chimneys, wells, shoes, and cheesecloths; wiping and dusting furniture; emptying chamber pots, throwing other things out (waste disposal), and shovelling dunghills. It is amongst these heterogeneous activities that male work is mostly found. The only two examples of emptying chamber pots both relate to men carrying out the task, one employed in an inn, the other using the opportunity to throw the contents on someone he disliked.Footnote ⁷⁸

Laundry work and cleaning activities showed different age structures as well as differences in workers’ gender. Laundry was more likely to be undertaken by married women and women over the age of 25; cleaning was commonly left to younger workers.Footnote ⁷⁹ The low status of everyday cleaning tasks was emphasised in a dispute concerning a gentry family from Terrington St Clement in Norfolk in 1659. Elizabeth Richars lived with her married brother, John, who was under bond to support her with ‘sufficient meat, drink, clothes, apparel, firing etc.’ until she married, and then to pay her £100 dowry. She complained to the justices of the peace that not only was John violent and insulting, throwing things at her, kicking and striking her, and calling her ‘an ugly creature to look on’, but he also ‘did command [her] to wash the dishes which she did. And he would have [her] to be at his wife’s command’. Elizabeth’s argument, it seems, was that she was being treated like a servant. John seemed to agree with her about the status of washing dishes, as in his defence he said that he ‘did never but once command her to wash the dishes’.Footnote ⁸⁰

Another commonplace activity reserved for subordinate members of the household was fetching and lighting candles. Mary Bower sent her son and daughter to a neighbour’s house to get a candle in Devon in 1597, and in two Somerset examples Alice Goole carried a candle upstairs for her master’s son in 1616, while in 1668 Edith Parker was called in by her master to witness a document but first lit a candle and carried it to him.Footnote ⁸¹ In contrast, male householders called for others to light candles for them: as when in Devon in 1639 William Holcombe was called upstairs ‘to the chamber of his said master to light a candle’.Footnote ⁸² Or in Norfolk in 1614 where Steven Harrise came home from working on the common at eight o’clock at night, and ‘went near his house and called for a light’ so that he could ‘go dress his horse’.Footnote ⁸³ This is a reminder that who undertook a task was determined by status as well as ability. While it may have been inconvenient for male householders to light their own candles in these cases, their disinclination to do so was surely more about enacting their superior status than a lack of ability or skill in candle lighting, just as Elizabeth Richars was reluctant to do the simple task of washing up.

Food and drink preparation is the largest subcategory within housework, and also the subcategory with the largest number of tasks done by men. Table 5.2 breaks this subcategory down further into ‘sub-subcategories’ and shows that all were heavily dominated by women except killing and preparing poultry. This group of tasks was closely related to the butchery subcategory in food processing, which was even more male dominated.Footnote ⁸⁴ Like butchery, killing poultry was most often recorded in theft cases in which the stolen animals were quickly consumed.

Table 5.2Gender division of labour in food and drink preparation

Notes: adj. = adjusted (x2.59).

Table 5.2Long description

The table presents a gender-based analysis of food preparation and service tasks. The first column lists specific kitchen activities, followed by four data columns, adjusted female task counts, male task counts, total tasks, and the adjusted percentage performed by women. The data reveals strong gender divisions in culinary labor during the period studied.

• To kill or prepare poultry, the corresponding values are 57, 47,104, and 54.8.

• To fetch ingredients, the corresponding values are 21, 3, 24, and 87.4.

• To Cook food, the corresponding values are 186, 31, 217, and 85.7.

• To bring or fetch food, the corresponding values are 36, 3, 39, and 92.4.

• To draw or serve alcohol, the corresponding values are 150, 30, 180, and 83.4.

• To serve food, the corresponding values are 39, 6, 45, and 86.6.

• For other, the corresponding values are 16, 3, 19, and 83.8.

• The total, the corresponding values are 505, 123, 628, and 80.4.

Nonetheless, cooking was one form of housework that men seemed to have been less uncomfortable taking part in. This can be broken down even further: men made up 35 per cent of those roasting meat or fish compared to between 8 and 12 per cent of those engaged in baking, boiling, and unspecified cooking, using adjusted figures. However, some men were even observed standing over the cooking pot. Occasionally, this was explained by circumstances. Robert Griffine stole a sheep, butchered it and ‘put part thereof into the pot over the fire to make broth and some provision for his wife being great with child and three children’ at Knook in Wiltshire in 1622.Footnote ⁸⁵ Other instances seem more casual, although still possibly connected with animal theft, as when a neighbour came round to borrow a sleekstone and found ‘Peter Stubbes standing by the fire side, and tending a pan over the fire, where was a pullet boiling’ at Rostherne in Cheshire in 1602.Footnote ⁸⁶ A case from Willoughby with Sloothby in Lincolnshire in 1634 seems to relate to (perhaps adolescent) boys deciding to cook when others were absent. It describes how a Jane Alderman

This case, in which two young men cooked a meal for a married woman, hints at the way in which we need to revise our understanding of housework in early modern England. It was a task that more often fell to the young rather than married women, who were busy with a plethora of other, often more skilled, tasks.Footnote ⁸⁸

Married women’s childcare work is often assumed to shape their other activities, but surprisingly little research has examined how early modern childcare was undertaken in practice. Women performed 92 per cent of all childcare recorded in the database, but almost half of the childcare tasks recorded were either explicitly paid, carried out by servants, or undertaken for people outside the household.Footnote ⁸⁹ This hints at the complexities of the relationships that supported childcare in early modern society. Linda Oja, exploring the evidence for childcare in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Sweden, identified a hierarchy of child-carework tasks, with the most constricting, demanding, or dirty tasks being taken on by women or employed carers.Footnote ⁹⁰ Breaking down the childcare tasks in the work-task database according to the relation of the care giver shows the disparate roles played by parents in the bringing up of their children. Only a third of childcare was performed by parents for their own children, and almost all of that was done by mothers. This carework was varied: mothers are described dressing their children by the fireside, holding and carrying children, tending to their sick child at the bedside, seeking medical advice, and nursing and feeding their children. In Baddiley, Cheshire, in 1671, Jane Broster’s mothering was described by other deponents thus: she ‘did often give the said child suck and was also very careful and tender of it’.Footnote ⁹¹ Nursing a child was often used as a term to describe a stage of motherhood. In Kirby Knowle, Yorkshire, in 1662, Grace Wetherell was described as ‘with child and had another in her arms that she had to nurse’.Footnote ⁹² What Oja has termed the ‘confinement’ of childcare is found in mothers’ descriptions of their work. In Mottram, Cheshire, in 1671, Katherine Higginbotham described nighttime care rituals as she awaited her husband’s late return ‘having then a young child sucking on her, which was in bed, and it crying’, adding that she breastfed her baby ‘to still it’.Footnote ⁹³

Fathers appear performing childcare infrequently. Linda Oja found fathers’ parenting and carework to be ‘supplementary’ to a mother’s care. Fathers were on ‘stand-by’ and relieved mothers where necessary but their engagement in childcare was an exception rather than expected or constant.Footnote ⁹⁴ Amongst the work tasks collected, there were just five examples of fathers performing childcare for their own children. In the only instance of disciplining a child, a father admonished his son for playing cudgels: he ‘rebuked his son, and gave him correction’, and removed his game.Footnote ⁹⁵ In a case of disputed paternity from Christleton, Cheshire, in 1672, Randal Gill held his child when the mother refused to pick up her baby without a promise from Gill for his financial support, the baby having been born out of wedlock.Footnote ⁹⁶ When performing healthcare for their children, fathers were more frequently involved in the fetching of care and supplies or arranging for others to care for their children than physically tending to their own child. In Merriott, Somerset, in 1689, John Lawrence fetched a pot of ale from the alehouse for his daughter, who was sick at home.Footnote ⁹⁷ In 1656 in Wigan, Lancashire, George Collier sought a nurse for his child on one occasion and took his son to be christened on another.Footnote ⁹⁸

However, the majority of the childcare recorded was not performed by parents. Where non-parents can be identified as having familial bonds, it was typically in the context of long-term care for a child. Two cases detail grandmothers providing long-term care for their illegitimate grandchildren. Aunts are mentioned in two cases caring for small infants, one of whom was employed as a wet nurse in her brother’s house after the death of his wife. In most childcare tasks, however, it was simply not possible to identify a relationship between the child and the carer. Some were wetnurses, as discussed in the next section, or transporting children to wetnurses. Only 7 per cent of childcare work tasks were explicitly performed by servants, although other work tasks were performed by people who may have been servants. For instance, in 1598 Mary Mills, spinster, of St Thomas, Exeter, described her ‘master and dame’ going out for the day leaving their six-month-old son in her care, and whilst he was sleeping in his cradle in the afternoon Mary asked Hugh Darke, a ‘groom’ or male servant, who was sitting by the fire, to ‘see unto it’ while she went on an errand.Footnote ⁹⁹ Some servants undertaking childcare were children themselves. The ten-year-old servant Elizabeth Michell was deemed able to milk cows, make beds, do ‘any other ordinary work about the house’ and ‘attend children’ in Gittisham, Devon, in 1674; while John Cowton from Whalley in Lancashire was 11 years old when he ‘waited upon his [master’s] children to school’ in 1629.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

Charmain Mansell’s detailed study of the carework in the testamentary suits of Hereford church courts illustrates the complex networks of carers that provided care in the home; close family were just one node of potential carers and instead Mansell identifies a range of family members, employers, employed carers, and unrelated kin who cared for the sick.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Despite this mixed economy of care, the majority of caregivers in the work-task database were women. There are some variations between subcategories; men performed a greater proportion of tasks in the education subcategory, at 61 per cent, and appear more frequently in the ‘other care’ subcategory where carework was described in broad terms and often referred to physically aiding others to travel.Footnote ¹⁰² Three-quarters or more of the tasks in the remaining carework subcategories were performed by women. While housework was allotted to the young, as discussed above, the importance of carework for women increased with age.Footnote ¹⁰³ Age seems to have been more important than marital status: carework made up 23 per cent of widowed women’s repertoires, but 38 per cent of those of women aged over 44.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

Historians have tended to explain women’s dominance of housework by the fact women with young children were restricted to working in or close to the house. The work tasks show that housework and childcare were often delegated to others. When women did care for their own children, they were not confined to the house, and often did so alongside other work tasks. Mothers certainly did do childcare and this was particularly onerous when caring for young babies, but non-relatives also undertook this care. Care of older children is rarely recorded, largely because they became workers themselves from a young age. Housework in particular seems to have been regarded as a demeaning form of labour that signified subordinate status. Men did take part in these activities but seem to have avoided them when they could. Often these tasks were done by paid workers.

5.3 Paid Work

The final misconception that needs to be addressed is the idea that housework and carework were predominantly forms of unpaid work that women did for their own families. In Chapter 2 we showed that 78 per cent of the carework observed in the work-task data was performed ‘for another’, meaning it was either paid work or performed by a non-family member.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ The percentage for housework ‘for another’ was lower at 44 per cent, but still substantial and similar to the proportion of agricultural work done ‘for another’. This section explores the ways in which such ‘for another’ work was carried out. It looks at the evidence for casual wage labour performing laundry and cookery for other households, and at the way alehouses offered commercialised housework. Analysis of paid carework examines wetnursing, and the balance between licensed and unlicensed healthcare practitioners. The proportion of ‘for another’ carework carried out by women was only slightly lower than the proportion carried out by men, 76 compared to 83 per cent, indicating that much of women’s carework was paid. Given that women made up 98 and 75 per cent of those providing midwifery and other healthcare services respectively, this is important to bear in mind.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

Table 5.3 takes a closer look at the contexts in which housework was undertaken ‘for another’. Work by servants is a significant subcategory of work ‘for another’, but this was not the only context in which housework was undertaken for pay, given servants only carried out 38 per cent of all housework done ‘for another’. Alehouses were another important institution for the provision of commercialised housework, dominated by attending guests as we might expect. Alehouses provided much of the food and drink provision ‘for another’, but there was commercial provision in other contexts too. A great deal of ‘for another’ work seems to have been women carrying out tasks on a casual basis for people outside the household: much of this work must have been paid but also might have been carried out in exchange with neighbours, or as acts of kindness.

Table 5.3Housework undertaken ‘for another’

Notes: ‘For another’, ‘by servants’, and ‘in an alehouse’ overlap, so the three categories add up to more than the task total. ‘By servants’ is a subset of ‘for another’. Many of those working in alehouses were servants. Alehouses include inns and fair-booths.

Table 5.3Long description

The table indicates housework done for other people with their corresponding statistical values. The first column lists task categories, followed by four columns on total tasks, For another, by servants, and in an alehouse. There are two subcategories for three columns of for another, by servants, and in an alehouse is number and percentage. The data is arranged below:

1. 1. Dataset for total tasks and for another column are:

   • For Attend guests, the corresponding values are 13, 12, and 92.3.

   • For Cleaning, the corresponding values are 70, 42, and 60.0.

   • For Collecting water, the corresponding values are 113, 22, and 19.5.

   • For Food and drink provision, the corresponding values are 318, 165, and 51.9.

   • For Laundry, the corresponding values are 116, 47, and 40.5.

   • For Light and fire provision, the corresponding values are 68, 40, and 58.8.

   • For Locking gates and doors, the corresponding values are 44, 27, and 61.4.

   • For Miscellaneous housework, the corresponding values are 5, 3, and 60.0.

   • For Total, the corresponding values are 747, 358, and 47.9.

2. 2. Dataset for servant’s column:

   • For Attend guests, the corresponding values are 2 and 15.4.

   • For Cleaning, the corresponding values are 20 and 28.6.

   • For Collecting water, the corresponding values are 20 and 17.7.

   • For Food and drink provision, the corresponding values are 40 and 12.6.

   • For Laundry, the corresponding values are 21 and 18.1.

   • For Light and fire provision, the corresponding values are 18 and 26.5.

   • For Locking gates and doors, the corresponding values are 13 and 29.5.

   • For Miscellaneous housework, the corresponding values are 2 and 40.

   • For Total, the corresponding values are 136 and 18.2.

3. 3. Dataset for in an alehouse’s column:

   • For Attend guests, the corresponding values are 12 and 92.3.

   • For Cleaning, the corresponding values are 6 and 8.6.

   • For Collecting water, the corresponding values are 0 and 0.

   • For Food and drink provision, the corresponding values are 67 and 21.1.

   • For Laundry, the corresponding values are 0 and 0.

   • For Light and fire provision, the corresponding values are 3 and 4.4.

   • For Locking gates and doors, the corresponding values are 3 and 6.8.

   • For Miscellaneous housework, the corresponding values are 0 and 0.

   • For Total, the corresponding values are 91 and 12.2.

Laundry work offers a good example. Although the total proportion undertaken ‘for another’ is not especially high, many work tasks were explicitly undertaken for people outside of the household, or for pay. Laundry was often done by female servants, but women did other types of paid laundry: 12 of the 56 laundry washing tasks include details that make it clear washing was sent out to others as a form of paid work. As well as the case of Mary Wilton described in the introduction to this chapter, examples include Agnes Eldridge who did washing for ‘the gentlemen attending on the Earl of Hertford’ and went to collect the wages owed to her in Amesbury, Wiltshire, in 1621; Margery Reader who was ‘hired by Mr Walter Paynes wife to wash her linen’ in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, in 1600; Elizabeth Bexwick who in 1627 ‘came unto the house of Isabel Gilbodye of Stretford … widow, and brought her a linen apron which she washed for the said Isabel’ in Manchester; Joan White who in 1661 was called ‘to the common well of the said town’ by Elizabeth Beales servant to Anthony Cates of Little Walsingham in Norfolk who ‘delivered her certain pieces of linen to wash for her’; and Ellena Bowman from Barnstaple in Devon who in 1576 declared she ‘getteth her living by washing and spinning’.Footnote ¹⁰⁷

Cookery and related food processing also presented opportunities for casual work. For instance, in Wiltshire in 1551, it was stated that the mother of a witness, Joan Drue, ‘doth much resort unto the parson’s house and doth the parson’s work as in brewing and baking and making of his malt and such other service’ on a daily basis rather than as a live-in servant. There are numerous examples of people cooking for other households, such as William Cooke’s wife and Edith Sadler, who went ‘to dress meat for Mr Pope’s supper’ at his house at Moorlinch in Somerset in 1566; William Putt, who ‘dressed [a] … marriage dinner’ for a couple in Devon in 1555; and Joan Ware, who in Somerset in 1637 ‘dressed a dinner at George Lawrence his house in Crewkerne … and after dinner carried home a pot to the house of Maurice Game’.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Johanna Smith from Hampshire stated in 1573 that she witnessed a dying man’s wishes as ‘she did dress his meat and drink and was in his house before with him’.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ A case from Winwick in Lancashire described how in 1626 Jane Gaskell ‘had flour upon her head; and that she went unto the house of Henry Litherland; and there would make pies of the said flour’.Footnote ¹¹⁰

Running an alehouse or inn offered another way to generate income from housework. Such establishments not only sold alcohol but commonly offered heat, light, food, and lodgings, providing what was in essence commercialised housework.Footnote ¹¹¹ The payment for overnight lodgings was not only for the use of a room but the labour of cleaning it, laundering the sheets, and making the bed, just as it is in a hotel today. Men and women provided alehouse housework, although women predominated, taking responsibility for 78 per cent of such tasks using the adjusted figures. Research by Amy Burnett shows that although it was men who most often held alehouse licences, it was more commonly married women who did the work of running them.Footnote ¹¹² A wide range of establishments are recorded in the work-task data, from booths at fairs selling food and alcohol, to well-established inns, such as the Catherine Wheel at Winchester, the Half Moon at Guildford, or the White Hart at North Curry in Somerset. Village alehouses were typically known by their owner’s name. Given other houses were also referred to in this way, it is sometimes only possible to identify alehouses by the activities taking place within them. For instance, in a case from Ely, Cambridgeshire, in 1614, the witness recounted that:

Descriptions of men arriving at a house and demanding alcohol indicate that the establishment was an alehouse. For instance, Henry Lucas described how, at Leyland in Lancashire in 1626, ‘about a month before Christmas last … there came to this examinant’s mother’s house [a diverse company, who] knocked at the door (this examinant and all the whole family being then in their beds) and demanded to come in to drink, whereupon [he] did rise and let them in and filled them ale’.Footnote ¹¹⁴ More excessively a 1598 case from Cheshunt, Hertfordshire, recounted that:

Bringing your own food and asking it to be cooked was not unusual. For instance, in 1620 at Brixham in Devon, Joan Frend described how ‘there came to [her] … house a poor walking man of Berry Pomeroy and requested [her] … to roast a couple of pilchards the which she granted him’.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Nor were lodgings only provided in larger inns. Another case from Devon in 1620 recorded how a man came as a guest to the common tippling house kept by Alice Sanders of Sampford Peverell, ‘and desired to have lodging and [was] … showed a chamber by a girl of the house’.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Similarly, Alice Smith recounted how a man named Richard Goseling and an unknown woman came to her dame’s alehouse late in the evening, and after eating the woman asked Alice ‘to show her a bed, for they would stay there that night and [she did] … light a candle and showed her a bed’ in Bowdon, Cheshire, in 1662.Footnote ¹¹⁸ It was maid servants, sent to clean rooms after guests had left, who often discovered property had been stolen and damaged, as did the maid servant ‘going to make the said bed’ at an inn at Bishops Cannings in Wiltshire in 1631.Footnote ¹¹⁹

If housework could be income generating, the same was even more true of carework. By definition, carework involved the provision of work by one person for someone else. Because of this, it allows the relationship between those two people to be inferred and demonstrates that the carework recorded in court depositions typically involved provision of care outside the immediate family. Table 5.4 provides more detail, showing the subcategories of carework divided according to work that was explicitly paid, performed as part of service, or ‘for another’ but with terms unspecified, as well as work that was not obviously ‘for another’ – either taking place within the family or without any details provided. Childcare was the only subcategory of carework which was not dominated by work ‘for another’. Only a small proportion of work tasks ‘for another’ had explicit evidence of payment for the work: the proportion was highest for healthcare at 15.6 per cent. Servants carried out a relatively small proportion of carework. Most carework tasks fell into the category of ‘for another’ but with terms unspecified: they were outside the family but the terms of payment are not stated. Much of this must have been paid work, but some could have been reciprocal and charitable.

Table 5.4Carework undertaken ‘for another’

Table 5.4Long description

The table indicates care work tasks and their payment arrangements. The first column lists care work categories, followed by three columns. The first column is total task counts, and the second column is percentage undertaken for another which has three subcategories, explicitly paid, service exchange, unspecified terms, and third column has data for percentage with no evidence task undertaken for another. The data is arranged below:

• For Childcare Education, the corresponding values are 124, 6.5, 7.3, 34.7, and 51.6.

• For Healthcare, the corresponding values are 25, 8, 4, 60, and 28.

• For Midwifery, the corresponding values are 211, 15.6, 6.2, 60.7, and 17.5.

• For Other care, the corresponding values are 124, 0.8, 1.6, 95.2, and 2.4.

• For Total, the corresponding values are 80, 2.5, 10, 72.5, and 15.

• For Overall, the corresponding values are 564, 8.2, 5.9, 64.2, and 21.8.

Care for the elderly could be given in expectation of inheritance, childcare could be reciprocal between family and neighbours, and healthcare could be given as an exchange of knowledge and learning. When the elderly widow Joan Fargeson died in Cambridge in 1594, Agnes and William Clarke and their son attested to the ongoing care they provided Joan in her last months, delivering her weekly 8d allowance, caring for her, dressing her by the fireside, and preparing medicinal drinks using nutmeg, ginger, spices, and bread. They appeared in a testamentary case claiming that in return for their care, ‘having been very troublesome’ to the Clarke family, Joan had verbally promised them all her worldly goods.Footnote ¹²⁰ The Clarke family utilised the terminology at court that Charmian Mansell identified as that most commonly used to describe patterns of paid work, ‘taking pains’, which implied that the care provided had been given in expectation of remuneration.Footnote ¹²¹ Care where terms were unspecified reflects these blurred obligations where remuneration was not explicit but could be expected, and make up the largest proportion of ‘for another’ carework for both men and women.

As discussed in Section 5.2, although the home was an important site of medical healthcare, 52 per cent of the healthcare work tasks recorded in the work-task database were performed outside of the actor’s own household.Footnote ¹²² Many of those providing care away from their own home did so to make a living. Testamentary cases often record ongoing care: in 1687 Agnes Hanford was described as employed by the son of Margaret Kempe with the sole purpose of providing care to his mother during her declining health, in Cruwys Morchard in Devon. He paid Agnes a wage and maintained her diet.Footnote ¹²³ In Odiham in Hampshire in 1631 as a man lay sick, Ann Phillips, along with a second woman, were hired to sit and watch him, and witnessed his visitors in his final days.Footnote ¹²⁴ In death, bodies were cared for in the home. In 1631 in Hillington, Norfolk, Margaret Wilson and Jane Betts were requested by Thomasine Tye to attend the house of Robert Tye to prepare the body of Alice Fendick. The two women stayed with Alice’s body during the night and the following day removed her clothes and wound her body in sheets ready for burial.Footnote ¹²⁵

The two largest subcategories of carework, healthcare and midwifery, recorded professional practitioners with occupational descriptors such as doctor, surgeon, apothecary, physician, and midwife, who were likely to be paid for their work even when this was not explicitly stated. The extensive literature on medical provision in early modern England has focused primarily on licensed practitioners, male and female, and men who can be identified by their occupational titles.Footnote ¹²⁶ The work-task data provides examples of licensed doctors attending patients, but also evidence of healthcare being provided by many people who had other occupations or were unlicensed, the majority of whom were female.Footnote ¹²⁷ At her bedside in Sandford, Devon, in 1617, Margaret Heydon was attended by Mr Doctor Wescombe with his apothecary and one ‘Trowte of North Tawton who is accompted to be a physician and to have done people good and money was paid to them’.Footnote ¹²⁸ In Runcorn, Cheshire, in 1627, a surgeon, Mr Jesup, was credited with saving the life of a young man who, being ‘unable to make water’, visited Mr Jesup who ‘with an instrument did or had taken forth of his yard a quart of the filthiest matter or corruption that ever he saw’.Footnote ¹²⁹ Yet it was a clergyman, Mr Hooke, who served his ministry in Stibbard, Norfolk, who doubled up as a medical expert in the 1610s. Dorothy Rutland carried her mother’s ‘matter’ to Mr Hooke for him to view and give his advice on her health, and John Durrant recalled that Mr Hooke ‘did prescribe and minister physic to her this deponent’s mother’.Footnote ¹³⁰ Percival Slake of Prescot, Lancashire, admitted in 1637 that he had attended Robert Bushell in his illness where he administered physic and that he had ‘given physic to diverse others theretofore but had no licence or toleration from anyone to do so’.Footnote ¹³¹

It is particularly striking that three-quarters of healthcare (not including midwifery) was provided by women who neither received licenses nor were given medical occupational titles. Some of these women openly asserted their skills. In 1605 Joanna Stukelie in Yeovil, Somerset, claimed that she ‘hath skill in physic and surgery and … used the same and received money of such as she hath helped and healed but saith that she hath no license to do so’.Footnote ¹³² Others clearly charged for their services, such as ‘one Bond’s wife of Saxthorpe’ in Norfolk, who charged 40d for healing Thomas Abraham alias Sleth in 1557.Footnote ¹³³ The case of Earth Bickley reveals a market for medical advice and care provided by women. When Earth was sexually assaulted in Crediton, Devon, in 1597, her husband Richard spoke to the wife of Ellis Basse ‘for the helping and curing of her [Earth]’. She examined Earth and noted that ‘that she had been very badly used’ but required a higher payment than Earth’s husband could afford. Instead, he ‘procured and appointed one Joan Browninge widow to help her, who had her in cure almost half a year before she was cured’. The attacker, Robert Aileston, who was also Richard’s employer, ‘did pay and deliver money to [Richard] to recompense her for the curing of her’.Footnote ¹³⁴

Midwives were exclusively female before the eighteenth century.Footnote ¹³⁵ This was the only medical occupation for which women were commonly licensed, although not all practising midwives were licensed. There were 97 midwives recorded in the database, who ranged in age from 18 to 80 with a median age of 48. Almost half of midwives, 49 per cent, had no marital status recorded. Nearly a third of the recorded midwives were described as married; eight were married to a husbandman and other spousal occupations included bricklayer, clerk, draper, weaver, inn-holder, butcher, glazier, and baker.Footnote ¹³⁶ Just five of the midwives, 4 per cent, were never married and all were older women, aged 42 or older. Widows made up 16 per cent of midwives – appearing at a greater frequency in the work subcategory of midwifery than any other in the dataset. They had an age range of 28 to 60.

Midwives attested to their experience and expertise. Isabella Rowell of St Oswald, Durham, was called to a labour in the city in 1598, ‘being a midwife and often employed in the like case’.Footnote ¹³⁷ Elizabeth Antrobus, a resident of Knutsford, Cheshire, in 1682, was a ‘professed midwife’.Footnote ¹³⁸ Elizabeth Yong testified that despite being a ‘very poor woman’, she was ‘much used for a midwife’ and her clientele included ‘the substantial parishioners’ of Muchelney, Somerset, in the early 1600s.Footnote ¹³⁹ In part this language reflects the official role granted midwives in the courts as experts in their field to grant access to the bodies of suspected women in the legal process. For example, as was common practice, the midwife in Winsham, Somerset, in 1659, Sybell Kingston, was called upon to search the body and breasts of Elinor Partridge at Master Bovett’s house before ‘diverse other women’, as Elinor was suspected of having recently borne an illegitimate baby.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ In 1674, midwife Elizabeth Twise, then aged 80, recalled taking her licence in the mid-1630s before the Bishop of Lichfield’s chancellor ‘for the employment of a midwife’. She did ‘take her oath faithfully to perform that office and has ever since practised the same in that neighbourhood’.Footnote ¹⁴¹ The use of promissory oaths to officiate midwives was a long-held practice recorded in early sixteenth-century church visitations. Taking a licence to practice midwifery could be costly. Records of licensing agreements in the Chester courts show an initial fee of 18s 8d was paid for a license whilst licenses in London varied between £1 and £2, with subsequent payments made at annual church visitations to continue to practise.Footnote ¹⁴² The practice required midwives to attest to their professionalism with the written testimony of the women they had already assisted in birth. Elizabeth Twise was already an experienced and professional midwife, aged 50 when she took her oath in the 1630s.

At times the role of midwife is less clearly defined. In Freshford, Somerset, in 1617, Margaret Tucker was awoken at midnight to ‘help deliver Mary Widdon of child’, and Katherine Tompson was ‘called to the travail’ of Hannah Lake in Sandbach, Cheshire, in 1682.Footnote ¹⁴³ Neither claimed to have been a midwife by profession. In other cases, it is apparent that women acted as midwife out of necessity. Similarly to the case described in the introduction to this chapter, Martha Lane was called ‘to the groaning’ of Mary Wyatt where she delivered Mary’s baby ‘in the absence of a midwife’, who was called for but did not arrive in time in Priston, Somerset, in 1693.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ At Winterbourne Monkton in Wiltshire in 1670, Mary Eatwell assisted the vicar’s maid in her labour, ‘having some skill in the mystery and cunning of midwifery’, a skill that was confirmed ‘by some of the women of the parish’.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ Licensed medical professionals were not absent from the rural care economy, but the depositions too show the ways in which non-licensed practitioners provided expertise in care.

In contrast to healthcare and midwifery, a small percentage of childcare, 15 per cent, was either explicitly paid or performed by servants. Nonetheless, care of infants and particularly wet nursing could provide an income for women. Of the six explicitly paid work activities performed by women in the category of childcare, four describe wet nursing newborn babies and a further two strongly suggest that wet nursing was involved as part of ‘nursing and keeping a child’ for a prolonged period of time. In total 12 women were recorded working as wet nurses caring for other people’s infants. We know considerably less about the arrangements for wet nursing in England compared to continental Europe, where foundling hospitals in urban centres employed wet nurses to feed abandoned infants and maintained records of their employees.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ For England, Valerie Fildes has suggested that during the seventeenth century wet nursing in the home could be a regular and lucrative form of employment, particularly in the rural parishes surrounding London.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ Wages from wet nursing could be significant: Amy Erickson has calculated the annual costs for raising children maintained by the parish to be roughly £5 per annum in the seventeenth century but rates varied by region and authority.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ The accounts of the Le Strange family show that they paid their wet nurses, who were women in local farming households, £5 4s per annum in the 1620s.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ Our evidence suggests similar rates of pay. A married woman with the surname Pitler was paid £5 per annum to wet nurse the son of a yeoman in Congresbury, Somerset, in 1668; while Julianne Blunt took in an infant to nurse for the payment of 17d a week (£3 13s 8d a year) in North Curry, Somerset, in 1619.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ However, it is likely that some of these agreed wages were not intended to cover the full costs of raising a child. Many of the wet nurses lived close-by to the infant’s family and received further help such as when in 1686 Ann Linsey visited her child at the home of its wet nurse and carer, Jenet Anderton in Myerscough, Lancashire, where she delivered ‘several parcels of linen’ and cloth.Footnote ¹⁵¹

Where details are given in the depositions, aside from the two wet nurses working in service, wet nursing was performed in the home of the wet nurse. Out of the 12 wet nurses recorded, nine were married women, two were widowed, and one (who worked in service) was never married. None of the wet nurses were described as employed by parish officials or doing the work in receipt of parish poor rates. One case did record an infant who was put out to nurse by a parish – ‘at the charge of the town of Sutton [Cheshire]’ – but failed to mention who was employed as the wet nurse.Footnote ¹⁵² Instead, the wet nurses described in the depositions appear to be mainly married women contracted privately. Their husbands were typically husbandmen or artisans. The work of caring for infants could carry on beyond the period of breastfeeding. Helen Katherine received 4d weekly for the bringing up of the young Thomas Abraham over the course of seven years in Norfolk in 1550; Alice Knowles in Derby in 1682 was paid 16d per week for the first quarter for nursing and keeping a child and £3 per year thereafter.Footnote ¹⁵³ Janet Anderton of Lancaster did not claim to be paid explicitly for her work, but did wet nurse and keep a child as a ‘tabler’ for Ann Linsley in 1686.Footnote ¹⁵⁴

The examples of wet nurses also illustrate some of the inequalities of the care economy. In the case from Congresbury in Somerset already mentioned above, the wife of John Pitler was well paid at £5 per annum for the nursing and caring of Samuel Cannoway. But upon the death of Samuel’s father, the terms of the arrangement broke down and John Pitler pleaded poverty in his deposition, ‘for that this informant being a very poor man, and hath a great charge of his own cannot maintain the said Samuel but must leave him to the parish’. The wage earned by his wife for nursing did not, he claimed, cover the cost of tabling Samuel in their home and his care compromised that of their own children.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ In 1698 Agnes Hargreave of Keighley gave a testimony at the Wakefield quarter sessions in Yorkshire in a case of disputed paternity. Her sister Margaret Hargreaves was, she recalls, ‘a spinster and servant or wet nurse to a child of one John Shakleton’.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ Margaret had been working in service for a year in the Shakleton household during which she became pregnant with the child of her master John Shakleton. Soon after the birth of the baby, Margaret did ‘turn away from the said bastard child and left the same to the charge of the town of Keighley’, moving to live close to her sister. Margaret was given 30s by John Shakleton, and gifts of butter at 5lb a time, presumably for her to sell, but her requests for consistent maintenance were refused. As a consequence, she left her baby with the parish so she could pursue productive labour, seeking work elsewhere to support herself.

Rather than assuming simplistically that women’s productive labour was reduced by marital and maternal duties, we can instead look to the complex networks of care that sustained women’s productive work as well as the ample opportunities specialist knowledge in care provision granted them for paid employment.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ Even carework that confined women to the home could provide opportunity for gainful employment: wet nursing and tabling young infants was a valuable source of income that could provide competitive wages for women.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ There were many opportunities to earn income from carework and housework in early modern England. Such work was dominated by women, but it was not separate from market relations. Indeed, with little state provision and attitudes to care that allowed everything from breastfeeding to care of the dying to be performed by non-family members, such work was probably more monetised in early modern England than in some more modern economies.

5.4 Conclusion

Examining housework and carework task-by-task perhaps fails to convey the way workers experienced these tasks, which were fitted in amongst other activities. This is captured in a rare testimony describing a day’s work by a female servant, Lucretia Harward of Bale in Norfolk in 1637. Accused of stealing money from a fellow servant, her defence was that she had been too busy to go into the man’s room where the money had been hidden in a handkerchief. It was harvest time, and Lucretia and another maid were brewing beer and baking bread for the harvest workers as well as seeing to their usual chores. Her description vividly conveys the need to juggle multiple activities in a busy household:

This chapter has sought to overturn three pervasive assumptions about housework and carework: that it took place within people’s own homes, was predominantly carried out by married women, and was unpaid work. Instead, we show that much of housework took place outside, while carework is most often observed taking place in other people’s houses. Only the care of young infants was predominantly carried out as unpaid work by mothers – overwhelmingly married women, but this did not restrict women to the home. Housework was most often undertaken by young unmarried people. Carework was dominated by healthcare which typically involved the care of people from outside the household. Much of housework and carework was paid work: although explicit evidence of payment is only recorded in a minority of cases, the performance of work for non-family members demonstrates the doing of such work outside of a family household was commonplace.

Exploring specific examples of the tasks involved in housework and carework in-depth, as this chapter has done, uncovers a new history of these forms of work. Close examination of housework tasks and who performed them suggests status was more important than gender: housework was left to the young and subordinate. Women’s predominance amongst those doing housework had more to do with their subordinate position than the ‘convenience’ of women combining housework with other forms of women’s work. In contrast, responsibilities for carework increased with age, but the carework described in court depositions was rarely routine childcare; instead, it was often skilled healthcare and midwifery. The work-task data captures the grassroots delivery of medical care, predominantly provided by women for people from outside their household. Just as other forms of work changed over time, so did housework and carework. Twentieth-century assumptions about housework being unpaid work carried out by married women within the privacy of the home cannot be applied to early modern England.