In the harvest of 1611, four wage workers set about reaping wheat in ‘two little pieces of ground’ belonging to Edward Hayward in Ryecroft, an open field in Redbourn, Hertfordshire. They were a 22-year-old servant, Anne Godman, who had been employed with Edward since the previous Christmas; Richard Byrch, a 45-year-old labourer who was hired by Hayward for a single day; Richard Black, a 33-year-old husbandman, hired by Hayward as a ‘harvestman’ since Midsummer; and Thomas Black, a 23-year-old husbandman employed as a ‘month’s man’ and Edward’s distant cousin. Part way through the day, with the reaping almost complete, Hayward took Richard Black and Thomas Black ‘to other business elsewhere and left the said Richard Byrch and Anne Godman to bind and shock the same wheat’. Each shock of wheat contained 15 sheaves, and there were 117 sheaves in total. At 7 in the evening, Richard and Thomas returned with Edward’s horse and cart and loaded up the wheat, being careful to leave the tithe, consisting of 12 sheaves, in the field. They ‘carried … home’ the rest of the wheat to Edward’s barn. Soloman Barton, passing by the field the next morning, saw the 12 tithe sheaves standing in the field. Philip Barker, the deputy of Francis Sylles, who owned the tithes, had spoken to the workers while they were loading the wheat but decided to come back the next day rather than waiting. By the time he returned some of the wheat was missing. As a consequence, the four workers were called to the church court the following November to give evidence, recounting in detail that one day’s work.Footnote ¹ Tithe disputes are a particularly rich source of evidence about agriculture and coastal fishing, but many other types of cases also provide snippets of evidence offering a window into the work activities involved in the largest sector of the economy: food production and the management of landed resources.

This chapter explores a set of related production activities. Most of these, such as agriculture, fishing, and food processing, involved the production of food. Others, such as woodland management and cutting turf, relate to closely connected forms of land management and the provision of land-based resources such as fuel. Occupational descriptors suggest farming remained the most common male occupation in early modern England up to 1700.Footnote ² The existing history of early modern agriculture is dominated by evidence from three types of sources, each of which has weaknesses that the work-task data can correct. Probate inventories provide details about the economies of individual farms, but they do not reveal who exactly carried out the work of farming.Footnote ³ Farming advice books offer stylised depictions of the division of labour between women and men, but it is unclear how far these conventions were actually followed.Footnote ⁴ The wage accounts of large farms frequently reveal details of the work undertaken by labourers paid by the day or task, but such documents are rare and a-typical, relating only to the large farms run by or for wealthy, literate owners.Footnote ⁵ They also leave us in the dark about the work carried out by the many servants employed, because their tasks are rarely described. The work-task data is valuable because it allows the whole cross-section of farms to be viewed, from smallholders with a single cow, to small family farms and large farms with gangs of workers, and they reveal who exactly was doing what. A further bonus is that work patterns recorded in court depositions go beyond farms into the realms of shared resources such as commons, woods, and bodies of water, providing an overarching view of rural labour.

Women’s role in agriculture has been the subject of many contradictory generalisations and thus is a particular focus of this chapter. The work-task data shows that 39 per cent of male work activities fell into the category of agriculture and land, which includes farming and fishing, while a further 4 per cent involved food processing. For women the equivalent figures were 20 per cent and 4 per cent. Overall, the adjusted figures show that women undertook just over a third of work in the agricultural and land category, and 42 per cent of food processing.Footnote ⁶ Previous assessments of women’s involvement in agriculture have ranged from Keith Snell’s assertion that ‘there is abundant supportive evidence for a very wide range of female participation in agricultural tasks before 1750’, to Marjorie McIntosh’s exclusion of agricultural work from her study of working women because it was ‘less directly related to the money economy’, and thus judged of little interest.Footnote ⁷ More commonly historians have repeated summaries drawn from early modern farming advice books, noting that farmer’s wives produced ‘food, drink, and clothing for their households … [they] tended small livestock, such as hens and ducks. They planted kitchen gardens, and processed fruit from orchards’.Footnote ⁸ Such descriptions are not wholly inaccurate, but they lack sufficient detail and underplay the flexibility and range of female farm labour.

Only a handful of articles have sought to reconstruct the historical gender division of labour in agriculture. Most famously Michael Roberts examined harvest labour, showing that while only men mowed with the scythe, women took part in other activities including harvesting with a sickle.Footnote ⁹ Amanda Flather used court depositions from rural Essex to reconstruct the interlocking work patterns of women and men more generally across the seventeenth century.Footnote ¹⁰ Our findings confirm the conclusions of both these approaches. Less reliable is A. H. Smith’s argument arising from analysis of one Norfolk gentleman’s farm, that ‘men’s work and women’s work was “sexually exclusive”’.Footnote ¹¹ Also problematic is the recent assertion of Alesina et al., that in historical ‘plough societies’ women work in the home rather than in agriculture.Footnote ¹² England was certainly a ‘plough society’ by their definition, but this did not lead to the exclusion of women from agricultural work. We find that the gender division of labour was flexible and women’s participation in agriculture was significant. Alesina’s approach is related to another strand in the history of gendered work in agriculture contrasting arable and pastoral regions. It has been suggested that women found more work in pastoral agriculture.Footnote ¹³ Recently, Voigtländer and Voth developed an elaborate theory based on the assumption that married women worked in arable agriculture and unmarried female servants in pastoral agriculture and thus the switch to more pastoral agriculture after the Black Death encouraged women to delay marriage and led to the development of the European Marriage Pattern.Footnote ¹⁴ The inaccuracy of these generalisations has been pointed out by Edwards and Ogilvie.Footnote ¹⁵ In this chapter, the agricultural work patterns of female servants and married women, and women’s involvement in arable and pastoral agriculture, are compared.

Tithe disputes offer some of the most detailed descriptions of agriculture and food production, providing 30 per cent of the work tasks in the agriculture and land category. The process of tithing awarded a tenth of produce from the land (and sea) to the tithe owner. Originally tithes supported the parish clergy. However, even before the Reformation, tithes were often appropriated by advowsons – people or institutions who received tithes and appointed clergy to parishes, and thus often fell into private hands.Footnote ¹⁶ Tithe collection led to disputes which were heard in the church courts. This was particularly the case in the half-century, 1550 to 1599, following the Reformation. Of the 143 tithe cases that provided evidence of work tasks in the database, 59 per cent came from this period. In total the 143 tithe cases provided evidence of 1,117 work tasks, of which 801 fall into the agriculture and land category. Nonetheless, agricultural work is a large category, and much of the evidence comes from other types of cases: theft, accidental death, and a whole range of miscellaneous cases provide valuable evidence. For food processing, theft cases yielded two-thirds of the work tasks collected. As such, integral tasks are generally included in the analysis in this chapter, as they capture many important forms of agricultural and food processing work that would otherwise be overlooked.

The chapter is divided into four main sections. The first provides an overview of the farm economy and the types of people undertaking agricultural work. This is followed by three sections looking in turn at arable agriculture, livestock husbandry, and work on or in commons, woods, and water. The processing of food and other resources is considered in the relevant sections: thus milling, malting, and brewing are discussed in relation to arable farming, butchering and dairying with livestock, and fishing and fuel with commons, woods, and water.

6.1 Farm Economy and Workers

Early modern England had a system of mixed agriculture in which the raising of crops was combined with keeping livestock.Footnote ¹⁷ The most common grains were wheat, barley, oats, and rye. In addition, peas, beans, and vetches were grown as field crops, while turnips and rapeseed started to appear in the second half of the seventeenth century. The most common livestock were sheep and cattle. Sheep provided wool, mutton, and tallow; while cattle were kept for milk, beef, and hides.Footnote ¹⁸ Oxen and horses provided traction for ploughing and pulling carts. Vegetables and fruit were cultivated in gardens and orchards, adding an essential element to diets. A tithe case from Pewsey in Wiltshire from 1675 reported, for instance, that Anthony Godman had ‘a small garden plot belonging to his house in Pewsey’ in which was grown ‘a few pot herbs’ and ‘sometimes a few cabbages for the use of his family and sometimes a few beans, but no peas, turnips or carrots’.Footnote ¹⁹ Animals such as pigs and poultry were another important source of food and income.

Maintaining yields of grain and other crops relied on land being kept in good heart. Manure was either collected and spread on the fields, or animals were grazed on the land when it lay fallow and spread the manure themselves. Thus, in Worstead, Norfolk, in 1528, a servant named William Chamber drove a cart ‘laden with dung to his master’s land to unload it there’, while in Weston Zoyland, Somerset, cows were put to graze on the grass that had grown beneath the corn in the open field between harvest and the start of ploughing in October 1583.Footnote ²⁰ Rotations also helped to maintain crop yields. At Wherwell in Hampshire in 1558, a classic rotation was described involving three large common fields in which local farmers each owned strips of land. One field was sown with wheat, one with barley, and the third ‘lay for a summer field’ – a fallow where sheep were grazed.Footnote ²¹ Peas, beans, and vetches were valued not only because they were used as food or animal fodder but because they replaced some of the nutrients extracted by other crops, thereby increasing soil fertility.Footnote ²² Another method for maintaining fertility was ‘convertible husbandry’. This involved alternating pasture and arable over a longer period: pasture was cleared, ploughed, and then cropped for several years before being put back down to pasture again. Two cases from Devon record this process: groups of men and women were engaged in ‘burning beat’ and ‘righting beat’ at Mr Halewood’s ground in South Molton in 1620, and at North Petherwin in 1593.Footnote ²³ Beat-burning had been practised as part of convertible husbandry in Devon since the medieval period and involved burning the vegetation off rough pasture to prepare it for ploughing.Footnote ²⁴

Table 6.1 shows the most common farm-based work activities, breaking down some of the larger subcategories in Appendix B, such as fieldwork and animal husbandry. Adjusted figures are used for female work tasks to represent women’s contribution more accurately. This offers an overview of the most labour-intensive activities on the early modern farm. In arable agriculture the most demanding processes were preparing the ground (which included ploughing), harvesting, and threshing crops. Animal husbandry also required large quantities of labour, although that labour was spread more evenly throughout the year. The hay harvest was an essential adjunct to keeping livestock, providing fodder over the winter. Farm transport encompassed the movement of crops and animals within the farm: common and time-consuming activities often overlooked in descriptions of agricultural labour. Trees and hedges were managed to provide timber for building and bundles of wood (faggots) for fuel, while well-maintained field-boundaries were essential to keeping livestock. Women dominated milking and are well represented in most categories. Only in farm transport, preparing ground, and wood husbandry, did their participation fall below 20 per cent of work tasks.

Table 6.1The most common farm-based work tasks

Notes: adj. = adjusted (x2.59). Farm-based activities from agriculture and land, and food processing, categories. Wood husbandry and hedging are combined. Cattle farming does not include milking. Harvesting crops does not include hay.

Table 6.1Long description

The table presents a gendered breakdown of agricultural labor tasks. The first column lists specific farming, followed by four data columns, adjusted female task counts, male task counts, combined totals, and women’s adjusted participation percentage. The data highlights how agricultural work was divided along gender lines, with women overwhelmingly responsible for dairy work while men dominated most other farm tasks.

• For harvesting crops, the corresponding values are 155, 317, 472, and 32.9.

• For sheep farming, the corresponding values are 96, 311, 407, and 23.6.

• For farm transport, the corresponding values are 70, 313, 383 and 18.3.

• For milking, the corresponding values are 231, 8, 239, and 96.7.

• For hay harvest, the corresponding values are 75, 128, 203, and 37.

• For cattle farming, the corresponding values are 91, 117, 208, and 43.7.

• For prepare ground, the corresponding values are 18, 171, 189, and 9.6.

• For caring for horses, the corresponding values are 52, 130, 182, and 28.5.

• For wood and hedge husbandry, the corresponding values are 16, 175, 191, and 8.8.

• For threshing and winnowing, the corresponding values are 52, 119, 171, and 30.3.

• For total, the corresponding values are 856, 1789, 2645, and 32.4.

Men whose main occupation was farming adopted a variety of titles. Table 6.2 shows the categories of agricultural work undertaken by men with different occupational descriptors. Yeomen were wealthier farmers, although below the gentry in status. Husbandmen were generally family farmers: men with smaller farms that were nonetheless sufficient to provide a living for their family.Footnote ²⁵ Some husbandmen also worked for wages. The Latin term agricola, or farmer, was also used in some church court records.Footnote ²⁶ Wage workers are represented by labourers and servants.

Table 6.2Agricultural repertoires of types of male farm workers

Table 6.2Long description

The table presents a comparative analysis of agricultural labor patterns among different male occupational classes. The first column lists specific farming activities, followed by five data columns depicting the percentage distribution of each activity within the work repertoire of yeomen, husbandmen, agricola, laborers, and male servants.

• For fieldwork, the corresponding values are 26.5, 38.5, 46.3, 29.8, and 22.5.

• For animal husbandry, the corresponding values are 46.8, 29, 17.1, 21.5, and 45.4.

• For farm transport, the corresponding values are 11.4, 17.9, 24.4, 16.9, and 17.9.

• For wood and hedges, the corresponding values are 3.8, 7.2, 8.1, 11.8, and 3.8.

• For other agricultural, the corresponding values are 11.4, 7.5, 4.1, 20, and 10.4.

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

• For total tasks, the corresponding values are 79, 335, 161, 255, and 240.

Husbandmen and agricola did the highest proportion of fieldwork: the agricola’s proportion is possibly inflated by the fact they only appear in the church courts, and thus often in tithe cases concerned with bringing in the harvest. Yeomen and male servants did higher proportions of animal husbandry; indeed, the agricultural repertoires of male servants were remarkably similar to those of yeomen, although servants did a higher proportion of farm transport. Labourers undertook a wide range of tasks and were particularly likely to do wood husbandry and hedging. Thus, for instance, two labourers, John Chescombe and John Henckocke, were paid to ‘make and repair the hedge of the churchyard’ at Newton Valence in Hampshire in 1523.Footnote ²⁷ Labourers also did noticeably more ‘other’ tasks. Two-fifths of these involved digging marl and clay, which was likely to have been paid work, but tasks such as collecting fuel, hunting, and gathering food related to their own smallholding economy.Footnote ²⁸

Apart from servants, women were typically described by their marital status rather than occupations. Women, like men, were heavily involved in fieldwork and animal husbandry, but the next most common subcategories were milking, and gathering food. Servants, maids, spinsters, and single women were mostly, but not always, younger women.Footnote ²⁹ While servants and most maids were paid employees, the occupational status of spinsters and single women is unclear. Some may have been servants, but their pattern of work differed, suggesting that many were unmarried women living with their parents and working either on the family farm or for day wages. All types of women were involved in all the categories of agricultural work shown in Table 6.3, but the emphasis of their work differed. As a proportion of agricultural tasks, servants did the most milking, single women the most animal husbandry, wives the most gathering – which included gleaning – and widows the most fieldwork. Together, milking and animal husbandry made up more than 60 per cent of servants’ and single women’s agricultural work, compared to 42 per cent of that of married women. Of all types of women, widows’ pattern of agricultural work was closest to that of men, suggesting some of these women were managing farms without much male labour. Tables 6.2 and 6.3 are a reminder that work was divided not just between men and women, but between family farmers and wage workers, and between unmarried and married people. Even amongst wage workers, servants and day labourers had different work patterns and skill sets.

Table 6.3Agricultural repertoires of different types of women

Table 6.3Long description

This table presents a comparative analysis of agricultural labor distribution among women of different marital and social statuses. The first column lists specific farming activities followed by four data columns representing the percentage distribution of each activity within the work repertoire of single women and spinsters, servants and maids, wife’s repertoire, and widow’s repertoire.

• For fieldwork, the corresponding values are 12.3, 20.4, 24.6, and 35.3.

• For animal husbandry, the corresponding values are 32.1, 24.5, 23.9, and 26.5.

• For milking, the corresponding values are 29.6, 38.5, 18.1, and 5.9.

• For gathering food, the corresponding values are 8.6, 5.1, 18.1, and 11.8.

• For other agricultural, the corresponding values are 17.3, 11.5, 15.2, and 20.6.

• For total, the corresponding values are 99.9, 100.0, 99.9, and 100.1.

• For total tasks, the corresponding values are 81, 78, 138, and 34.

Agricultural work was strongly seasonal.Footnote ³⁰ Our evidence supports Flather’s conclusion that gendered work patterns varied across the year, sometimes overlapping but often occupying women and men in different activities.Footnote ³¹ In animal husbandry, women were most heavily involved in milking and care of cattle, while men dominated sheep farming. In May and June, however, men and women worked together to move, wash, and shear sheep. Women’s involvement in these labour-intensive tasks seems to have been more common in communities of the south-west. In Stogursey, Somerset, for instance, ‘at sheep shearing time … about the beginning of June’ 1603, Marie, the wife of William Bitford, worked alongside other men and women ‘at sheep shearing in the barn’ of her husband.Footnote ³² Men and women also worked side by side in the fields as the summer progressed, making hay together in July and harvesting cereal crops in August and September. Gleaning corn in the late summer was largely the preserve of women. Fruit harvest, on the other hand, saw a more even division – 51 per cent female – as in Somerset in August 1681, when the tailor Thomas Clarke worked ‘at Cloford with his wife and son George in an orchard … gathering of apples’.Footnote ³³

Running a farm required the mastery of many interlocking activities and a wide range of skills. Male servants were particularly prominent in animal husbandry, and male labourers in wood management and hedging and ditching; female servants and unmarried women dominated milking, and married women were prominent amongst the gleaners. Yet these were differences in emphasis rather than specialisms. All types of agricultural workers took part in the main areas of farm work: fieldwork and animal husbandry. The varied seasonal work tasks and peaks of labour demand in the summer meant that agricultural workers had to be multiskilled and flexible.

6.2 Field Crops

The frequency with which different field crops were mentioned in work tasks is shown in Figure 6.1. ‘Corn’ was a catch-all term for grain crops. Wheat was valued as a bread corn: high-quality white bread was always made from wheat. Barley, although sometimes made into flour or added to pottage, was primarily used to make beer. Oats, which were a hardier crop than wheat, were eaten throughout the north of England as the main food grain, in the form of oatcakes or porridge.Footnote ³⁴ Oats were sometimes brewed into ale in the west of England, a famously unpleasant drink.Footnote ³⁵ Jane More was malting oats ready for brewing ‘in the granary of her husband’s house … in which there was a malt kiln, with her servants Mary Hayward and Christiana Osmond’ in West Coker, Somerset, in 1598; Mary passed a sieve full of oat malt to Jane, ‘and as she carried the sieve to empty it in the granary her feet slipped due to weight of the sieve’.Footnote ³⁶ Throughout the country, oats were also valued as fodder for working horses, the main form of traction and transport. Rye was another hardy grain which would grow on thin sandy soils and in upland regions. It was sometimes sown as a mixture with wheat. Rye was a bread grain, often mixed with wheat for cheaper forms of bread. Peas are highly nutritious and were valued as human food used in pottage and the cheapest form of wholemeal bread, but also as animal fodder.

Figure 6.1 Field crops mentioned in work tasks.

Notes: Graph shows the number of work tasks in which each crop was mentioned.

Figure 6.1Long description

The data in the format, crop name and mentioned count are as follows. Corn, 284. Barley, 231. Wheat, 199. Oats, 103. Peas, 60. Rye, 49. Beans, 17. Vetches, 14. Turnips, 11. Mixed grains, 9.

The cultivation of field crops followed an annual cycle that notionally began and finished each year at Michaelmas (29th September). Wheat and rye were sown in the autumn from August to November, while barley, oats, beans, and peas were sown in March and April.Footnote ³⁷ Figure 6.2 demonstrates how key tasks were spread unevenly over the year with the preparation of ground (mostly ploughing) and threshing and winnowing dominating the winter months, weeding occurring in spring and early summer, and haymaking and the grain harvest concentrated in the busy months of July, August, and September. Food processing had an inverse seasonal distribution to agricultural fieldwork and animal husbandry. As discussed in Section 4.2, the majority of threshing and winnowing, milling, and food storage and preservation took place in the coldest six months of the year. Tasks were also gendered, with more female involvement in the summer tasks of weeding, harvesting, and gleaning.

Figure 6.2 Seasonality of arable and harvesting tasks.

Notes: Harvest additions and monthly weights applied: for an explanation of these, see Appendices C and D. F adjusted (x2.58). This differs from the standard multiplier as it is designed to give an equal number of male and female tasks with weighted monthly data attached.

Figure 6.2Long description

The vertical axis is labeled proportion of monthly task repertoire and ranges from 0 to 100 percent in increments of 10. The horizontal axis presents the months of a year. Five bars are stacked on the graph. The approximate data in the format, month, prepare ground percent, threshing and winnowing percent, weeding percent, hay harvest percent, and grain harvest percent, are as follows. January, 25%, 80%, 0%, 0%, 0%. February, 42%, 40%, 18%, 0%, 0%. March, 50%, 50%, 0%, 0%, 0%. April, 45%, 25%, 30%, 0%, 0%. May, 12%, 20%, 68%, 0%, 0%. June, 25%, 5%, 45%, 25%, 0%. July, 2%, 10%, 0%, 70%, 18%. August, 1%, 7%, 0%, 5%, 87%. September, 2%, 6%, 0%, 4%, 88%. October, 22%, 35%, 0%, 0%, 43%. November, 33%, 67%, 0%, 0%, 0%. December, 35%, 65%, 0%, 0%, 0%.

Ploughing was an overwhelmingly male activity. The only example found of a woman engaged in ploughing was Margaret Parsons, a female servant who helped to plough a field in WestonZoyland, Somerset, in 1551.Footnote ³⁸ Ploughing was not the only preparatory process, however. Land that had been out of cultivation was stubbed, grubbed, or cleaned of ‘briars, brambles, bushes, weeds, thistles, and nettles’.Footnote ³⁹ Fields were spread with manure and marl. Digging marl, clay, chalk, sand, and top soil, which were all used to improve the quality of soil in fields and gardens, had peaks in May and June, and again in November, fitting around the more urgent work of the harvest, and avoided when the ground was frozen.Footnote ⁴⁰ In Devon and Somerset, the spring-sown barley land was ‘hacked’ or ‘balled’ as well as manured, which appears to refer to breaking large lumps of heavy clay soil before sowing.Footnote ⁴¹ This was done by teams of workers. At Rewe outside Exeter in March 1636 at least five men were ‘hacking barley land’; while in Brean in Somerset two men and a woman were ‘at work viz. at balling of barley land’ in April 1584.Footnote ⁴² After sowing, ground might also be rolled. This could be hazardous: all the examples come from the coroners’ reports into accidental death. The roller was a heavy piece of wood, drawn by either one or two horses, used to flatten the ploughed soil. When Thomas Lorkyn was rolling a field at Ickleton in Cambridgeshire in March 1524, ‘he struck the horse on the head and the horse pulled him to the ground, struck him with its feet and ran the roller over him’.Footnote ⁴³

In northern and eastern England sowing was a male activity, but it was more mixed in south-west England. Out of 37 examples of people sowing crops, the six women recorded all came from Devon and Somerset.Footnote ⁴⁴ Ivy Pinchbeck implied that women’s involvement in planting peas and beans was an eighteenth-century innovation, yet two cases record women setting peas and planting beans in fields in the mid-seventeenth century in Somerset and Devon, and bean planting had been dominated by women in the medieval period.Footnote ⁴⁵ Three cases recorded women sowing corn. At Shute in East Devon in 1672 a whole family, including two women, shut up their house for the day because they were in the field sowing corn.Footnote ⁴⁶ Weeding was commonly done by women: only 8 of the 28 weeders recorded were men.Footnote ⁴⁷ While weeding vegetable gardens might begin as early as February or March, field crops were weeded between April and June. A case from Cornwall in 1595 referred to the period between Whitsun and Midsummer as ‘weeding time’.Footnote ⁴⁸ Weeding was typically done in groups and seems to have been an occasion for sociability and gossip: 16 of the 28 workers taking part in weeding were recorded in cases relating to defamatory gossip. For instance, five women were ‘weeding in the ground of William Zeager within the parish of Broadclyst’ in Devon in 1617, when ‘Agnes Voysy and Margaret West fell at variance between themselves’ and Agnes slandered Margaret saying ‘John Holmead did lye with thee in Mr Moores shippon and the boys did look in through the door and make a game of it’.Footnote ⁴⁹

In late June the busiest period of the year began, with first hay harvested and then grain. The hay harvest is described in the next section. Harvesting grain sometimes began as early as late July in southern England but was normally concentrated in the second half of August and the first three weeks of September, occasionally stretching into early October. Of the grain harvest tasks that recorded the month of activity, 6 per cent took place in July, 54 per cent in August, 33 per cent in September and 7 per cent in October.Footnote ⁵⁰ Crops were harvested with sickles and scythes and then bound into sheaves and stood up in shocks, stooks, or pooks, before being transported back to the farm for longer-term storage.Footnote ⁵¹ Scything was a less careful method of harvesting and mowers were accompanied by rakers who gathered up the cut stalks for binding.Footnote ⁵² Once the harvest had been cut and stacked, gleaners scoured the fields for ears of corn that had been missed. Table 6.4 shows the gender breakdown of these harvesting tasks. Aside from gleaning, reaping and raking used the highest proportion of female labour, while mowing with a scythe was a male-only task.

Table 6.4Gender division of labour in the grain harvest

Notes: adj. = adjusted (x2.59). These figures are lower than ‘harvest crops’ in Table 6.1 because not all harvest work was described in detail and some involved non-grain crops.

Table 6.4Long description

The table presents a gendered breakdown of harvest-related agricultural tasks. The first column lists specific activities followed by four data columns, adjusted female task counts, male task counts, combined totals, and women’s adjusted participation percentage. The data highlights how harvest labor was divided along gender lines, with women completely excluded from mowing while dominating gleaning activities.

• To reap or shear, the corresponding values are 60, 82, 142, and 42.3.

• To mow, the corresponding values are 0, 33, 33, and 0.0.

• To rake, the corresponding values are 13, 18, 31, and 41.9.

• To bind, the corresponding values are 21, 53, 74, and 28.4.

• To stack, the corresponding values are 28, 52, 80, and 35.

• To glean, the corresponding values are 91, 12, 103, and 88.3.

• For total, the corresponding values are 213, 250, 463, and 46.

The different verbs used to describe the two harvest technologies, ‘mow’ for scythes, and ‘reap’ or ‘shear’ for sickles, allow the distribution of the two technologies to be explored. Between 1500 and 1700 the scythe was predominantly used to harvest barley and oats, as well as peas and vetches, and was used in all the regions studied. Snell argued that use of the scythe to harvest wheat as well as barley and oats decreased women’s participation in harvest work from the mid-eighteenth century onwards, a conclusion recently confirmed by Joyce Burnette, who noted that while the sickle persisted longest in northern England, the scything of wheat was widely adopted between 1750 and 1850, squeezing women out of the harvest workforce.Footnote ⁵³ For the period before 1700 we found only one case of the scythe being used to harvest wheat, from Axminster in Devon in 1634.Footnote ⁵⁴ Sickles were used to harvest all types of grain. It was the normal way of harvesting wheat, and rye was only ever harvested with a sickle. Reaping barley with a sickle was recorded not only in Cheshire in 1555 but also in Norfolk in 1627 and 1642, and shearing (reaping) oats was recorded in County Durham in 1602 and Yorkshire in 1663.Footnote ⁵⁵ The scythe and sickle had existed side by side as alternative technologies for many centuries, and the respective qualities of the two tools were likely well understood. The scythe saved labour, allowing grain to be harvested more quickly, but it was wasteful, leading to more grain being dropped in the field; it also required the highest-paid form of male labour. The sickle ensured less grain was wasted and could be wielded by both women and men. The choice of which to use therefore depended on the available labour force and the priorities of the farmer.

In contrast to Snell’s pessimistic picture, Pinchbeck argued that women’s involvement in agriculture increased in the late eighteenth century, working with new crops and techniques.Footnote ⁵⁶ The new crops of the 1500 to 1700 period did not necessarily involve women’s labour. In the dataset, only men were recorded sowing and ‘drawing’ (or pulling) turnips, which appeared in the late seventeenth century. It was men who cut woad leaves to harvest them in Hampshire in 1579, but women who were engaged in picking saffron in Cambridgeshire in 1582.Footnote ⁵⁷ Gardening, with only 15 recorded activities, was dominated by men (12 male tasks against 3 female), despite the insistence in early modern husbandry books that this was a female activity.Footnote ⁵⁸ Early modern commentators such as Gervase Markham characterised fieldwork, on the other hand, as the responsibility of the male husbandman, but this generalisation overlooked the significant contribution of women.Footnote ⁵⁹ Some tasks were more strongly gendered than others: men dominated ploughing and threshing, while women dominated weeding and gleaning. Harvesting required everyone’s labour. Only men mowed, but the workers who reaped or sheared crops with a sickle and bound them into sheaves were mixed. As a consequence, women made up a third of the workers harvesting crops, and of those engaged in growing and harvesting crops overall.Footnote ⁶⁰ It is wrong, therefore, to characterise arable agriculture as the province of men alone.

Grain crops were removed from the field with stalks attached. Before the crop could be used or sold it had to be threshed (beaten with a flail to dislodge the grains from heads of corn) and winnowed (tossed into the air to separate grain and chaff). Table 6.5 shows that threshing was largely undertaken by men, whereas winnowing was a mixed activity. In fact, as discussed in Section 3.1, the gender of winnowers was strongly regional: female in the west of England and male in the east. For instance, Agnes Clement was sent for ‘to winnowing, whilst that the wind did serve’ at John Peyrce’s house in Midsomer Norton in Somerset in 1607, announcing on arrival, ‘I am come to winnow your corn’; whilst in Tickhill in Yorkshire in 1690, it was a man, Matthew Taylor of Moorehouse, who ‘was windowing [winnowing] wheat at Mistress Rowleston’s house’.Footnote ⁶¹

Table 6.5Gender division of labour in processing of field crops

Notes: adj. = adjusted (x2.59). Threshing and winnowing are lower than the figures in Table 6.1 because some tasks involved cleaning peas and lentils, not shown here.

Table 6.5Long description

The table presents a gendered analysis of post-harvest grain processing tasks. The first column lists specific activities, followed by four data columns, adjusted female task counts, male task counts, combined totals, and women’s adjusted participation percentage. The data reveals complementary gender roles in grain processing, with men handling heavy threshing while women specialized in winnowing and malting.

• For threshing, the corresponding values are 10, 98, 108, and 9.6.

• For winnowing, the corresponding values are 39, 14, 53, and 78.5.

• For malting, the corresponding values are 16, 6, 22, and 72.1.

• For milling grain or malt, the corresponding values are 23, 47, 70, and 33.2.

• For total, the corresponding values are 65, 118, 183, and 35.4.

Malting, the process by which barley or other grains were prepared for brewing (by soaking in water, allowing the grain to sprout, and then roasting gently in a kiln), was an activity undertaken by women and men. As we saw in the case from West Coker in Somerset discussed above, there it was a wife and two female servants who malted oats in 1598.Footnote ⁶² In a case from Cambridge in 1525 the workforce was male: in the brewhouse of Ralph Bicardike, Thomas Brankeston and William Bicardike carried a barrel of boiling wort while Clement Ferror was stirring malt in mash vat of boiling liquid.Footnote ⁶³ Markham tried to make sense of this mixed picture by saying of malting: ‘this office or place of knowledge belongeth particularly the housewife; and though we have many excellent men maltsters, yet it is properly the work and care of the woman, for it is a house work’.Footnote ⁶⁴

Grain had to be milled into flour, and malt was also milled before brewing. Milling was one of the few truly industrial processes in the English countryside. Mechanised watermills and windmills had replaced the labour of hand-milling corn with a quern in the medieval period.Footnote ⁶⁵ Corn tended to be milled in small batches as flour keeps much less well than unmilled grain. The transport category shows roughly equal numbers of women and men carrying corn to the mill: 18 women and 15 men.Footnote ⁶⁶ Nor was mill-work an exclusively male affair: 33 per cent of milling work tasks were undertaken by women.Footnote ⁶⁷ Some cases relate to customers helping to grind their own corn or malt, while others relate to women married to male millers. A defamation case from Moorlinch, Somerset, in 1605 recorded Joanna Tintyinge and James Allen, who were both servants of Alexander Walton, gentleman, visiting the house of Agnes Salter for ‘grinding certain malt in a mill of the said Salter’s’, implying that Agnes Salter was running her own mill.Footnote ⁶⁸

The baking of flour into bread and other foods was undertaken both for household consumption and as a commercial occupation. Of the 15 work tasks that record people baking, 13 were done by women and 2 by men. In seven cases they were baking bread, four relate to pies, and four tasks to other or unspecified baking. The gender balance was reversed for people with the occupation of baker: 3 were women and 11 men. The most common activity undertaken by people described as bakers was selling bread (7 instances). Only one of the bakers, Joan Mundyn of Cornwood in Devon in 1673, was actually recorded baking. Joan, who appeared in a long and complex church court case relating to a disputed will, also ran an alehouse, and is described purchasing malt, taking corn and malt to the mill, and selling bread and beer, as well as baking.Footnote ⁶⁹ Brewing was part of a subset of food processing activities concerned with making alcoholic drinks. Judith Bennett has described how brewing ale, a female-dominated activity in medieval England, developed into male-dominated beer brewing in early modern England.Footnote ⁷⁰ All 11 people with the occupation ‘brewer’ in the database were men. However, as Table 6.6 shows, women remained heavily involved in beer production.

Table 6.6Gender division of labour in making alcoholic drinks

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

Table 6.6Long description

The table presents a gendered breakdown of alcohol production tasks. The first column lists specific activities, followed by four data columns, adjusted female task counts, male task counts, combined totals, and women’s adjusted participation percentage. The data demonstrates women’s primary role in beer production processes while being excluded from cider production during this period.

• To make malt, the corresponding values are 16, 6, 22, and 72.1.

• To fetch ingredients, the corresponding values are 16, 3,19, and 83.8.

• To brew beer, the corresponding values are 62, 10, 72, and 86.1.

• To make cider, the corresponding values are 0, 4, 4, and 0.

• For other, malt and brew, the corresponding values are 5, 2, 7, and 72.1.

• Total, the corresponding values are 99, 25, 124, and 79.8.

Despite generalisations in early modern farming advice books about fieldwork being a male domain, women were actively involved in many areas of crop production. Processing grain into foodstuffs also involved both women and men: although men dominated the occupations of ‘baker’ and ‘brewer’, women dominated the work of baking and brewing.

6.3 Livestock

With an estimated 0.93 million cattle and 16.75 million sheep in England in 1600, animal husbandry was dominated by sheep and cattle.Footnote ⁷¹ Table 6.7 shows a breakdown of the main tasks related to farming livestock by gender of worker. This table includes milking and the hay harvest, a more expansive definition of livestock farming than the one used in the animal husbandry subcategory in Appendix B. This shows that women were more involved in pastoral farming than arable, carrying out 45 per cent of work tasks compared to 32 per cent for arable farming. However, this difference depends largely on how each type of farming is defined, with the classification of milking being crucial.Footnote ⁷² Rather than pastoral farming providing more employment for women, it is the presence of milk cattle and dairy production that led to higher demand for women’s work in comparison to crop production. Without milking, women’s contribution is 35 per cent – much closer to the level for arable farming. Nonetheless, this proportion demonstrates that women’s involvement in keeping livestock was not confined to milking and raising poultry as some early modern advice books suggest.Footnote ⁷³

Table 6.7Gender division of labour in animal husbandry

Notes: adj. = adjusted (x2.59). Other animals = goats, rabbits, dogs, fish, bees. Provide fodder is for unspecified animals only – otherwise included in care of that animal.

Table 6.7Long description

The table presents a gendered analysis of animal husbandry tasks. The first column lists specific livestock care activities, followed by four data columns, adjusted female task counts, male task counts, combined totals, and women’s adjusted participation percentage. The data depicts clear gender divisions in animal care responsibilities, with women specializing in dairy and small animal care while men handled larger livestock.

• For care of cattle, the corresponding values are 91, 117, 208, and 43.8.

• For milking, the corresponding values are 231, 8, 239, and 96.7.

• For care of sheep, the corresponding values are 67, 247, 314, and 21.3.

• For shearing sheep, the corresponding values are 28, 64, 92, and 30.4.

• For care of horses, the corresponding values are 52, 130, 182, and 28.6.

• For care of pigs, the corresponding values are 21, 11, 32, and 65.6.

• For care of poultry, the corresponding values are 49, 20, 69, and 71.0.

• For other animals, the corresponding values are 10, 25, 35, and 28.6.

• For hay harvest, the corresponding values are 75, 128, 203, and 37.

• To provide fodder, the corresponding values are 5, 9, 14, and 35.7.

• Total, the corresponding values are 629, 759, 1388, and 45.3.

While fieldwork was heavily seasonal, concentrated particularly in the summer months, animal husbandry required constant work that was more evenly spread over the year. Nevertheless, as Figures 6.3 and 6.4 demonstrate, animal husbandry had a seasonality of its own, varying according to the type of animal and task concerned. The demands of livestock farming were most intense from May to July, particularly if the hay harvest, shown in Figure 6.2, is also taken into account.

Figure 6.3 Animal husbandry: monthly distribution by animal type.

Notes: Harvest additions and monthly weights applied: see Appendices C and D; Integral excluded; F adjusted (x2.36). This differs from the standard multiplier as it is designed to give an equal number of male and female tasks with weighted monthly data attached.

Figure 6.3Long description

The vertical axis is labeled number of tasks and ranges from 0 to 100 percent in increments of 10. The horizontal axis presents the months of a year. Four bars are stacked on the graph. The approximate data in the format, month, cattle task count, sheep task count, horses task count, and other or unspecified task count are as follows. January, 5, 8, 7, 2. February, 20, 10, 10, 8. March, 10, 18, 12, 5. April, 18, 10, 2, 5. May, 30, 35, 12, 5. June, 20, 35, 40, 0. July, 35, 13, 10, 11. August, 21, 4, 11, 8. September, 38, 2, 10, 2. October, 18, 9, 17, 4. November, 18, 4, 7, 3. December, 12, 17, 5, 3.

Figure 6.4 Animal husbandry: monthly repertoires by task type.

Notes: Harvest additions and monthly weights applied: see Appendices C and D; Integral excluded; F adjusted (x2.36). This differs from the standard multiplier as it is designed to give an equal number of male and female tasks with weighted monthly data attached.

Figure 6.4Long description

The vertical axis is labeled proportion of monthly task repertoire and ranges from 0 to 100 percent in increments of 10. The horizontal axis presents the months of a year. Six bars are stacked on the graph. The approximate data in the format, month, feeding percent, droving or moving percent, keeping percent, care percent, milking percent, and shearing percent, are as follows. January, 35%, 10%, 45%, 10%, 0%, 0%. February, 30%, 5%, 35%, 25%, 5%, 0%. March, 35%, 28%, 22%, 10%, 5%, 0%. April, 25%, 20%, 20%, 15%, 20%, 0%. May, 5%, 20%, 30%, 10%, 25%, 10%. June, 5%, 20%, 40%, 8%, 12%, 15%. July, 20%, 20%, 40%, 0%, 20%, 0%. August, 15%, 15%, 35%, 15%, 25%, 0%. September, 27%, 20%, 3%, 50%, 0%, 0%. October, 2%, 48%, 15%, 20%, 15%, 0%. November, 18%, 22%, 12%, 10%, 38%, 0%. December, 18%, 20%, 40%, 10%, 12%, 0%.

Much of the summertime peak in animal husbandry derived from the care of sheep and cattle in particular. Out of these, sheep washing and shearing was by far the most seasonal, with 83 per cent of these tasks concentrated in the months of May and June. Milking had a less pronounced but distinctive seasonality, with 75 per cent taking place in the summer half of the year. However, the production of these two resources, wool and milk, can only partly account for the summer peak in activity. The droving of livestock was also at its height in the spring quarter, with another bulge in the autumn. Most droving was related to sales, often at markets and fairs, but some movements related to animals grazed well away from home, perhaps on a seasonal basis. For instance, Richard Burge, who came from Spaxton near Bridgewater, pastured sheep on a ‘parcel of ground’ he rented on the Somerset coast at Brean 20 miles away, and then drove them to Bristol market, a further 30 miles, in June 1678.Footnote ⁷⁴ Droving fell to a low in the winter quarter, when foddering reached its height. During these barren months, feeding, alongside the general maintenance or ‘keeping’ of beasts, became the most time-consuming livestock husbandry activity.

Table 6.8 explores the tasks involved in farming cattle. Women’s almost total monopoly of milking was a distinctive feature of their farmwork in early modern England.Footnote ⁷⁵ Our findings confirm women’s domination of milking, although 8 out of 97 of milking work tasks were carried out by men. Five of these work tasks relate to men helping women, or being with women when they were milking, such as William Marten, who was described as ‘going homewards from milking with his wife’ in a tithe case at Wembdon, Somerset, in 1632.Footnote ⁷⁶ Thomas Hesketh went with his wife ‘to milk their cow’ at Halsall in Lancashire in 1626.Footnote ⁷⁷ Less ambiguous, although still open to interpretation, was William Ridwood of West Pennard in Somerset’s statement in 1670 that ‘he doth live by his labour and doth milk two cows’, which appears to describe his work activities but might refer to his source of income.Footnote ⁷⁸ The only clear case involved two men in Griston, Norfolk, who milked a cow belonging to another man in 1615: this was only detected because the farmer’s wife noticed the cows were giving less milk.Footnote ⁷⁹ Women went outside to milk, with the phrases ‘went to milking’ and ‘came from milking’ occurring repeatedly. The regularity of these movements allowed one William Masters to commit adultery with Marie Allen in Pawlett, Somerset, in 1621 while his wife was ‘at milking’ and before her servants ‘came from milking’.Footnote ⁸⁰ Sometimes the cows were brought closer to the farmstead for milking, but in other cases women went to fields, passing neighbours on the way, as when Isabel Worthington ‘was going to milk’ one Friday morning and passed ‘James Bullor stood at his own door’ in Standish, Lancashire, in June 1657.Footnote ⁸¹ Trudging in and out to the fields at the beginning and end of each day was a time-consuming activity but one that refutes the idea of women working at home. As we have seen, it was a task often given to young unmarried women.Footnote ⁸²

Table 6.8Gendered patterns in cattle farming

Notes: adj. = adjusted (x2.59). ‘Care’ includes medical care but also searching, rescuing, and cleaning; feeding includes providing fodder and water and leading to pasture; keeping includes many unspecific entries regarding ‘looking to’ or ‘tending’ cattle, as well as tethering and housing. Care of calves was only noted when calves were not with cows.

Table 6.8Long description

The table presents a detailed gendered analysis of cattle-related tasks. The first column indicates task types, followed by seven columns namely F tasks adjusted, M tasks, total tasks, types of cattle cared for, F tasks adjusted, M tasks, and total tasks. The data reveals extreme gender specialization, with women performing nearly all dairy-related work while men handled most tasks involving male cattle and general herd management.

• For care tasks, the corresponding values are 26, 8, 34, unspecified or mixed cattle, 36, 55, and 91.

• For move tasks, the corresponding values are 31, 38, 69, male cattle is used, 0, 19, and 19.

• For feed tasks, the corresponding values are 16, 43, 59, female cattle is used, 272, 42, and 314.

• For keep tasks, the corresponding values are 18, 28, 46, calves are used, 3, 9, and 12.

• For milk tasks, the corresponding values are 220, 8, 228.

• For total tasks, the corresponding values are 331, 125, 436.

It is clear from Table 6.8 that women’s involvement in caring for cattle extended well beyond milking and included looking after herds of cows in the fields, leading them to water, feeding them hay, and droving and fetching them. The most significant difference between men’s and women’s work was in the type of cattle cared for. It was almost always men who cared for male cattle (bulls and bullocks), while women looked after cows, calves, and mixed groups. It is perhaps unsurprising that women’s work extended beyond milking to other care activities for herds of milk cows, given the close relationship that the twice-daily milking of small herds was likely to entail. Where farms specialised in fattening bullocks for beef, women’s involvement would have been much lower.

The processing of milk into butter and cheese was an indoor task rather than an outdoor one. This distinction was drawn with regard to Mistress Wood of East Anstey in Devon in 1686, who was described as ‘not entrusted nor did concern herself with the management of her husband’s estate or outdoor affairs’ but did engage in ‘the making of butter and cheese and such like’.Footnote ⁸³ Fourteen work tasks recorded people making butter or cheese: all were women. The relatively small numbers recorded stem from a lack of detail about who carried out this task. Tithe cases sometimes required the amount of cheese produced to be stated but rarely specified who made it. A man from Selborne in Hampshire in 1564 was unusual when he stated that it was his wife and maids who typically made 30 cheeses from the milk of 8 kine (milk cows) each year.Footnote ⁸⁴ Elizabeth Creston described how she was set to ‘stir the butter’ by her mistress, and did so for at least two hours, to explain why she had not observed what her mistress was doing with one Tom Wilmot in an upstairs chamber at Priddy in Somerset in 1617.Footnote ⁸⁵ On the Somerset levels, some women ran dairies that were separate from the main farm. Anthoine Pearman was employed by a man who took her ‘from Sanford to Burnham to a tenement which he had there and appointed her there to look to his dairy’ in 1615. Similarly, Joan Buckland kept a dairy at Stenning in Stogursey in 1605.Footnote ⁸⁶ A much larger number of work tasks recorded butter and cheese being transported and bought and sold. These tasks were also majority female, with 83 per cent carried out by women. Even when men were involved, traces of women’s work are often evident. Jarred Doon reported going to Newcastle to sell ‘all the butter and cheese his wife made’ each week in a testamentary case in 1570.Footnote ⁸⁷

The hay harvest was essential for the survival of livestock, particularly cattle, over the winter months when low temperatures meant grass did not grow, and even covered it with snow. Examples of hay being fed to cattle, horses, sheep – and in one case from Norfolk, rabbits – are concentrated in the winter months between November and April. Such hay would have been harvested the previous summer, mostly between late June and mid-August, when it was mown with a scythe and then ‘made’ or dried in the field.Footnote ⁸⁸ In a tithe dispute in Somerset in 1632 John Clement described haymaking in Woodberrie Meade in Camerton. After mowing, it ‘lay on the ground for some few days’, and then was tossed and ‘made up into small cocks’ or heaps, and ‘so stood some two or three days in such cocks’. Next, it was loaded onto a wain, with a maid raking after the wain to catch stray pieces, and carted back to the farm. The tithe hay, ‘every tenth cock’, was left in the field, and soon after was ‘made up into greater cocks’ by a man and his wife employed by the tithe owner. However, it was left too long in the field ‘till by means of foul weather the same was spoiled and worth little or nothing’, having originally been worth 10s.Footnote ⁸⁹ The purpose of haymaking was to dry the cut grass so that it could be stored for later use. Wet hay rotted, as this case indicates. The necessity of good weather could delay and prolong haymaking, meaning that it sometimes overlapped with the grain harvest, intensifying labour demand in August.

While mowing was always done by men, haymaking – the raking, tossing, and heaping – was done by both men and women. Smith found that haymaking was an exclusively female task in late sixteenth-century Stiffkey in Norfolk, but the work-task data, and household accounts that record payments to haymakers, shows that it was a mixed task.Footnote ⁹⁰ The adjusted figures indicate almost equal numbers of female and male haymakers: 67 and 62 respectively. Mowing was more strenuous, but haymaking required more work: Henry Best says two haymakers were needed for each mower ‘as there are many things that belong to the tifting of hay, as spreading and sometimes turning, raking and cocking, throwing together and casting into the great cock’.Footnote ⁹¹ Using the adjusted figures, this is almost exactly the proportion of work tasks: 62 mowing tasks to 129 in haymaking.

There were many more sheep than people in early modern England.Footnote ⁹² The quarter sessions reveal sheep to have been particularly criminogenic: small enough to steal easily, but relatively high value. Of 339 animal husbandry work tasks drawn from theft cases, 186 relate to sheep, compared to 53 concerning horses, 39 to cattle, and 34 to poultry.Footnote ⁹³ Women’s involvement in sheep husbandry was lower than in cattle farming, yet they were nonetheless involved in all the aspects shown in Table 6.9. Where sheep were milked, this was done by women. Only four instances were noted, three from Hampshire in the late sixteenth century, and one from Ulverston, Lancashire (now Cumbria), where Dorothy Holmes sent her son ‘to fetch in the ewes’ so that she could milk them in 1636.Footnote ⁹⁴ The busiest time of the sheep farming year was when flocks were washed and shorn, as depicted in the sixteenth-century English drawing shown in Figure 6.5. Only two cases of women washing sheep, from Wiltshire and Yorkshire, were recorded. Both came from coroners’ reports of accidental death, suggesting the hazards of a task undertaken in rivers and streams. All our examples of female sheep shearers came from Devon and Somerset, such as Anne Josse and Wilmotta Smallridge, both married women, who deposed that ‘they did shear … yearly 50 sheep’ for one Westcott of Holcombe Burnell, three years in a row from 1632 to 1634, in a Devon tithe case.Footnote ⁹⁵ However, other types of evidence record female sheep shearers elsewhere in southern England, as well as for the medieval period.Footnote ⁹⁶

Figure 6.5 Washing sheep.

Notes: Thomas Fella (compiler), A booke of diveirs devises and sortes of pictures, with the alphabete of letters, deuised and drawne with the pen (manuscript, 1585, 1593-4, 1622), f.51v. Call no. V.a.311. Image no. 23640. Folger Shakespeare Library.

Figure 6.5Long description

In the foreground, three people are actively engaged washing the sheeps. Two people are kneeling beside the stream, gently handling and washing the sheep. The third person, wearing a hat and short trousers, stands nearby, overseeing the activity and tending to another sheep. The sheep are depicted with thick wool. The stream meanders are behind them, with grassy banks and foliage. In the background, there is a wooden fence, and further in the distance, a person is milking a goat while another goat stands nearby. Above this scene, a large crayfish or lobster-like creature is drawn horizontally. To the upper right, the words june and cancer are written. To the upper left, a text reads, This hurtless beast with meek mood yields his wool and skin. To clothe our naked clod of clay. He gives his flesh to feed our bellies full. Nought for himself he brings but for our stay.

Farming advice books placed pigs and poultry under the care of housewives, as animals that were raised close to the house, and often fed with the waste from food processing and cooking.Footnote ⁹⁷ Sometimes, these animals were even found inside the home. In 1651 John Wills of Sheepwash in Devon recounted how he came home at four in the afternoon and found ‘within his house two hens or pullen walking and picking crumbs on the table board’. He was accused of stealing them but said they wandered in through a hole in the door.Footnote ⁹⁸ In a dispute over pig ownership at Otterhampton in Somerset in 1679, Rachael Pilcorne fetched a pig from a neighbour’s barn where it was being kept and put ‘him in her dwelling house’. Elizabeth Score, who believed the pig was hers, then assaulted Pilcorne, and ‘took the pig out of the house and carried him away and put him in her own dwelling house where she yet detained him’.Footnote ⁹⁹ Table 6.7 shows that pigs and poultry were mostly, although not exclusively, cared for by women. Some work tasks fit the stereotype of the farming advice books as work allotted to housewives. For instance, Jane Whittell ‘was desired by the wife of Christopher Asley to keep her two ducks and one drake, until such time that their corn was gotten in … [but] the said ducks were strayed away from her house’ in Leigh, Lancashire in 1637.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ However, it is notable that neither pig nor poultry keeping was strongly gendered: both men and women were involved.

Live animals provided milk, eggs, honey, wool, and in the case of horses and oxen, traction. But most animals were also kept for their meat. Quarter sessions cases relating to the theft of animals often also describe how they were killed, and sometimes how they were cooked. In 1614, when Margaret Harward of Tilney cum Ilsington in the Norfolk fens was challenged by a constable who found mutton baking in the oven of her house, she said it was ‘parcel of the ewe of her husband’s that was drowned … and she baked it not before that day and … she herself did flay the sheep’.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Similarly in Sherston Magna in Wiltshire in 1641, when asked what had happened to a pig, suspected of being stolen, one Palmer’s wife ‘answered that the said pig was killed and dressed by her’.Footnote ¹⁰² These cases demonstrate that women could butcher animals if they needed to. Yet the occupation of butcher was exclusively male, and indeed the great majority of work tasks recording the butchering of animals for red meat were undertaken by men – 260 compared to only 98 by women.Footnote ¹⁰³ Butchering showed a distinct seasonal pattern. The traditional start to the slaughtering season was the Feast of St Martin (11 November), as livestock owners reduced their flocks and herds to save fodder during winter, and meat was purchased in preparation for Christmas.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ The autumn quarter accounted for 38 per cent of butchery work tasks. The flurry of activity began in October and rose to an annual peak during December. Lent, when red meat could not be sold, brought a trough in March, before numbers rose again in April and May as the new season’s animals became available. The lowest levels of butchering were in July and August: perhaps because hot weather made meat difficult to preserve and other foodstuffs were plentiful.

While pastoral farming is often characterised as employing more women than arable agriculture, historians are rarely specific about the tasks women or men were involved in. The work-task data confirms that pastoral agriculture made more use of women’s labour, but the difference is not as great as is sometimes assumed and was largely the consequence of women’s responsibility for milking. It should also be remembered that almost everywhere raising crops and livestock existed as symbiotic activities within individual farms. Husbandry manuals, which ignored women’s labour caring for cattle and sheep, have also caused historians to underestimate the range of women’s work tasks. Conversely, tasks such as haymaking and poultry keeping, often characterised as female, frequently involved male labour, underlining the flexibility of agricultural work patterns.

6.4 Commons, Woods, and Water

The rural economy depended on other resources which lay beyond arable fields and enclosed pastures. This section examines three of these: common pasture, woodland, and water (both freshwater and the sea).Footnote ¹⁰⁵ All were characterised by complex sets of rights which governed uses and users in early modern England. These rights have been discussed in detail elsewhere.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Much less evidence is available about the types of work that these resources enabled and the workers who carried it out.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Debates around eighteenth-century enclosures present a picture of poorer households depending on the commons, with women and children earning or saving precious resources while men worked for wages.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ As Andy Wood points out, in earlier periods the use of the commons was more socially varied. It was not only the poor who grazed their animals upon the common and collected fuel but also the members of wealthy and middling rural households.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

In addition to parish-level commons, the regions studied contained several extensive areas of common land. These included the upland moors of Dartmoor and Exmoor in the south-west, and the Pennine moorlands of Lancashire and Yorkshire. There were also lowland moors and fens, which were only partly drained in this period; most famously the fens of Lincolnshire, Cambridgeshire, and Norfolk but also the Somerset ‘moors’ or fens, and areas of lowland ‘moss’ in Lancashire and Cheshire.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Woods, although not extensive, were scattered across the countryside. These were often carefully managed as renewable resources. There were also areas described as ‘forest’: technically these were areas where forest law applied, protecting deer for hunting, although many, such as the New Forest, were areas of wood.Footnote ¹¹¹ Of the counties studied, all except Wiltshire, Hertfordshire, Cambridgeshire, and Northamptonshire had sea coasts, providing opportunities for maritime fishing and gathering.Footnote ¹¹²

Work concerning commons, woods, and areas of water is examined here using two main approaches. The first is to focus on the type of place and observe the activities carried out there. The second is to analyse the types of work that are likely to have been carried out in these environments: gathering food and fuel, wood husbandry, and hunting and fishing. Neither approach offers a complete picture. Many records of work tasks provide little indication of their exact location. Added to that, terms such as ‘common’ and ‘moor’ had multiple meanings and uses, which make some descriptions ambiguous. There were 235 work activities recorded as carried out in, or associated with, commons, moors, and fens. These activities indicate that such land was mostly rough pasture but could also be marsh or woodland. Women carried out 33 per cent of the 235 work tasks.Footnote ¹¹³ The majority of the work activities, 73 per cent, involved livestock-related activities, including caring for animals, moving them, buying and selling livestock, and butchery. Of the 35 butchery tasks recorded in connection to common land, the animals had either died on the common or been stolen from it. Most of the actual butchering took place at home, as when Oliver Nabb confessed he had taken two sheep from the common next to his house and ‘killed them being forced to do so through hunger and want’, in Bury, Lancashire, in 1643.Footnote ¹¹⁴ However, some butchering did take place opportunistically on commons. A group of four women from Sibsey in Lincolnshire were gathering wool in the fen in 1652 when they found a dead sheep ‘with the eyes and entrails pulled out and not knowing whose it was they cased it and divided the skin and carcass amongst them’.Footnote ¹¹⁵

Of the 83 work tasks that were related to keeping livestock on the common, 49 related to sheep, 23 to cattle, 5 each to horses and geese, and one to a pig. The pig, in a slightly comic case from 1674, was taken by its owner, a husbandman named Thomas Kithingman, to Leeds market. He failed to sell the animal and as he returned home the pig became tired, so Thomas left it on Shadwell Moor. Unsurprisingly, when his maid was sent to collect it the next morning, it had gone. It turned up later, dead, hanging in a butcher’s shop in nearby Thorner.Footnote ¹¹⁶ In a number of cases, those caring for livestock on the commons were children and young people. In 1691 near Boston in Lincolnshire, John Wright had a cow and calf ‘with about a score of other cattle’ on ‘the Eight Hundred fen wherein [he] hath right of common’, and where his son was ‘looking to the cattle’.Footnote ¹¹⁷ In the fens at Wisbech in Cambridgeshire in 1661, three siblings, ‘Michael Dixon the younger and Mary Dixon his sister and one Richard Dixon his brother’, were observed ‘driving eight sheep upon the common’, which were claimed to be stolen.Footnote ¹¹⁸ At Little Fransham in Norfolk in 1637, William Bluncall put his geese upon the common under the care of ‘Widow Topping’s daughter’, who brought the geese home.Footnote ¹¹⁹ While at Wilmslow in Cheshire in 1672 a boy, Thomas Bradford, was responsible for ‘driving Mary Royle’s geese to the common’.Footnote ¹²⁰ John Harnay of Gidleigh in Devon, who was ‘sent to Dartmoor to see his master’s flock of sheep’ in 1669, was most likely a servant.Footnote ¹²¹ John Elton of King’s Somborne in Hampshire described himself as a servant, keeping the sheep of a Mr Russell ‘upon the Cowards Common’, during a period from 1596 to 1598.Footnote ¹²²

Activities within the subcategories collecting fuel and gathering food, shown in Table 6.10, might be expected to take place on common land. In fact, Figure 6.6 shows that only 12 out of these 211 work tasks were clearly specified as taking place on commons, all of which related to collecting fuel. No tasks related to gathering food were described as taking place on a common. This was in part because many of the food-gathering activities either related to gathering cultivated fruit or vegetables, or to gleaning arable fields for dropped grain: both of these activities were more likely to take place on land belonging to specific people (private land).Footnote ¹²³

Table 6.10Gender division of labour in collecting fuel and gathering food

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

Table 6.10Long description

The table presents a gendered analysis of gathering and fuel-related tasks. The first column lists specific activities, followed by four data columns, adjusted female task counts, male task counts, combined totals, and women’s adjusted participation percentage. The data depicts clear gender divisions, with women performing most gathering work while men handled all cutting of wood, gorse, and turf.

• To cut wood, the corresponding values are 0, 14, 14, and 0.

• To gather or fetch wood, the corresponding values are 49, 43, 92, and 53.3.

• To cut or fetch gorse, the corresponding values are 0, 5, 5, and 0.

• To dig or fetch turf, the corresponding values are 0, 12, 12, and 0.

• To fetch dung, the corresponding values are 3, 0, 3, and 100.

• To pick cultivated vegetables, the corresponding values are 10, 8, 18, and 55.6.

• To pick cultivated fruits, the corresponding values are 23, 23, 46, and 50.

• To glean grain, the corresponding values are 91, 13, 104, and 87.5.

• To collect honey, the corresponding values are 10, 0, 10, and 100.

• To collect wild plants/food, the corresponding values are 26, 11, 37, and 70.3.

• For total, the corresponding values are 212, 129, 341, and 62.2.

Figure 6.6 The location of collecting fuel and gathering foods.

Figure 6.6Long description

The data in the format, location and task count are as follows. Field, 49. Private land, 44. Named place, unknown status, 27. No description, 27. Wood, 18. Common, 12. Roadway, 12. House or barn, 12. Hedge, 10.

In some cases the status of the land, and thus legality of the activity, was under dispute. This was particularly true of hedges. Collecting firewood from hedges, or ‘hedge breaking’, was frequently forbidden and subject to fines in local by-laws.Footnote ¹²⁴ Of the 10 work tasks that recorded gathering resources from hedges, all implied disputed ownership. Four related to gathering fruit: two from plum trees that grew in hedges, and two from currant bushes where the fruit hung over the hedge from a garden. Three tasks related to a group of women who raked hedges for barley as well as gleaning – presumably gathering stalks of grain that had fallen from the farm carts. The final three related to taking wood from hedges. An attempt to discredit Robert Stuckye of Muchelney in Somerset in 1604 described him as a ‘very poor man and one that hath wasted his estate and that doth use now and then to cut a stick out of other men’s hedges’.Footnote ¹²⁵ At Collingbourne Ducis in Wiltshire in 1570 Elizabeth Blansdon argued with two building workers at a parsonage over whether ‘certain hedge wood’ was taken from their employer’s hedge.Footnote ¹²⁶ George Gilmore, accused of stealing bits of wood in Wiltshire in 1653, said he ‘had cut them out of a hedge’.Footnote ¹²⁷ Some activities that took place in roadways had similar implications, as when Elizabeth Hunt claimed she ‘did take two pieces of a rotten tree in the Kingsway which was found’ in Bradford on Tone in Somerset in 1679, and Robert Lawrance of Merriott, also Somerset, in 1668, who ‘took up wood in the highway’, both arguing that the wood was not stolen.Footnote ¹²⁸

Table 6.10 shows interesting patterns of gendered work, although the small numbers mean these should be treated with caution. For instance, while all the examples of cutting turf related to men, other sources record women’s involvement in drying and transporting peat for fuel in the late seventeenth century.Footnote ¹²⁹ The division between cutting or digging fuel (male) and collecting and fetching it (mixed, with a slight predominance of women) does seem significant. On the other hand, gleaning, and collecting wild foods and plants, were mainly undertaken by women. The plants collected included weeds to feed to pigs, thistles and teasels for brewing, cowslips and primroses, herbs to make ‘rosa solis’ (a type of cordial), crab apples and bullaces, nuts and acorns.Footnote ¹³⁰ Fruit, however, was mostly gathered in orchards, which were overwhelmingly private. The vegetables that were ‘gathered’ – rather than harvested in the fields – included turnips ‘fetched’ from a field, and cabbages from a winter garden. The majority, however, relate to fresh peas, or ‘peascods’. In 1632 in Wiltshire, a man’s wife ‘did gather a capful [of peas] and no more’ as part of an allowance to top up her husband’s wages.Footnote ¹³¹ Edith Prankett gathered half a quart of peas, before they were taken off her by a man who was later accused of stealing them, in Somerset in 1618.Footnote ¹³² A boy was more clearly in the wrong when he was found to have ‘plucked [peas] off from horses carrying tithe peas’, also in Somerset in 1668.Footnote ¹³³

Wood husbandry and hedging were two distinctly male work activities. Together 181 tasks were recorded in these two subcategories of which only six were undertaken by women. England had few extensive tracts of woodland and trees were a valuable resource, growing both in woods and as part of the hedgerows that enclosed many fields, and used for fuel and timber. The most common tasks recorded were felling trees, accounting for 50 work tasks, and lopping wood from living trees, which accounted for 43. Coroners’ reports into accidental death provided 40 per cent of these tasks, including 56 per cent of tasks that involved felling trees, and 65 per cent of lopping wood, highlighting the dangers involved. For example, John Spycer was hired to work in Castle Camps park in Cambridgeshire in February 1565 and was sent ‘to cut certain branches of the trees to feed the animals there in the extreme or snowy weather … he went to a oak tree with a hatchet in his hand and climbed it but stood on a small or slender bough to cut another branch growing a little higher’, when the higher branch fell knocking him to the ground.Footnote ¹³⁴

As well as felling trees and lopping wood, a range of commonplace but less dangerous tasks are recorded: making faggots, cutting felled wood, maintaining hedges, and making fences. Just as women’s group work weeding in the fields provided a setting for defamation, so did men’s hedging work. John Carter ‘was at hedging or making of a hedge with Richard Skerne … one William Towker did work by the further side of the hedge’ when defamatory words were exchanged in Brixham, Devon, in 1559.Footnote ¹³⁵ Less frequently recorded tasks included making charcoal, cutting rushes or reeds, brambles or ‘thorns’, and bracken, and cutting twigs to make brooms. Here there was some involvement of women, engaged in tasks such as cutting rushes and sedge, gathering birch twigs and brambles to make brooms, and making ‘wyth kidds’. This last activity, which took place in an unnamed Lincolnshire parish in 1656, involved cutting and bundling pliable willow twigs, which were used for rope.Footnote ¹³⁶ Wood husbandry was concentrated in the winter and spring, which together accounted for 64 per cent of the tasks carried out, and reached a low point in the summer, with only 14 per cent. Collecting fuel followed a similar seasonal pattern, although people fetched wood and faggots most often during the three-month period from December to February.

In contrast, hunting and fishing was concentrated in the warmer spring months. Poaching (illegal hunting and fishing), like other forms of theft, was not recorded in the work-task database when it was the cause of prosecution. Thus, the hunting recorded was either legal or its legality was not the main issue of the case. As a consequence, cases of accidental deaths were the most common source of hunting and fishing work tasks, providing 32 per cent. Tithe cases were also a valuable source of evidence, particularly for fishing, providing a further 21 per cent. Like wood husbandry and hedging, hunting and fishing was overwhelmingly the work of men. Only two women are recorded: Jane Felde caught coots in a pond in her father’s garden at Hitchen in Hertfordshire in 1511, and Jane Coper who fished in the tidal channel at Salthouse in Norfolk in 1571.Footnote ¹³⁷ Catching freshwater fish was the most common type of activity in the hunting and fishing subcategory accounting for 40 per cent of tasks, followed by catching and scaring wild birds at 22 per cent, catching sea fish at 16 per cent, and hunting and trapping rabbits at 13 per cent. The remaining 9 per cent fell into a miscellaneous category. The most hunted birds were rooks and crows: they were killed as a nuisance to farmers, for sport, and in the case of chicks, sometimes for food.Footnote ¹³⁸ Other birds mentioned included kites, owls, ravens, magpies, jays, wild ducks and geese, herons, woodcocks, partridges, and martins. Rabbits or conies were kept in protected warrens but still had to be caught by the warreners, typically using nets with dogs or ferrets to flush the rabbits out. Rabbits did not respect boundaries and were also hunted by those with neighbouring land, or illegally. Unusually Richard Smyth of Axminster, Devon, was shooting rabbits in a hedgerow with a bow and arrow in 1515.Footnote ¹³⁹ The miscellaneous hunting tasks included six cases of unspecified hunting, four cases involving park keepers protecting game, three of catching moles, one of catching polecats, and one of setting a dog on a sheep to kill it. Deer featured only in the activities of park keepers. In two separate but related cases from Northamptonshire in 1671, two pairs of keepers reported watching for deer and poachers in Astell Park and Whittlewood Forest.Footnote ¹⁴⁰

Freshwater fishing most often involved catching eels, but trout, carp, pickerel, lampreys, and perch are also mentioned. Fish were typically caught in nets, sometimes from boats and sometimes from the bank or wading into the river or pond. Occasionally more detail was provided: at Mary Tavy in west Devon in 1690 ‘the said William Mare was in the water fishing and David Mare was by the side of the river assisting’, at a place called St Mary’s pool ‘towards the lower end of the said pool with a net hanging on a long pole (which this deponent doth believeth was a net commonly called a Tramell)’.Footnote ¹⁴¹ Kettle nets and bow nets are also mentioned, along with pots lying in the water to catch fish in a mill pond and traps called ‘leapes’. Three cases mentioned angling or using an angling rod. One man caught a fish (a pickerel) with a hook on a piece of string, while another described using his hands.

The examples of sea-fishing in the database are geographically uneven. Of the 27 tasks recorded, 23 come from south Devon, and predominantly from a set of tithe disputes ranging in date from 1556 to 1662.Footnote ¹⁴² Eleven of the 27 tasks originate in 3 related tithe disputes from Torbay parishes dating from 1594 to 1595 and are exceptionally interesting. In 1595, William Ball described how in the last 12 years he had ‘hath set out for Newfoundland’ each year. Balthazar Bounde outdid this stating that ‘about 30 years ago he … did begin to travel to Newfoundland and continued the same every year (unless he was pressed into the queen’s ships) by the space of 13 years together … he and the rest of his company did always pay the tithe of the Newfoundland fish brought home by them in barques or ships’.Footnote ¹⁴³ A string of men from the neighbouring parishes of St Marychurch, Tor Mohun, and Cockington made similar statements, noting that the ships returned from Newfoundland at the end of August, and the tithe of preserved fish was paid each Easter. Some named the ships they sailed in, such as the ‘Judith of Stonehouse’, ‘a ship of Plymouth’, ‘the Grace of Dartmouth’, and ‘a ship of Poole [Dorset] called the Royal’. These depositions make clear the international scope of fishing by this date.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ Closer to home, but still travelling widely, Philip Croppe sailed in one Thomas Seyes’ boat of Exmouth, catching mulwell, pollock, and ling off Scarborough in the North Sea in 1559, and herring off Great Yarmouth in Norfolk in 1560.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ In 1614 Thomas Grant described how he ‘used the trade of fishing with his 3 boats and nets and hooks’ and he ‘himself or such fishermen as he hath employed therein’ caught ‘pilchards, plaice, hake, bream, [and] haddock [and] landed them at East Teignmouth, sold the bulk to fish “jowkers” and divided the rest amongst the company’. He paid his tithes in nearby Bishopsteignton rather than East Teignmouth.Footnote ¹⁴⁶

The Vicar of West Alvington’s claims that the local fishermen of South Huish and Malborough were short-changing his tithes in 1556 led to a detailed account of how coastal fishing was organised and paid in that locality. John Hinxton, the owner of two fishing boats and a seine net, landed 12,000 mackerel in June that year, along with 64 porpoises, together worth £33 6s 8d. The fishermen went to sea in groups of 4 or 5 boats, and each boat had a crew of 5 or 6 men. These included men such as 60-year, old John Gerves, and were variously described as a company, servants, labourers, and mariners. Custom dictated a complex division of the catch between boat and net-owners, crew-members, the local manorial lord, and the church. Members of the community gathered on the shore to see the catch divided and observed the fish being sold. The nub of the dispute was that the vicar did not receive one-tenth of the catch. Hinxton instead paid the tithes of mackerel and porpoises following practices used ‘for at least forty years’, which dictated that the catch was first divided in half with half going to the lord of the manor. The other half was divided between the men who drew in the seine net: ‘if there be forty men drawing they shall have forty parts’. The vicar received only ‘so much as one man hath’.Footnote ¹⁴⁷

The wide range of activities surveyed in the section is a reminder that although arable and livestock farming had the primary claim on labour in rural England, many work activities related to other resources were fitted into the seasonal cycle. It was not just the poor but those of all levels of wealth who made use of commons, woods, and water, providing extra pasture and fodder, fuel, timber, and wild foods. The activities reveal a ‘taskscape’ of rural England and beyond where every piece of land, tree, or water served a useful and often carefully managed purpose for the local population, and workers ranged from children looking after geese on the common to crews of men sailing to Newfoundland.Footnote ¹⁴⁸

6.5 Conclusion

The work-task data reveals much about agricultural labour and food production in early modern England that has previously been hidden. Existing studies of agricultural labour have had to rely on the wage accounts of large farms, farming advice books, and probate inventories to investigate the profile of workers and tasks undertaken. Work tasks allow the previously hidden activity within family farms and food processing businesses to be retrieved, as well as work outside the farm using common resources. They suggest a more overlapping and flexible division of labour than was previously appreciated and reveal the significant role of women as agricultural workers. Women carried out more than a third of total agricultural work tasks, undertaking both paid work as servants and labourers, and unpaid work on their own farms or farms of family members. Food processing tasks reveal a majority female workforce in brewing and baking, despite the male predominance in the occupations of brewer and baker; butchering tasks were more male but nonetheless show that women were capable of butchering sheep and pigs.

As the Hertfordshire tithe case discussed in the chapter’s introduction illustrates, farms depended on a varied workforce of men and women, family members, and workers employed on a variety of contracts. The work patterns of yeomen, husbandmen, labourers, and male servants were characterised by differences in emphasis rather than radically different work repertoires. Yeomen and male servants did a higher proportion of work with animals, husbandmen more crop cultivation, and labourers more wood husbandry than other male workers. Similarly, the agricultural work of female servants, wives, and widows had contrasting but overlapping profiles. Servants did more milking, wives more gleaning, and the work profiles of widows were closer to those of men. Women’s higher participation in pastoral farming was almost entirely due to female dominance of milking; with milking excluded, their participation rates in pastoral and arable husbandry were similar at around a third. Errors made by historians and economists seeking to characterise the rural labour force often stem from a failure to appreciate the flexibility of farming and the workforce. If insufficient male mowers were available, harvests could be brought in by women using sickles; if insufficient female servants were available to milk a dairy herd, wives, daughters, and female labourers could also be deployed, or cows sold to reduce the labour demand; when widows found themselves without a husband’s labour, they not only employed male servants but also undertook some majority-male tasks themselves. The art of good husbandry and housewifery was thrift.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ That meant ensuring that no resources, from land, labour, and livestock, to woods, hedges, and water, went to waste: the work-task data provides ample evidence of this system in motion in early modern England.