Preliminary Programme

All households were, to some degree, enmeshed in networks of obligations in the early modern economy yet this normative credit that so often functioned as an alternative currency in the marketplace left little evidence in the written records. The management of household debt was a crucial component of housewifery. Alexandra Shepard has shown married women held greater agency as asset managers in a household; brokering credits and keeping track of reciprocal obligations to neighbours in economies of shift. Yet married women have left little trace in the inventories used for studies of consumption and legal codes of coverture have disguised their access to moveable wealth in the home. Focusing in this paper on the objects bought, sold, pawned, exchanged, lent and borrowed shows the consumer good oscillating from an object of consumption to a store of value and means of exchange and the central role played by married women as determinants of value and worth in household economies. Depositions from church courts, coroner’s courts and quarter sessions recount these exchanges in detail and the data allows for some quantitative analysis of the borrowing and lending patterns of men and women in rural economies. The paper ascribes greater agency to married women, arguing that marriage, rather than precluding women from commerce, granted greater agency to a tactile knowledge of domestic household goods and their worth (Show less)

This paper provides evidence of the varied household economies of rural Norway in which women undertook the majority of agricultural work while men worked elsewhere, for instance in fishing or forestry. Women were responsible for growing crops, often ploughing or cultivating the land with spades, in the absence of men. Women also raised livestock and produced butter and cheese, migrating to upland pastures in the summer. Norway’s rural economy challenges ideas about the types of work women could or could not do within Europe’s rural economies, and demonstrates how wives, husbands and other family members undertook different types of work in order to support their households and make a living. (Show less)

Using English farming account books from 1480-1680 this paper explores the patterns of paid day labour by men and women, and particularly husbands and wives. Wage series and reconstructions of household income make estimates and model working patterns in order to estimate changing standards of living. Here we examine the actual working patterns of particular families. Two main arguments are made. First, regular weekly work of five or six days a week in agricultural day labour was very rare, even by men on large farms, in the period before 1680. This type of labour was instead provided by servants in husbandry employed on annual contracts; such workers were typically unmarried. This can be demonstrated by comparison of expenditure on servants and day labour. Women were sometimes employed in large numbers to undertake agricultural work paid by the day, but such work was highly seasonal, concentrated between late June and early September when women weeded, made hay and harvested grain crops. The important series of women’s wage rates constructed by Humphries and Weisdorf ignored high harvest wages, and instead estimates earnings based on low wages all year round. Wage accounts suggest year-round work was not available in rural England. Finally, there is very little evidence of the employment of children in wage accounts, this also needs to be taken into consideration. The paper draws evidence from a set of around thirty accounts recording agricultural wages, with four sets spread across the period studied in greater detail to reconstruct family work patterns. (Show less)