Raphael Samuel (editor) - Village Life and Labour

Routledge Revivals

Village Life and Labour

First published in 1975, this volume aims to direct attention at a number of aspects of the lives and occupations of village labourers in the nineteenth-century that have been little examined by historians outside of agriculture. Some of the factors examined include the labourers gender, whether they lived in closed or open villages and what they worked at during the different seasons of the year. The author examines a range of occupations that have previously been ignored as too local to show up in national statistics or too short-lived to rank as occupations at all, as well as sources of secondary income. The analysis of all of these factors is related to the seasonal cycle of field labour and harvests. The central focus is on the cottage economy and the manifold contrivances by which labouring families attempted to keep themselves afloat.

Village Life and Labour

Edited by
Raphael Samuel

First published in 1975

by Routledge & Kegan Paul

This edition first published in 2017 by Routledge

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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

1975 History Workshop Journal

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Publishers Note

The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original copies may be apparent.

Disclaimer

The publisher has made every effort to trace copyright holders and welcomes correspondence from those they have been unable to contact.

A Library of Congress record exists under LC control number: 75315965

ISBN 13: 978-1-138-21354-8 (hbk)

ISBN 13: 978-1-315-44800-8 (ebk)

edited by

Raphael Samuel

Tutor in Social History and Sociology Ruskin College, Oxford

Village Life and Labour

First published in 1975

by Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd

Broadway House, 68-74 Carter Lane,

London EC4V 5EL and

9 Park Street,

Boston, Mass. 02108, USA

Set in Monotype Modern Extended

and printed in Great Britain by

The Camelot Press Ltd, Southampton

this collection History Workshop, Oxford, 1975

The place of harvesters in nineteenth-century

village life David H. Morgan 1975

Country work girls in nineteenth-century

England Jennie Kitteringham 1975

Editorial introduction, Village labour

and Quarry roughs Raphael

Samuel 1975

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except for the quotation of brief passages in criticism

ISBN 0 7100 7499 9 (c)

0 7100 7500 6 (p)

Contents

Raphael Samuel

David H. Morgan

Jennie Kitteringham

Raphael Samuel

Illustrations

Plates

between

The place of harvesters in nineteenth-century village life

Country work girls in nineteenth-century England

Quarry roughs: life and labour in Headington Quarry, 18601920

Figures

David Morgan started work on the land in 1940 and was a cowman for over twenty years. He was a student at Ruskin College from 1967 to 1969. His chapter on Harvesters was first given at a History Workshop on the English countryside in the nineteenth century (in 1967), and later extended into a thesis at the University of Warwick.

Jennie Kitteringham comes from a farm workers family and spent her childhood on farms in Dorset and later Warwickshire. She was a student at Ruskin College from 1969 to 1971 and is now at Hull University. Her chapter stems from work begun for the History Workshop on childhood (1970), and a version of it appeared as a History Workshop pamphlet.

Raphael Samuel has been tutor in social history and sociology at Ruskin College since 1963. An early version of the chapter on Headington Quarry was given at the History Workshop on proletarian Oxfordshire, in 1968.

A workers questions while reading

Who built Thebes of the Seven Gates?

In the books stand the names of Kings.

Did they then drag up the rock-slabs?

And Babylon, so often destroyed,

Who kept rebuilding it?

In which houses did the builders live

In gold-glittering Lima?

Where did the bricklayers go

The evening the Great Wall of China was finished?

Great Rome is full of triumphal arches.

Over whom did the Caesars triumph?

Were there only palaces for the inhabitants of much-sung Byzantium?

Even in legendary Atlantis

Didnt the drowning shout for their slaves

As the ocean engulfed it?

The young Alexander conquered India.

He alone?

Caesar beat the Gauls.

Without even a cook?

Philip of Spain wept when his fleet went down.

Did no one else weep besides?

Frederick the Great won the Seven Years War.

Who won it with him?

A victory on every page

Who cooked the victory feast?

A great man every ten years.

Who paid the costs?

So many reports

So many questions.

Bertolt Brecht

It is remarkable how much history has been written from the vantage point of those who have had the charge of running or attempting to run other peoples lives, and how little from the real-life experience of people themselves. The history of education is a prime example. It is either a history of great headmasters and reformers, or else about organizational change. The student is expected to memorize (for examination purposes) the more controversial clauses of the different Education Acts, to summarize the findings and recommendations of various Royal Commissions, and to set education in a wider context of denominational rivalries and party politics. He does not need to know much about the children where they sat, what they learnt, how they were disciplined (or bribed) into obedience; nor will he be invited to inquire into the wider context which the child itself experienced the interplay of family, work and home, or the way in which schooling helped to teach behaviour and inculcate sex and class roles.

Trade-union history, though ostensibly devoted to the workers, is often quite as bureaucratic. This is partly because of the nature of the documents available (chiefly executive minute books), partly because of the teleological way in which the subject is defined (the origin and growth of national organization), and partly, perhaps, because of an inherited bias from the Webbs, who first gave the subject shape. Everything is seen from Head Office. The General Secretary walks in and out, a familiar figure; the rank and file, on the other hand, remain anonymous, a dark outside, and appear in the records only as troublemakers, or seceders, or members in arrears. Housing conditions, to take another nineteenth-century example, are still seen through the eyes of the sanitary reformer rather than those of the people who actually lived in them as tenants or lodgers. The problem is defined as hygienic. We are told about overcrowding but not about its consequences for family and street life; about mortality rates and epidemics, but not about the ways in which illness was treated, pregnancies coped with, or families reorganized at death. The student will be more familiar with the medical officer of health than the threepenny back street doctor. (See, however,