A picture of hay-harvesting in the West of England given by Celia Fiennes suggests that in other parts of England to which she was accustomed, the labour, especially that of women, was not quite so heavy. All over Devon and Cornwall she says, hay is carried on the horses’ backs and the people “are forced to support it wᵗʰ their hands, so to a horse they have two people, and the women leads and supports them, as well as yᵉ men and goe through thick and thinn.... I wondred at their Labour in this kind, for the men and the women themselves toiled Like their horses.”[[112]]
There was hardly any kind of agricultural work from which women were excluded. Everenden “payed 1s. 2d. to the wife of Geo. Baker for shearing 28 sheep.”[[113]] In Norfolk the wages for a “woman clipper of sheepe” were assessed at 6d. per day with meat and drink, 1s. without, while a man clipper was paid 7d. and 14d. It is noteworthy that only 4d. per day was allowed in the same assessment for the diet of “women and such impotent persons that weed corn and other such like Laborers” and 2d. per day for their wages.[[114]] Pepys on his visit to Stonehenge “gave the shepherd-woman, for leading our horses, 4d.,”[[115]] while Foulis enters, “Jan. 25, 1699 to tonie to give ye women at restalrig for making good wailings of strae, 4s. (Scots money).”[[116]]
But the wives of husbandmen were not confined to agricultural work as is shown by many payments entered to them in account books:[[117]] Thus the church wardens at Strood, in Kent, paid the widow Cable for washing the surplices 1s.[[118]]; and at Barnsley they gave “To Ricard Hodgaris wife for whipping dogs” (out of the Church) 2s.[[119]] while “Eustace Lowson of Salton (a carrier of lettres and a verie forward, wicked woman in that folly)” and Isabell her daughter are included in a Yorkshire list of recusants.[[120]]
No doubt the mother with young children brought them with her to the harvest field, where they played as safely through the long summer day as if they and she had been at home. But at other times she chose work which did not separate her from her children, spinning being her unfailing resource. It is difficult living in the age of machinery to imagine the labour which clothing a family by hand-spinning involved, though the hand-spun thread was durable and fashions did not change.
In spite of the large demand the price paid was very low, but when not obliged to spin for sale, time was well spent in spinning for the family. The flax or hemp grown on the allotment, was stored up for shirts and house-linen. If the husbandman had no sheep, the children gathered scraps of wool from the brambles on the common, and thus the only money cost of the stuff worn by the husbandman’s household was the price paid to the weaver.
The more prosperous the family, the less the mother went outside to work, but this did not mean, as under modern conditions, that her share in the productive life of the country was less. Her productive energy remained as great, but was directed into channels from which her family gained the whole profit. In her humble way she fed and clothed them, like the wise woman described by Solomon.
The more she was obliged to work for wages, the poorer was her family.
C. Wage-earners.
In some respects it is less difficult to visualise the lives of women in the wage-earning class than in the class of farmers and husbandmen. The narrowness of their circumstances and the fact that their destitution brought them continually under the notice of the magistrates at Quarter Sessions have preserved data in greater completeness from which to reconstruct the picture. Had this information been wanting such a reconstruction would have demanded no vivid imagination, because the results of the semi-starvation of mothers and small children are very similar whether it takes place in the seventeenth or the twentieth century; the circumstances of the wives of casual labourers and men who are out of work and “unemployable” in modern England may be taken as representing those of almost the whole wage-earning class in the seventeenth century.
The most important factors governing the lives of wage-earning women admit of no dispute. First among these was their income, for wage-earners have already been defined as the class of persons depending wholly upon wages for the support of their families.