It has been seven years since my preliminary thesis notes, ten cassettes, two sleeping bags, a roll of paper towels, a tin of condensed milk, and an English cucumber were stolen from my car in Lyons. The theft brought about the first of several fresh starts to thinking about servants in husbandry. The others were the result of my good fortune in finding a post as lecturer at York University in Toronto, which made it impossible to recall, each May, exactly what I had intended to do the September before. The research, supported for three years by a Canada Council fellowship, took the intermediate form of a thesis between a first set of drafts in 1975–7 and a second set in 1978–80.

In Cambridge from 1973 to 1975 I was able to attend the King's College seminars in social history, organized by Alan Macfarlane and Martin Ingram, and to share thoughts with others, especially Keith Wrightson, John Walter, and David Levine, on what seemed to be an at least theoretically interlocking puzzle, whose parts were the various research projects being done at the time. Back in Toronto, I read preliminary versions of parts of the work at the Economic History Workshop of the University of Toronto and at the Toronto Social History Group, and gained from the critical discussions. I was challenged into the production of a better thesis by John Munro, Andrew Watson, and Scott Eddie, not least by knowing that if I intended to ignore some of their suggestions, I had to present a compelling defence of this position.