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Labour History and the Rural Poor, 1850–1980*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 January 2009

Alun Howkins
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Extract

The history of the labouring poor in the late nineteenth century has been shaped by different and often competing ‘ways of seeing’. Rural labourers occur in histories of social policy as clients or victims of the Poor Law; to the historian of crime they are social bandits or deviants; even to the historian of conventional politics they are the ‘objects’ of reform. All these ways of seeing are important, but I want to concentrate on one in particular, that ‘created’ by the discourse of ‘labour history’. This area laid down, and to a limited extent still continues to define, a structure which concentrates on the formal and quasi-formal organisations of labour. As such it still owes a good deal to the Webb's view of a kind of inevitable and desirable progress from ‘barbarianism’ or non-organisation, through struggle with unjust wages and hard masters, to the organised union with the general secretary and the enlightened employer sitting down together to fix a fair day's work and a fair day's pay.

Type
Research Article
Information
Rural History , Volume 1 , Issue 1 , April 1990 , pp. 113 - 122
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1990

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References

Notes

1 The most recent accounts of the labourer are Armstrong, Alan, Farmworkers: A Social and Economic History 1770–1980 (London, 1988Google Scholar) and Danziger, Renée, Political Powerlessness, Agricultural Workers in post-war England (Manchester, 1988Google Scholar). The most satisfactory account in many ways is still Newby, Howard, The Deferential Worker (Harmondsworth, 1979).Google Scholar

2 The standard account is still Hobsbawm, Eric and Rudé, George, Captain Swing (London, 1969)Google Scholar; but see also Wells, Roger A.E., ‘The development of the English rural proletariat and social protest, 1700–1850’, Journal of Peasant Studies 6, number 2 (1979)Google Scholar and the Wells, Roger A.E., ‘Rural rebels in southern England in the 1830s’, in Clive, Emsley and James, Walvin (eds.), Artisans, Peasants and Proletarians 1760–1860, (London, 1985).Google Scholar

3 See Jones, David, ‘Thomas Campbell Foster and the rural labourer: incendiarism in East Anglia in the 1840s’, Social History 1(1976)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Archer, John, ‘Under the cover of night: arson and animal maiming’, in Mingay, G.E. (ed.), The Unquiet Countryside (London, 1989).Google Scholar

4 The standard accounts of the unionisation of the 1870s and 1880s are still the two articles by Dunbabin, J.P.D., ‘The “Revolt of the Field”; the agricultural labourers' movement in the 1870s’, Past and Present 26 (1963)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and ‘The incidence and organisation of agricultural trades unionism in the 1870s’, Agricultural History Review 16 (1968).Google Scholar See also his Rural Discontent in Nineteenth-Century Britain (London, 1974).Google Scholar More recently, Armstrong, Farmworkers and Howkins, Alun, Poor Labouring Men: Rural Radicalism in Norfolk 1870–1923 (London, 1985).Google Scholar

5 On Scotland Carter, Ian, Farm Life in Northeast Scotland 1840–1914: A Poor Man's Country (Edinburgh, 1979)Google Scholar and Devine, T.M., Farm Servants and Labour in Lowland Scotland 1770–1914 (Edinburgh, 1984)Google Scholar; on Wales see Pretty, David A., The Rural Revolt That Failed: Farm Worker's Trades Unions in Wales 1889–1950 (Cardiff, 1989)Google Scholar; on Ireland a starting point is Clark, S. and Donnelly, J.S., Irish Peasants (Madison, 1983).Google Scholar

6 PP 1881 XVII, ‘Royal Commission on the Depressed Condition of the Agricultural Interest’, p. 676.

7 Haggard, Henry Rider, Rural England, 2 volumes (London, 1902), 2, 541Google Scholar for example.

8 For example see Norfolk and Suffolk as reported in the Norfolk News (20 September, 1919), p. 7.Google Scholar

9 Newby, Howard, Green and Pleasant Land (Harmondsworth, 1980), pp. 132–3.Google Scholar

10 See Armstrong, Farmworkers, p. 132; Dunbabin, Rural Unrest, p. 67. The arguments have their origins in Jones, E. L., ‘The agricultural labour market in England, 1793–1872’, Economic History Review, 2nd series, 17 (1964–5).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11 , J.L. and Hammond, Barbara, The Village Labourer (London, 1911).Google Scholar

12 Bennett, E.N., Problems of Village Life (London, 1913).Google Scholar

13 Groves, Reg, Sharpen the Sickle! (NUAAW ed., London 1949).Google Scholar

14 Wells, Roger A. E., ‘The development of the English rural proletariat and social protest, 1700–1850’, Journal of Peasant Studies, 6, number 2 (1979).Google Scholar

15 The Beehive. The People's Paper (13 January 1872), p. 1.

16 Labour Leader (4 March 1910), p. 130.Google Scholar

17 See Exell, Arthur, The Politics of the Production Line: Autobiography of an Oxford Car Worker (Oxford, 1981).Google Scholar

18 Madden, Michael ‘The National Union of Agricultural Workers 1906–1956 (A Study in the Development of the Policies of Leadership)’, unpublished B.Litt thesis, University of Oxford 1956.Google Scholar

19 Newby, The Deferential Worker.

20 Danziger, Powerlessness.

21 Raphael, Samuel (ed.), Village Life and Labour (London, 1975), pp. 3–8.Google Scholar

22 Green, F.E., A History of the English Agricultural Labour, 1870–1920 (London, 1920).Google Scholar

23 For a general discussion see Kussmaul, Ann, Servants in Husbandry in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 1981)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Snell, K.D.M., Annals of the Labouring Poor (Cambridge, 1985).CrossRefGoogle Scholar On Sussex see Short, Brian, ‘The decline of living-in servants and the transition to capitalist farming: a critique of the Sussex evidence’ Sussex Archaeological Collections 122 (1984)Google Scholar and the reply by Mick Reed in ibid. 123 (1985).

24 Mutch, Alistair, Rural Life in S.W. Lancashire (Lancaster, 1988)Google Scholar; Dunbabin, Rural Unrest.

25 Carter, Farm life; Devine, Farm Servants; Bouquet, Mary, Family, Servants and Visitors (Norwich, 1985).Google Scholar

26 For example see Hobsbawm and Rudé, Captain Swing.

27 Macfarlane, Alan, The Origins of English Individualism (Oxford, 1978)Google Scholar; Beckett, J.V., ‘The peasant in England: a case of terminological confusion?’ Agricultural History Review 32, part II (1984).Google Scholar

28 Donajgrodzki, A.P., ‘Twentieth century rural England; a case for “peasant studies”?’ Journal of Peasant Studies 16, number 3 (1989).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

29 Hobsbawm and Rudé, Captain Swing; Wells, ‘Development’.

30 See Marx, Karl ‘Results of the Immediate Process of Production’ Appendix to Capital, volume 1, (Harmondsworth, 1976), p. 1024.Google Scholar

31 Generally Capital, volume 1 and ‘Results’.

32 Armstrong's book for instance has about 20 pages with reference to women's work out of well over 200.

33 There is still however relatively little published material. See, though, Kitteringham, Jennie, ‘Country work girls in nineteenth-century England”, in Samuel, (ed.) Village LifeGoogle Scholar;, Miller, C., ‘The hidden workforce: female fieldworkers in, Gloucestershire, 1870–1901, Southern History 6 (1984)Google Scholar; a recent general view in Bradley, Harriet, Men's Work, Women's Work (Oxford, 1989).Google Scholar

34 Walby, S., Patriarchy at Work (Cambridge, 1986).Google Scholar

35 Higgs, Edward, ‘Women, occupations and work in the nineteenth-century censuses’, History Workshop Journal 23 (1987).Google Scholar

36 Northumberland Record Office, ZBL/78, Hiring agreements, Middleton Hall.

37 Northumberland Record Office 302/24, Wages Book, Castle Heaton Farm.

38 Anthony, P. Cohen (ed.), Belonging, Identity and Social Organisation in British Rural Cultures (Manchester, 1982), p. 2.Google Scholar

39 Lee, C.H., The British Economy since 1700. A Macroeconomic Approach (Cambridge, 1986), p. 135.Google Scholar