Agricultural History Review, Volume 39 Part 2 (1991), pp. 143–166

By the 1920s, the East Riding of Yorkshire was the last arable county in England where the hiring of single youths on yearly contracts as living-in farm servants was unquestioned and universal. Mostly by oral history it has been possible to analyse this traditional way of life in depth, and particularly to get the servants' own views on it. As a very practical way of running a horse-powered farm, it offered distinct economic advantages to both farmer and servant as long as labour was relatively short. It also preserved many pre-industrial attitudes to work and management, and was integrated into the wider life of the community. This study of adaptation to change shows that mechanization did not require a break with the past, and that the degraded position of nineteenth-century servants in the south is no guide to the way the system had run before the labour market collapsed there. 

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