Agricultural History Review, Volume 61 Part 2 (2013), pp. 244–281

It has generally been presumed that most men in early modern rural England significantly augmented the income from their principal occupation by engaging in one or more subsidiary economic activities. The historical evidence for the prevalence of such by-employments is almost exclusively based on probate inventories. Historians have determined by-employment incidences for regions and time intervals throughout early modern England through straightforward frequency counts of inventories that indicate multiple gainful activities. This article argues that such frequency counts are unreliable. Using early eighteenth-century Cheshire and Lancashire as a test case, we demonstrate that the by-employed were more likely to be probated than those with only one source of income. Using occupational data from parish registers and estimates of contemporary livestock numbers, we assess the degree to which the by-employed are over-represented in the probate record. We conclude that inventories vastly exaggerate by-employment incidence. This conclusion has a currency beyond the temporal and geographic bounds of our test case since the cause of the exaggeration – the probate record’s inherent wealth bias – was common to the whole of England, throughout the early modern period. We therefore conclude that by-employments were not nearly as ubiquitous as has been assumed. 

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