Agricultural History Review, Volume 61 Part 1 (2013), p. 173

Craig Muldrew’s work is really two distinct books about the living standards of English agricultural labourers rolled into one. The first is a study of the standard of living of agricultural labourers in England between the sixteenth and late eighteenth centuries, based on the simple, but original, premise that if agricultural productivity increased as much as historians have suggested (not least in the Review), then agricultural labourers must have worked harder, necessitating a higher calorific intake than they are accorded in most of the recent literature. The second pursues labourers’ living standards by an in-depth reconstruction of their diet and material comfort across the period, through similarly original research into household accounts and probate inventories. The first book sacrifices a sufficiently large number of sacred cows in the standard-of-living debate, notably the axiomatic link between nutrition and height that it is likely to be the target of numerous econometric papers and PhD theses for years to come. The second book tilts at smaller windmills, and provides a valuable, subtle and far-reaching reassessment of the working lives, household economies and fortunes of agrarian labourers, and begins to redress the historiographical neglect of this group and of the materiality of labour per se since the seminal studies of Everett and Snell. These comments are not meant to detract from Muldrew’s significant conclusions about the calorific intake of labourers, nor from his assertions that this was the basis for significant productivity increases from the mid-seventeenth century. Instead, they are made in the hope that the value of the second study is not obscured by the likely historiographical fuss about the first.

As suggested, the originality of Muldrew’s approach to the standard of living debate is that he rejects interpretations based on anthropomorphic data and those that use a ‘basket of consumables’ to estimate the value of real wages. In particular, his cautions about generalizations based on Davies and Morton Eden’s household budgets from the crisis years of the 1790s are particularly well made. Instead, he focuses on the calorific intake of agrarian workers, by an extensive, imaginative and fascinating reconstruction of typical diets, based on primary source evidence (such as household accounts), and heroic assessments of changes in total food production through the period, to get some sense of the available supply. While he acknowledges that these favour live-in servants on larger estates, and adult labourers rather than their families, he asserts that the average calorific intake was much higher than estimates by Fogel and others. Indeed, he argues that by the mid-eighteenth century adult male labourers were receiving an average of more than 4000 calories per diem, which was generally enough to fuel them through 8 or 10 hours’ labour, although as many as 7500 calories might be needed for 10 hours’ mowing in harvest. It will doubtless come as a great relief to many members of the BAHS to learn that much of this calorific intake (36 per cent among Robert Loder’s servants) came from beer, and that this liquid source of energy has been significantly underrepresented in existing specimen diets, perhaps because of labourers’ reluctance to admit it to clerical enquirers into the state of the poor.

In this respect, Muldrew’s study tends to align with Robert Allen’s recent analysis of British industrialization, and its conclusion that the spurs to mechanization in Britain included the comparatively high price of labour, and the low price of coal. However, Muldrew is also careful to note that this optimism is bounded temporally between c.1650 and c.1780. He notes that in years of dearth in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, adult male labourers might have been in deficit in terms of their calorific intake balanced against work requirements. They may have come close to this fate again after 1790, too. Similarly, he finds that the material possessions of labourers stagnated in this period, suggesting that most income was devoted to immediate consumption needs. Muldrew is also wary of assuming that just because adult labourers fared better than expected, that this good fortune applied equally to their families. He points out that children in southern England may have been receiving insufficient amounts of milk through most of the period. Similarly, although adults’ food was high in calories, the staples of bread and butter, bacon, cheese, sugar and beer, were not particularly nutritious, nor were they affordable in sufficient quantities when accident or illness interrupted wage-earning capacity.

Such estimates are based on a forensic reconstruction of what labourers ate, how they worked, how long they laboured each day, how household economies were formed around adult labour, and how the material furnishings of labouring households slowly became more durable and extensive. This analysis does much to answer questions that have been begged repeatedly since Everett’s pioneering research in the 1960s, and in most other studies that purport to be about work – namely, how did labourers work, and how did they live? Since Muldrew is unconstrained by the desire to establish whether or not these labourers became more or less of a ‘working class’ by the end of his period, he is free to explore their lives, livelihoods and living conditions in unparalleled depth.

As a consequence, the qualitative sections of Chapters 2 to 5 are truly ground-breaking, because they provide a thoroughly researched, carefully assembled and tremendously perceptive account of labouring lives. Here, Muldrew sketches out the seasonal rhythms of rural work, the ways in which diets were patched together, subtle but measurable increases in material prosperity, and consideration of the contributions of by-employments, particularly female earnings and access to agrarian resources. This is a worthy extension of research initiated by Joan Thirsk, and truly national in scope.

This work is likely to receive as much attention as Muldrew’s first book, The economy of obligation. As indicated, it will probably stir up rather more controversy than his earlier work, and come under fire from the cliometric machine-gunners. The economy of obligation forced us to re-think the meaning of credit, by demonstrating that it was an all-pervasive concept in seventeenth-century England, linking social validation to personal credit rating. This book is likely to have a similarly profound effect on how we think about work in early modern England, by requiring us to consider how work was done, about the effects on those who did it, and about the scale of their contribution to processes we tend to summarize all too easily as the agrarian or industrial revolutions.