Prosperous Labourers?

The prevailing view, owing something to Marx’s Capital, but more to R.H. Tawney’s Agrarian Problem (1912) and Keith Snell’s Annals of the Labouring Poor (1985), sees the labouring people of agrarian England becoming more and more impoverished across the early modern period as they lost direct access to land and became increasingly dependent on wages, which were both low and irregular. Studies of real wages – from Henry Phelps Brown and Sheila Hopkins’ classic series based on urban building workers, to Gregory Clark’s recent agricultural wage-series – show that from a high point in the fifteenth century real wages declined rapidly during the sixteenth century, reached a nadir in the early seventeenth century, and – despite a slight improvement between 1650 and1750 – failed to equal mid sixteenth-century levels again until the second half of the nineteenth century. This picture is reinforced by two independent sources of evidence: biometric measures of height and calorie consumption which suggest a poorly fed and impoverished working population in eighteenth-century England; and the increase in poor relief payments across the same period.¹

Craig Muldrew’s Food, Energy and the Creation of Industriousness offers a fresh perspective on these issues, and one that pushes towards a radical revision. It paints a picture of a moderately prosperous, hard-working population of wage earners, who made a decent living outside of the crisis periods of 1595–1630 and the late eighteenth century. The book has a lot to offer social and cultural historians, with a detailed examination of ordinary people’s diet, of families’ multiple sources of income, and of the material culture of the home. However, the thrust of its argument is aimed at debates within economic history, about real wages, standards of living and levels of productivity. Muldrew begins with a conundrum: if large sections of the labouring population were so poor that they could barely afford the calories necessary to stay alive, as historians such as Robert Fogel have suggested, how did the substantial increases in the productivity of agriculture and rural industry suggested by Robert Allen and Jan de Vries occur in the late seventeenth and eighteenth century?² A labourer doing hard physical work needs 4,000 calories or more a day, much more than the intake of 2,826 estimated by Fogel as the norm for the labouring poor in the eighteenth century (pp. 12–3). With very little mechanization of production processes, increased productivity must have depended on physical energy of the workforce. In exploring these issues Muldrew’s guiding principle is ‘not to reduce standard of living to a statistical series, but rather to look at the meaning of differences in diet, household goods and earnings’ (p. 11), and he does so using sources such as probate inventories, household and institutional accounts, advice books, diaries, and contemporary social commentary and observation, all of which are exploited extensively and in detail.

The conclusions are startling: working people consumed many more calories per day and lived much more comfortably than historians have previously assumed. This was because their overall earnings (not just wages but all types of payments and access to resources) were much higher than calculations of real-wage rates suggest. And in turn, these well-rewarded workers were able to do the hard physical labour necessary to significantly raise productivity before industrialization. Farmers and other employers were well aware of the close link between diet, physical energy and productivity, and they made sure their workers were fed accordingly. There were important variations across time and during an individual’s life-cycle. The years from 1595 to 1630 were particularly grim, with families struggling to make ends meet: Muldrew’s reconstructed household budgets show a negative balance indicating that despite working hard and having access to resources, families fell into debt (p. 257). Budgets from 1568, 1690 and 1760, however, show a modest prosperity with labouring households generating a surplus which would have allowed them...