Servants in Rural Europe: 1400-1900 ed. by Jane Whittle (review)

After years of neglect in favour of "productive" labour, scholars have, over the past few decades, come to recognize the importance of service labour for understanding the economic, social, and cultural history of Europe and beyond. As the work of the Cambridge Group for the Study of Population and Social Structure showed in the 1960s, in preindustrial England servants made up a significant proportion of the population, and perhaps 60% of its youth. In the late 1970s, the group's founder, Peter Laslett, identified live-in service as one of the three key characteristics of the Western family, and E. A. Wrigley described it as both an essential form of de facto family planning and a mechanism for redeploying surplus labour. Since then, scholars from Ilana Krausman Ben-Amos (Adolescence and Youth in Early Modern England, 1994) to Sheila McIsaac Cooper and other contributors to the Servant Project (Proceedings of the Servant Project = Actes du Servant Project, 2001-2005) have examined the roles played by life-cycle service in the maturing of young men and women from a wide variety of backgrounds, offering opportunities to acquire practical and social skills, contacts, and the economic resources needed to become independent and marry. And since all but the poorest of early modern households included at least one servant, we can—as Tim Meldrum (Domestic Service and Gender, 1660-1750, 2000), Laura Gowing (Common Bodies, 2003), and Paula Humfrey (The Experience of Domestic Service for Women in Early Modern London, 2011) have shown—also learn about employers' lives through the experience of those who served them, while Douglas Hay and Paul Craven's work on master and servant legislation (Masters, Servants, and Magistrates in Britain and the Empire, 1562-1955, 2004) illuminates the ways in which states attempted to regulate the development of wage labour.

Running through Servants in Rural Europe is a productive dialogue/debate with the core concepts discussed in these and a myriad of other studies. Christine Fertig confirms the validity of the life-cycle model for northwestern Germany, where in the eighteenth century service offered younger generations training and helped redistribute surplus labour from peasant households with little land to those with high demand. Jeremy Hayhoe shows that throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Burgundy wine harvests continued to employ young men, but also older people and the children of peasant families themselves. Cristina Prytz, on the other hand, focuses closely on the experience of older, highly skilled servants in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Sweden and emphasizes the attractions of life-long service. Writing of rural Norway in the same period, Hanne Østhus investigates mobility between various ways of earning a living, arguing that the very category of "servant" is one with "porous boundaries." Finally, in what is (rather regrettably) the only chapter to deal with southern Europe, Raffaella Sarti analyzes quantitative data available for several regions of Italy and across a broad time span, finding surprisingly high numbers of rural servants and of neo-local, "simple" families, findings that challenge accepted "geographies of service," and question simplistic applications of the European marriage pattern.

This book, however, does more than revise received ideas: it opens up a field of research which—with the exception of the work of Ann Kussmaul (Servants in Husbandry in Early Modern England,1981)—has been almost wholly neglected. As the volume's editor, Jane Whittle reminds us in her introductory overview, "Early modern Europe was an overwhelmingly rural society: before 1800 at least 85 per cent of the population lived outside of large towns. The great majority of people, including servants, had some involvement in farming. Yet the literature on servants continues to the dominated by studies of urban and domestic servants" (p. 2). The essays brought together here help to redress this imbalance, providing in-depth analyses of the characteristics and working conditions of servants in specific agricultural contexts across Europe over five centuries. No grand, cohesive picture is offered. "The significance of local and regional variations as...