Servants in Rural Europe, 1400–1900 ed. by Jane Whittle (review)

This book is a welcome contribution to the existing literature on the history of servanthood. As Whittle rightly points out, most studies concern urban domestic service, although historically, the largest share of servants has worked in the countryside. In an excellent introduction, Whittle outlines the theoretical background of the book, in which the work of Hajnal and Laslett play a central role.¹ Hajnal outlined a specific Western European demographical system in which people married late and started new households after marriage. Working as a servant between youth and marriage was, according to Laslett, an integral part of this system because it provided young men and women with the opportunity to accumulate financial and human capital before marriage. The situation was supposedly different in Eastern Europe where the age at marriage was lower and extended families were more common. These concepts of the European Marriage Pattern (emp) and life-cycle servanthood run as a common thread throughout the volume.

The twelve contributions reveal the many different faces of rural servanthood. Lies Vervaet, Thijs Lambrecht, Whittle, and Jeremy Hayhoe show how local economic structures and the type of farm impacted the size and the composition of the servant labor force in fifteenth-century Flanders, sixteenth-century Flanders, England around 1700, and Burgundy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, respectively. Carolina Uppenberg, Charmian Mansell, and Sarah Holland explore the legal side of servanthood in Sweden (1750–1850) and England (1550–1650 and the mid-nineteenth century). The link to Hajnal and Laslett is most explicit in the studies of Cristina Prytz, Hanne Østhus, and Raffaella Sarti, who emphasize the many regional differences in rural servanthood in Sweden c. 1700, Norway 1650–1800, and Italy during the past five centuries. They conclude that concentration on the emp and life-cycle servanthood simplifies reality. Christine Fertig, however, largely confirms Laslett's concept of life-cycle servanthood for northwest Germany around 1750, and Richard Paping shows how this practice ceased to exist in the Netherlands during the nineteenth century.

The bookʼs main strength lies in the rich source material, covering six centuries and nine countries, skilfully collected and analyzed by the authors. Few readers will remain unconvinced about the heterogeneity of rural servanthood through space and time by the evidence that the contributors present from farm accounts, court documents, death certificates, and census-enumerator books. Many might even begin to wonder whether we can speak about "servanthood"in the first place, simply because it apparently has multiple meanings. It was much more than part of the emp, the sanctity of which the book does not entirely support either.

But in its strength also lies the book's weakness. Most authors let their sources determine the structure of their argument. Consequently, most of the contributions remain largely descriptive, in some cases, failing to move beyond a mere summary of the sources'contents. The largely descriptive character of the articles makes the absence of a conclusion all the more disappointing; the rich empirical material stands in need of a synthesis to connect the three strands of demography, labor markets, and legal practices expounded in the introduction. That approach would make this book more than a collection of individual articles.

A truly interdisciplinary, comparative monograph about the history of rural servanthood in Europe has yet to be written. Whoever writes it—Whittle or someone else—will find Servants in Rural Europe to be a firm basis upon which to build.