| dc.description |
This thesis presents a detailed study of the wage workers employed by the Shuttleworth family of Smithills and Gawthorpe in Lancashire between 1582 and 1621, based on their household accounts and other supporting documents. This long-run of accounts provides a unique window into the lives of wage workers in northern England during a period which has been identified as one of economic crisis. The findings show that current studies of wage labour and living standards have underestimated the complexity of these issues in early modern rural England society.
The first chapter of this thesis provides the background of labour employment in Lancashire, exploring demographic changes, types of agricultural farming and rural industries in the places where the Shuttleworths lived and owned farmland between 1550 and 1650, and the changes of the Shuttleworths’ landholdings during this research period. The second chapter concentrates on servants hired by this gentry family, discussing their daily tasks, length of service, wage levels and the relationship between employers and employees. The third chapter analyses the work experiences of casual labourers, exploring gender division of labour, the number of working days per year and gender wage gap. In particular, the employment of male servants and male labourers in the late sixteenth century goes against the opinion that employers increasingly preferred day labourers to servants during this period. The fourth chapter turns to rural craftsmen and specialists employed by the Shuttleworths, and discusses the working lives of rural building workers in detail, including their different types of tasks, annual working days and wage levels. In addition, it considers the connection between occupations and money wages by exploring the mobility of skilled workers. The final chapter focuses on the evaluation of wage workers’ living standards. The discussion on the diverse costs of feeding different types of wage workers and the low annual wage incomes indicate that current real wage series do not reflect rural wage workers’ living standards in northwest England during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. By connecting wage income earned by the Shuttleworth employees with their inventories’ values, it demonstrates that monetary wages could be used to measure the purchasing power of wage workers during a specific period of their life cycle, but they did not have a positive correlation with wage workers’ living standards measured using inventories. Access to land played a key role in their changing living standards. |
|