This post is part of a series that marks the publication of The Experience of Work in Early Modern England. The book is co-authored by monster head Mark Hailwood, along with Jane Whittle, Hannah Robb, and Taylor Aucoin. It uses court depositions to explore everyday working life between 1500 and 1700, with a particular focus on how gender shaped work. It is an open access publication (i.e. it is available to view/download for free, here). The post first appeared on the ‘Women’s Work in Rural England, 1500-1700′ blog as a ‘work in progress’ piece in 2017 – it is reposted here to whet your appetite for finding out where the research ended up, which you can do by reading the book!

Mark Hailwood

As a treat for surviving a long winter of data entry, I have indulged myself in recent days with some invigorating morning walks, enjoying the first signs of the turnover of the seasons (well, we have one daffodil out in the garden at least) a phase that the poet John Clare called ‘the thaw’ (the title of this post is borrowed from Clare too).[1] This time of year was a key watershed in the early modern agricultural year, of course, as thoughts drifted back to the fields after their dormant winter. With the passing of the frosts it was time to start ploughing the earth in preparation for sowing crops in the spring. It was time to set the agricultural cycle in motion once more.

It seems a reasonable assumption that it was not a favourite work task in the period, yoking the oxen (in the vast majority of our examples it was oxen rather than horses pulling the plough[2]) and heading out in inclement weather (Clare again: ‘March month of “many weathers” wildly comes’). There was certainly an element of danger involved. On 21^st February 1564, James Treherne, a servant, was ‘driving six oxen of his master’s drawing a plough tilling the ground’ in Rowde, Wiltshire, when one of the oxen knocked him down, whereby he fell on an axe he was carrying and was fatally wounded. In 1651, Thomas Harding, of Bradninch, Devon, was giving testimony in a testamentary dispute when he recalled that the deceased, Thomas Potter of Broadhembury, had ‘died of a wound received by a ploughshare [blade] in his thigh as he was in a field at plough, which happened some days before his death’.

This post is part of a series that marks the publication of The Experience of Work in Early Modern England. The book is co-authored by monster head Mark Hailwood, along with Jane Whittle, Hannah Robb, and Taylor Aucoin. It uses court depositions to explore everyday working life between 1500 and 1700, with a particular focus on how gender shaped work. It is an open access publication (i.e. it is available to view/download for free, here). The post first appeared on the ‘Women’s Work in Rural England, 1500-1700′ blog as a ‘work in progress’ piece in 2016 – it is reposted here to whet your appetite for finding out where the research ended up, which you can do by reading the book!

Mark Hailwood

I often describe the main bulk of the work that underpins this project as ‘data entry’. But perhaps ‘data entry’ isn’t the best way to describe the harvesting process that has been our focus: reading thousands of depositions (I recently estimated that I’ve read somewhere between 6000-7000 individual depositions so far this year) and all of the stories of everyday life that they contain, and then carefully converting these complex qualitative sources into usable quantitative data, is a more varied and stimulating exercise than the term ‘data entry’ conjures up.

One of the upshots of this kind of work is that in among all the lengthy tithe and testamentary disputes that often turn out to be of little use to us, you occasional unearth a remarkably rich case that contains a veritable jackpot of work activities. And it is one such case that I want to discuss in this post.

Step forward: the Conant Family of Moretonhampstead.

This post is part of a series that marks the publication of The Experience of Work in Early Modern England. The book is co-authored by monster head Mark Hailwood, along with Jane Whittle, Hannah Robb, and Taylor Aucoin. It uses court depositions to explore everyday working life between 1500 and 1700, with a particular focus on how gender shaped work. It is an open access publication (i.e. it is available to view/download for free, here). The post first appeared on the ‘Women’s Work in Rural England, 1500-1700′ blog as a ‘work in progress’ piece in 2015 – it is reposted here to whet your appetite for finding out where the research ended up, which you can do by reading the book!

Mark Hailwood

One aspect of the experience of work that our data sheds light on is seasonal patterns in work activities. As the English nights start to draw in, we ask: what tasks did early modern English workers do to make ready for the onset of winter?

A significant number of our examples from late November and early December relate to the replenishing of wood supplies to fuel much-needed winter fires. On the 25th of November 1591, Thomas Ven, an 80-year-old husbandman of King’s Brompton in Somerset, was up a ladder pruning an oak tree with an axe when he plummeted to his death. Locals must have started to wonder if evil spirits possessed the wood of Barlynch Grove, where Ven had fallen, for in December of the following year the 28-year-old Edward Norman met his end by falling out of an ash tree that he had climbed to cut branches from.