In early modern society people were frequently assessed and categorised according to their economic standing. A person’s place in society could be framed around their material or monetary worth or descriptions of their labour, as Shepard’s work has shown.
1 Shepard, Accounting for Oneself; Shepard, ‘Poverty, Labour’, 51–95. This section considers how objection-raising witnesses levied ‘economic’ objections to young men and women’s working and living arrangements. It assesses the extent to which these objections intersected with the ideas of service embodied in the Statute of Artificers. The restrictions on labour presented by the Statute affected women more acutely than men. Men could seek alternative work to service, learning a trade as an apprentice (although the poorest strata in society could not afford this). Labouring women’s options in the Statute were fewer, yet they nonetheless sought alternatives to service. For example, Craig Muldrew has shown that spinning opportunities for women could be lucrative and allow them to enjoy freedoms outside service.
2 See C. Muldrew, ‘The “Ancient Distaff” and “Whirling Spindle”: Measuring the Contribution of Spinning to Household Earnings and the National Economy in England, 1550–1770’, Economic History Review, 65 (2012), 498–526. Assessing the wages and productivity of spinners from the late sixteenth to the early nineteenth century, however, Jane Humphries and Ben Schneider have argued that there was no high-wage economy in spinning in pre-industrial England.
3 J. Humphries and B. Schneider, ‘Spinning the Industrial Revolution’, Economic History Review, 72 (2019), 126–55. But women of the south-west certainly engaged in this form of labour: Anne Combe of Chudleigh in Devon lived with her mother and father in 1598, getting her living by carding and spinning.
4 Devon Heritage Centre (hereafter DHC), Chanter 864, Jane Iverye vs Pentecost Ball and Andrew Fole (1598). They also sought other alternative employments: Grace Kinge, a nineteen-year-old from Yeovil in Somerset, was described in her 1629 deposition as a bonelace maker.
5 SHC, DDCd65, Marie Bashiler vs Joanna Hilson (1629). Grace is one of the very few female witnesses (other than servants) for whom an occupational description is recorded. Labouring men also sought alternative work, sometimes on a seasonal basis. In 1633, twenty-five-year-old fuller John Catford of Dulverton in Devon told the court that he had been hired in the harvest season to rake.
6 SHC, DDCd75, Aldred Cruse vs Spurwaie (1633). This seasonal work was not uncommon for young women either.
Requiring unmarried people to work in service meant there was an expectation they would live away from their parents in the homes of their masters and mistresses. Some alternative forms of labour likewise took place in the homes of others, but young people also continued to live and work in the familial home. Numerous young witnesses in the church courts described living at home with parents. In 1573 Edward Jackette of Meysey Hampton in Gloucestershire told the court that he ‘dwelleth together with his father & soe as yet hath little of his owne’.
7 GA, GDR/25, Edyth Snell vs Martyn Bradford (1572). Shepard notes that dependence on parents was sometimes framed explicitly as a form of ‘training at home, acquiring experience, and serving a family enterprise in advance of their inheritance’.
8 Shepard, Accounting for Oneself, p. 208. Even servants expressed reliance on parents. In the statement of her worth made in interrogatory questioning, servant Alice Gullock of Farmborough in Somerset deposed in 1610 that ‘she is a mayden and hath but little more then her apparrell, but she dependeth chieflie uppon her parents’.
9 SHC, DDCd44, Sara Kelston vs Richard Kelston (1610).Tim Wales notes the mid-seventeenth-century preoccupation of authorities with poor young people living at home with their parents.
10 Wales, ‘“Living at their own Hands”’, 29–30. But parishioners in the south-west used their discretion when actively policing young people who lived at home, often using wealth as a key determinant in deciding when to take legal action. Mary Smith of Brampford Speke in Devon was presented to the local Justices of the Peace for living at home with her alms-dependent widowed mother in 1635, while the habitation of other young people of modest means with parents went unnoticed.
11 DHC, Chanter 866, Mary Flood vs Dorothea Tucker (1635). For a more detailed discussion of this case, see Mansell, ‘Female Service and the Village Community’, pp. 77–8. A 1574 defamation dispute in the parish of Bromsberrow in Gloucestershire reveals the underlying tensions in assessing whether young people should reside at home. Responding to objections raised against witness John Guynell, husbandman John Ferne argued:
he haith knowen him [John] sythence his infancye whoe was borne in Elsfield and is one honest yonge man lyvinge sometyme in service & sometyme with his mother a widowe & a thriftie yonge man of sufficient credite to beare witness in the saied cause.
The original objections raised against John Guynell were that he was allegedly very poor and reliant on parish alms. One witness added that he was lame. If we believe that he was the physically impaired son of a poor widow, it becomes a reasonable assumption that some allowances were made regarding his living situation and his labour. John described himself to the court as a husbandman and it appears that flexibility in the conditions of his labour was permitted; sometimes he worked as a day labourer and sometimes in service. He perhaps sporadically received relief when his disability prevented him from working or earning a sufficient income to support himself. His periodic residence at home with his widowed mother was tolerated by most.
12 GA, GDR/32, Elinore Grove vs John Bromadge (1574); GDR/32, John Bromadge vs Guy Grove (1574). It is likely, then, that the objection-raising witnesses in this case took advantage of his poverty and disability, presenting a hyperbolic and unsympathetic view of his status.
But being reliant on a parent was rarely referred to by objection-raising witnesses. Only three objectionable witnesses were negatively characterised as dependent on parents across the four courts. All three (one woman and two men) fell in the ‘thirty and under’ age bracket. In none of these cases was it explicitly stated that they ought to be in service
rather than living at home. In fact, only one witness in each of the three cases made any reference to them living at home at all: Agnes Plumbley of Westbury in Somerset was described in 1604 by husbandman George Spiring as a ‘very poore girle nowe dwelling at home with her father’. The atypical production of her father as a witness in this case provides access to further information. His deposition reveals that he was fifty-six years old and got his living ‘by hard labor & working at the myneryes [mines]’. He was worth, by his own estimation, just four shillings. He confirmed that his daughter was poor and had lived with him for three years, having formerly been employed as a servant.
13 SHC, DDCd28, John Hardweech vs William Bowlting (1604). In 1606, gentleman Alexander Walton of Moorlinch in the same county deposed that Jacob Allyn, who self-identified as a groom, ‘liveth at daye labor with his father’.
14 SHC, DDCd30 and DDCd38, Margaret Huckbridge vs Agnes Salter (1606). The final example of dependence on parents being expressed in the exceptions was of a twenty-year-old yeoman, Thomas Powell, whose misbehaviour was clearly the issue rather than his residence in the familial home and is discussed in detail later in this chapter.
15 SHC, DDCd34, Marcus Taber vs Thomas Powle (1603).Similarly, terms associated with being ‘masterless’ are also rarely found in the exceptions responses. Living without a master features as an accusation only four times in the sample: it is used three times in Somerset to refer to two men and one woman under thirty, and once in Devon to refer to a female witness also under thirty. Criticism of the witness Alice Hancock of Isle Brewers in Somerset represented the clearest articulation of service being perceived as a means of honest labour. She was described in 1613 as ‘one that will staye with noe Master but is an idle wenche and ran awaye from Rabidge Labyes mother 6 or 7 yeeres since or therabouts’.
16 SHC, DDCd45, Matilda Midleton vs Rabigia Labie (1613). Yet, even here, perhaps running away and being idle were her true ‘crimes’, rather than failing to live in service. Thomas Fox of Westbury in Somerset was described as ‘unmarryed and for the most part masterles’ in 1604. Close reading of the case reveals that the issue raised by witnesses concerned trade and apprenticeship (another area of labour regulation that the Statute sought to reform) rather than living out of service. Thomas was a tailor, but witnesses deposed that he had served just two years of his apprenticeship. Their grievance, therefore, was that ‘hee bee scarcely his crafts master, yett hath continewed a masterles man’. The labour laws sought to regulate access to crafts and trades that required formal training in the form of apprenticeship.
17 Chris Minns and Patrick Wallis, ‘Rules and Reality: Quantifying the Practice of Apprenticeship in Early Modern England’, Economic History Review, 65 (2012), 556–79. Thomas’ failure to complete his training was the concern here, not his living outside service.
18 SHC, DDCd28, John Hardweech vs William Bowlting (1604). Here, laws on service and apprenticeship appear to have reinforced one another.
Despite the preoccupation of the Statute with forcing unmarried people to live under a master, the framework for what was permissible was much broader. Rather than explicitly criticising young people for living without a master, objection-raising witnesses more frequently expressed their concerns about those who had no fixed place of residence or were vagrant. The expression of views on vagrancy was gender-related: female witnesses less frequently depicted objectionable witnesses as vagrant. Their contributions accounted for just four of the forty-seven references to vagrancy. This is low considering that 20 per cent of objection-raising witnesses were women. All four of the women who participated in this discourse were between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five and in service. The restrictions on their own freedoms may have made them particularly aggrieved at those who had no fixed abode and enjoyed living outside the control of a master. Perhaps litigant parties might deliberately showcase women in service as objection-raising witnesses to serve as a clear juxtaposition against the unruly self-governance and autonomous lifestyles of individuals brought in as witnesses on the opposing side.
Although fewer women participated in discourse around vagrancy, a higher proportion found themselves the target of it. They were the recipients of 48 per cent of vagrancy-related attacks on their character, and women aged thirty and below were a particular target. In 1607 broadweaver Hugo Salter of Uley in Gloucestershire objected to the testimony of Joanne Daingerfield, who he described as ‘one that hath noe certen habitacion but worketh sometimes with one & sometimes with an other as she cann procure worke in anye place’.
19 GA, GDR/100, George Birche vs Thomas Payne (1607). The concern about Joanne was directly linked with work but, elsewhere, no clear connection with labour or lack of service was referred to. In 1578, twenty-five-year-old Richard Rogers was described as ‘one who neyther hath any certeyne place of abode but is compted [counted] for a common renigate and a vagabond’.
20 DHC, Chanter 860, John Morris vs John Sparcks (1578). In using these terms, objection-raising witnesses tapped into the language of settlement and vagrancy that was prevalent in the period. As Wales reminds us, it is important to consider the labour laws alongside other legislation on settlement and poverty.
21 Wales, ‘“Living at their own Hands”’, 22.Service might help to pin down the vagrant, but it was not always a successful strategy. The Statute stipulated that service should be annual; however, this was not always the case.
22 See Jane Whittle, ‘A Different Pattern of Employment: Servants in Rural England c.1500–1660’, in Jane Whitte (ed.), Servants in Europe, 1400–1900 (Woodbridge, 2017), pp. 57–76; Mansell, ‘Female Service and the Village Community’, pp. 91–2; Mansell, ‘The variety of women’s experiences’, 328–31. A 1594 defamation dispute from Gloucestershire reveals tensions between holding a position in service and vagrancy. Three male witnesses – Maurice Earle (22), Thomas Baker (26) and Griffin George (22) – all self-identified as servants. Yet the six witnesses produced to discredit their testimonies labelled them as vagrant. Many, including local minister Thomas Rocke, agreed that Thomas Baker ‘was & yet is servannte’ to Richard Oliffe, but his fellow objection-raising witness Thomas Hughes deposed that ‘Thomas Baker … is not worth tenne shillings & such a one as hath no certayne place of aboade but is accompted a wandering ydle fellow.’ Another witness added that Thomas Baker’s mother was poor and had never married, living by the relief of the parish while her son ‘is not worth xx [20]
s & is such a one as hath no certayne place of aboad’. Servant Joanna Estington described Maurice Earle as ‘a vagrant person & such a one as hath no certayne place of habitacion’. While Maurice claimed to be a servant in nearby Prestbury, Thomas Rocke countered that he ‘is at this instannte placed as he hath heard in London’.
23 GA, GDR/79, Joane Mare vs Joane Oliffe (1594). It is likely that the periods that these men worked in service were short and did not provide the stability of residence that early modern parishioners considered important for young people. Evidence like this further demonstrates that the clause of the Statute that service should be annual was not strictly enforced.
Service as the Statute envisaged it was therefore a strategy for ensuring a stable residence for labouring young people that society understood and, in some cases, upheld. But the responses of objection-raising witnesses reveal a wider spectrum of what was deemed permissible: living at home offered young people the stability society sought for them and acceptability was assessed according to family finances and dynamics. Being masterless was referred to less frequently than having no fixed abode simply because stability was not conceived solely in terms of service. Service did not always offer stability: if young people were moving too frequently from master to master then eyebrows might be raised. Stability was an important social marker of belonging and individuals who remained in the same place could be held to account within their local community. Having the stability of a fixed abode represented economic security and some insurance against risk. The views that objection-raising witnesses articulated intersected with the aims and concerns of the Statute, but stability was conceived as achievable outside service.