Customs in Common, page 48
This irregular working rhythm is commonly associated with heavy week-end drinking: Saint Monday is a target in many Victorian temperance tracts. But even the most sober and self-disciplined artisan might feel the necessity for such alternations. “I know not how to describe the sickening aversion which at times steals over the working man and utterly disables him for a longer or shorter period, from following his usual occupation”, Francis Place wrote in 1829; and he added a footnote of personal testimony:
For nearly six years, whilst working, when I had work to do, from twelve to eighteen hours a day, when no longer able, from the cause mentioned, to continue working, I used to run from it, and go as rapidly as I could to Highgate, Hampstead, Muswell-hill, or Norwood, and then “return to my vomit”. . . This is the case with every workman I have ever known; and in proportion as a man’s case is hopeless will such fits more frequently occur and be of longer duration.2
F. Place, Improvement of the Working People (1834), pp. 13-15: Brit. Mus. Add MS 27825. See also John Wade, History of the Middle and Working Classes, 3rd edn. (1835), pp. 124-5.
We may, finally, note that the irregularity of working day and week were framed, until the first decades of the nineteenth century, within the larger irregularity of the working year, punctuated by its traditional holidays, and fairs. Still, despite the triumph of the Sabbath over the ancient saints’ days in the seventeenth century,1 the people clung tenaciously to their customary wakes and feasts, and may even have enlarged them both in vigour and extent.2
See Hill, op. cit.
Clayton, op. cit., p. 13, claimed that “common custom has established so many Holy-days, that few of our manufacturing work-folks are closely and regularly employed above two-third parts of their time”. See also Furniss, op. cit., pp. 44-5, and the abstract of my paper in the Bulletin of the Society for the Study of Labour History, 9 (1964).
How far can this argument be extended from manufacturing industry to the rural labourers? On the face of it, there would seem to be unrelenting daily and weekly labour here: the field labourer had no Saint Monday. But a close discrimination of different work-situations is still required. The eighteenth- (and nineteenth-) century village had its own self-employed artisans, as well as many employed on irregular task work.3 Moreover, in the unenclosed countryside, the classical case against open field and common was in its inefficiency and wastefulness of time, for the small farmer or cottager:
“We have four or five little farmers. . . we have a bricklayer, a carpenter, a blacksmith, and a miller, all of whom. . . are in a very frequent habit of drinking the King’s health. . . Their employment is unequal; sometimes they are full of business, and sometimes they have none; generally they have many leisure hours, because. . . the hardest part [of their work] devolves to some men whom they hire. . .”, “A Farmer”, describing his own village (see note 3 on p. 380), in 1798.
. . . if you offer them work, they will tell you that they must go to look up their sheep, cut furzes, get their cow out of the pound, or, perhaps, say they must take their horse to be shod, that he may carry them to a horse-race or cricket-match (Arbuthnot, 1773.)
In sauntering after his cattle, he acquires a habit of indolence. Quarter, half, and occasionally whole days are imperceptibly lost. Day labour becomes disgusting. . . (Report on Somerset, 1795.)
Whenalabourerbecomespossessedofmorelandthanheandhis family can cultivate in the evenings. . . the farmer can no longer depend on him for constant work. . . (Commercial & Agricultural Magazine, 1800.)4
Cited in J. L. and B. Hammond, The Village Labourer (1920), p. 13; E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (1963), p. 220.
To this we should add the frequent complaints of agricultural improvers as to the time wasted, both at seasonal fairs, and (before the arrival of the village shop) on weekly market days.1
See e.g. Annals of Agriculture, xxvi (1796), p. 370 n.
The farm servant, or the regular wage-earning field labourer, who worked, unremittingly, the full statute hours or longer, who had no common rights or land, and who (if not living-in) lived in a tied cottage, was undoubtedly subject to an intense labour discipline, whether in the seventeenth or the nineteenth century. The day of a ploughman (living-in) was described with relish by Markham in 1636:
. . . the Plowman shall rise before four of the clock in the morning, and after thanks given to God for his rest, & prayer for the success of his labours, he shall go into his stable. . .
After cleansing the stable, grooming his horses, feeding them, and preparing his tackle, he might breakfast (6-6.30 a.m.), he should plough until 2 p.m. or 3 p.m., take half an hour for dinner; attend to his horses etc. until 6.30 p.m., when he might come in for supper:
. . . and after supper, hee shall either by the fire side mend shooes both for himselfe and their Family, or beat and knock Hemp or Flax, or picke and stamp Apples or Crabs, for Cyder or Verdjuyce, or else grind malt on the quernes, pick candle rushes, or doe some Husbandly office within doors till it be full eight a clock. . .
Then he must once again attend to his cattle and (“giving God thanks for benefits received that day”) he might retire.2
G. Markham, The Inrichment of the Weald of Kent, 10th edn. (1660), pp. 115-7.
Even so, we are entitled to show a certain scepticism. There are obvious difficulties in the nature of the occupation. Ploughing is not an all-the-year-round task. Hours and tasks must fluctuate with the weather. The horses (if not the men) must be rested. There is the difficulty of supervision: Robert Loder’s accounts indicate that servants (when out of sight) were not always employed upon their knees thanking God for their benefits: “men can worke yf they list & soe they can loyter”.1 The farmer himself must work exceptional hours if he was to keep all his labourers always employed.2 And the farm servant could assert his annual right to move on if he disliked his employment.
Attempting to account for a deficiency in his stocks of wheat in 1617, Loder notes: “What should be the cause herof I know not, but it was in that yeare when R. Pearce & Alce were my servants, & then in great love (as it appeared too well) whether he gave it my horses. . . or how it went away, God onely knoweth”. Robert Loder’s Farm Accounts, ed. G. E. Fussell (Camden Society, 3rd series, liii, 1936), pp. 59, 127.
For an account of an active farmer’s day, see William Howitt, Rural Life of England (1862), pp. 110-1.
Thus enclosure and agricultural improvement were both, in some sense, concerned with the efficient husbandry of the time of the labour-force. Enclosure and the growing labour-surplus at the end of the eighteenth century tightened the screw for those who were in regular employment; they were faced with the alternatives of partial employment and the poor law, or submission to a more exacting labour discipline. It is a question, not of new techniques, but of a greater sense of time-thrift among the improving capitalist employers. This reveals itself in the debate between advocates of regularly-employed wage-labour and advocates of “taken-work” (i.e. labourers employed for particular tasks at piece-rates). In the 1790s Sir Mordaunt Martin censured recourse to taken-work
which people agree to, to save themselves the trouble of watching their workmen: the consequence is, the work is ill done, the workmen boast at the ale-house what they can spend in “a waste against the wall”, and make men at moderate wages discontented.
“A Farmer” countered with the argument that taken-work and regular wage-labour might be judiciously intermixed:
Two labourers engage to cut down a piece of grass at two shillings or half-a-crown an acre; I send, with their scythes, two of my domestic farm-servants into the field; I can depend upon it, that their companions will keep them up to their work; and thus I gain. . . the same additional hours of labour from my domestic servants, which are voluntarily devoted to it by my hired servants.3
Sir Mordaunt Martin in Bath and West and Southern Counties Society, Letters and Papers (Bath, 1795), vii, p. 109; “A Farmer”, “Observations on Taken-Work and Labour”, Monthly Magazine, Sept. 1798, May 1799.
In the nineteenth century the debate was largely resolved in favour of weekly wage-labour, supplemented by task-work as occasion rose. The Wiltshire labourer’s day, as described by Richard Jefferies in the 1870s, was scarcely less long than that described by Markham. Perhaps in resistance to this unremitting toil he was distinguished by the “clumsiness of his walk” and “the deadened slowness which seems to pervade everything he does”.1
J. R. Jefferies, The Toilers of the Field (1892), pp. 84-8, 211-2.
The most arduous and prolonged work of all was that of the labourer’s wife in the rural economy. One part of this — especially the care of infants — was the most task-orientated of all. Another part was in the fields, from which she must return to renewed domestic tasks. As Mary Collier complained in a sharp rejoinder to Stephen Duck:
. . . when we Home are come,
Alas! we find our Work but just begun;
So many Things for our Attendance call,
Has we ten Hands, we could employ them all.
Our Children put to Bed, with greatest Care
We all Things for your coming Home prepare:
You sup, and go to Bed without delay,
And rest yourselves till the ensuing day;
While we, alas! but little Sleep can have,
Because our froward Children cry and rave. . .
In ev’ry Work (we) take our proper Share;
And from the Time that Harvest doth begin
Until the Corn be cut and carry’d in,
Our Toil and Labour’s daily so extreme,
That we have hardly ever Time to dream.2
Mary Collier, now a Washer-woman, at Petersfield in Hampshire, The Woman’s Labour: an Epistle to Mr. Stephen Duck; in Answer to his late Poem, called The Thresher’s Labour (1739), pp. 10-11, reprinted (1989).
Such hours were endurable only because one part of the work, with the children and in the home, disclosed itself as necessary and inevitable, rather than as an external imposition. This remains true to this day, and, despite school times and television times, the rhythms of women’s work in the home are not wholly attuned to the measurement of the clock. The mother of young children has an imperfect sense of time and attends to other human tides. She has not yet altogether moved out of the conventions of “pre-industrial” society.
V
I have placed “pre-industrial” in inverted commas: and for a reason. It is true that the transition to mature industrial society demands analysis in sociological as well as economic terms. Concepts such as “time-preference” and the “backward sloping labour supply curve” are, too often, cumbersome attempts to find economic terms to describe sociological problems. But, equally, the attempt to provide simple models for one single, supposedly-neutral, technologically-determined, process known as “industrialisation” is also suspect.1 It is not only that the highly-developed and technically-alert manufacturing industries (and the way of life supported by them) of France or England in the eighteenth century can only by semantic torture be described as “pre-industrial”. (And such a description opens the door to endless false analogies between societies at greatly differing economic levels.) It is also that there has never been any single type of “the transition”. The stress of the transition falls upon the whole culture: resistance to change and assent to change arise from the whole culture. And this culture expresses the systems of power, property-relations, religious institutions, etc., inattention to which merely flattens phenomena and trivialises analysis. Above all, the transition is not to “industrialism” tout court but to industrial capitalism or (in the twentieth century) to alternative systems whose features are still indistinct. What we are examining here are not only changes in manufacturing technique which demand greater synchronisation of labour and a greater exactitude in time-routines in any society; but also these changes as they were lived through in the society of nascent industrial capitalism. We are concerned simultaneously with time-sense in its technological conditioning, and with time-measurement as a means of labour exploitation.
See the valuable critique by André Gunder Frank, “Sociology of Development and Underdevelopment of Sociology”, Catalyst (Buffalo, Summer 1967).
There are reasons why the transition was peculiarly protracted and fraught with conflict in England: among those which are often noted, England’s was the first industrial revolution, and there were no Cadillacs, steel mills, or television sets to serve as demonstrations as to the object of the operation. Moreover, the preliminaries to the industrial revolution were so long that, in the manufacturing districts in the early eighteenth century, a vigorous and licensed popular culture had evolved, which the propagandists of discipline regarded with dismay. Josiah Tucker, the dean of Gloucester, declared in 1745 that “the lower class of people” were utterly degenerated. Foreigners (he sermonised) found “the common people of our populous cities to be the most abandoned, and licentious wretches on earth”:
Such brutality and insolence, such debauchery and extravagance, such idleness, irreligion, cursing and swearing, and contempt of all rule and authority. . . Our people are drunk with the cup of liberty.1
J. Tucker, Six Sermons (Bristol, 1772), pp. 70-1.
The irregular labour rhythms described in the previous section help us to understand the severity of mercantilist doctrines as to the necessity for holding down wages as a preventative against idleness, and it would seem to be not until the second half of the eighteenth century that “normal” capitalist wage incentives begin to become widely effective.2 The confrontations over discipline have already been examined by others.3 My intention here is to touch upon several points which concern time-discipline more particularly. The first is found in the extraordinary Law Book of the Crowley Iron Works. Here, at the very birth of the large-scale unit in manufacturing industry, the old autocrat, Crowley, found it necessary to design an entire civil and penal code, running to more than 100,000 words, to govern and regulate his refractory labour-force. The preambles to Orders Number 40 (the Warden at the Mill) and 103 (Monitor) strike the prevailing note of morally-righteous invigilation. From Order 40:
The change is perhaps signalled at the same time in the ideology of the more enlightened employers: see A. W. Coats, “Changing attitudes to labour in the mid-eighteenth century”, Econ. Hist. Rev., 2nd series, xi (1958-9).
See Pollard, op. cit.; N. McKendrick, “Josiah Wedgwood and Factory Discipline”, Hist. Journal, iv (1961); also Thompson, op. cit., pp. 356-74.
I having by sundry people working by the day with the connivence of the clerks been horribly cheated and paid for much more time than in good conscience I ought and such hath been the baseness & treachery of sundry clerks that they have concealed the sloath & negligence of those paid by the day. . .
And from Order 103:
Some have pretended a sort of right to loyter, thinking by their readiness and ability to do sufficient in less time than others. Others have been so foolish to think bare attendance without being employed in business is sufficient. . . Others so impudent as to glory in their villany and upbrade others for their diligence. . .
To the end that sloath and villany should be detected and the just and diligent rewarded, I have thought meet to create an account of time by a Monitor, and do order and it is hereby ordered and declared from 5 to 8 and from 7 to 10 is fifteen hours, out of which take 1 for breakfast, dinner, etc. There will then be thirteen hours and a half neat service. . .
This service must be calculated “after all deductions for being at taverns, alehouses, coffee houses, breakfast, dinner, playing, sleeping, smoaking, singing, reading of news history, quarelling, contention, disputes or anything foreign to my business, any way loytering”.
The Monitor and Warden of the Mill were ordered to keep for each day employee a time-sheet, entered to the minute, with “Come” and “Run”. In the Monitor’s Order, verse 31 (a later addition) declares:
And whereas I have been informed that sundry clerks have been so unjust as to reckon by clocks going the fastest and the bell ringing before the hour for their going from business, and clocks going too slow and the bell ringing after the hour for their coming to business, and those two black traitors Fowell and Skellerne have knowingly allowed the same; it is therefore ordered that no person upon the account doth reckon by any other clock, bell, watch or dyall but the Monitor’s, which clock is never to be altered but by the clock-keeper. . .
The Warden of the Mill was ordered to keep the watch “so locked up that it may not be in the power of any person to alter the same”. His duties also were defined in verse 8:
Every morning at 5 a clock the Warden is to ring the bell for beginning to work, at eight a clock for breakfast, at half an hour after for work again, at twelve a clock for dinner, at one to work and at eight to ring for leaving work and all to be lock’d up.
His book of the account of time was to be delivered in every Tuesday with the following affidavit:
This account of time is done without favour or affection, ill-will or hatred, & do really believe the persons above mentioned have worked in the service of John Crowley Esq the hours above charged.1
Order 103 is reproduced in full in The Law Book of the Crowley Ironworks, ed. M. W. Flinn (Surtees Society, clxvii, 1957). See also Law Number 16, “Reckonings”. Order Number 40 is in the “Law Book”, Brit. Lib. Add MS 34555.
We are entering here, already in 1700, the familiar landscape of disciplined industrial capitalism, with the time-sheet, the time-keeper, the informers and the fines. Some seventy years later the same discipline was to be imposed in the early cotton mills (although the machinery itself was a powerful supplement to the time-keeper). Lacking the aid of machinery to regulate the pace of work on the pot-bank, that supposedly-formidable disciplinarian, Josiah Wedgwood, was reduced to enforcing discipline upon the potters in surprisingly muted terms. The duties of the Clerk of the Manufactory were:
