The Countryside: Economic Continuity and Change
The Countryside: Economic Continuity and Change
Importance of Agriculture. Even during the era of industrialization, the production of food was of primary importance. In fact, as cities grew and housed burgeoning, non-food-producing populations, the countryside was called upon to produce ever greater surpluses of food products to be shipped to urban markets. Before the coming of the railroad and steamboat, transporting grain and dairy goods was slow, expensive, and risky. In times of bad harvests, for example, wagons and barges filled with food for urban areas were often attacked and emptied by starving villagers and peasants.
Fallow Farming. Until well into the nineteenth century various factors limited the amount of food Europeans could produce. In the absence of artificial fertilizers and knowledge about crop rotation, fields were fertilized by grazing cows and other animals while the land lay fallow. In most areas fields lay fallow one out of every three years, but in some places, it was one out of every two years. Peasants rotated fields in and out of fallow in blocks. They owned or rented land in at least three blocks so they would always have fields to plant. Only wealthy peasants and farmers owned farm animals, but everyone needed fertilizer. Thus, until enclosure changed this arrangement, fields were unfenced and animals were allowed to roam freely on the unplanted fields.
Agricultural Improvement. During the eighteenth century, agricultural production increased in western Europe.
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The key to improved crop yield was the introduction of new crops and the adoption of crop rotation. If farmers alternated grain crops with other crops—such as turnips, clover, and legumes—they could eliminate the rotation into fallow fields. The new crops replaced nutrients removed by grain, improved crop yields, and provided fodder for animals, thus allowing for more dairy and plow animals. Improvement occurred piecemeal. Not all farmers could afford seeds to plant the new crops. Those who could bought and sold land to group their fields together and enclosed them behind fences and hedges to keep out their neighbors’ grazing animals. Those who could not afford new seeds, fences, and hedges, or who were suspicious of the new crops, often lost out in this process, becoming landless laborers with seriously reduced incomes and diets. By the late nineteenth century, machines began to appear in farmers’ fields. Steam-powered plows appeared in 1858, and the gasoline-powered tractor came into use in 1892. In the 1880s some farmers began to use chemical fertilizers to increase crop yields. In eastern Europe, in contrast, the existence of serfdom well into the nineteenth century retarded the adoption of new farming techniques. The grouping and enclosing of fields, and mechanical and chemical changes in farming, did not take place there until after World War I (1914–1918).
Agriculture and Industrialization. Agricultural improvement was directly tied to the industrial, transportation, commercial, and population revolutions. The production of more food allowed the population to increase. This advance in turn provided workers for factories and more consumers for the increased food supply. Improved transportation made it possible for food to be transported to these new consumers, ending starvation that local harvest failures had caused before and encouraging regional specialization in agriculture. This step forward then led to a yet greater increase in the production of foodstuffs. Finally, a growing commercial sector organized the transportation and sale of agricultural goods to city dwellers and manufactured goods to rural farmworkers. By the middle of the nineteenth century, in western Europe at least, urban and rural worlds had become much more distinct than ever before. Rural dwellers engaged in any occupation but farming, and gone from the workers’ yards in small towns and cities were the chickens and pigs.
Family Economy. In the preindustrial world no individual stood alone. For the vast majority of the population, no one could earn enough to survive on his or her own. Survival depended on the family, which depended upon the work of everyone. Children, beginning at the age of five, worked alongside adults, and women labored alongside men. Households always contained a biological family group (perhaps with additional nonkin workers). Much rarer were households of unrelated individuals who had banded together to survive. Men were always paid more than women regardless of the kind of work, but even so, men were not paid enough to support even two adults without assistance. A husband and wife working
together could support themselves and perhaps one or two young children. In the simplest form of the family economy, members of the household contributed to the whole by producing either farm goods or manufactured items. This production invariably involved a sexual division of labor where the primary occupations of the men and women were distinct. If manufacturing were involved, for example, the man might be a blacksmith or brickmaker and the woman a spinner or seamstress. In practice, during slow periods in their own occupation, men might help with the women’s work, tasks they would have learned as boys in any case, as all children were expected to assist their mothers. The family economy held sway in both urban and rural settings of traditional, preindustrial Europe. Industrialization, however, gradually destroyed it over the course of the nineteenth century. Wages rose for both men and women, and this increase made it possible for many nonfarm women to exit the paid labor force for at least a part of their adult lives.
Cottage Industry. Cottage industries were ubiquitous in rural, preindustrial Europe. The difficulty and expense of transporting manufactured goods and agricultural produce meant villages or clusters of villages tried to produce every-thing they needed. Fabric, shoes, clothing, ropes, furniture, farm implements, building materials, and a full range of crops were produced everywhere, although many peasants engaged especially in spinning thread from wool or flax and
A WORKING CHILD’S CHRISTMAS
Samuel Bamford was born into a successful weaving family. Both of his parents, as well as other relatives, were cotton weavers. This passage from his memoir paints a happy picture of cottage manufacturing but also reveals how hard this work was. The scene must have occurred in the 1790s; spinning had moved into factories, and women, who previously had been cottage spinners, as well as men were working at handlooms.
Some two or three weeks before Christmas, it was the custom in families to apportion to each boy or girl weaver a certain quantity of work which was to be done ere his or her holidays commenced. An extra quantity was generally undertaken to be performed, and the conditions of the performance were such indulgences and gratuities as were agreeable to the working parties. In most families, a peck or a strike of malt would be brewed; spiced bread and potato custard would be made, and probably an extra piece of beef, and some good old cheese would be laid in store, not to be touched until the work was done. The work then went on merrily. Play hours were nearly given up, and whole nights would be spent at the loom, the weavers occasionally striking up a hymn or Christmas carol in chorus. A few hours of the late morning would perhaps be given to rest; work would be then resumed, and the singing and rattle of shuttles would be almost incessant during the day. In my uncle’s family we were all singers, and seldom a day passed on which several hymns were not sung; before Christmas we frequently sung to keep ourselves from sleep, and we chorussed “Christians awake,” when we ourselves were almost gone in sleep.
Christmas holidays always commenced at Middleton on the first Monday after new-year’s day. By that day every one was expected to have his work finished. That being done, the cuts were next carefully picked, and plated, and made up for the warehouse, and they having been dis-patched, the loom house was swept and put in order; the house was cleaned, the furniture rubbed, and the holidays then commenced. The ale was tapped, the currant-loaf was sliced out, and lad and lass went to play as each liked best; the boys generally at foot-ball, and both boys and girls at sliding, when there was ice on the ground. In wet weather we should have a swinging rope in the loom-house, or should spend the day in going from house to house amongst our playmates, and finishing at night by assembling in parties of a dozen or a score, boys and girls, where on some warm, comfortable hearth, we sat singing carols and hymns, playing at [the game of] “forfeits,” proposing riddles, and telling “fyerin tales” [scary stories] until our hair began to stiffen, and, when we broke up, we scampered homeward, not venturing to look behind lest the “old one” himself [the Devil] should be seen at our heels.
Source: Samuel Bamford, Early Days (London: Simpkin, Marshall, 1849), pp. 131-135.
weaving this thread into cloth. Many of these items were used by the family that made them, or they were sold locally. Peasants alternated the tasks of cottage industry with agricultural demands, both seasonally and by time of day. In the winter, manufacturing occupied most of the days, while in summer or fall, while crops needed tending, manufacturing might be abandoned or done in the evening hours.
Location of Cottage Industries. Cottage production depended on the terrain, the type of farming common to the area, and the proximity of a city or town with a mer-chant population. In many areas large numbers of women spun thread, and men wove cloth for nearby city merchants who provided workers with raw materials and paid them for the finished products. This method was called “the putting-out system of manufacturing.” In mountainous Switzerland, women spun for urban merchants, but the ter-rain was too steep for the transportation of heavy warps of cloth and finished fabrics. Thus, no weaving was done there. Men joined the women in spinning thread. In mining areas, nails and other small metal objects were made in the cottages. With industrialization, cottage manufacturing gradually disappeared. Peasant families that had depended upon it for part of their income gradually found themselves, or at least their children, forced to join the new industrial labor force.
Protoindustrialization. In the eighteenth century an intensification of rural manufacturing production occurred. Urban merchants sought more and more cottage workers to produce goods for national and international markets that were growing significantly. Historians call this process protoindustrialization. With accelerating demand for manufactured products, protoindustries employed far more people than the traditional cottage industries. Traveling merchants transported raw materials to villagers and carried finished items back to the cities for sale. In some rural areas a majority of the population worked for the urban putting-out merchants. People worked in their own homes, as they always had, and used traditional tools—spinning wheels, hand looms, anvils, and hammers. The difference was in the scale of production. In some areas the protoindustrial merchants acquired substantial resources that they later invested in building new machines and factories. What made rural workers desirable from the urban merchants’ point of view were their availability, the low wages for which they would work, and the absence of guilds that controlled production and quality in the cities. What made the work attractive to peasants and farmers was their sheer poverty. Areas with poor soil, hilly terrain, or the concentration of land in a few hands (which meant the majority of peasants were landless) forced the local peasantry to accept work eagerly from the putting-out merchants. Cottage manufacturing in both its small traditional form and as protoindustrialization was eventually replaced by factory production, but this transformation was a protracted process. Even as some manufacturing moved into factories, outwork or cottage work expanded as manufacturers sent work home to be done by the families. This arrangement was particularly the case in the garment industry where women did fine needlework and finishing in their homes.
Sources
Maxine Berg, ed., Markets and Manufacture in Early Industrial Europe (London & New York: Routledge, 1991).
Jerome Blum, The End of the Old Order in Rural Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978).
J. D. Chambers and G. E. Mingay, The Agricultural Revolution 1750-1880 (London: Batsford, 1966).
Gay L. Gullickson, Spinners and Weavers of Auffay: Rural Industry and the Sexual Division of Labor in a French Village, 1750-1850 (Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
Pat Hudson and W. R. Lee, eds., Women’s Work and the Family Economy in Historical Perspective (Manchester & New York: Manchester University Press, 1990).
Olwen Hufton, “Women and the Family Economy of Eighteenth-Century France,” French Historical Studies, 9 (Spring 1975): 1-22.
Ivy Pinchbeck, Women Workers and the Industrial Revolution, 1750-1850 (London: Routledge, 1930).
K. D. M. Snell, Annals of the Labouring Poor: Social Change and Agrarian England, 1660-1900 (Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
Louise A. Tilly and Joan W. Scott, Women, Work and Family (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1978).