Farm Wages and Living Standards in the Industrial Revolution: England, 1670- 1869
Author(s)
Clark, Gregory
Abstract
Much has been written on agricultural wages in England from 1670 to 1869, but this information has never been formed into one national series of agricultural wages. Wilson Fox provides good evidence based on farm accounts for 1850 and later. But for the years 1770-1849 the only national series available is the one Bowley constructed in 1898 mainly from wage survey. While Bowley’s index is well founded in the years after 1824, for the earlier period it relies on considerable interpolation, and takes no account of manuscript sources that have become available in the past hundred years. In an unpublished doctoral thesis, Eccleston calculated the day wages of workers on large agricultural estates from five midland counties from 1750 to 1834, and gave an annual day wage series for these counties. In another unpublished thesis, Richardson similarly calculated the average wages in seven English counties from 1790 to 1840, in part from estate sources. Bu t while the volume of The agrarian history of England and Wales for 1750 to 1850 offers a number of wage series on individual farms, it gives no overall wage series for that period .For the years before 1750 the information is sparser. From manuscript sources, Bowden calculated average winter day wages for some decades in six counties for the years 1640-1749, but he had no observations for the north of the country before 1690, and none for the west in any decade.
