The Origins of the Consumer Revolution in England

From Brass Pots to Clocks

Joanne Sear, Ken Sneath

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000765700
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Consumer Behaviour
• Index: Business

The Origins of the Consumer Revolution in England explores the rise of consumerism from the end of the medieval period through to the beginning of the nineteenth century.

The book takes a detailed look at when the 'consumer revolution' began, tracing its evolution from the years following the Black Death through to the nineteenth century. In doing so, it also considers which social classes were included, and how different areas of the country were affected at different times, examining the significant role that location played in the development of consumption. This new study is based upon the largest database of English probate records yet assembled, which has been used in conjunction with a range of other sources to offer a broad and detailed chronological approach. Filling in the gaps within previous research, it examines changing patterns in relation to food and drink, clothing, household furnishings and religion, focussing on the goods themselves to illuminate items in common ownership, rather than those owned only by the elite.

Using a combination of qualitative and quantitative evidence to explore the development of consumption, The Origins of the Consumer Revolution in England will be of great use to scholars and students of late medieval and early modern economic and social history, with an interest in the development of consumerism in England.

1

The consumer revolution

In 1785, John Goodes, a carpenter from Huntingdon, died. The value of possessions recorded in his inventory totalled £32 7s, considerably below the median value of inventories for craftsmen in the second half of the eighteenth century. His tools and various sorts of wood in his workshop represented about a quarter of the valuation. In his parlour was a tea table, china dishes, tea cups and saucers, a teapot, teaspoons. silver spoons and prints. In the kitchen were knives and forks, a warming pan and a 30-hour clock. In the bed chamber was a four-post bedstead, a featherbed, a looking glass and a chest of drawers. There were nine pictures in the bed chamber and two window curtains and rod.¹ Just over a century earlier in 1677, another carpenter, William Robotham, had died in Huntingdon. Like John Goodes he did not own any animals or crops and his inventory was valued at just £9 18s 4d.² Robotham also slept on a featherbed but this was the only item which also appeared in the list of goods owned by John Goodes. These two examples suggest a transformation in the living standards of craftsmen in a small market town and might be used to support the suggestion that a ‘consumer revolution’ had taken place. However, how representative are these anecdotes and to what extent is there evidence of a consumer revolution? If it occurred, when did it take place? Was it confined to certain areas of the country or did it spread throughout the nation? And who were the beneficiaries?

The present study seeks to answer some of these questions by exploring the changing ownership of goods from the late Middle Ages through to the beginning of the industrial revolution. A range of different sources have been used to provide a quantitative and qualitative approach to this investigation. This chapter considers the historiography of consumption as it relates to the key questions to be addressed. However, it is important to note that recent writing on the subject has explored new approaches and sources, particularly with regard to material culture and the impact of the built environment upon consumption.

When did consumer change take place?

In 1982, Neil McKendrick argued that a consumer revolution occurred in the eighteenth century and that the pre-industrial world was characterised by poverty, poor diet and ‘few comforts … to sustain them’.³ McKendrick’s pioneering work marked the beginning of a range of studies which considered various points in history and dated the expansion of consumerism earlier, or later. Whilst all of these authors, and others, have made valuable contributions to the debate, the present study suggests that it is inappropriate to try and specify a date for a ‘consumer revolution’, or to claim that a specific aspect caused such an event. We argue that what was actually occurring was a long, drawn out evolution of consumption which started around 1350 and subsequently affected various groups within society differently, both in terms of the timing and nature of changes to consumption patterns. Not only did this process impact variously on different societal groups, but the pattern of adoption of new goods varied by region. The cumulative effect of these changes was such that by the dawn of the industrial revolution, most people in England were actively enjoying a wide range of consumer goods. This development was not instigated by one event or outcome but fuelled by a complex interaction of factors which affected both the supply and demand of consumption goods.

Whilst no single element can be cited as the cause of the ‘consumer revolution’, the social and economic consequences of the Black Death were a key instigator. In the period after 1350, increased access to cheap land and food, combined with rising wages, promoted wider consumption, particularly amongst the peasantry. Other factors were also coming into play; for example, at the same time as these poorer groups were accessing a wider range of basic goods and services, an increasingly diverse range of luxury goods were being imported from the Far, South and Middle East into southern Europe, and then into England, which encouraged consumption by the wealthier members of society. An ongoing range of new and exciting imports continued to attract the attention of ‘middle-class’ consumers throughout the early modern period. As the goods which they had found desirable were imported in increasing numbers and unit costs fell, they in turn became the goods of choice for poorer groups. What emerged was increased consumption of an expanding range of goods which was characterised by a cascading effect: new goods were initially introduced in small numbers and at a high cost and adopted by the social elite, but as volumes increased and prices fell, the wider availability of these items would cascade downwards through the various tiers of English society. Whilst this general process was occurring throughout the period in question, certain factors stimulated, or restricted, demand or supply at various times. Some of these will be considered in greater detail throughout this study.

Revolution or evolution?

Regardless of speed, revolutions are profound in their effect so that for a ‘consumer revolution’ to have taken place, a change needed to have occurred whereby most members of society had moved from being passive consumers of a limited range of predominantly sustenance goods, to one where they were active participants in the consumption of a much wider range of goods and services. A ‘consumer society’ must have emerged in which members of all social groups were consumers and consumption was not just associated with the elite. Although many commentators consider that a consumer society had emerged by the end of our period, there is far less consensus on when this process began.

Christopher Dyer and Maryanne Kowaleski both asserted that the ‘consumer revolution’ began in the Middle Ages although for Dyer it continued for half a millennium between the period 1250–1750. Dyer pinpointed the ‘later Middle Ages’ as the time when consumption changed significantly with new patterns in the acquisition and use of material goods which had a wide impact on the whole economy.⁴ Kowaleski claimed that the devastating fall in the population caused by the Black Death stimulated higher per capita expenditure and encouraged spending on a growing diversity of goods and services. She maintained that many features of the early modern consumer boom – new consumer goods, the attraction of novelties, changes in attitudes towards spending, increases in the amount and diversity of possessions and the penetration of consumer demand further down the social hierarchy – can all be seen in the Middle Ages.⁵

More recently, Tara Hamling and Catherine Richardson’s A Day at Home in Early Modern England endorsed Craig Muldrew’s ‘birthplace of consumption’ at around 1550 and argued that the divide between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was key to understanding the broader shifts in materiality that impacted most strongly on domestic life and consumption.⁶ Sara Pennell highlights archaeological evidence that the age of transition for material change in England was 1400–1600, noting that it was more profitable to seek out continuities than to focus on the periodisation of the birth of consumption changes.⁷ Pennell further supported Joan Thirsk in emphasising the importance of changes in consumption in the seventeenth century.⁸ For Pennell, change was expressed in three ways: in new hearth goods, smoking (and thus tobacco) and mundane goods such as drinking glasses and brass thimbles.⁹ Pennell also identified an important paradigm shift in consumption with a change in focus from durable goods, which involved repair and maintenance, to novelty.¹⁰

By contrast, Mark Overton argued that there was an absence of consumer goods in the sixteenth century and little that any extra income could be spent on, so that there was ‘much voluntary underemployment’ as once basic needs were satisfied, people preferred greater leisure time to earning more money.¹¹ This view was widely held by contemporaries and was encapsulated by Bernard Mandeville who asserted in 1714 that ‘everybody knows that there is a vast number of journey-men … who if by four days labour in a week they can maintain themselves will hardly be persuaded to work the fifth’. Thus, for Mandeville, high wages bred laziness, disorderliness and debauchery and other ‘injurious practices’ such as tea-drinking which he considered to be wasteful of time and destructive of industry.¹²

Based on his work on Dutch rural inventories, Jan de Vries argued for an ‘industrious revolution’ which began in the second half of the seventeenth century and marked a change when people became motivated by new consumer aspirations and began to prefer working longer hours for more money rather than greater leisure time. Within households, leisure time was reallocated as husbands worked longer hours and wives and children took on paid work so that greater household earnings allowed more consumer goods to be bought.¹³ Although de Vries dated his ‘industrious revolution’ to before the classic years of the industrial revolution, Julian Hoppit suggested that this event was also accompanied by a significant change in behaviour and that consumers reacted to changes on the supply side of the economy by consuming more goods and services rather than spending more time at leisure.¹⁴ Carole Shammas also highlighted this period as being significant and showed that it was marked by a significant rise in the consumption of groceries (in the form of tobacco, sugar products and caffeine drinks), and semi-durables (including textiles, pottery and glass). Shammas argued that the most surprising aspect of this spread of new consumer commodities was that it occurred among ‘a broad spectrum...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of images
• List of figures
• List of maps
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. The consumer revolution
• 2. Sources and their Interpretation
• 3. Food and drink
• 4. Clothing
• 5. The home environment
• 6. Religious consumption
• 7. When and where did the consumer revolution take place?
• 8. Social groups
• 9. Who benefited from revolution?
• 10. Conclusions
• Appendix
• Glossary
• Index