Albion's People

English Society 1714-1815

John Rule

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317895930
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

This second volume of John Rule's major two-volume portrait of Georgian England is a comprehensive and authoritative survey of eighteenth-century society, incorporating the exciting new research findings of recent years. It deals in turn with the upper class, `middling sort' and lower orders; with popular education, religion and culture; with standards of living in town and country; and with crime, punishment and protest. The book, which is as rich and varied as the age it explores, ends with an assessment of continuity and change across the century.

CHAPTER ONE

The Background

POPULATION GROWTH

Around the middle of the eighteenth century, after two decades of stagnation, the population of England entered a new phase of growth. Steady at first, the annual rate of increase from 1741 to 1771 was around 0.5 per cent. Growth then accelerated so that from 1771 to 1811 the annual average was over 1 per cent. The meaning of these percentages is revealed in the outcome. The Hanoverian dynasty began its rule in 1714 over 5.25 million English subjects. By the time of Waterloo, a century later, George III had 10.5 million. Growth had continued, unchecked, through the forebodings of Malthus and the hyper food crises of the 1790s and 1800/1. The economy was discovering new supportive powers and although around the turn of the century the Malthusian trap threatened to snap, its jaws did not close. The escape was in part due to the agrarian sector very nearly managing to feed an expanding population, despite the fact that most of the working population no longer farmed; but more significant in the long term was the emerging ability of the economy to export manufactured goods to pay for imported cereals. In short, the industrial revolution broke through age-old constraints which had until then imposed a population ceiling of around 5 million.¹

Economic historians have tended to regard the rate of population growth in eighteenth-century England as ‘optimal’ for economic progress. There is much truth in this. A slower rate would not have expanded the market to the necessary extent, nor supplied the labour for a significant increase in total employment. A more quickly growing population, anywhere near the rates of much of the underdeveloped world of our time, would have pressed too hard on the resources of the economy. Increasing output would have been unable to keep even marginally ahead of demographic increase and income per head would have fallen, bringing widespread poverty and, for much of the population, destitution.² All this may seem clear to the hind-sighted historian, but how does a society experience changes of this kind?

Some of the effects were certainly felt. Higher food prices and a greater degree of shortage in the markets brought widespread food rioting in years of bad harvest such as 1757, 1766, 1773/4, 1795/6 and 1800/1. Increasing competition in the labour market prevented money wages, in general, from matching the growth of the economy and accordingly real wages after the 1760s hardly improved for most workers. The population growth rate was optimal rather for employers than for them, and the ‘reserve army of labour’ across the Irish Sea confirmed their disadvantage. There were regions of significant exception. In the expanding industrial areas of the North and Midlands the labour market was much more favourable to the workers. However, the most important point is that the developing English economy managed to absorb so much of the augmented labour force. There was not full employment. Seasonal underemployment was endemic in many trades. Under the putting-out system of manufacture the organising merchant capitalists tended to keep the number of home-based out-workers at the need level of brisk times rather than of slack. As the century progressed the agricultural labourers of the South increasingly experienced what can best be described as chronic structural underemployment, with large numbers unable to get work for a full year and many able to get hired only a daily basis. There was deep and widespread poverty, but no slide into mass destitution. It was, however, to be the second decade of the nineteenth century before any clear upward trend in real wages for most workers set in.³

The mechanics of population growth have been largely confirmed by a major study. The Population History of England 1541–1871 by E.A. Wrigley and R.S. Schofield has brought new techniques and the aid of the computer to fresh data to demonstrate that a rising birth rate was more important than a falling death rate. That is not to say the latter was unimportant. Greater fertility can increase population only to the extent that mortality permits. The death rate has to be at least permissive. In fact over the eighteenth century mortality stabilised. The soaring peaks associated with famine and epidemics were lowered. The plateau remained high – expectation of life at birth was still only thirty-five years in 1780 and forty in 1826 – but ironically Thomas Malthus at the turn of the century was drawing attention to the fearsome effects of population crises at the very moment when, so far as England was concerned, soaring mortality peaks were ceasing to be part of the demographic pattern. Nor did the Plague trouble Britain after the seventeenth century. Smallpox, which had threatened to assume its deadly mantle, was brought under control by inoculation and vaccination. Even cities and large towns began to prove capable of natural increase. Studies of Leeds, Exeter, Norwich and Nottingham all show an excess of births over deaths in the second half of the eighteenth century, although rapid growth was still possible only through immigration. In Nottingham it still provided 60 per cent of an increase of 11,000 inhabitants between 1779 and 1801.⁴

All this mattered. Against constant fertility, mortality changes could still have produced a population increase of around 0.5 per cent a year and may indeed have been particularly responsible for the growth over the middle decades. According to Wrigley and Schofield, however, against a constant mortality, increasing fertility would have produced a rate three times as high. Once married, women had children at very much the same rate from the time of Elizabeth to that of Victoria. What began to happen in the eighteenth century was that fewer of them stayed unmarried and, more important, the average age of women at first marriage fell significantly. A reconstitution of the parish register data from a sample of twelve parishes shows a fall from 26.5 years in the second half of the seventeenth century to 23.4 by the first half of the nineteenth. From such a change, if it is sufficiently general, can come substantial population growth. Not only do extra births come from the backward extension of marriage over the most fertile years, but the interval between generations also shortens.⁵

Was the fall in marriage age widespread? Although so far only a small number of parish reconstitutions have been completed, general tendencies which can be clearly discerned in the period strongly suggest so. The decline in living-in service and in apprenticeship released some young people from institutional constraints on early marriage. But more generally a fall in the age at marriage was related to a change from a ‘peasant’ to a ‘proletarian’ marriage pattern. Peasant societies, that is societies of small land occupiers, tend to marry late. There is a need to inherit or otherwise obtain a farm, perhaps through saving on the part of both the intending man and woman. For the minority who did not farm, there was the equivalent need to acquire a craft practice. In contrast, a waged proletarian when he reaches adult earnings is as capable of supporting a family as he will ever be and is not under the same economic pressure to delay marriage. Expecting to acquire neither land nor the means to follow life as an independent craftsman, he has no expectations to justify caution.⁶

‘Proletarianisation’ here is not used in the special sense of Marx and Engels to describe the process by which the factory labour force was formed, but generally as a shorthand for the protracted process by which the working classes became overwhelmingly waged, dependent on selling their labour power and no longer owning the means of production, nor directly selling their product. Mixed occupations, where very small-scale farming supplemented a living from a waged employment such as weaving or mining, remained widespread through the eighteenth century, but what matters is the main means of living. It has been suggested that in the mid sixteenth century around a quarter of the English population depended on wages; by the mid nineteenth century 80 per cent did. There are sound reasons for believing that the eighteenth century saw especially rapid change in this respect.⁷

In the first place, there was the considerable spread of manufacturing into the countryside and, as Professor Wrigley has indicated, the rural non-farming population grew more quickly over the eighteenth century than did the farming population. Labelling it ‘proto-industrialisation’, historians have recently stressed the significance of this development, which was not confined to England.⁸ Textiles, hosiery, cutlery, nails and hardware were produced in cottages to which merchant capitalists ‘put out’ materials and from which they collected and marketed the product. Thus the system became widespread in the woollen cloth districts of the West Country, in the cotton districts of south Lancashire and in the hosiery knitting east Midlands, and in worsted production in the West Riding, although Yorkshire woollen cloth continued to be made by small independent clothiers until the coming of the factory. It was also to be found in the Black Country where especially nails, but also other hardware items, were made up in countless small forges attached to cottages. Around Sheffield cutlery was made up in villages, although it was usually inferior to that made in the town itself. Similarly in the Warwickshire villages around Coventry, cheaper silk ribbons were woven than those produced by the skilled artisans of the towns.⁹ In effect rural manufacturing was based on piece rates paid to out-workers. Some capitalists employed very large numbers – larger than those concentrated in the early factories. The system had developed as merchant capitalists began to draw upon the spare labour provided, especially in pastoral districts, by a rising rural population. As it grew it began to impart a demographic momentum of its own. This process has been well described by Hans Medick and David Levine in the context of textile regions. The unit of labour in cottage-based manufacture was the family. Once children had passed through infancy, their contribution in performing the subsidiary tasks needed around the weaving loom, or the knitting-frame, increased the family’s earning potential. Thus, it is argued, not only was early marriage permitted by the fact that maximum earning potential came sooner in the life-cycle, but there was a positive advantage from larger family size.¹⁰

Levine found that in the Leicestershire knitting village of Shepshed the mean age of women at first marriage was 28.1 in 1600–99, but fell with the introduction of the hosiery manufacture through 27.4 in 1700–49 to 24.1 in 1750–1824. Of course, early-marrying need not necessarily have produced larger families, but Levine found that fifty-five marriages when the bride was between twenty and twenty-four produced a mean completed family size of 5.6, whereas fifty-one marriages where the age range was twenty-five to twenty-nine, produced one of 4.5. Although the switch to a manufacturing-based economy did make for a slight increase in child mortality, the effect on the reproduction rate was formidable. At the rate of 1600–99 population would have taken 250 years to double; at that of 1750–1824, only forty years.¹¹ The interest in proto-industrialisation has certainly produced valuable insights, but its demographic impact should be kept in perspective. It was hardly the only force operating in the direction of population increase. In part at least the high initial growth of manufacturing villages was due to in-migration of young adults, who not only added their own immediate numbers but very soon contributed their high fertility.

This was also the case with a second form of wage-dependent rural community: the mining village. The majority of miners were coal miners employed on the coalfields in the North-East, Yorkshire, Lancashire, the Midlands and on smaller fields in Cumbria and Somerset. They numbered between 12,000 and 15,000 by 1700 and exceeded 50,000 by 1800. Metal mining was also of growing importance. Cornish mines, tin and copper, probably exceeded 10,000 by 1800, and when iron miners and the lead miners of the Peaks and north Pennines are added, metal miners altogether must have numbered more than 13,000. Miners also married early and mining villages had during their expanding years a high rate of in-migration of young adults. A study of the Somerset/Wiltshire border area has shown that mining parishes there had significantly higher birth rates than non-mining parishes.¹²

Urban birth rates were also influenced by the in-migration of young adults but in towns, too, the proportion of the labour force which could be described as ‘proletarian’ was increasing. This was not only due to the overall increase in the size of the labour force in an era of urban growth, but also to a shift in the employment structure of several large trades. In London especially, but also in large provincial towns, the eighteenth century saw the growth of a class of permanent ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Abbreviations
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Introductory Note
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1. The Background
• 2. The Upper Class
• 3. Middling People
• 4. Middle-class Values
• 5. The Lower Orders
• 6. Popular Education, Religion and Culture
• 7. The Standard of Living
• 8. Social and Industrial Protest
• 9. Crime and Punishment
• 10. Change and Continuity
• Bibliography
• Index