Farm servants in Victorian England: evidence of census records and registers of servants

Kolosov, Mikhail (2024) Farm servants in Victorian England: evidence of census records and registers of servants. PhD thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science.

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Abstract

This thesis offers a quantitative answer to a key question in the studies of agricultural labour in the later part of the nineteenth century: the persistence of farm service. There is consensus in the literature that farm service remained important. Various factors favourable to its continuation have been suggested, and the role of hiring fairs as the only public institution wholly dedicated to servants has been recognized. However, all published studies have been limited in scale and scope. Given the diversity of English agriculture, their findings cannot be generalized to form a coherent picture. The central argument of the thesis is that a nationwide understanding of farm service can be achieved if statistical methods are applied to two sources known to historians but not yet used systematically for this purpose. These are the I-CEM database of census enumerators’ books and the registers of hired servants. The first substantive chapter of the thesis asks how many people worked as farm servants in the second half of the nineteenth century. It introduces a new computer model that uses a set of filters to identify farm servants in I-CEM from 1851 to 1911. Modelling shows that the existing estimates of the incidence farm service should be revised upwards. The decline of service was slow, and the number of servants in 1911 was still almost half of their number in 1851. Despite the contribution of alternative arrangements, living-in remained the dominant form, while the share of females remained stable throughout the period. In the second chapter, the reasons for the survival of farm service are considered. The chapter examines a diverse set of factors that have been suggested in the literature to explain the incidence of service. By applying quantitative analysis to data on farm service and a range of potential explanatory variables, the thesis tests the contribution of a range of factors. The findings confirm the importance of settlement dispersion and the presence of farm animals, while also revealing an additional significant factor: the share of population working in agriculture. The family hiring system in Northumberland is explained as a rational response to the demands of labour-intensive agriculture in a remote area with low population density. In the third chapter, the thesis examines one of the main institutions that existed to allow farm servants to find employers, the hiring fair. In a detailed case study, the digitized records from hiring fairs in Wiltshire are used to demonstrate the difference between the masters’ and servants’ usage patterns, with the former hiring almost all their servants at a major local fair, and the latter using it for less than a third of their job moves, exploring other opportunities instead. Additionally, the analysis or registers produces new estimates for the value of in-kind payments and a female-male wage ratio. Finally, cross-referencing the registers with the census yields estimates for how well the servants performed their year-long contracts.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Additional Information:	© 2024 Mikhail Kolosov
Library of Congress subject classification:	H Social Sciences > HC Economic History and Conditions H Social Sciences > HD Industries. Land use. Labor S Agriculture > S Agriculture (General)
Sets:	Departments > Economic History
Supervisor:	Wallis, Patrick and Horrell, Sara
URI:	http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/4872

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