The World We Have Lost

Further Explored

Peter Laslett

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138142213, 9781138142213
• eBook ISBN: 9781134376919
• Edition: 4
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Weltgeschichte

The World We Have Lost is a seminal work in the study of family and class, kinship and community in England after the Middle Ages and before the changes brought about by the Industrial Revolution. The book explores the size and structure of families in pre-industrial England, the number and position of servants, the elite minority of gentry, rates of migration, the ability to read and write, the size and constituency of villages, cities and classes, conditions of work and social mobility.

English society before and after the coming of industry
Chapter 1

The passing of the patriarchal household: parents and children, masters and servants

In the year 1619 the bakers of London applied to the authorities for an increase in the price of bread. They sent in support of their claim a complete description of a bakery and an account of its weekly costs.¹ There were thirteen or fourteen people in such an undertaking: the baker and his wife, four paid employees who were called journeymen, two apprentices, two maidservants and the three or four children of the master baker himself. Six pounds ten shillings (£6.50) a week was reckoned to be the outgoings of this establishment, of which only eleven shillings and eightpence (58p) went for wages: half a crown (25p) a week for each of the journeymen and tenpence (4.5p) for each of the maids. Far and away the greatest expense was for food: two pounds nine shillings (£2.45) out of the six pounds ten shillings, at five shillings (25p) a head for the baker and his wife, four shillings (20p) a head for their helpers and two shillings (lOp) for their children. It cost much more in food to keep a journeyman than it cost in money; four times as much to keep a maid. Clothing was charged up too, not only for the man, wife and children, but for the apprentices as well. Even school fees were claimed as a justifiable charge on the price of bread for sale, and sixpence (2.5p) a week was paid for the teaching and clothing of a baker's child.

A London bakery was undoubtedly what we should call a commercial or even an industrial undertaking, turning out loaves by the thousand. Yet the business was carried on in the house of the baker himself. There was probably a 'shop' as part of the house, 'shop' as in ' workshop' and not as meaning a retail establishment. Loaves were not ordinarily sold over the counter: they had to be carried to the open-air market and displayed on stalls.² There was a garner behind the house, for which the baker paid two shillings a week in rent, and where he kept his wheat, his 'sea-coal' for the fire and his store of salt. The house itself was one of those high, half-timbered overhanging structures on the narrow London street which we always think of when we remember the scene in which Shakespeare, Pepys, or even Christopher Wren lived. Most of it was taken up with the living-quarters of the dozen people who worked there.

It is obvious that all these people ate in the house, since the cost of their food helped to determine the production cost of the bread. Except for the journeymen they were all obliged to sleep in the house at night and live together as a family.

The word generally used at that time to describe such a group of people was 'family', though household is found as well. The man at the head of the group, the entrepreneur, the employer, or the manager, was then known as the master or head of the family. He was father to some of its members and in place of father to the rest. There was no sharp distinction between his domestic and his economic functions. His wife was both his partner and his subordinate, a partner because she ran the family, took charge of the food and managed the women-servants, a subordinate because she was woman and wife, mother and in place of mother to the rest.³

The paid servants of both sexes had their specified and familiar position in the family household, as much part of it during their residence as the sons and daughters, but not quite in the same situation of course. At that time the family was thought of not as one society only, but as three societies fused together. There was the society of man and wife, that of parents and children, and that of master and servant. The first of these was for the life of husband and of wife; only death could put an end to their being members of each other, though this society could be and often was renewed by remarriage. The second association bound father and mother to son and to daughter until the time came for the child to leave home, though he or she could return at will, at least up until marriage. But a servant did not enjoy permanent membership of the household in which he served. When a servant left, the relationship was over. Most households, moreover, had no servant at all, so that the society of master and servant did not exist for them.

A period of service began with an undertaking to serve, the best-known of such undertakings being the binding out, as it was called, of a youth as an apprentice. Here the agreement is made between the parents of a boy about to become an apprentice and his future master. The boy covenants to dwell with his master for seven years, to keep his secrets and to obey his commandments.⁴

Taverns and alehouses he shall not haunt; dice, cards or any other unlawful games he shall not use; fornication with any woman he shall not commit; matrimony with any woman he shall not contract. He shall not absent himself by night or by day without his master's leave but be a true and faithful servant.

On his side, the master undertakes to teach his apprentice his 'art, science or occupation with moderate correction'.

Finding and allowing unto his said servant meat, drink, apparel, washing, lodging and all other things during the said term of seven years, and to give unto his said apprentice at the end of the said term double apparel, to wit, one suit for holy days and one suit for worken days.

Apprentices, therefore, and many other servants, were workers who can be thought of in a sense as extra sons or extra daughters (for girls could be apprenticed too), clothed and educated as well as fed, obliged to obedience and forbidden to marry, often unpaid and dependent until after the age of twenty-one or even considerably longer. If such servants were workers in somewhat the position of sons and daughters, the sons and daughters of the house were workers too. John Locke laid it down in 1697 that the offspring of the poor had to work for some part of the day when they reached the age of three.⁵ The children of a London baker were not likely to go to school for many years of their young lives, or even to play as they wished when they came back home. Soon they would find themselves doing what they could in 'bolting', that is sieving flour, or in helping the maidservant with her panniers of loaves on the way to the market stall, or in playing their small parts in preparing the never ending succession of meals for the whole household.

We may see at once, therefore, that the world we have lost, as I have chosen to call it, was no paradise, no golden age of equality, tolerance or of loving kindness. Once into their teens, not often earlier, they might become servants too and leave the parental home to work in another family, work for a living. The coming of industry cannot be shown to have brought economic oppression and exploitation along with it. It was there already. The patriarchal arrangements which we have begun to explore were not new in the England of Shakespeare and Elizabeth. They were as old as the Greeks, as old as European history, and not confined to Europe. The institution of life-cycle service, as we have come to call it, was a peculiarly western European one, nevertheless. And it may well be that such relationships as we have described abused and enslaved people quite as remorselessly as the economic arrangements which had replaced them in the England of Blake and Victoria.⁶

Perhaps every servant in the old social world was confident enough that he or she would some day get married and be at the head of a new family, keeping others in subordination. In this they were deceiving themselves to some extent, for by no means all persons found spouses in pre-industrial western society, and some stayed subordinate to a master in a master's house for the whole of their lives. If it is legitimate to use the words exploitation and oppression in thinking of the economic arrangements of the pre-industrial world, there were nevertheless differences in the manner of oppressing and exploiting. The ancient order of society was felt to be eternal and unchangeable by those who supported, enjoyed and endured it. There was no expectation of reform. How could there be when economic organization was domestic organization, and relationships were rigidly regulated by the social system, by the content of Christianity itself?

Here is a vivid contrast with social expectation in Victorian England, or in industrial countries everywhere today. Every relationship in our world which can be seen to affect our economic life is open to change, is expected indeed to change of itself, or if it does not, to be changed, made better, by an omnicompetent authority. This makes for a less stable social world, though it is only one of the features of our society which impels us all in that direction. All industrial societies, we may suppose, are far less stable than their predecessors. They lack the extraordinarily cohesive influence which familial relationships carry with them, that power of reconciling the frustrated and the discontented by emotional means. Social revolution, meaning an irreversible changing of the pattern of social relationships, never happened in traditional, patriarchal, pre-industrial human society. It was almost impossible to contemplate.

Almost, but not quite. Sir Thomas More, in the reign of Henry VIII, could follow Plato in imagining a life without privacy and money, even if he stopped short of imagining a life where children would not know their parents and where promiscuity could be a political institution. Sir William Petty, 150 years later, one of the very first of the political sociologists, could speculate about polygamy; and the English of the Tudors and the Stuarts already knew of social structures and sexual arrangements, existing in the newly discovered world, which were alarmingly different from their own. But it must have been an impossible effort of the imagination for them to suppose that they were anything like as satisfactory.⁷

It will be noticed that the roles we have allotted to all the members of the capacious 'family' of the master-baker of London in the year 1619 are, emotionally, all highly symbolic and highly satisfying. We may feel that in a whole society organized like this, in spite of the subordination, the exploitation and the obliteration of those who were young, or female, or in service, everyone belonged in a group, a family group. Everyone had his or her circle of affection: every relationship could be seen as a love-relationship. This in spite of the fact that demography prevented everyone from belonging to a familial unit in the literal sense, a family of his own or her own, or the family of a parent. In spite also of the further fact that the social rules actually tended to exclude the orphaned and the widowed from the familial group and from the support of kinsfolk not immediate in their relationship to the victim of circumstances.

But with us, the social world is such that no sentiment of the familial kind is likely to attach itself to work relationships. Who could love the name of a limited company or of a government department as an apprentice could love his superbly satisfactory father-figure master, even if he were a bully and a beater, a usurer and a hypocrite? If a family is a circle of affection, we must remember that it can also be the scene of hatred. The worst tyrants among human beings, the murderers and the villains, are jealous husbands and resentful wives, possessive parents and deprived children. In the traditional, patriarchal society of Europe, where practically everyone lived out his whole life within the family, though not usually within one family, tension like this must have been incessant and unrelieved, incapable of release except in crisis. Conflict in such a society was accordingly between individual people, on the personal scale. There could scarcely be a situation such as that which makes our own time, as some say, the scene of perpetual revolution, social revolution.

All this is true to history only if the little knot of people making bread in Stuart London was indeed the typical social unit of the old world in its size, composition and scale. There are reasons why a baker's household might have been a little out of the ordinary, for baking was a highly traditional occupation in a society increasingly subject to economic change. A 'family' of thirteen people, which was also a unit of production of thirteen, less the children still incapable of work, was quite big for English society at that time and in a way exceptional as well.

In fact the town and the craft probably bulk too large in the folk-memory we still retain from the world we have lost. Agriculture and the countryside do not dominate our recollections to anything like the extent that they dominated that vanished world. We have all heard about the apprentices who married their master's daughter: these are the heroes. Or about the outsider who married the widow left behind by the father/master when he came to die: these unwelcome strangers to the family are the villains. We refer to bakers as if they really baked in their homes; of spinsters who really sat by the fire and span. A useful, if a rather arbitrary and romantic guide to the subject in hand, is the famous collection of fairy tales compiled by the brothers Grimm in Germany a century and a half ago and more, where the tales we tell to our children mostly have their source.⁸ Even in the form given to them by Walt Disney and his successors, the makers of television programmes and picture-books for the youngest members of our rich, leisurely, powerful, puzzled world of successful industrialization, stories like Cinderella are a sharp reminder of what, life was once like for the apprentice, the journeyman, the master and all his family in the craftsman's household. Which means, in a sense, that we all know it all already.

We know, or half-remember, that a journeyman might sometimes have to spend a year or two on his journeys, serving out that difficult period after he was trained and capable of his craft, but before he had made, or inherited, or had the prospect of marrying, enough money to set up as master by himself. It takes a little reflection to recognize in this practice a reason why so many heroes of the nursery rhymes and stories are on the road, literally seeking their fortunes. We have to go even further to search here for the origin of the picaresque in literature, perhaps for the very germ of the novel. And conscious analysis, directed historical research of a kind only recently supposed to be possible and necessary, has had to be done before even a few fragmentary facts about the tendency of young people to move about could be recovered. It has been found that most young people in service, except, of course, the apprentices, seem to have looked upon a change of job bringing them into a new family as the normal thing every few years.⁹

We shall have more to say about the movement of servants from farmhouse to farmhouse in the old world, and shall return to the problem of understanding ourselves in time, in contrast with our ancestors. Let us emphasize again the scale of life in the working family of the London baker.

Few persons in the old world ever found themselves in groups larger than family groups, and there were not many families of more than a dozen members in any locality. But at the very top of the society family households could be huge, even larger than in parts of the world where the generations often lived together. Apart from the royal court and the establishments of the nobility, lay and spiritual, a resident gentleman like Sir Richard Newdigate, Baronet, could have dozens of people around him. In his house of Arbury within his parish of Chilvers Coton in Warwickshire, in the year 1684, there were thirty-seven in the 'family': himself; Lady Mary Newdigate, his wife; seven daughters, all under the age of sixteen; and twenty-eight servants: seventeen men and boys and eleven women and girls.¹⁰ This was still a family, not an institution, a staff, an office or a firm.

Everything physical was on the human scale, for the commercial worker in London, and the miner who lived and toiled in Newdigate's village of Chilvers Coton. No object in England was larger than London Bridge or St Paul's Cathedral, no structure in the western world to stand comparison with the Colosseum in Rome. Everything temporal was tied to the human life-span too. The death of the master baker, head of the family, ordinarily meant the end of the bakery. Of course there might be a son to succeed, but the master's surviving children would frequently be young if he himself had lived only as long as most men. Or an apprentice might fulfil the final function of apprenticehood, substitute sonship, that is to say, and marry his master's daughter, or even his widow. Surprisingly often, the widow, if she could, would herself carry on the trade.

This, therefore, was not simply a world without factories, without firms, and for the most part without economic continuity. Some partnerships between rich masters existed, especially in London, but since nearly every activity was limited to what could be organized within a family, and within the lifetime of its head, there was an unending struggle to manufacture continuity and to provide an expectation of the future. ' One hundred and twenty family uprising and downlying, whereof you may take out six or seven and all the rest were servants and retainers': this was the household of the Herberts, Earls of Pembroke in the years before the Civil War, as it was remembered a generation later by the sentimental antiquarian of the West Country where the Herberts were seated, John Aubrey of the Lives. It is wise to be careful of what men liked to report about the size and splendour of the great families in days gone by: £16,000 a year was the Herbert revenue, so John Aubrey claimed, though 'with his offices, and all' the earl 'had £30,000 per annum. And, as the revenue was great, so the greatness of his retinue and hospitality were answerable.' These are improbably large figures, but we know that Lord William Howard kept between forty and fifty servants at Naworth Castle in Cumberland in the 1620s on a much smaller revenue. And as late as 1787, the Earl of Lonsdale, a very rich, mine-owning bachelor, lived in a household of fifty at Lowther in Westmorland, himself that is and forty-nine servants. All this illustrates the symbolic function of aristocratic families in a society of families, which were generally surprisingly small. They were there to defy the limitation on size, and to try to maintain a patnline which should last indefinitely.

We may pause here to point out that our argument is not complete. There was an organization in the social structure of Europe before the coming of industry which enormously exceeded the family in size and endurance. This was the Christian Church. It may be true to say that the ordinary person, especially the female, never went to a gathering larger than could assemble in an ordinary house except when going to church. When we look at the aristocracy and the church from the point of view of the scale of life and the impermanence of all man-made institutions, we can see that their functions were to some degree compensatory. The calendar itself underlined the great age and the continuity of the church. The rules of succession permitted a cousin, however distant, to succeed to the titl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
• PREFACE TO THE REISSUE
• INTRODUCTION TO THE THIRD EDITION
• INTRODUCTION TO THE FIRST EDITION
• 1 ENGLISH SOCIETY BEFORE AND AFTER THE COMING OF INDUSTRY
• 2 A ONE-CLASS SOCIETY
• 3 THE VILLAGE COMMUNITY
• 4 MISBELIEFS ABOUT OUR ANCESTORS
• 5 BIRTHS, MARRIAGES AND DEATHS
• 6 DID THE PEASANTS REALLY STARVE?
• 7 PERSONAL DISCIPLINE AND SOCIAL SURVIVAL
• 8 SOCIAL CHANGE AND REVOLUTION IN THE TRADITIONAL WORLD
• 9 THE PATTERN OF AUTHORITY AND OUR POLITICAL HERITAGE
• 10 THE POLITICS OF EXCLUSION AND THE RULE OF AN ÉLITE
• 11 AFTER THE TRANSFORMATION
• 12 UNDERSTANDING OURSELVES IN TIME
• GENERAL NOTE
• NOTES TO THE TEXT
• LIST OF AUTHORITIES
• INDEX