Early modern Europe was predominantly rural and agriculture was the most common form of production. Yet women’s contribution to agricultural work is relatively neglected in studies of women’s work and remains an area of discussion and disagreement among historians. This chapter sets out to tackle misconceptions around women’s agricultural work. It does so first by critically examining the main areas for debate; secondly by offering a survey of women’s work in different parts of Europe; and finally through two detailed case studies (of Norway and south-west England). The case studies not only highlight women’s contribution to agricultural work in detail but also suggest a range of research approaches to uncovering women’s work. We find that women’s work in agriculture was often substantial and was varied and adaptable. For instance, in coastal Norway and some mountainous regions women did the majority of agricultural work because men were absent working elsewhere; in eastern Europe women’s labour was as important as men’s; in south-west England women contributed about a third of labour required in agriculture; while in some economies, such as central Spain in the eighteenth-century, women were largely absent from agricultural work because they could earn more from rural textile production.

Servants were paid workers who lived within the home of their employer, and who received board and lodging as well as a cash wage. They were employed for longer terms, typically several months to a year at a time rather than by the day or task. Both men and women worked as servants, and most servants were young, unmarried people. In terms of days worked, throughout the early modern period servants were the dominant form of wage labour in many European societies, particularly in farming households. For instance, one recent estimate for eighteenth-century England, suggests that there were 1.7 servants for every day labourer in the population. Early-twentieth-century histories of service tended to view the institution through a nineteenthcentury lens, and were largely concerned with domestic servants undertaking housework in middle-class, urban, and wealthy households. It was not until the research of Peter Laslett and John Hajnal was published from the mid-1960s onwards, that historians began to understand the ubiquity of servants in early modern society across large areas of northern and western Europe, and consider the wider implications of service for economic, social and demographic structures. Early modern Europe was an overwhelmingly rural society: before 1800 at least 85 per cent of the population lived outside of large towns. The great majority of people, including servants, lived and worked in households that had some involvement in farming. Yet the literature on servants continues to be dominated by studies of urban and domestic servants. To date, there is only one monograph on rural servants, Ann Kussmaul's Servants in Husbandry in Early Modern England (1981), and no book-length study that compares rural service in different European countries. This volume aims to redress this imbalance.

Servants are important to our understanding of the society and economy of the past for a number of reasons. First, servants were an integral element of what Laslett describes as ‘the family in the western tradition’, and Hajnal ‘the north-west European simple household system’, now commonly referred to as ‘the European marriage pattern’ or EMP. This demographic system was characterized by the dominance of nuclear families (or ‘simple families’), relatively late marriage for both women and men, the setting up of a new household at marriage, and the circulation of young people between households as servants before marriage.

Ann Kussmaul's classic study of servants in early modern rural England was published in 1981. It built upon the earlier work of J. Hajnal, who mapped out the distinctive features of life-cycle service in north-west Europe, and Peter Laslett, who demonstrated the presence of large numbers of servants in early modern England. Although Laslett and Kussmaul aimed to discuss the whole of the early modern period, the sources they used were heavily weighted to the period from 1660 to 1830. This chapter argues that as a result, they failed to identify important changes in the pattern of servant employment over time in England. Both Laslett and Kussmaul made use of a set of one hundred ‘household listings’ describing the composition of households in particular communities, which were identified and transcribed by the Cambridge Group for the Study of Population and Social Structure. Only five of these dated from before 1660, and three of those related to towns. The main source used by Kussmaul to map the incidence of service in the period before 1660 was the seasonality of marriages recorded in parish registers, which could be measured from the 1550s to the 1830s. She argued that changes in the seasonality of marriage reflected levels of servant employment as many servants married just after leaving service: in areas of southern and eastern England where arable agriculture dominated, servant contracts began and ended at Michaelmas (29 September) after the grain harvest. Thus the prevalence to October marriages indicated the incidence of service over time.

Using this evidence Kussmaul proposed that the incidence of service ‘did not remain fixed, but rose and fell in two major cycles from c.1450–1900’. In the first cycle October marriages peaked around 1560, before declining gradually to the 1630s, and then dipping sharply during the Civil War years of the 1640s and 1650s. In the second cycle the incidence rose quite steeply in the late seventeenth century to a peak in 1740, before declining again over the following century. Kussmaul argued that the underlying cause of these cycles were demographic. As population increased in the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, so did the cost of living, and real wages fell, as can be seen clearly from the day wage rates for male agricultural labourers compiled by Gregory Clark.

Robert Loder was a prosperous Berkshire farmer who made over £100 a year selling malted barley, which was shipped down the Thames to London. His account books for 1610–20 record his concerns for the business and profits of farming: issues such as the balance between wheat and barley in his fields and the expense of feeding his live-in farm servants. The Loder household consisted of Robert, his wife, their children and five farm servants – three men and two women. All the adults were actively engaged in farming. While the men worked in the fields and transported grain to market, the female servants malted the barley, milked cows, and picked and marketed fruit from the orchards. Mrs Loder and the female servants baked bread, brewed beer, made cheese and cured bacon, providing all the basic foodstuffs for the household from the products of the farm. Everyone helped in the fields at harvest time. In the same decade of the seventeenth century, Alice Le Strange, the wife a gentleman with an income of over £2,000 a year, began running the home farm on his estate in Hunstanton, Norfolk. Among her employees were the Wix family. Richard Wix, his wife Anne and their son were all occasional agricultural labourers for the Le Stranges, but they also had other means of making a living. Richard's main occupation was as a thatcher, while Anne earned an income from knitting stockings. She also spun wool and made butter and cheese. They had a smallholding; grew a small amount of grain; and kept cows, pigs and poultry. When Richard died in 1628 their moveable goods and livestock were worth £11 12s. A century later, another account keeper, Richard Latham of Scarisbrick, Lancashire, spent his whole adult life living on a 19-acre life-leasehold farm inherited from his father. He rented out some land but also grew wheat, oats and occasionally barley, and kept cows. His wife and daughters spun linen and cotton, both for income and to make household textiles. This farm economy provided them with enough to get by but they were far from self-sufficient. Richard worked for wages and employed others on his farm; the family purchased grain, other foodstuffs such as sugar, and textiles. The Lathams were deeply enmeshed in a local economy of informal loans and exchanges of money, goods and labour.

One hundred years ago, in 1912, R. H. Tawney published his first book, The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century. Tawney became famous as a socialist thinker and campaigner; his reputation as a historian rests largely on his best-known book, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926), and his later contribution to the debate on the causes of the English Civil War. Yet The Agrarian Problem has been deeply influential in the economic history of late medieval and early modern England and is still a regular feature on undergraduate reading lists. It remains readable, lively and relevant. Its importance stretches well beyond the history of rural England in the sixteenth century. From at least Marx's Capital onwards, changes in the property rights and class relations of rural England between 1440 and 1660 – particularly the enclosure of land and increased landlessness – have been highlighted as a turning point in the development of capitalism, crucial in explaining why England became the ‘first industrial nation’. To quote Marx,

Tawney was not a Marxist and did not cite Marx in The Agrarian Problem.