The conclusion draws together the findings of the book, assessing how the work-task approach has revealed hidden forms of work, and highlighting those types of work which remain partly or wholly hidden. It reconsiders the relationship between work and the market. The importance of thinking about how early modern people experienced work is asserted.

Chapter 7 turns to work in crafts and construction, an area of the economy that displayed much sharper distinctions between men’s and women’s work. It explores the role of apprenticeship in creating these gendered patterns before looking at one male-dominated work area, building and construction, and two in which women were often employed, textile and clothing production. Despite the absence of guilds in the great majority of localities providing evidence, the requirement of apprenticeship in many craft occupations effectively excluded women from those areas of work. Yet women’s skilled work in some areas of textile and clothing production, alongside the contributions of non-craftsmen in construction, suggest that specialisation through apprenticeship was just as much about status and prestige, as it was about skill acquisition.

Chapter 5 begins a tour of the variety of work in early modern England by examining the neglected topics of housework and carework. To correct misconceptions, it focuses on the location of these tasks, who performed them, and whether they were paid. This demonstrates that much of this work took place outside the home; housework was most commonly undertaken by young unmarried women rather than married women; and carework was more often skilled healthcare than childcare, was undertaken predominantly by women, and was typically paid work.

Chapter 8 considers commerce and money management, the largest category of work in the work-task database. This provides a detailed view of petty commerce, the typically small transactions that took place every day across the country, with women and men almost equally involved. Markets remained the most common locations of commerce, but transactions took place everywhere including the home, the street, and occasionally, the specialist retail shop. Evidence of administering debts and pawning goods demonstrates the significant role played by married women in these activities.

Chapter 6 focuses on agriculture and food processing. Analysis demonstrates that women undertook a little more than a third of agricultural work tasks, doing more work in animal husbandry than arable agriculture but participating widely in both. The work-task approach also allows less well-documented activities such as work on common land to be analysed for the first time. The gender division of labour in agriculture is shown to have been flexible.

Chapter 2 focuses on types of workers. It examines how work varied by age and marital status, showing that while men’s work remained fairly stable across the lifecycle, women’s work varied significantly. Evidence of working ‘for another’, outside the family household, is analysed in relation to debates about paid work. Evidence of occupations and status indicators are compared with work tasks to address the debates about by-employment and explore the work of labourers and servants. Although women typically lacked such descriptors, some analysis of how wives’ activities varied according to their husband’s occupations is possible.

Chapter 3 turns to the location of work, examining the spatial dimensions of work on various scales. It begins by looking at regional differences and the contrasts between rural and urban work. The former were remarkably muted, but rural–urban differences are clear. The importance of travel and types of transport is considered as an important element of work largely neglected in existing studies. The final part of the chapter examines workspaces, quantifying inside and outside work and considering the dimension of privacy.

This introduction surveys existing approaches to the history of work that this book engages with, including accounts of economic change, studies of waged work, understandings of the role of households in the economy, and the importance of gender to all of the above. It introduces the alternative ‘work-task approach’ to be applied in this study.