First published in 1975, this volume aims to direct attention at a number of aspects of the lives and occupations of village labourers in the nineteenth-century that have been little examined by historians outside of agriculture. Some of the factors examined include the labourer’s gender, whether they lived in ‘closed’ or ‘open’ villages and what they worked at during the different seasons of the year. The author examines a range of occupations that have previously been ignored as too local to show up in national statistics or too short-lived to rank as occupations at all as well as sources of ‘secondary’ income. The analysis of all of these factors in related to the seasonal cycle of field labour and harvests. The central focus is on the cottage economy and the manifold contrivances by which labouring families attempted to keep themselves afloat.
