Abstract
AbstractThis article provides a novel framework within which to evaluate real household incomes of predominantly rural working families of various sizes and structures in England in the years 1260–1850. We reject ahistorical assumptions about complete reliance on men's wages and male breadwinning, moving closer to reality by including women and children's contributions to family incomes. Our empirical strategy benefits from recent estimates of men's annual earnings, so avoiding the need to gross up day rates using problematic assumptions about days worked, and from new data on women and children's wages and labour inputs. A family life‐cycle approach which accommodates consumption smoothing through saving adds further breadth and realism. Moreover, the analysis embraces two historically common but often overlooked family types alternative to the traditional male‐breadwinner model: one where the husband is missing having died or deserted, and one where the husband is present but unwilling or unable to find work. Our framework suggests living standards varied widely by family structure and dependency ratio. Incorporating detailed demographic data available for 1560 onward suggests that small and intact families enjoyed high and rising living standards after 1700, while large or disrupted families depended on child labour and poor relief until c. 1830. A broader perspective on family structures informs understanding of the chronology and nature of poverty and coping strategies.
Highlights
It is clear that the result of women not working or savings not being used for consumption would be to increase the amount of child labour required above the levels estimated later
It can be observed that only occasionally were families forced below this standard, prior to the Black Death and in Tudor times, both periods of recognized hardship and widespread claims on charity or poor relief, and only in old age or when the family was at its peak size
We selected a subset of the family reconstitution data containing only ‘completed’ marriages, that is, where the wife and husband both survive until the end of the family life cycles, ensuring that fertility was not interrupted by mortality
Summary
Our wages for men, women, and children are those collected and published in recent articles by Horrell, Humphries, and Weisdorf.[12]. Employment was modest even during the post-Black Death labour shortages, when Mate observed married women working 53 days annually at Chalvington, Essex, in 1441, so close to one day per week on average across the year.[23] Moving forward in time, Elizabeth Dyson and Ann Parkinson, employed at the Oakes farm during the early modern period as documented by Burnette, worked 112 and 124 days per annum, respectively.[24] Two mid-nineteenth-century wives, recorded by le Play, worked 48 and 112 days, respectively. Children’s labour inputs are endogenized in our subsequent analyses, as we explain later
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