Food, Energy and the Creation of Industriousness: Work and Material Culture in Agrarian England, 1550–1780, by Craig Muldrew

Abstract

This is a rich and satisfying book. It sets out from the premise that food was the ‘petrol’ of the pre-industrial age: if a society was to increase its production, then it had to increase the amount of energy its workers were consuming; thus, as Craig Muldrew points out, what people ate was a critical—perhaps the critical—determinant of how ‘industrious’ they could be. It is a book that will be widely read, and justifiably so. Its importance is threefold: it presents useful quantitative data about the production and consumption of food in early-modern England; it is a rare and detailed study of the lives of English labourers, their earnings and their consumption (not merely of food); and it presents a highly stimulating argument about a major (and hitherto little understood) driving force behind economic development in the period. The task of recovering details of the diets of labourers presents a considerable challenge, but Muldrew manages to deploy varied, rich and often vivid evidence. Some of the basic outlines are gleaned from conduct literature, which—even if it was aimed at elite readership—often contained advice on how to feed servants and labourers working on wealthy men’s estates. As might be expected, Frederick Morton Eden’s 1797 survey is heavily leaned upon, and there is some support from institutional records, farm and personal accounts, and the odd estate survey. Regional variations are identified: the greater importance of oats and oatcakes rather than wheaten bread in the north; the hint of a lower consumption of beer among northern labourers; the westcountryman’s taste for cider. To generalise, though, the labourer’s diet was not necessarily as grim as is often supposed, particularly since labourers often owned small gardens, providing fruit and vegetables, and cows. There were deprivations, to be sure. Sugar and honey, for example, were so hard to come by that, unless you were one of the 4 per cent of labourers who kept bees, beer was the main source of sweetness. It was even used to flavour porridge. But the overall picture is of a diet much more varied than ‘common stereotypes about cheese and pottage would have us believe’ (p. 45).