How Saucy did it Make the Poor? The Straw Plait and Hat Trades, Illegitimate Fertility and the Family in Nineteenth-Century Hertfordshire

Abstract

Although the straw plait and hat industry provided considerable employment for women and children in south and west Hertfordshire in the nineteenth century, it was absent in much of the north and east of the county. Many contemporaries felt the industry had a deleterious effect upon morality and the stability of the family, and its regional specificity within Hertfordshire allows these propositions to be tested through a comparative analysis of illegitimacy and examination of the family circumstances of young straw workers. What is discovered is that illegitimacy ratios often give a misleading impression and fail to take into account the size of the population ‘at risk’, while illegitimacy rates suggest only minor differences between straw and non-straw areas, a more noticeable feature of the data being the generally higher illegitimacy rates found in Hertfordshire's small towns. Nor does the evidence suggest that the industry led to early break-up of families. The rise and decline of illegitimacy in England between the late eighteenth and late nineteenth centuries presents a continuing conundrum, and while the growth and decay of the straw industry offers little explanatory value for this, this article suggests that the changing conditions in the agricultural labour market may have more relevance to counties such as Hertfordshire.