The census and the servant: a reassessment of the decline and distribution of farm service in early nineteenth-century England

Abstract

I n 1981 Ann Kussmaul published her book on farm servants in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England. This clearly demonstrated the early decline and extinction of farm service in the south and east and its survival for longer in the north and west of the country.2 Her argument remains the orthodox interpretation of the changing composition of the English agricultural workforce and the spatial distribution of the decline of farm service in the early nineteenth century. While a number of local studies have revised Kussmaul's figures or contended technical points, the main thrust of her argument and her methods have not been seriously challenged.3 This article offers some caveats to employing IKussmaul's methods. Both these and the 1831 data are shown to be flawed, a finding which has important implications for our understanding of the changing composition of the agricultural workforce and the decline of farm service. Conventional wisdom points to the persistence of farm service in the north of England until the mid-nineteenth century and beyond, and suggests that this was caused by the peculiar nature of the labour requirements in pastoral husbandry, often on the urban fringes, and the competition for labour from industry.4 Kussmaul calculated that by far the highest proportion of farm servants in 1831 were found in northern counties, reaching as high as 60 per cent of the adult male agricultural workforce in Lancashire and Westmorland, compared with the national average of 31 per cent.5 In 1851, the highest proportion of farm servants continued to be found in the northern and western counties despite an overall decline in their significance.6 These data have contributed to the