Rural History | University of Guelph

Terry Crowley 'Rural Laborers,' in Pendergast, Tom, and Sara Pendergast, editors; James Eli Adams, editor-in-chief. The Encyclopedia of the Victorian Era. 4 vols. Danbury, CT: Grolier Academic Press, 2004.

Rural laborers ceased to be a cohesive social category in the British Isles during the nineteenth century, but they remained as vital to agricultural production as they were in other parts of the globe. Stereotyped in Britain as Hodge - a barely human representative of the species displaying rustic language, dress, diet, and customs - rural laborers constituted the bottom rung of waged employees. Their lives balanced precariously between grinding poverty or physically taxing work with meager remuneration. Novelist Thomas Hardy portrayed rural laborers as existing in an unaltered pastoral continuum that had only begun to change in his own day, but Hardy's historical conception was flawed and he failed to capture the class resentments or sexual division of labor that characterized the English countryside. Countries such as the United States, Australia, Canada, South Africa, and New Zealand offered greater possibilities for owning farmland. Such places changed the conception of white rural laborers into that of resourceful people who might one day be rural proprietors, or yeomen as they were characterized in England.

Nineteenth-century British agriculture experienced a traumatic adjustment to the conclusion of the Napoleonic wars with France, a mid-century adjustment to the repeal of the Corn Laws, the expansion of railroads, internal improvements, and greater mechanization. After 1870, British farming was restructured in response to imports of foodstuffs. The depression in agricultural prices after 1815 increased the misery of rural laborers. After many revolted in the machine-smashing Swing riots, the new Poor Law of 1834 responded to the problems of the destitute. With Britain's population continuing to expand, the numbers of people engaged in agriculture grew until 1851. The end of the protectionist Corn Laws brought free trade in grains in1846 and legislation to provide farmers with loans to expand farmland through draining marginal lands. When the price of wheat retained some buoyancy in the face of foreign competition, many landlords undertook farm improvements that included enhancement of laborers' cottages. In Ireland, the population fell during the great famine from 1846 to 1851 by a million and a half, its agricultural workforce shrank, and rural laborers tended to disappear during the next half-century as they were replaced through the work of neighbors and relatives at critical junctures during the year.

Married farm servants were engaged for a year at annual hiring fairs (and single men for six months), particularly in lowland Scotland and in northern and eastern England where they were also provided with accommodation. Deals where struck within a bondage system whereby men provided a female worker, or bondager, to labor on demand for the employer in exchange for such things as the cottage rent. In the overpopulated rural south, agricultural laborers were mostly hired by the day, piece, or other short period, as they were abroad. Low wages - paid in cash or kind - resulted in wretched diets, bad work habits, and the low productivity that formed a vicious circle. Work days were often incredibly long, the jobs heavy and dirty, and the relative isolation of farms served as a disincentive to those attracted by higher wages and greater conviviality in urban places. Crimes such as incendiarism and animal maiming that were associated with social resentments were rife until they began to decline after mid-century. Gangs of men, women, and children performed a variety of tasks, especially in Lincolnshire, the Fens, and East Anglia. Gang masters were decried as profiting from human misery and viewed as the agrarian equivalent to industrial 'sweaters' who served as intermediaries in letting out work for home production through the sweating system. The Gang Act of 1867 required gang masters to be licensed, prohibited children under eight years from participating, and excluded women from men's gangs. Legislation directed at agricultural children in 1875 proved to be largely unenforceable in limiting the age at which children began paid work or in requiring school attendance. Only slowly did rural literacy improve through educational legislation after 1870, but new mental attitudes began to develop as exchanges between cities and countryside increased through the extension of railroads.

After mid-century, employment in British agriculture began to recede in the face of grain imports, conversion of farmlands from cereals to pasture, and mechanization. Changes in the uses to which fields were put were probably more important to the decline of rural labor than mechanization since the British were slower to adopt machinery than their North American counterparts because labor was scarcer and much more expensive. Attempts at unionization were largely unsuccessful. The National Agricultural Labourer's Union was formed in 1872 but it was essentially broken by an employers' lockout during a strike two years later. Even though wages for rural laborers improved, they did not reach more than sixty per cent of industrial wages.

The proportion of men employed in British agriculture decreased from a quarter at mid-century to barely twelve per cent by 1901. Most were lost to internal migration but many to emigration as well. Women continued a marked long-term trend in withdrawing from full-time agricultural employment in such capacities as dairymaids and byre (cowshed) workers or as indoor/outdoor workers laboring in home and fields. Whether a waged worker, bondager, or homemaker, women's rural work was more consistently demanding than men's work throughout the year. Women generally controlled the family's meager finances. In Scotland, where higher proportions of women agricultural laborers were waged, women worked at all farm tasks except those associated with horses or the heaviest operations such as ditch digging. It was not unusual for farm women to work sixteen-hour days.

In countries such as the United States or Australia, rural labor was only occasionally provided by a hired man or woman and more often by offspring or young neighbors or relatives. The seasonal nature of much agricultural labor as well as its relative scarcity and cost spurred mechanization of as many operations as possible. Steam tractors were so cumbersome and expensive as to necessitate continued reliance on animal motive power, but specialized threshing concerns circulated within numerous localities. Since free or cheap land remained readily available, rural labor was viewed as constituting the first rung on an agricultural ladder that might lead to farm ownership. The advent of extensive sharecropping in the aftermath of slavery's abolition vitiated such aspirations for most Black southerners in the United States, or emancipated slaves in the West Indies who did not receive land of their own either.

As such farms were family enterprises, a smaller proportion of women was directly employed in agriculture and a larger number engaged in contributing to their family's self-sufficiency. Domestic service by the young brought income and was viewed as preparation for married life. Women undertook the production of fruits, vegetables, poultry, eggs, dairying, milk, butter, cider, beer, and a wide variety of home manufactures. They labored in the fields during harvests and they engaged in a wide assortment of tasks such as butchering. Large families often predominated because the hands of many offspring were needed.

In North America, rural labor was ethnically diverse and varied enormously on a regional basis. Frequently illiterate cowboys who lead generally dull lives herded cattle for large commercial concerns from Texas through the American plains and as far north as the foothills of the Rocky Mountains in Canada. Californians employed agricultural laborers from many cultures. Aboriginals were employed on ranches, Italian contract labor arrived after 1865, and Asians emerged as an increasingly important source of labor. Along the east coast, especially in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, the expansion of market gardening to supply cities attracted the migrant labor of African Americans, French Canadians, and Italians, but their low pay and wretched living conditions gave rise to demands for improvements.

Although indispensable to agricultural production, rural laborers found themselves pushed to the periphery as the nineteenth century ended. Their numbers declined, either in proportion to the workforce or in absolute terms, and agricultural labor became increasingly seasonal. Rural laborers lacked union representation and were widely dispersed geographically. Public attention focused on the more immediately visible problems of urban workers than on their rural counterparts who appeared increasingly as anachronisms.