Differing Responses to an Industrialising Economy - eTheses ...

1841 census, but many must have served in Alcester’s households. As Laslett explains, a
large proportion of these would have been adolescents. 335
In early periods male servants
may have comprised a higher share of the workforce than in the nineteenth century, but
evidence is lacking. Schwarz discusses problems of quantifying servants and suggests
the feminisation of domestic service before the nineteenth century. 336
Certainly by the
time of the 1831 census Alcester had 110 female servants, who comprised some 8.6% of
total females in the parish, and only 19 male servants over twenty years old and 14 under
twenty. 337
Summary for Alcester, the market town 1660-1840
As Table 4.1 demonstrates, Alcester’s occupational structure changed over the
two centuries. The tertiary sector was always important and grew in probate data from a
fifth to a third of adult males. Secondary remained the largest sector, but in the second
half of the eighteenth century the primary sector regained ground. Although Alcester was
not highly urbanised, it was more than a large village. The town was the economic,
religious and social focus for its hinterland and a nucleated settlement where ‘a majority
of households supported themselves from non-agrarian activity’ 338
Alcester’s tailors,
cordwainers, saddlers, victuallers and shopkeepers serviced the surrounding countryside,
and its maltsters, curriers, tanners and others processed the area’s agricultural produce.
335 P. Laslett, The World We Have Lost - Further Explored, (London, Routledge, 1994), p. 4. Apprentices
and journeymen are sometimes mentioned in local records. If their trade is known, they are included in
discussion under the appropriate heading.
336 L. Schwarz, ‘English servants and their employers during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries’,
Econ. Hist. Rev., 52, (1999), pp. 236-256.
337 The figures for domestic servants in the 1841 census are shown above in Table 4.8. Of females whose
occupations were listed in 1841 more than a third of adult women and two-thirds of those under 20 were in
domestic service.
338 A. Dyer, ‘Small market towns 1540-1700’, in Clark, The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, vol. 2, p.
427.
136