Differing Responses to an Industrialising Economy - eTheses ...

Yelling has shown that in both the champion parishes and woodland parishes of
East Worcestershire from 1700 until the 1740s there was a general increase in the
numbers of cattle, sheep, pigs and horses kept by farmers. 89
This was in part to keep up
with the demand for food from the manufacturing towns of the west midlands, which also
received supplies of fruit and vegetables from the Vale of Evesham market gardeners. 90
As always, the west midlands farmers were adapting to changing times, which was also
achieved by the adoption of more modern farm practices with greater use of leys, turnips,
clover and ryegrass. 91
As if bad harvests and population crises were not enough, local
farmers also had to endure the distressing consequences of cattle plague, which struck
from 1742. 92
Corn prices fluctuated, and although meat prices were a little steadier,
periods such as the early thirties saw falling prices in most agricultural produce. 93
Such
uncertainty in farming led landowners to seek alternative sources of income and led
farmers (especially smallholders) to maintain another string to their bow. As Sharpe has
intimated, there may have been a decrease in the amount of farm-work undertaken by
women in the eighteenth century. 94
The consequent fall in family income was partly offset
by a lower cost of living in mid-century, but this trend would free women to work in
industrial by-employments, where these were on offer. 95
89 J. Yelling, ‘Livestock numbers and agricultural development, 1540-1750: a study of East
Worcestershire’, in Slater, Field and Forest, p. 281.
90 Martin, ‘The social and economic origins of the Vale of Evesham market gardening industry’, Ag. Hist.
Rev., 33, (1985).
91 J. Yelling, ‘Changes in crop production in East Worcestershire 1540-1867’, Ag. Hist. Rev., 21, (1973),
pp. 18-34.
92 J. Broad, ‘Cattle plague in eighteenth-century England’, Ag. Hist. Rev., 31, (1983), pp. 104-5. This may
explain why Yelling’s livestock numbers decline slightly in the 1740s.
93 C. Wilson, England’s Apprenticeship, 1603-1763, (London, Longman, 1965), p. 243.
94 This decrease in women’s involvement in farm-work may have started during this period and continued
into the next.
95 P. Sharpe, ‘The female labour market in English agriculture during the Industrial Revolution: expansion
or contraction?’, Ag. Hist. Rev., 47, (1999), p. 180-1.
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