Men at Work: Labourers and Building Craftsmen in the Towns of Northern England, 1450-1750This study redresses the north and south imbalance of much work on economic and social history by focusing on the lives and economic impact of the building trade in the early-modern period in the context of the change from rural economy to the eve of industrialisation. The period 1450-1750 witnessed substantial changes in England: in the size of national population; the range of industry practised; the commodity structure and patterns of overseas trade; in agricultural techniques; and in the proportion of population tied to the soil. The evidence analysed in this book uses the nature of building and labouring work to consider the variations in wages and living standards allied to studies of individual towns. Using many hitherto unworked sources from local archives, the author addresses conditions of work in the building trades, levels of remuneration, the characteristics of the life-cycles of male and female workers, gender differences in work, and relationships with employers - at times running counter to the prevailing orthodoxies. |
Other editions - View all
Men at Work: Labourers and Building Craftsmen in the Towns of Northern ... Donald Woodward No preview available - 2002 |
Men at Work: Labourers and Building Craftsmen in the Towns of Northern ... Donald Woodward No preview available - 1995 |
Common terms and phrases
10d a day 6d a day Accts apprentices beer Beverley bricklayers bricks building craftsmen building trades building workers Carlisle carpenters CCORO CCRO cent Chester joiners church churchwardens cost crafts CUMROC customers decades diet Durham early-modern England earned economic employed fifteenth freemen gild given glazier HCORO HCRO hired Hull Trinity House inventories John journeymen Kendal Knoop & Jones labourers and building laid late later seventeenth less Lincoln Lincoln Cathedral London masons master craftsmen nominal rates northern accounts northern towns number of days occasions Palliser parish paver payment pence period plumbers Rappaport 1989 rarely rates of pay received relatively rents Robert Salzman seventeenth century sixteenth century skilled Society Statute of Artificers suggests supplied Swanson Tattershall Castle tilers timber TWAS urban VCH Hull wage rates wage-earners widows William winter women Woodward workmen WSMB/K York York Minster Yorkshire