Agricultural History Review, Volume 45 Part 1 (1997), pp. 49–60

In a recent issue of the Review, Alun Howkins argued that the traditional analysis of British agriculture througli the tripartite structural model of landlord/tenant/labourer is fatally flawed because large numbers of small farmers and farm servants blurred the supposedly sharp dividing lines between the categories. It is argued here that English farm servants were in recent times associated with highly capitalistic farming, and that most of the individuals involved did not identify strongly with the farmers who employed them. Most would spend their lives as landless labourers, and they knew it. Moreover, both the origins and development of farm service seem to be part of the spread of capitalism throughout the economy, rather than the survival of peasant agriculture. Both the legal history of servants' employment contracts and their role as the only permanent paid labour on early modern farms support this contention. The spread of casual labour in the nineteenth century in the south of England has obscured this fact, given the general perception that the southern experience was the norm and that other experiences were deviant. The general perception of servant contracts as inherently oppressive arises from the same source and is shown to be equally wrong. To remove servants as a group from the landless labourer class is thus unjustifiable, and even though a correct understanding of their real nature does destroy the stark simplicity of the old tripartite model, it does not remove its basic strength in helping to understand the roots of change in agriculture. 

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