Agricultural History Review, Volume 72 Part 2 (2024), pp. 169–190

This article presents a new dataset of wages of agricultural and unskilled workers in England between 1480 and 1680. Evidence is drawn from 14 year-long samples of wage accounts from rural gentry households in twelve different locations. Together these accounts record over 20,000 workdays paid by the day, 29.3 per cent of which were undertaken by women. The great majority of the work recorded was agricultural. Women’s work was highly seasonal, concentrated in three types of tasks: weeding, haymaking, and the grain harvest. It was surprisingly common for women and men to receive the same daily wage for the same tasks and modal wages for women and men often overlapped. However, men achieved higher average (mean) wages and worked more consistently throughout the year. The gender pay gap for day wages was 38.5 per cent, lower than that suggested by existing wage series, but the gender pay gap in annual earnings was much higher. Women’s participation in casual agricultural wage labour declined significantly over time.