Agricultural History Review, Volume 56 Part 2 (2008), p. 232

Gary Moses has been building up to this work for over a decade, so much so that those cognizant with his publications will already be familiar with the contents of this book. For those readers who are perhaps not fully conversant with Dr Moses’ work, the book is not quite as broad-ranging as the title suggests, but is an analysis of the evangelical campaign against hiring fairs in the East Riding of Yorkshire, 1850–80. Due to the research output of both Steve Caunce and Gary Moses, the farm servants of the East Riding are undoubtedly one of the most closely studied groups of English farm workers, and this synthesis of the existing scholarship forms a very useful addition to the available literature. However, this book is not well presented by the publisher, nor is it priced at an accessible level, and the familiarity of its contents will not aid its success.

The importance of hiring fairs is not as widely recognized as it could be, and there is a tendency to see them, like farm service itself, as a northern anachronism. In this respect it is only right that this book should indeed be seen as a contribution to our understanding not only of moral reform, but of the social, economic and cultural landscape of rural England in this period. Although much work remains to be done on hiring fairs and on farm service in general, it has been successfully argued that neither are incompatible with highly productive and progressive, commercial agrarian regimes. So if this book assists in the ongoing process of the intellectual acceptance of northern agrarian systems as being integrated within a national whole rather than being dismissed as being peripheral, anachronistic or simply different, then it will serve an invaluable purpose.

Despite the essential contribution made by hiring fairs to agricultural success in much of the North, it was argued by some contemporaries that they were outmoded and uncouth, incompatible with respectability and economically unnecessary. Although there is no paradox whatsoever between capitalist farming and the public hiring of servants, hiring fairs themselves were an arena that offended some contemporary perceptions of modernity, the collision of capitalism and respectability, between popular culture and moral reform. Hiring fairs were, quite literally, a labour market, but they were also mass recreational assemblies that were feared due to their corrupt and corrupting influence.

Chapter one introduces the book by reviewing literature on approaches to popular culture, as well as discussion of the importance of farm service in northern English agriculture. Chapter two is based substantially on the article that appeared in the Review in 1999, and discusses the relationship between farm service and the changing economic landscape in the East Riding c.1840–80. Chapter three discusses hiring fairs as labour markets, arguing that they adapted and expanded in response to market conditions. Chapter four investigates hiring fairs as arenas of popular recreation in the recreational cycle of activities, demonstrating how they provided the carnivalesque atmosphere within which servants expressed their independence. It was because of this temporary cessation of normality, when servants were masterless, that they became a perceived threat. Their exuberance in leisure coupled with their bargaining power helped fuel antagonism towards both hiring fairs and servants.

Chapter five, ‘The church critique of hiring fairs and farm service’, is partially reprinted from an article that first appeared in Rural History in 1996 and demonstrates that the church objected to the ‘moral danger’ posed by hiring fairs. This was coupled with wider national concerns about the loss of status for the established church. The campaign against hiring fairs is discussed further in chapter six, which discusses proposals emanating from the Church for the reform of hiring fairs. The most successful of these was the promotion of separate indoor hirings for female servants; campaigns to undermine farm service as a system, or as a labour contract, were very largely unsuccessful. Despite the clamour generated by the Church of England against the perceived immorality of hiring fairs, the campaign against farm service achieved very little. This is undoubtedly a product of the extent to which servants were integral to the intensification of capitalist production and the ‘reshaping of farm service into a proletarian institution’ (p.212).