Agricultural History Review, Volume 66 Part 2 (2018), p. 297

The institution of service was an important, and sometimes dominant, form of wage labour in many rural early modern European societies, and one that persisted in some areas well into the modern era. Servants were workers who lived in the home of their employer, were paid a cash wage plus board and lodging (and sometimes other payments in kind) and were hired on a long-term contract. Their presence had many implications for demographic, social and economic structures but, as Jane Whittle points out in her introduction to this volume, there has yet to be a book that compares the European experience of service across time and space. This book is therefore a very welcome contribution to our understanding of service and servants in rural Europe.

Whittle’s lucid and accessible introduction is followed by twelve chapters, which span the early fifteenth to the early twentieth centuries and cover eight areas: Flanders, England, Sweden, Westphalia, Italy, France, Groningen and Norway. The range of primary sources on which these chapters are based is impressive, from the accounts of landowners, householders and farmers, to taxation and census listings, parish registers, and court records. Taking the subject forward in different ways, many of the chapters also acknowledge the influence of Ann Kussmaul’s Servants in husbandry in early modern England (1981), whilst casting a critical eye over this landmark publication.

The volume is wide-ranging and is a constant reminder of the significance of local and regional contrasts; service was a changing and adaptable institution that differed from country to country, region to region and sometimes farm to farm. There are many themes that emerge. The number and type of servant hired depended on farm size, patterns of landownership and methods of production and was segregated by gender. In coastal Flanders in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, male servants were always in the majority but in the sixteenth century, female service thrived where large farms were absent. Similarly in seventeenth-century Sweden, a male workforce was more dominant where grain production was widespread but women were hired where livestock farming predominated. On the small-scale farms of parts of Norway, if the household could afford a servant, it was most likely to be a woman. But in areas of eastern France in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, pastoral farmers had a preference for male servants rather than female. Here rural service gradually became more masculine as urban service became more feminine. Hiring arrangements changed over time; in sixteenth-century England, hiring relied on local, family and business connections, with entry and exit points across the year, whilst in nineteenth-century West Yorkshire, the hiring or statute fair was dominant. The wages that servants received varied according to age, experience and gender, but a male-female wage-gap was almost universal, with adult female wages showing little progression.

Whilst the life-cycle pattern of service was dominant, with servants overwhelmingly young, unmarried and mobile, there were some exceptions to this. In an effort to control movement and restrict the freedoms of young men and women, in many areas service was heavily regulated by law, but we are also shown that service could be elastic. In the case of sixteenth-century England, Charmian Mansell’s chapters show that service was a flexible form of work for young women, with periods of casual labour and service not necessarily mutually exclusive. Hanne Østhus points out that the term ‘servant’ could be porous and in seventeenth-century Norway, many men were both soldiers and servants.

Finally although servant voices are difficult to access, their motives, demands and networks emerge. In early modern Flanders, Thijs Lambrecht shows how servants maintained close connections to their kin through home visits, and the transfer of money and goods. Similarly in Italy, Raffaella Sarti demonstrates that service did not necessarily weaken family ties. The hiring fairs in nineteenth-century England are shown by Sarah Holland to be contested ground, servants defending their rights to a holiday and face-to-face bargaining whilst local elites launched a concerted, if unsuccessful, effort to suppress them.

This is a really coherent and accessible volume of essays, which has been expertly edited. Available in paperback, for a modest sum the reader will be treated to a range of methodological approaches that serve as models for future research. Service took many forms across Europe and beyond; the continuities and changes can be brought out by careful comparative work, as this volume proves.