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AUSTREY VILLAGERS

Servants & Apprentices

Servants

A survey of inhabitants would not be complete without mention of servants and apprentices who comprised the bulk of young people entering and leaving the parish. Although a vital part of the occupational work force, household servants, indentured 'servants in husbandry' and craft apprentices go largely unrecorded in parish registers.  Register entries from the late seventeenth century record only one servant in Austrey and no-one is specifically identified as an apprentice in the register. Bequests to servants in the wills and references to servants' chambers and bedding in the inventories nevertheless indicate that servants were far more numerous that these registration figures seem to imply. Evidence has already been presented to suggest that almost all the gentlemen and perhaps a third or more of the yeomen in each parish kept servants.

Service was largely 'transitional'. A large proportion of servants were adolescent children who were counted as part of their master's household.  Those old enough to be 'servants in husbandry' had a place in a graded hierarchy of farming occupations that included waggoners, carters, ‘aged retainers', horse lads and farm stewards. Yet servants had no independent status within the village social order; their position varied according to that of their master. A. Macfarlane, Ralph Josselin’s biographer, estimates that approximately two-thirds of men and three-quarters of women between puberty and marriage lived away from home as servants and apprentices.  Servants provided two advantages to employers: a convenient and socially acceptable solution to the problem of under-employment among the poor and access to a valuable source of labour, which was available whenever needed. The advantages were not all one-sided, however. A stint in service was seen as fit preparation for young women anticipating marriage and provided valuable experience and opportunities for saving capital to young men hoping to take up farming.

The two different types of servant, those who lived in as menials and those who were employed as farm labourers, are not clearly differentiated.  Nor is there much information about their social origins. Some of the male servants like Thomas Some of the male servants like Thomas Erpe, the son of an Austrey wheelwright, were recruited within the parish. Most of the servants named in the records appear to have come from outside parishes.  Servant maids such as Alice Juthley, Elnor Wilks and Elizabeth Blountt, who lived in Austrey before 1600 were obviously new to the parish since none of these surnames occur elsewhere in the registers or parish listings.

The most common type of domestic servant referred to in the wills was the 'maid servant'.  This title attached to young girls who were taken in to assist in household duties or to take care of aged householders in their declining years.  In his will, drawn up in 1618, John Perkins of Austrey reveals the close affinity that could develop between master and servant.  In his will John promises each servant living in at the time of his death an annuity, together with a ewe and a lamb (the customary token).  On Ann Farren, his maid servant, however, he bestows the special reward of a cottage in Potterstotton in Warwickshire mindful of 'the great paynes she hath taken with mee in my weakness'.

Although such gifts are rare, decedents commonly provided appreciatory bequests for services in their infirmity.  Several wills and inventories record small payments to servants for wages or services. In 1568, for example, Roger Taylor a husbandman left his servant Catherine Broomfield, ‘one good smock or money to bye her one’, besides her wages.

The function of service as a stage in the occupational life-cycle is highlighted in the wills and registers.  Marriage sometimes offered a way of leaving service and setting up as a smallholder, as is shown by Thomas Heer's [or Heire’s] elevation from servant to husbandman in 1607 after marrying his employer's eldest daughter. The Austrey register records eight servant marriages between 1572 and 1600. One was the marriage of two servants from the same household.  Six of the female marriage partners were servant maids marrying farm labourers or craftsmen. The remaining male servant is described as a day-labourer after his marriage. Servants commonly changed status after marriage. Although servants in husbandry are not clearly identified as such in wills their presence is suggested by references to farmers' men. . In common with the menial servants who lived in and worked about the yard, servants in husbandry were protected from endemic food shortages and other privations by their attachment to households at fixed rates.  Their economic status varied according to their responsibilities and length of service. 

Thomas Heer’s  inventory which was enrolled in the Leicester archdeaconry court in 1588 is the only Austrey servant inventory to survive from this period. He probably moved to Appleby shortly before his death and his comparative wealth suggests that he occupied a special place in the servant hierarchy, as a servant in husbandry with his own smallholding. He was comparatively prosperous by smallholder's standards with goods together with a lease worth £4.10.0, 'corne and grasse in the fielde' and livestock, came to £21.16.10. The kitchen and scullery maids who slept on trundle beds in the kitchen, or the stable lads who slept in the chambers above the stables in Austrey, were poor by comparison. It is hardly surprising that none of the younger, menial servants left inventories.

Unfortunately it is not possible to acquire more than an impressionistic picture of servants' movements within individual parishes.  As members of various households servants are rarely recorded in tax listings and census returns, and only rarely mentioned in other sources.  Research so far however, tends to suggest that there was a rough balance between young people entering and leaving individual parishes.  The pattern that emerges recent studies is of short-term hirings of one or two years duration, within a comparatively small recruitment area. There were hiring fairs at Ashby, Atherston and Polesworth where servants assembled to seek contracts of employment for the coming year.  Austrey residents seeking servants probably attended the Michaelmas hiring fairs like the one in Polesworth described by Marshall in 1790 as one of the largest hiring fairs in the country with (by then) 2,000 to 3,000 annual hirings.

A handful of eighteenth-century settlement certificates issued by the Warwickshire quarter sessions provide a glimpse of the distances travelled by servants.  A typical case is that of Michael Harrison, the son of an Austrey husbandman, who took up his first employment with Mr Sharmans of Newton Regis in the early 1700s.  Michael evidently extended his contract another year before taking up a new contract at Fazeley, near Tamworth, where be was apprenticed to a baker. A number of other settlement cases concerning servants and apprentices confirm the general picture of short-term moves. Yet, despite their numbers, servants appear to have made little impact on the existing social structure.  They were not treated as a separate status group.  The contracts of employment which guaranteed their support usually ensured that they did not become a charge upon the parish.

 Sources and Notes

A.S. Kussmaul, 'The Ambiguous Mobility of Farm Servants', ECHR, 2nd Series, 24 (1981), 224. and Servants in Husbandry, 24.

A. Macfarlane, Ralph Josselin, 209.

Alice Juthley was servant to Robert Crispe, yeoman,  Elnor Wilks to Thomas Taylor, husbandman, Elizabeth Blountt to Margaret Orton, widow. Austrey Parish Register, 1578, 1590, 1600.

P.R.O. will, John Perkins, PROB 11/132/71.

From a sample of 96 settlement eighteenth-century settlement cases Kussmaul has calculated that 42% of servants married immediately on leaving service and further 28% within three years.  Marriage usually signalled departure from service: Servants in Husbandry, 84-5; Cf.  Elizabeth Wilson left the employ of Robert Broomfield, an Austrey carpenter, to marry a day-labourer in 1595. 

L.R.O. wills, Thomas Heire, servant,1588. inventories PR I/61/122;

W. Marshall, Rural Economy II, 19; An account of the hiring fairs in J. Skinner, Facts and Opinions Concerning Statute Hirings  2nd ed., London 1861; Ashby's hiring fair mentioned in Nichols II, 614; List of hiring fairs in Kussmaul, op. cit. 159-161.

W.R.O. Settlement Certificates: Michael Harrison [n.d., MS damaged].

The Austrey Apprentices

Despite similarities to servants in their age at recruitment and geographic mobility, apprentices occupied a separate social niche in the parochial hierarchy.  One reason was that apprenticeship was almost exclusively restricted to males entering into the services of tradesmen and merchants from a restricted socio-economic group.  Not everyone could afford the cost of indentures.  Despite evasions of the property restrictions on entry into trades laid down in the Statute of Artificers of 1563, there was a definite social bias in favour of the wealthier inhabitants. The few, scattered references to apprentices in the Austrey records are almost all post 1660, and they suggest that apprentices were drawn primarily from the yeomanry and gentry in each parish.  Here, as in other rural areas, apprenticeship caused a loss of young men to London and to local market towns.

Some of the myths surrounding apprentice-migration to London in the early modern period have now been dispelled. We now know that apprenticeship, far from being confined to an unrepresentative elite claimed young men of many different stations from all parts of the

country.  However, the gentry were by far the most actively involved in apprenticeship placements and they made full use of their kinship connections. References to Austrey apprentices in London trades' listings provide evidence of an 'apprenticeship hierarchy'.  While Henry Kendall apprenticed his son, William, to the prestigious London Drapers' Company in 1632, for example, Edward Wilkes, the village blacksmith, put his own son with another local blacksmith. Clearly the cost of indentures, ranging from £1.10.0 for a local nailer to £150 or more for London stationers and goldsmiths' guilds, was a major consideration.  This may be one of the reasons why yeomen like John Taylor apprenticed his son to a cooper in Tamworth while Thomas Stretton apprenticed his son to a Coventry weaver at a cost of £7 and £6 respectively  rather than to the more prestigious specialist London tradesmen. Placement with an apothecary, an attorney or a jeweller would have cost at least six or seven times as much. Yet the status of apprentices was only indirectly linked to their wealth and family background.  The status of apprentices in rural areas was enhanced, for example, by literacy or the ability to keep accounts.  The status of apprentices in London, which contained a wide variety of specialist craft and merchant guilds, is not easily translated into a rural context where most activities were connected with agriculture. In Austrey the infrequency of any references to apprentices in wills and other documents tends to suggest that their numbers were small and restricted to tradesmen's and craftsmen's households. Apprentices are therefore in many respects even more 'invisible' to than servants.

The critical factors bearing upon the status of apprentices were probably their relative youth and the comparatively low status of craft occupations.  Most apprentices seem to have started indentures when they were about thirteen years old.but calculations based upon the average lengths of apprenticeships suggest that their median age was closer to twenty, so many of them would have been fully grown youths.  These older apprentices, unpaid apart from the obligatory food and lodgings, represented an invaluable source of cheap labour for the skilled craftsmen.  These two factors combined to place apprentices in a position that combined the role of servant and craftworker.

Sources and Notes

The 1563 statute required that an apprentice's father should be able to dispose of 40s freehold, or in the case of entry into a merchant household, £10 annually, or be the son of a gentleman or merchant.

V.B. Elliott, thesis, 153.

cf. Apprenticeship to a Coventry apothecary in 1719 cost £50, an attorney £80 (1724), a Birmingham jeweller, £50 (1755): Warwickshire Apprentices and their Masters, 1710-60, ed.  K.J. Smith, Dugdale Society, Oxford, 1975: 21, 120, 123, 133, 136 et seq.

Account keeping in the case of Roger Lowe who acted as unofficial notary and accounts reckoner in one northern parish: Diary of Roger Lowe of Ashton-in-Makerfield,  Lancashire, 1663-74 ed.  W.L. Sachse (New Haven, 1938), 4 . Both Thomas Higgs and William Mould, were 13 when taken on as apprentices at Coventry and Ashby respectively.