Monthly Archives: November 2025

The Pudding Pinching Heifer Heisters

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This post is part of a series marking the print and online Open Access (free) publication of The Experience of Work in Early Modern England. The book is co-authored by Jane Whittle, Mark Hailwood, Hannah Robb, and myself (Taylor Aucoin). It uses court depositions to explore everyday working life between 1500 and 1700, with a particular focus on how gender shaped work. This post first appeared on the Forms of Labour Project website in 2020.

About a month before Christmas 1626, a company of men approached the house of one ‘Duck-wife Lucas’ in Hoghton, Lancashire, knocking at her door and demanding ‘to come in and drink’. Being ‘about ten of the clock in the night time’, the whole family were then in their beds. Nevertheless, Henry Lucas, the duck-wife’s son, arose to let the company in and fill them some ale. After a time, members of the party, particularly two named James Garstang and Edward Cattrell, grew ‘outrageous and unruly’, and demanded Henry ‘give them some pudding’. Henry answered that ‘he could give them none’, and then fetched his mother out of bed.

Duck-wife Lucas quickly moved to placate the rowdy group, assuring them they ‘should have anything in the house that was fitting’, as long as they would ‘keep good order among themselves’. This proved too much to ask. No sooner had she taken ‘water & set over the fire & boyled two puddings’, then someone filched them ‘out of the pan…before they were half-ready’. Then the company began taking down cheeses ‘from the shelf’, cutting, eating, and absconding with them ‘at their pleasure’. But Garstang and Cattrell soon went beyond discourteous cheese-eating and pudding-pinching. Evidently feeling affronted in some way, they gave ‘fowle words’ to Henry Lucas and his mother, before finally levelling this ominous threat: ‘they would be even’ with Duck-wife Lucas, ‘before hunting time went out’.

Such was the information Henry Lucas gave to a justice of the peace on the last day of May 1627. His testimony, along with those of five other men, provided evidence for a criminal case that had been the talk of the township for half a year, and would now be heard at the Midsummer Quarter Session in Preston. For as Henry concluded in his deposition, a few nights after her threatening treatment Duck-wife Lucas had ‘a black heifer [young cow] stolen out of her ground’.[1]

Illustration of April in Michael Beuther, ‘Calendarium Historicum’ (Frankfurt, 1557) ©The Trustees of the British Museum CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Aside from the intrigue of the hijacked heifer, Henry’s one-page deposition contains much of interest to the social historian. There’s information about time-use (what hour the family was abed) and time-reckoning (the reference to ‘hunting time’). There are signs of atypical household structure in the descriptions and interactions of Henry Lucas (a husbandman) and his mother (a duck-wife). ‘Husbandman’ would normally imply Henry headed his own household and farm, yet he seems to have lived in the house and under the authority of his mother. Unlike most women in early modern court records, she was described by her occupation (someone who keeps ducks), rather than her marriage status (spinster, wife, widow). Beyond duck-keeping, it’s heavily implied she was an alehouse keeper (though that’s never stated outright), and she certainly owned some cattle. Clearly, Duck-wife Lucas was a woman of some economic position and power.

The distinct work activities listed in Henry’s blow-by-blow account speak to these questions about gender, labour and authority (our project’s primary interests). Why, for example, did Henry decline to provide puddings after otherwise catering to these guests? Did he lack the necessary cooking skills? Was this a task thought unfit for a husbandman? Was it outside his authority to portion out his mother’s goods? Or was he simply fed up dealing with these annoying drunks alone? Whatever the case, Henry went into obsessive detail about his mother’s cookery, recounting each step of her work and lingering over the great scandal of the purloined puddings, snatched from the pan before their time, ‘but by whom [he] kneweth not’. To Henry this seemingly small matter was no mere trifle!

Diego Velázquez, Old Woman Frying Eggs, c. 1618, National Gallery of Scotland. Public Domain.

What’s less clear is how such ostensibly irrelevant minutia pertained to the case of the stolen cow. Perhaps Henry was trying to establish the context of the threat against his family, and the ill-fame of those he suspected of the heifer theft. But regardless of their value as legal evidence, these little particulars provide rare insight into the experience and specifics of early modern food production, and are exactly the kinds of ‘work activities’ we collect for our project database. Work practices also suffuse the other case depositions, which pick up the story in later months.

As the carpenter William Dawson deposed, not long after the heifer went missing, ‘ the matter was spread abroad and in everybody’s mouths’. During Lent, masons, stonemen, wallers and husbandmen working at stone delfs (quarries) in nearby Wheelton and Withnell, ‘did falle in talk about the said heifer, wondering who [did] steal her’. This seventeenth-century watercooler gossip – a glimpse of intersecting labour and sociability in the local industrial economy of upland Lancashire – soon brought damning evidence against the culprits to the surface.  One stoneman, William Horrobyn, ‘did of his own mere motion’ report that James Garstang, with some accomplices, had done the deed and given the heifer to Edward Cattrell. Garstang would later confront Horrobyn about the matter a few weeks before Easter, digging himself a hole even deeper than the stone delf when he angrily confessed: ‘I have done the said Lucas wife wrong & if she complayne I will do her a further injury’.

But the Lucas family would not be cowed. Nor were they content to simply wait for justice to run its course. According to Dawson, Henry Lucas travelled some 25 miles to Hebden Bridge in Yorkshire, to meet ‘with a wiseman to know which way the said heifer was gone’. The ‘wiseman or witch’ showed Henry ‘in a vision, those persons that took the said heifer’ and told him it was being kept ‘between two corn moughs [stacks]’. As several surviving recognizances (bonds to appear in court) demonstrate, the Lucas family would later move to prosecute Garstang, Cattrell and their accomplices at the quarter sessions, though it’s unclear whether the magical consultation (itself a form of work) influenced this decision.

While the evidence appears stacked against Garstang &co, the depositions (as is typical) do not provide a verdict for the Midsummer trial. Related sources like indictments, when they survive, sometimes contain such information, but even with them we are always left with but part of a story. Frustratingly, many questions remain that will never be answered. Was the wiseman’s vision accurate? Did Duck-wife Lucas ever get her heifer back? And of course, the burning question on everyone’s lips: who pinched the puddings from the pan? Whoever that villain was, we can only hope he got his just deserts.

[1] Lancashire Archives, QSB/1/25/31.

The Autumnal Experience of Work in Early Modern England

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This post is part of a series marking the print and online Open Access (free) publication of The Experience of Work in Early Modern England. The book is co-authored by Jane Whittle, Mark Hailwood, Hannah Robb, and myself (Taylor Aucoin). It uses court depositions to explore everyday working life between 1500 and 1700, with a particular focus on how gender shaped work. This is a crosspost from Cambridge University Press’s blog Fifteen Eighty Four.

Autumn is most definitely here: leaves crunch underfoot; the air is crisp and cool; pumpkin and apple spices waft from the coffee shops. But while the season brings many changes, it does not alter work patterns dramatically for most modern people, though teachers might disagree. Of course, things were quite different in the agrarian society of early modern England, where the seasonality of labour loomed large. Our new Open Access book The Experience of Work in Early Modern England examines this subject of time-use, alongside many others central to social and economic history. The ‘Rhythms of Work’ chapter in particular asks how early modern worktime differed in its seasonal, weekly and daily experiences, and according to gender, occupation or employment status. This blog post offers a taste of the chapter and book (with just a hint of apple spice), as we take a brisk walk through the autumnal experience of early modern work.

Public Domain Image: Labors of the Months. Image copyright The Metropolitan Museum of Art / Art Resource / Scala, Florence. Image Description: Late 17th-century English needlework showing typical labours of the month. Focus shows a woman picking apples in October, and a woman spinning in November.

The book is the collaborative and co-authored fruit of over a decade of research, across multiple projects led by Jane Whittle at the University of Exeter. It is based on a dataset of nearly 10,000 ‘work tasks’ spanning northern, eastern and south-western England, 1500 to 1700. We have collected these incidental references to specific work activities (and any ancillary information) by reading tens of thousands of witness testimonies from England’s church, criminal and coroners’ courts. These depositions yield incredibly rich vignettes of everyday life; our book blends qualitative readings of these narratives, with quantitative analysis of the work tasks extracted from them. 

Almost exactly ten years ago, Mark Hailwood wrote a blog post exploring Autumnal Gatherers and Cider Makers, based on work tasks collected in the very early stages of our research. He raised questions about the gender division of fruit picking and cider production, and our project’s potential to shed new light on such subjects in the future. It seems fitting to return to this subject now. And appropriately, the ‘Rhythms of Work’ chapter opens with an anecdote about apples, cider and other autumnal labours in seventeenth-century Cheshire.

Margaret Johnson of Handley, the wife of a butcher named Ralph, had neighbours over for a drink in late September 1662, selling perry (pear cider) from her house. The sixteen-year-old servant Thomas Stockton out-drank his money, but paid back Margaret later on St Luke’s Day (18 October) with some apples and pears. Margaret accepted these, but ‘for fear of her husband’, had Thomas leave them in a shed instead of the house. As later revealed, Thomas had stolen the apples from his master (thus prompting the court case), though Margaret apparently did not know this when she received them. One week later, in the early hours of Saturday morning, she stored the fruit in the loft secretly while Ralph looked out the horses and cart. Together, husband and wife cut down and prepared their butcher’s meat, before transporting it to market day in distant Chester.

The episode is flush with time-use details, more than can be discussed here; it features early morning work in the dark or candlelight; workweek patterns pivoting around Saturday markets; people labouring on legal holidays. And it speaks to some of the work closely associated with autumn in early modern England and its gendered dimensions: fruit harvest; the storage and processing of produce and other foods (like meat); and commerce.  

Figure 1

* Harvest additions and monthly weights applied; Integral included; Female adjusted (x2.58). See Ch. 1 and Ch. 4 for adjustment details.

For the purposes of our seasonality analysis, the autumn quarter runs from October to December. But as Figure 1 shows, most of our apple and pear picking tasks occurred in August and September, trailing off in October. We don’t know if Margaret or Thomas Stockton were directly involved in such picking, but our data suggests a near fifty-fifty gender division in this type of labour. The tailor Thomas Clarke testified in 1681, for example, that ‘sometime since apples were growing upon the trees this year’ [in August], he, his wife and son had been ‘gathering of apples’ together in one Mr Master’s orchard in Cloford, Somerset, when they heard information pertinent to a matrimonial church court case. 

Once the fruit was in storage, it could be turned into cider. We recorded just four cider production tasks, all done by Devonshire men. But the qualitative richness of testimonies can help with quantitative limitations. Margaret’s involvement in cider production is never explicit, for instance, but it is heavily implied by the sale of perry from her house, combined with her acceptance and storage of apples. Keeping her husband in the dark, though perhaps tied to the apples’ suspicious origins, also suggests a degree of independence to her enterprise. Women’s connection to cider production comes through elsewhere in the dataset: nearly all buying, selling or serving of cider was done by women (89%), while women dominated the malting and brewing work category (80%).

Malting and beer brewing could take place throughout the year, but it had a definite autumnal flavour; tasks clustered between September and November. This was part of a shift in focus from the cultivation and harvesting of food in the summer half of the year, to its processing in the winter half. As Figure 2 shows, food processing rose to a crescendo in the autumn quarter, underpinned by brewing, threshing and winnowing, and corn milling, but also slaughtering. Butchery tasks were at their height in these three months (38%), and could in turn prompt a flurry of transport and commerce. Butcher William Cubbech, for instance, purchased a heifer in Setchey market, Norfolk in November 1674, before droving it home for slaughter and sale at Lynn market in December.

Figure 2

* 100 = monthly average. Harvest additions and monthly weights applied; commerce excludes integral tasks; food processing reflects raw numbers. See Figure 4.3. Female adjusted for food processing (x2.58), commerce (x2.36). See Ch. 1 and Ch. 4 for adjustment details.

As this episode hints, market activity reached its zenith in the autumn quarter, with a December peak for the buying and selling of most types of goods, and not just livestock.  Men and women, like Ralph and Margaret, shared fairly evenly in this commerce, though the former were more likely to contract the pricey livestock exchanges. Beyond commerce, women might generate income for the household through food and drink provision, as with Margaret’s perry party. Autumn ushered in a busy festive season for such social events; and commerce, food processing and provision all hinged around the frenzied Christmas season. One Cheshire miller summed up the mania in 1622, explaining that he never slept in his corn mill, except from ‘about a fortnight before Christmas because of that time there is much grinding’.

Grinding teeth might be more apt for modern Yuletide consumers, but the hectic holiday season sounds relatable nonetheless. With it, the early modern autumn came to a close. This season had much to keep people busy, in contrast to the old narrative of a lax and lazy cold half of the early modern economic year. And as our work-task approach illustrates, both men and women played crucial and overlapping roles therein.

In this way The Experience of Work seeks to capture the contributions of all workers and types of labour in early modern England, engaging with major debates about the preindustrial economy and shining new light on the contours of Tudor and Stuart working life.