Easter Football 1598: Surprising Details from some Star Chamber Depositions

Posted on April 22, 2026 by merryshrovetide

The Records of Early Football series highlights types of evidence and sources central to the study of medieval and early modern football, as compiled in the REF database. This post spotlights court depositions (legal witness statements).

During Easter celebrations in 1598, the villagers of North Moreton, Berkshire (now Oxfordshire) gathered to watch and play football in the close of William Leaver, a wealthy yeoman farmer and high constable of the hundred. Multiple matches were ‘made and played’ on the day, including a particularly consequential one ‘between six persons’. Simon Watts, a husbandman from nearby Sandford, Oxfordshire and servant to a local gentleman, was present that day as a player and spectator:

…he and some others went to play at football in a close…. and after [he] had there played awhile he left off and then a new match was made and played in the said close between William Field, John Field, Robert Field, Richard Gregory, John Leaver and a boy of one Sydbury’s and in that play the said Richard Gregory stroke the said John Field with his fist at two several times and at the last time John Field with his fist stroke Richard Gregory again (at which time one Brian Gunter, William Gunter and this defendant and John Gregory and diverse other persons were looking on the said play). John Field and Richard Gregory then buffeting one another, William Gunter went to them to part them and thereupon a quarrel began and blows were given between William Gunter and John and Richard Gregory. And then Brian Gunter seeing that affray drew his poniard [dagger] and coming to the Gregories did therewith strike and wound them both a little on the heads that the blood followed in some small measure...¹

While this ‘small measure’ of bloodshed ended the fight, both of the young Gregory brothers would die some weeks later, allegedly from the head wounds sustained. The incident sparked a long-running family feud between the Gunters and the Gregories, which crackled on through a rising conflagration of assaults, witchcraft accusations, litigation, and ultimately an intervention from King James I himself. Historian Jim Sharpe masterfully reconstructed this sordid tale in his microhistory The Bewitching of Ann Gunter, which I highly recommend.² But here I want to focus on the football match which started it all. The testimonies of Simon Watts and many other witnesses come from a 1601 case before the notorious Star Chamber Court in Whitehall.³ The evidence demonstrates how rich court depositions can be as a source for early football, challenging some preconceptions about the premodern game.

The Star Chamber case was launched against Brian Gunter and his men by various well-heeled yeomen of North Moreton, including the owner of the close where the football had taken place. The Gunters exerted considerable influence in the village, being the only gentry family. But the senior Brian was clearly an unpopular figure. The bill against him and his household alleged much lawbreaking and violence (not just the football incident). Simon Watts was one of Gunter’s servants and fellow defendants. His testimony was hardly impartial, but a wide array of witnesses corroborate the basic details of the event. Taken together, we can reconstruct a day of play in an Elizabethan village, gaining some insight into the two main questions of football history: how was the sport organized and played; how was it viewed and valued within society?

To take game play and organization first (see slide above), the North Moreton matches do not conform to the typical popular and scholarly image of premodern football as a mob game: ‘played by variable, formally unrestricted numbers of people sometimes in excess of 1000’, with ‘no equalisation of numbers’, ranging ‘over open countryside and through streets of towns’, exhibiting a ‘loose distinction between players and spectators…and an unusually high level of violence’.⁴ Mass games like this were certainly played during the Tudor period. For example, in March 1576 some 100 people assembled to play football in the rural parish of Ruislip, Middlesex, a game which eventually gave rise to ‘a great affray’. And mass games are also the main form of traditional football that survives today, in festive fixtures like the Easter Tuesday ‘ba game’ at Workington, Cumbria (pictured below).

Yet North Moreton’s Easter football in 1598 did not look like this.⁵ At least one of the games featured very small sides: just three matched against three. There was an element of formality in delineating these teams, seen in the distinction between ‘making a match’ and the playing of it. There were far more spectators than players and the lines between these two were quite clear. Simon Watts had played in a match earlier in the day, but stood ‘looking on’ for the second one. When the spectators closed in, it was not to participate in an ad hoc way, but to break up a fight. The game was not played across country or through streets, but within the relatively defined space of a local close – by definition a smaller piece of land often enclosed or fenced. Within this close, the game must have been fairly spaced out, considering the small numbers involved. But the players also must have regularly come together for close contact, since Richard Gregory struck John Field twice before the fight even began. Gameplay may have looked something like the contemporary woodcut pictured below, showing six ‘country swains’ at football.

Over the last few decades, football historians have increasingly recognized that games of small and even sides existed alongside mass games, long before the codifications of the nineteenth century.⁶ London schoolmaster Richard Mulcaster advocated for this type of football play as early as 1581, while schools and colleges in Aberdeen were putting it into practice in the early 1600s. Significantly, the North Moreton evidence shows that this type of football also existed outside elite and educated circles, among rural farmers. It is also of note that, though the Fields, Gregories and Leavers were not necessarily highly educated or of gentle status, they did come from the most powerful families in the village. Looking at the background of the players and spectators can tell us something about football’s place in this agrarian society.

Football was technically an ‘unlawful game’ in Tudor England – the Ruislip players of 1576, for example, were indicted for the offense. Despite this, the local oligarchy of North Moreton clearly embraced the sport. Play took place in the close of a high constable; this was a significant legal office (usually held by lower gentry or prosperous yeomen) with criminal and administrative jurisdiction over a subdivision of the county called the hundred. Moreover, the list of spectators included a veritable who’s who of the parish – wealthy and elder yeomen and husbandmen who periodically held local offices (see slide below). Our list of those present on the day is undoubtedly biased towards the upper crust of village men: they would have been favoured as witnesses in the Star Chamber case. But those of more humble status were probably there too, to judge from the attendance of poorer husbandmen and servants like Simon Watts and John Taylor. It may be significant that Simon played a separate match to the one between the higher status yeomanry. Perhaps these matches were a reflection (and reinforcement) of local social hierarchies.

Such interest across the social ranks shows how deeply embedded football was within village life. Moreover, it suggests a respectability to this sport, rather at odds with the view of contemporary intelligentsia. Most of them saw football as a brutal and dangerous pretext for settling scores, and engendering bad blood. In 1583, Puritan writer Phillip Stubbes derided it as ‘more a friendly kind of fight, than a play or recreation, a bloody and murdering practice, than a fellowly sport or pastime’. The North Moreton football would seem a case in point, until we look a bit closer.

There’s little evidence that the three-a-side match was an outlet for any pre-existing factionalism or enmity among the players and wider community. Or that such factionalism led to the fight. In fact, the depositions show the Field, Gregory, Leaver, and Sydbury families making common cause against the Gunters’ various indiscretions over the following years. Rough football play certainly led to the fisticuffs between John Field and Richard Gregory, but a multitude of witnesses saw William Gunter and others trying to break up or part the ‘buffeting’ players, rather than escalate things. According to John Taylor, the fighting was actually successfully quelled. But John Gregory objected to how William Gunter had handled his brother Richard, so they ‘fell to words and then to blows’. It’s this secondary fight that carried fatal consequences.

Rather than craving bloodshed, the players and spectators were seemingly trying to avoid it, trying to get the game back on track. Premodern football was obviously a violent sport: it was a close contact struggle to possess and advance a ball, prone to serious injury, flared tempers, pride and passion. But the same could be said for modern football codes. Bruising contact remains central in American and rugby football, while factional fighting has notoriously devolved to the hooligans and ultras in association football. The narrative that premodern football exhibited an ‘unusually high level of violence’ which the leisured classes then needed to reform during the 1800s to make our modern ‘civilized’ codes is a tidy story. Perhaps it is a comforting tale of progress to some. But using the past as a foil for the present does not make for good history.

As the rich incidental and contextual detail in this Star Chamber case hopefully makes clear, legal depositions can be an ideal source for premodern football history – something of a gold standard. Newspapers and antiquarian accounts may surpass them in detail, but those sources are invariably written from an outside perspective, usually elite and/or educated. And of course, newsprint only survives in numbers from the eighteenth century onward. What makes depositions particularly special is how they open windows onto the perspectives and experiences of ordinary people. We don’t have to simply take the hostile word of Stubbes or an indictment for granted: deponents can tell us (directly or indirectly) how and why they played football.

But just like any source, depositions have their own problems and limitations. For one, depositional references to football are exceedingly rare, though they can be found across the medieval and early modern periods. More problematic is the issue of reliability. Like today, legal witnesses such as Simon Watts were rarely impartial or infallible: they often had skin in the game and certainly had malleable memories. Testimonies could often contradict one another, and they were all mediated by convention, the legal process, and scribal language. How do we know the words on the manuscript reflect reality?

One approach is to compare and corroborate evidence across other sources, and the depositions of other plaintiffs, defendants and more impartial witnesses. You can then pair this with a degree of reasonable inference: Simon Watts would likely try to downplay any violence and injury, and portray himself, William Gunter, and others in his party as being concerned with keeping the peace, rather than causing a ruckus. But even witnesses who were no friend to the Gunters largely backed up Watts’ account. Moreover, he had far less reason to lie about the general organization of the football play, our main topic of interest. Beyond these techniques, we can use depositions as records of the plausible if not the definitively true. As Laura Gowing, historian of early modern gender and work, eloquently explains:

Fictions woven for court cases tend to reveal fantasies that had real power over people’s minds, and the power of the plausible means that fictionalised, exaggerated versions can be as useful to historians as strict truths. Alongside the key contested events, most testimonies include significant extraneous detail that reveals who was doing what, where and when. From the answers witnesses gave to leading questions, a landscape of daily life can be reconstituted alongside an attention to the fantasies and fictions people wove around their daily lives.⁷

Depositions from this Star Chamber case thus show early modern football as not merely a ‘bloody, murdering practice’, but a sport deeply inscribed into the ‘landscape of daily life’ in an Elizabethan village.

The National Archives (TNA), STAC 5/L30/23, Deposition of Simon Watts. ↩︎
James Sharpe, The Bewitching of Anne Gunter: A horrible and true story of deception,
witchcraft, murder, and the King of England, (New York, 1999), chapter 2. ↩︎
TNA, STAC 5/L3/19, L30/23, L31/124, L35/5. ↩︎
John Goulstone, ‘Football’s Secret History – chapters 2 and 3’, Soccer & Society (2017), p. 2 quoting and critiquing E. Dunning, J. A. Maguire and R. E. Pearton, The Sports Process; A Comparative and Developmental Approach (1993). ↩︎
Sharpe dates the football play to May 1598, based on the death of the Gregories in May and a note in the burial register saying the injuries were sustained a fortnight prior. However, this register note was added later at an unknown date. The Star Chamber material consistently dates the football to ‘at/in or about the feast of Easter’ (16 April that year). Such dating could be vague and approximate but May Day would have been a more typical marker for something which occurred in early May. Regardless, this small-sided type of football was plausible enough as an Eastertide occurence not to raise any objections from deponents. ↩︎
Goulstone’s Football’s Secret History (2001) was a pioneering work in this regard. ↩︎
Laura Gowing, Ingenious Trade: Women and Work in Seventeenth-Century London (Cambridge, 2021), p. 6. ↩︎

The Oldest Firm: Institutional Football in Medieval Scotland

Posted on March 12, 2026 by merryshrovetide

It’s a historic time for Scottish football: the men’s national team has qualified for the World Cup, ending a near three-decade drought. And there’s a distinct possibility a club outside the ‘Old Firm‘ could win the top Scottish League for the first time since 1985. The erstwhile dominance of Celtic and Rangers has me wondering: what is the oldest ‘firm’ in the history of Scottish football? I don’t mean this in the modern sense of oldest surviving or earliest documented football club. Rather, what is the oldest evidence we have of Scottish organizations or institutions supporting football in a sustained way, and how did they do so?¹

The answer takes us back to medieval or pre-Reformation Scotland, and specifically the 1530s, when Perth’s trade incorporations (i.e. guilds), and St Andrews’ city government and university were all sponsoring football in some sense. I’ve written at length about the Perth guilds in my thesis, so this essay will focus on institutional patronage in St Andrews. It’s a good opportunity to consider how premodern football was organized and played, and its complicated relationship with authority.

Annotated map 'Scotia Regnum' c. 1595 by Gerhard Mercator, highlighting Perth and St Andrews as the first known locations of institutional football in Scotland, c. 1530s. — Annotation of map ‘Scotia Regnum’ c. 1595 by Gerhard Mercator, highlighting Perth and St Andrews as the first known locations of institutional football in Scotland. Map reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland. CC-BY

Football in Medieval Scotland and St Andrews

Football – as a broad family of games where a ball is contested via foot and/or hands and usually advanced to goals – has deep roots in Scotland. Unfortunately, the country’s relatively sparse medieval records make it difficult to assess just how deep, or to illuminate the early game’s nature. Our oldest Scottish references date to the fifteenth century, when official prohibitions suggest that football was already popular among the rural populace and university students. As the slide below shows, the crown, Parliament and other authorities didn’t much approve of the sport.

Powerpoint slide detailing various parliamentary acts and university statutes from Scotland concerning the prohibition of football and other sports from the 1400s and early 1500s.

Around the turn of the sixteenth century, St Andrews University and its constituent faculties and colleges deemed the game ‘dishonest and dangerous’, threatening to expel or excommunicate students who played. But considering this hostility, it’s perplexing to find the bursar of the university’s Arts Faculty purchasing footballs: for 6 pence and 8 pence Scots in 1535 and 1537 respectively (roughly equal to a building labourer’s day wage at the time). An entry in the Faculty’s act book dated to 19 February 1537 sheds further light on the curious sponsorship (translated from the original Latin on the slide below). It records the minutes of a faculty congregation which discussed, among other things, disorder caused by football play the week prior on Shrove Tuesday, the pre-Lent Carnival (known as Fastern’s E’en in Lowland Scotland). By digging into the dense and sometimes confusing details of this act, the bursar’s payments, and some other comparative and contextual evidence, we can piece together the story of Scotland’s oldest firm.²

Powerpoint slide on the institutional patronage of football in St Andrews, featuring a quote in translation from the University's Faculty of Arts acts dated to February 1537. It demonstrates that the Faculty and the burgh government sponsored football on Shrove Tuesday, and that the Faculty planned to withhold this support in future due to the disorder caused by the sport.

Let’s summarize what we know. During the 1530s and presumably earlier, the provost (mayor) of St Andrews – or the city bailies (bailiffs) on his behalf – customarily provided one football each to the three main colleges of the university on Shrove Tuesday for play in the fields outside the city. For some undeclared reason, in 1537 (and based on the bursar’s accounts presumably 1535 too) the Faculty of Arts’ Dean (instead of the burgh provost) furnished the football for one of the colleges called the Pedagogy. But then on the day of play, the Faculty’s Beadle (a type of officer) ended up confiscating that same ball, causing a ‘great schism’ in the fields. Prompted by this particular disorder, and the ‘many ills’ the football had engendered in the past, the Faculty decided to withdraw their tacit or direct support for the tradition: Arts students should no longer receive a ball from the burgh hereafter.

St Andrews and Shrovetide Sport

To make sense of all this, we need to start with the institutions involved. The provost and his two baillies were the elected leaders of the burgh council. This was the city government made up of select burgesses/freemen (merchants and craftsmen who were members of the city’s ‘freedom’ with its special economic and political privileges). The colleges in question were St Leonard and St Salvatore, and the Pedagogy – a quasi-college run by the Faculty of Arts. Like at Oxford or Cambridge today, these colleges were semi-autonomous educational institutions responsible for the housing and teaching of students. Teachers, curricula and exams were organized under faculties, with Arts being the lowest and largest, acting as a prerequisite for the three higher faculties of Medicine, Law and Theology. Faculties and colleges all came under the unifying authority of ‘the University of St Andrews’ which had been incorporated under a foundational charter from the pope in 1413. The sixteenth-century map below summarizes when and where the institutional players in this football drama emerged over the course of the university’s first century.³

Annotated map of sixteenth-century St Andrews 'S. Andre sive Andreapolis Scotiae Universitas Metropolitana' c.1580 by John Geddy, highlighting key institutions and locations for patronage of Shrove Tuesday football in 1530s. — Annotation of sixteenth-century map of St Andrews ‘S. Andre sive Andreapolis Scotiae Universitas Metropolitana’ c.1580 by John Geddy, highlighting key institutions and locations for patronage of Shrove Tuesday football in 1530s. Map reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland. CC-BY

We can deduce that the Shrove Tuesday football tradition changed over the years, merely by looking at when the colleges had been founded. St Leonard’s had only come into existence about two decades prior to the 1537 incident. Before this time, the burgh presumably only had two footballs on its Shrovetide gift list. Or perhaps the whole tradition was a quite recent innovation. For several reasons, however, I think the custom stretched back into the fifteenth century, and was simply adapted as the university grew and changed.

For one, Shrovetide sports are documented at the university from its earliest years. In 1415 the Faculty of Arts allowed the grammar schoolboys their old customary privilege of Shrovetide cockfighting, as long as these bloodsports were restricted to three days, rather than three weeks (!). No mention is made of football then, but cockfighting, football and Shrovetide were a package deal in many medieval communities. In twelfth-century London, scholars held cockfights on Shrove Tuesday morning, and played a ball game in the afternoon, while the great and good of the city looked on with approval. Likewise in the fifteenth-century Norman town of Abbeville, the schoolboy who won the Shrovetide cockfight helped the mayor preside over the ball game.⁴ It’s therefore quite possible that students and the burgh council were already involved with football back when the university was founded.

Certainly, by the end of the century, football was popular enough to prompt university, faculty and college bans. But where would that leave any established Shrovetide matches? While football was technically an unlawful game, many authorities in medieval and early modern Britain made an exception on Shrove Tuesday and other important festivals. South of the border, for example, Durham priory regularly banned football among its tenants during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Yet in 1492 the prior explicitly allowed certain villages to play the game on two days of the year: Plough Monday and Shrove Tuesday.⁵

Reasons for Institutional Support of Football

Why would those in power make such exceptions? Tolerating or even sponsoring football on established occasions could give officials a degree of control over a rowdy game – a chance to channel students’ festive energies into approved and supervised outlets. But as I’ve written elsewhere, institutional interest in football often went beyond a desire for social control. This was especially true for civic institutions, like the burgh government of St Andrews. Many urban craftsmen and tradesmen in medieval and early modern Britain were deeply invested in football, whether as players or patrons. Some within this burgeoning middling sort found great value in the sport, despite its illegal stature and violent nature. It could be a marker of a freeman’s status – both a privilege and obligation – to facilitate football, and thereby provide entertainment and ‘manly exercise’ for the ‘commonwealth’. We see the currency of football as a common good and right of the people of St Andrews in a 1553 contract between the burgh council and the Archbishop. It allowed the Archbishop a rabbit warren in the common links (pictured below), but reserved to the community ‘all manner of right and possession’ on the commons, including ‘playing at golf, football, shooting at game, with all manner of other pastimes as ever they please’.⁶

St Andrews Old Course. Once the common links of the city used for resources, and recreations like football as well as golf. It is likely where the Shrove Tuesday football took place in the medieval burgh. Image credit: UK Golf Guy.

Freemen who did not uphold football could be punished severely, like the maltman from Rutherglen (near Glasgow) who had his goods seized in 1626 because he didn’t join the rest of the burgesses on the town green for the annual Fastern’s Eve match. There’s a seriousness about football here that I think modern fans would recognize, although you won’t get fined for missing the derby these days! And I think this seriousness is key to understanding the 1530s incident. When the provost stopped giving a football to the Pedagogy, he seems to have continued giving ones to the two rival colleges. I suspect the Arts Faculty stepped in to make sure their associated college received proper due as befitted its equal status and privileges, something all three colleges guarded fiercely. Moreover, receiving the provost’s football gifts and participating in the Shrovetide sport likely reaffirmed symbolically the city and university’s important (yet sometimes fraught) relationship. The Faculty may not have approved of football themselves, but exclusion from a longstanding and laudable Shrovetide custom would be a dishonour on many counts. This prompts the question: why did the burgh slight the Pedagogy by withholding their ball, and why did the Dean’s substitute ball end up causing controversy? Context is key here.

Since its founding in the early fifteenth century, the Pedagogy had been chronically underfunded. Periodic attempts over the century to re-found it as a proper college with adequate endowment and buildings had failed. After 1533, the Pedagogy and its buildings were in such decay that student enrollment plummeted. While St Salvator’s and St Leonard’s were graduating around thirteen students a year, the Pedagogy could claim zero. Something was finally done in February 1538, one year after the Faculty pulled out of the Shrovetide football. The Pedagogy was re-founded as the properly endowed St Mary’s College.⁷ With this context in mind, I hypothesize that the burgh stopped giving the Pedagogy a customary ball once it became clear there was no coherent student body to accept it; the Faculty tried to save face for a few years by purchasing their own balls before withdrawing support for the custom entirely. This theory tracks with the Arts bursar’s accounts, which span before and after the 1530s, but only show football purchases in 1535 and 1537.

St Mary’s College, St Andrews. Built on the location of the old Pedagogy in the sixteenth century. Image Courtesy of the University of St Andrews Library, ID PGA-6-10 © The University of St Andrews

Football Play and Profitability

We don’t get any specific details on how the St Andrews football games were played, but we can speculate based on the ball distribution, location, and comparative examples. Historians have assumed the game was either intercollegiate or between city and university. These are reasonable assumptions. We can find examples of town vs gown Shrovetide matches in early modern Cambridge and Oxford. In the late fifteenth century, rivalry between the Pedagogy and St Salvator’s led to bloodshed, while about a century later St Leonard’s and St Salvator’s students were ordered to take recreation in different fields to avoid conflict.⁸ However, based on the fact that each college received their own ball, it seems more likely to me that the games were intra-collegiate: students played their own college peers. We find this structure later in the century at Cambridge, where football was allowed but only within colleges, never between them.⁹ Similarly at the beginning of the seventeenth century, the University of Aberdeen’s Marischal College propagated weekly football matches within the college student body. Students were further divided based on their year, and there were complicated rules for how new balls should be supplied when the ones in play inevitably burst (see slide below).

Slide with some examples of institutional support from schools universities and burgh governments for football after the Scottish Reformation. It details regulations from Marischal College (Aberdeen) in 1605 and mentions of David Wedderburn's educational contributions to the sport in the 1630s. The text also details burgh corporations like Glasgow and Rutherglen providing footballs and promoting the game during the late 1500s and 1600s.

It’s often assumed that premodern football was a bloody free-for-all with uneven throngs of players, indeterminate boundaries, and no rules. But not only could this cross-country style of play exhibit sophisticated tactics and rules in its own right, it was also not the sport’s only form.¹⁰ From post-Reformation Scotland we can also find examples of small and even-sided games, defined playing areas and goals, passing and goal keeping. Play at the Aberdeen schools and colleges had some of these features, and if the St Andrews Shrovetide football was intra-collegiate and confined to the links it may have looked similar. Certainly, university officials (normally hostile to football) were more likely to tolerate play of this more structured form.

On the other hand, it is possible there was just one free-for-all game where the balls were tossed up in turn. This was how the civic-sponsored Shrove Tuesday game worked in Chester during the 1530s.¹¹ Plus, the Faculty act technically refers to a ‘game’ in the singular (ludo) which followed the receiving of the balls, though this could also be translated as the more ambiguous word ‘play’. Perhaps the provost even gave out additional balls to other civic institutions (beyond the colleges) which went unmentioned in the Faculty records. Later in the century, for example, the Glasgow burgh council annually bought six footballs for their town’s own Fastern’s Eve festivities, though no rhyme or reason was ever given for such a specific number (see slide above). But again, I think the events narrated in the Faculty’s act support the intra-collegiate hypothesis. If the Pedagogy’s ball was just one of a series to be played by everyone in the fields, it’s not clear why it specifically should prompt disorder and confiscation. There was obviously something controversial about who should possess this particular ball. I suspect that without a substantial Pedagogy student body to play with the Dean’s football, students from the other colleges tried to claim it for themselves. When the Arts Beadle intervened, the students were not pleased.

The Faculty of Arts used this incident as pretext for withdrawing support from the Shrovetide game, at least ‘so far as concerned it’. This wording speaks to the Faculty’s limited jurisdiction in the matter. Although the congregation couched the decision as in the best interests of the whole university, the Faculty only held power over its own students and the Pedagogy. They could not stop the burgh from offering the footballs, nor the other colleges from accepting them. This makes it even more likely the single game referred to in the act was the Pedagogy’s game, something the Faculty had some say in, rather than a general free-for-all. It’s also a reminder that Shrovetide football may have continued in St Andrews long after the Faculty signaled its disapproval. If the 1553 contract concerning access to the common links (mentioned above) is anything to go on, the burgh council remained sympathetic to football for some time, as did many civic institutions in Scotland.

Slide summarizing conflicting views on the social value of football in medieval and early modern Scotland, featuring points from various sources including quotes from Parliament acts and notable figures, discussing football's dangers and unprofitable nature on one hand, and benefits as a manly exercise on the other.

The burgh and university’s differing attitudes towards football point to an ongoing and underlying ideological debate about the premodern sport’s social value (see slide above): was it a manly exercise of good fellowship and community worthy of patronage, or an unprofitable waste of time, health and property to be prohibited? This St Andrews case shows how complicated this sort of cost-benefit analysis could get. When the Faculty’s ledger finally swung fully to ‘unprofitable’, it cited the ‘many ills’ and disorder football brought to the university. But it was perhaps just as much (or more) about avoiding further embarrassment over the derelict state of their Pedagogy and its lack of students. After all, the Faculty had only just gone out of their way to keep the Pedagogy involved in the custom. Clearly, football held a value that was difficult to quantify or ignore, something which prompted educational and civic institutions throughout premodern Scotland to invest.

As we know, universities and cities (schoolboys and workers) would continue to shape the development of Scottish football into the modern era. The story of the ‘oldest firm’ shows just how deep that heritage goes. And for just how long Scottish football has been ‘more than a game’.

This question formed part of a talk I gave for the University of Edinburgh’s Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies in November 2024. The slides in this post are from that talk. For football in medieval and early modern Perth, see pp. 120-125 of my thesis. ↩︎
The bursar payments are in St Andrews Special Collections, UYUY412 Faculty of Arts. Bursars book, 1456-1853, fols. 27v, 28v. The faculty act is printed in A. I. Dunlop, ed. Acta Facultatis atrium Universitatis Sanctiandree 1413 – 1588, 2 vols. (Scottish History Society, 1964), vol. 2 pp. 380-381. For digitization of the original manuscript see SASC, UY411/1 Acta facultatis arterium. 1413-1728, fol. 166v. From 1534-7, day wages for building labourers in Linlithgow, Falkland and Edinburgh averaged 8-10 pence. See A. J. S. Gibson and T. C. Smout. Prices, Food and Wages in Scotland, 1550–1780 (CUP, 1994), p. 313. ↩︎
Roger A. Mason, ‘University, City and Society’, in K. Stevenson and M. Brown (eds.) Medieval St Andrews: Church, Cult, City (Boydell & Brewer, St Andrews Studies in Scottish History, 2017), pp. 268–297. ↩︎
On Shrovetide sports in St Andrews see David Ditchburn, ‘Religion, Ritual and the Rhythm of the Year in Later Medieval St Andrews’, in K. Stevenson and M. Brown (eds.) Medieval St Andrews: Church, Cult, City (Boydell & Brewer, St Andrews Studies in Scottish History, 2017), p. 105. For Shrovetide cockfighting and football in Britain see chapters 1 and 2 of my thesis. The Abbeville reference is to the football-like ball game of ‘cholle’ or soule. See John Brand, Observations on Popular Antiquities: Chiefly Illustrating the Origin of Our Vulgar Customs, Ceremonies and Superstitions, 2 vols. ed. Henry Ellis (1811 edition), vol 1, p. 66. ↩︎
Durham University Special Collections, DCD-Halm.Rolls, 1492 Spring, Billingham and Cowpen Bewley. ↩︎
Norman Reid, ‘Five Centuries of Dispute: The Common Land of St Andrews’, Scottish Archives 21 (2015), p. 31. ↩︎
Mason, pp. 288-296. ↩︎
Ronald Gordon Cant, The University of St Andrews: A Short History (3rd edition, 1992), pp. 32,37. St. Leonard’s students were ordered to take recreation in St Nicholas fields, outside the city near their college, while St Salvator’s students were to go to the old links, near their college. ↩︎
I hope to write soon on college football in Tudor and Stuart Cambridge. ↩︎
On the sophisticated tactics of traditional cross-country football games see Hugh Hornby, Uppies and Downies: The Extraordinary Football Games of Britain, (Swindon: English Heritage, 2008). ↩︎
See chapter 2 of my thesis for details on the Chester game. ↩︎

‘The Ploughman’s Feasting Days’: Festive Work Relations in Thomas Tusser

Posted on January 12, 2026 by merryshrovetide

Originally posted on the University of Exeter’s History of Economy Research Blog on 23 February 2021.

This blog post explores the relationship between work and festivity (and play more generally) in early modern England, through the lens of Thomas Tusser’s Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry united to as many of Good Huswifery.¹ Tusser’s poetic advice manual on Elizabethan agrarian life provided useful and entertaining information for modest landholders, addressing the farming year, working day, and household management, among other subjects. Published and reworked in stages from 1557 until the author’s death in 1580, it was immensely popular during Elizabeth’s reign (perhaps the best-selling book of poetry), with eighteen editions in the 16th century and periodic re-printings throughout the 17th. During the 18th and 19th centuries the treatise remained a cultural touchstone, with new editions adding commentary which reflected contemporary rural practices. Structured around the agrarian calendar, issues of seasonality and festive custom naturally pervade the text. Yet one section in particular celebrates the feasting days of rural servants and workers, and that will be my focus here.

But first, a little more background on the author and the publication history. Thomas Tusser was a gentleman farmer and poet, born around 1526 in Essex. Educated at St Paul’s, London (as a chorister), Eton College and then Cambridge University, Tusser began his career as a musician at the royal court, under patronage of William Paget, from around 1544 to 1552. After his patron fell from royal favour, Tusser left court, married, and took up farming in Cattiwade (Suffolk). Here he began writing his farming manual, initially entitled A Hundred Points of Good Husbandry (published 1557). Due to his wife’s ill health, Tusser moved to Ipswich (where his wife died) and then settled with a new wife and family in West Dereham (Norfolk). They would move again to Norwich, and finally to Fairsted (Essex), where Tusser would spend the remainder of his life farming on tithe land. Although not a particularly successful husbandman, Tusser’s real and varied experience as a farmer in Suffolk, Norfolk and Essex would greatly influence his poetry.

Over the last two decades of his life, Tusser continually shaped his husbandry manual. In 1562 he ‘married’ his hundred points on husbandry (focused on the husbandman’s monthly tasks) to ‘a hundred good points of huswifery’ (focused on the huswife’s daily labours). This format was published again in 1570 and 1571, and then in 1573 expanded to ‘five hundred points’ of advice. This was essentially the final form of the book, though there were small changes and additions throughout the 1570s, and particularly in the 1580 edition. As will be discussed below, these small edits could significantly supplement or alter meaning.

Subsequent editions largely copied the 1580 format, until Daniel Hilman’s Tusser Redivivus (1710). This was a partial re-print with substantial ‘observations explaining many obsolete terms…and what is agreeable to the present practice’. Later scholarly editions in 1812 (Mavor), and 1878 (Payne and Herrtage) would follow Hilman’s lead, attempting both interpretation and contemporary comparison. As a result, the many editions of Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry provide something of a running commentary on rural industry and custom in England from the mid-16th through the 19th centuries, with notes on change over time and regional differences.

This intertextual conversation is particularly pertinent to the section called ‘the ploughman’s feasting days’. First appearing in the 1570 edition, in the ‘book of huswifery’, it describes a series of celebrations important to servants-in-husbandry. The opening quatrain sets the stage:

Good huswives, whom God hath enriched enough,

forget not the feasts that belong to the plough.

The meaning is only to joy and be glad,

for comfort with labour is fit to be had.

Stanzas follow dedicated to each feast and its associated activities. They proceed in calendrical order, starting with Plough Monday – traditionally the first day back at work after Christmastide break:

Plough Monday, next after that Twelfthtide is past,

bids out with the plough, the worst husband is last.

If ploughman get hatchet or whip to the screen,

maids loseth their cock if no water be seen.

This quatrain captures the general spirit and form of the others which follow. For simplicity’s sake, I have distilled the rest of the poem into a chart below, summarizing and interpreting where possible. Of course, the Plough Monday stanza also captures just how difficult interpretation can be when dealing with obscure terms and festive customs. What is going on with the ‘hatchet or whip to the screen’ or the cock and the water, for instance?

Plough Monday Festivities from *The Costume of Yorkshire* (1814) by George Walker (1781-1856)

To parse these customs’ meanings, historians and literary scholars have perhaps been too quick to rely on subsequent commentaries. Payne and Herrtage (1878) and Mavor (1812) drew heavily on contemporary descriptions of festive ‘survivals’, and most heavily on the ‘observations’ of Daniel Hilman. While an early modern himself, Hilman was a surveyor from Surrey who wrote 140 years after Tusser. His explanations of these feast day activities likely say more about customs in his own time and region than they do about Tudor East Anglia. We should not fall into the trap of thinking festive customs immutable or invariable.

Indeed, Tusser supplies direct evidence of regional variance in these feast day traditions through his own glosses. From the 1580 edition onwards, glosses indicate in which (nearby) counties these customs were found (i.e. they were not universal). Such glosses replaced older ones (from the 1570, 1571 and 1573 editions) which clarified the feast day occasion, sometimes with comical redundancy. For example, the stanza, ‘Shrovetide: At Shrovetide to shroving, go thresh the fat hen’ includes the superfluous gloss *At Shrovetide.

Still, elsewhere the glosses provide our only direct evidence of occasion. Using these glosses, and prioritizing contemporary (or near contemporary) evidence, the following chart presents the full panoply of the ploughman’s feasts, with attempts to discern ‘hen-threshing’ and the like. The original verses can be viewed in this online edition of Payne and Herrtage.

The ploughman’s feasting daies. [Original terms/text in italics]

Feast Title	Summary/Interpretation of Activities	Gloss – Occasion (Editions 1570, 1571, 1573)	Gloss – County (Editions 1580 onwards)
Plough Monday	Back to work after Christmastide. Competition to avoid being last husbandman to bid out with the plough. Also competition within household to return tools to the screen/hearth first [ie finish tasks first], between serving-men [ploughing, pruning] and maids [fetching water]. Prize at stake seems to be a cockerel, perhaps for eating/play at next feast.	At Twelfthtide [Monday after Plough Sunday, ie first Sunday after Twelfth Day, 6 January]	Leicestershire
Shrovetide	Devoted to ‘shroving’ [carousing/celebrating]. A fat hen given to the serving-men to thresh – a blood sport where blindfolded competitors try to strike the immobilized bird, killing and tenderizing it. Besides feasting on this poultry, servant-maids make enough fritters and pancakes for the household. Even the lowly slut [scullery maid] gets one for company sake [fellowship’s sake].	At Shrovetide [Moveable festival ending with Shrove Tuesday on eve of Lent, falls in February or March]	Essex and Suffolk
Sheep Shearing	Feasting during/after the shearing of sheep. Huswife to prepare the dinner, sparing flesh neither corn and making wafers and cakes. Seems to be a communal work activity which includes the neighbours as well as servants in husbandry, all expecting good cheer and welcome.	At Midsummer[24 June]	Northamptonshire
Wake Day	Maids tasked with staying up on the eve of Wake Day, baking flans in the oven. The parish festival would be characterised by general revelry for the serving-men and women, when every wanton [merry girl] may dance at her will, both Tomkin with Tomlin, and Jankin with Gill.	The Wake Day [Dedication feast for parish church or chapel, most occurred between June & October]	Leicestershire
Harvest Home	After the harvest finishes, the ploughmen are given a harvest home goose to feast upon.	In August
Seed Cake	During this week, if the weather hold clear, the last of the wheat sowing should be completed. The huswife is tasked with preparing the seed Cake, the Pasties [pies], and Furmenty pot [similar to cream of wheat] for a celebratory feast.	At Hallowtide [Halloween, All Saints, All Souls, ie 31 Oct-2 Nov]	Essex and Suffolk
Twice a Week Roast	By custom and right, good ploughmen expect roast meat suppers twice weekly. Who so keeps these and the above customs, they will call thee good huswife, [and] love thee likewise.	Twice a Week [On Sunday and Thursday nights]

What conclusions can we draw about early modern work, play and festivity from these ploughmen’s feasts, and what further questions do they spark?

First, we might view them in terms of classic historiographical approaches to festivals. Social histories of festive culture in early modern England (and Europe more broadly) often query, in a general sense, how far festive phenomena reinforced or subverted the social or political order through public action (Burke, 1978). In more specific senses, they focus on periods of contestation, when the very ideas and actions of festivity became the subject of political conflict. Early modern England was full of such periods, from macro reformations, revolutions and restorations (Hutton), to micro struggles over local enforcement of King James I’s Book of Sports (Marcus).

Tusser’s poem, in contrast, speaks more to festivity’s ability to inform the social order of a single household, rather than society as a whole. It also highlights the vital and enduring social importance of festivity, whether or not it happened to be a political football contested at the time.

Scholarly approaches to feasting as a reciprocal act informing social relations might be more pertinent here. Felicity Heal’s research on gift-giving, hospitality and charity in early modern England, for example, has highlighted how feasting and food-gifts ‘established and developed the bonds of good lordship and clientage’ in premodern society (2008:45). Most scholarship in this vein, however, has focused on the bonds between hosts and guests, tenants and landlords, and neighbours, often with an emphasis on Christmastide feasting.

Tusser’s ploughmen feasts stand somewhat apart in concentrating on the master-servant relationship, and in taking place outside the high holy seasons of Christmas, Easter or Whitsun. Indeed, most of his feasts had only a tenuous link to the liturgical calendar and, significantly, were characterised by blurred lines between work and play: ‘comfort with labour is fit to be had’. These feasts thus do not sit easily within classic labour-leisure models, where ‘pre-industrial societies had festivals…while industrial societies have leisure’ (Burke: 137; Marfany). If the latter was so, where did premodern festivals infused with work fit? Nor do they complement early modern elite understandings of play as antithetical to work, projecting instead a sympathetic view of play as essential to work identities and relations. A perspective perhaps indicative of Tusser’s experience as a musician and poet.

More broadly, the ploughmen’s feasts point to the complexity of the festive gift economy as a social and symbolic system. We know feasting informed early modern social relations, but the specific seasonal (not to mention liturgical) context of a feast could influence exactly which social bonds were informed and why. Tusser, for example, devotes a separate section of his book to Christmas feasting, highlighting the multi-lateral giving among various levels of society during that season [emphasis mine]:

At Christmas be merie and thankfull withall,
And feast thy poore neighbors, the great with the small,

This stands in contrast to the more pointed, downward giving to household servants during the ploughmen’s feasts (save perhaps sheep shearing, which included neighbours as well).

Lastly, if these feasts speak to the master-servant relationship, what do they say? For one, the latter should be definitively renamed the ‘dame-servant’ relationship, for Tusser makes clear that the huswife negotiated, managed and maintained such work relations. Elsewhere in his book, Tusser advises huswives how best to order, manage and discipline servants. But on the feast days, the shoe was on the other foot: feasts were both practical and symbolic manifestations of a social contract (a two-way exchange), epitomising what was owed the servant by ‘custom and right’ in this relationship. Tusser employs imperative after imperative to reinforce this point: ‘This must not be slept / Old Guise must be kept’. With a final flourish, he drives home the far reaching significance of these festive exchanges, not just to household cohesion and amity, but also to the essential premodern commodity of reputation:

This doing and keeping such custom and guise,
they call thee good huswife, they love thee likewise.

[¹] I have modernised Tusser’s spellings throughout this post, with exceptions here and there, when the early modern spelling helps draw a distinction between premodern and modern definitions (e.g. ‘huswifery’ and ‘huswife’) or contributes to meter or rhyme.

The Pudding Pinching Heifer Heisters

Posted on November 27, 2025 by merryshrovetide

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

Posted on November 20, 2025 by merryshrovetide

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 17^th-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.

Corner Craftsman

Historian Taylor Aucoin