‘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.

The Magiconomy of Early Modern England

Posted on October 30, 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.

On the night of 8 April 1693, a burglar broke into Thomas Masterman’s house in Stokesley, making off with the hefty sum of £2 10s. To identify the thief and reclaim his money, Masterman trekked south through the north Yorkshire moors to Byland Abbey. There he met with William Bowes, described by Masterman as ‘a man who pretends to discover stolen goods by casting of figures or otherwise’. Bowes proceeded to do just that, and ‘in a glass did show…the likeness & physiognomy of Richard Lyth’, a tailor to whom Masterman had recently repaid a small debt. Bowes advised to look no further than Lyth for the thief, adding that, ‘he could not have power to dispose of the money, but within a few days it would be brought again & thrown in a corner near [Masterman’s] house’. For this information and service, Bowes received one shilling in payment.[1]

Masterman’s story, captured in a court deposition from the North Riding of Yorkshire, is not altogether unusual for the time. We know that many premodern English men and women similarly consulted and contracted local magical practitioners (variously called wisemen, cunning folk, or soothsayers) to cure ailments, find lost or stolen property, or fix other problems. While reading through court depositions from quarter sessions of the peace for counties of northern England, I’ve come across a number of references to such ‘practical magic’, as well as more classic examples of malicious witchcraft. And since it’s Hallowtide, it seems the perfect time to survey these magical findings and discuss their relevance to the project: what they suggest about the relationship between work and magic during this period, and the ways in which some magical activities could constitute ‘forms of labour’ in their own right.[2]

In the northern quarter sessions at least, I’ve found that depositional evidence of magic usually derives from just a few types of criminal cases.

Most obvious are those of witchcraft, where the very crime concerned was the use of black magic to harm people or property.

While witchcraft was legally a felony and should have been tried at higher courts like the Assizes, cases could initially be examined at the county quarter sessions.[3] And so we sometimes get depositions like those against widow Dorothy Bentum of Coppull, Lancashire, who in 1676 allegedly ‘did harm by her tongue’, bewitching one women into madness and another to death.[4]

Evidence of magic also crops up in defamation cases, when plaintiffs brought suits against those who slanderously accused them of witchcraft and thereby harmed their public reputation.

Like witchcraft, defamation was usually handled by other courts in England, namely those of the church.[5] Nonetheless, similar cases could be brought up at the quarter sessions, like when Anne Harrison, a widow of Burland, Cheshire deposed in 1662 that her daughter-in-law had uttered the following defamatory words against her: ‘God blesse me against all witches and wizards and thou art one’.[6]

In such cases of defamation or witchcraft, magic was either integral to the crime or the crime itself. Yet magic could also be more incidental or tangential to a case. Accusations of witchcraft, for example, sometimes prompted retaliatory breaches of the peace. In a 1690 physical assault case from Idle, Yorkshire, Martha Thornton attacked James Booth and ‘dasht his head against a cupboard’ because the latter man claimed Martha had ‘destroyed’ his daughter ‘by witchcraft’ and also ‘did ride on witching every night’.[7]

But as Thomas Masterman’s story implies, not all depositional references to magic were negative. Theft cases – the vast majority of business handled by the quarter sessions – sometimes yield references to practical, helpful magic, as plaintiffs sought to track down their missing goods. In a case that I’ve already covered in detail for a previous blog post, Henry Lucas of Hoghton, Lancashire travelled across the county border in 1626 to consult with a ‘wiseman or witch’ in Yorkshire about his mother’s stolen cow. The wiseman provided a vision ‘of those persons that took the said heifer’ and told his clients where the cow might be found.

Similarly, in 1612, when a servant-boy named Thomas Aston went missing in Over, Cheshire, his master and mistress went to ‘blynd Burnie, to know whether he were quicke or dead’. Blind Burnie obliged, and ‘told them he [Aston] was alyve and lustie and was in Torpley parish and that at Michaelmas he would come home again to fetch his cloathes and the rest of his hire’.[8] Blind Burnie’s foresight proved myopically off target – not altogether shocking considering the wizard’s name!

It is these references to soothsaying and consultation that most clearly qualify as ‘magical work activities’ for the purposes of our project. They were transactional in nature, and although technically illegal, the magical acts themselves weren’t usually under criminal investigation. While rare, they hint at a much wider service industry of magic – what we might call a ‘magiconomy’. Like much else in early modern society, it was underpinned by reputation. As Alan MacFarlane demonstrated in his classic study of witchcraft in early modern Essex, people would travel long distances to consult specific cunning folk because of their famed skill, and not necessarily those practitioners nearest to them.[9] The same seems to have been the case in the north: Thomas Masterman and Henry Lucas each travelled over twenty miles to remote locations for their respective magical consultations.

Cunning folk also had a complex relationship with remuneration. Although many were poor characters living on the periphery of society, some refused payment for their services, claiming that compensation disrupted their abilities.[10] Interestingly, this represents something of an antithesis to work by commission or piece-rate, challenging the assumption that the quantity/quality of labour or service necessarily increased with the incentives offered. It also reinforces an argument that our project champions: that unpaid work was still work.

All that being said, many practitioners of ‘good’ magic did indeed charge for their services. William Bowes of Byland Abbey certainly received one shilling for his prognostication. We don’t know if Blind Burnie or the Wiseman from Yorkshire also had going rates, but one large and complex case, from our sample of quarter sessions depositions in eastern England, suggests the potential complexity and variance of magical service transactions.

In 1590, the Hertfordshire quarter sessions heard a case against Thomas Harden of Ikelford, who was ‘rumoured to be a wiseman and skilful in many matters’. The depositions include a veritable laundry list of magical work activities and corresponding prices: 6d (with more promised) to cure a ‘changeling’ child who could neither speak nor walk; 5s worth of money, bacon and pigeons to find a stolen parcel of clothes; 12d (with 20s more promised) to discover two lost horses; 40s (with an extraordinary £20 more promised) to divine who had burned down a house.[11]

There was clearly a pattern of paying a smaller sum upfront, with more promised upon the (presumably) successful completion of service. It was this last criterion that seems to have landed Harden in hot water, essentially for fraud. The problem was not so much that he illegally practiced magic or witchcraft (the deponents gladly and openly consulted him) but that he provided faulty prognostications and cures and then refused to refund customers. Thomas Masterman may represent a similarly dissatisfied client, since his deposition at the beginning of this post was actually levelled against William Bowes and pointedly stated that Bowes merely pretended to discover lost goods.

In Thomas Harden’s case, he eventually confessed to the charges of fraud. He admitted ‘that he could do nothing’, but added that ‘there was a time when he could do much’, before a ‘nobleman of the realm’ tricked him out of his ‘familiar spirit’ and a ‘great many books’. Such cases of fraud imply, as many scholars have been at pains to point out, that practical magic was a craft like any other: it required skill, tools of the trade, and a reputation for effectiveness, with avenues in place for quality control.[12]

And just like many other early modern forms of labour, magic was gendered, with discovering lost property generally coded male, and charms, incantations, and curses usually coded female.[13] This division of labour, and the types of quarter sessions cases most likely to contain evidence of magic (i.e. witchcraft, theft, fraud), help explain the overrepresentation in our depositional references of men as positive practitioners and women as negative ones.

Much more could be said about these magical work activities. For example, as our research proceeds apace on samples of court depositions from northern and eastern England, there may be scope in the future for comparisons between regions or types of courts. But regardless, practical magic demonstrates the diverse forms which early modern labour could take, and the incredible richness of early modern depositional material for a wide range of research topics.

[1] North Yorkshire Record Office (NYRO): QSB/1693/230.

[2] The literature on magic and witchcraft in premodern England is obviously vast, but on popular or cunning magic in particular see Tom Johnson, ‘Soothsayers, Legal Culture, and the Politics of Truth in Late-Medieval England’, Cultural and Social History, (2020) DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/14780038.2020.1812906; Catherine Rider, ‘Common Magic’, in The Cambridge History of Magic and Witchcraft in the West: From Antiquity to the Present, ed. David J. Collins (Cambridge, 2014), pp. 303–31; Owen Davies, Popular Magic: Cunning-folk in English History (London, 2008); Alan MacFarlane, Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England: A Regional and Comparative Study (Abingdon, 1970), ch. 8; Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in popular beliefs in sixteenth and seventeenth century England (London, 1971).

[3] On early modern legal jurisdiction over magic and witchcraft see MacFarlane, ch. 3.

[4] Lancashire Archives (LA): QSB/1/1676/ Information of Richard Fisher, Examination of William Millner.

[5] For some examples from the Diocesan Courts of the Archbishop of York: https://www.dhi.ac.uk/causepapers/results.jsp?keyword=witchcraft&limit=50

[6] Cheshire Archives and Local Services (CALS): QJF/90/1/100.

[7] West Yorkshire Archives Service (WYAS): QS1/29/9/ Examinations of John Thornton, James Booth, Lawrence Slater.

[8] CALS: QJF/41/4/71-73.

[9] MacFarlane, pp. 120-1.

[10] Johnson, p. 6; Rider, p. 321; MacFarlane, pp. 126-7.

[11] Hertfordshire Archives and Local Studies: HAT/SR/2/100.

[12] Johnson, p. 10; Thomas, pp. 212-52; Davies, ch. 4.

[13] On the gender of magical practitioners, see Johnson, p. 5; Davies, ch. 3; MacFarlane, pp.127-8. And for cutting-edge work on the gender dynamics of practical magic, as a craft and service industry in premodern England, see the research of Tabitha Stanmore, particularly Love Spells and Lost Treasure: Service Magic in England from the Later Middle Ages to the Early Modern Era (2023) and Cunning Folk: Life in the Era of Practical Magic (2024).

Corner Craftsman

Historian Taylor Aucoin

Tag Archives: Work

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

The Pudding Pinching Heifer Heisters

The Autumnal Experience of Work in Early Modern England

The Magiconomy of Early Modern England