THE ECONOMIC RELATIONS OF THE HOUSEHOLD By MABEL ATKINSON, M.A. (Glasgow)

I. INTRODUCTORY

The household has been treated by economists with curious negligence. The founder of political economy showed so little insight into the real nature of the work carried on there as to class those whom he described as menial servants with unproductive labourers.[13] The later classical economists have followed his lead. Marshall, it is true, shows throughout his books an appreciation of the position and responsibilities of the housewife and the mother which is foreign to most of his colleagues.[14] But he has never attempted to analyse the economic functions of the household, or to show its varying relations to the rest of the community; neither has he pointed out the peculiar factors which differentiate the position and remuneration of the women employed in domestic activities from those of all other workers. On the other hand, the more modern school of economists, those who devote themselves to the history of economic development in the past or to the intensive study of special economic institutions in the present, have equally failed to discuss with any adequacy the organisation of the household.

The economic historians describe with minuteness the rise and fall of gilds and chartered companies, the workings of different methods of education and of poor relief in successive epochs. They rarely indicate how the various forms of industrial organisation translated themselves into the domestic expenditure of the people. It would, for instance, be very difficult to extract from the pages of the economic historians an answer to the question, “What were the conditions determining the supply of domestic servants at the close of the Middle Ages, in the eighteenth century and in the nineteenth century respectively?” It is not easy to answer definitely even simpler and more fundamental questions than these. It is often stated, for example, that the household arrangements of the serfs on the mediæval manors were rude and uncomfortable to the last degree,[15] but it is certain that this is not so universally true as has been thought. Some at all events of the more prosperous inhabitants of the manors possessed household furniture and equipments of a kind not inferior to the outfit of the casual labourer to-day. Sheets, for example, are mentioned several times in extant inventories. But much more investigation than has yet been possible would be necessary before it could be determined whether these instances of a higher standard of comfort are or are not exceptions to a general rule.

To take other instances of unsettled problems: How was pottery made in the Middle Ages—by travelling potters as in the East to-day, by gilds of potters, or by the inhabitants of the manor directly for their own use? Or again: When did the custom of building houses to let on rent first become general in England? It is clear that the habit of living in rented houses has and must have the most profound influence on family life and national character. But so far, neither from economic histories on the one hand nor from histories of architecture on the other, have I been able to obtain any reliable information on this point.

When one turns to even more important questions—such, for instance, as the industrial position of women at different epochs—it is equally difficult to obtain precise and detailed knowledge. Without a very lengthy and elaborate investigation of the extant original materials, many of them scattered in municipal chambers in distant parts of England, it would be quite impossible to say on what terms women were admitted as members of the gilds and fraternities which extended over the whole area of industrial life in the Middle Ages. The character and organisation of the household and the position of women in the Middle Ages are subjects still practically untouched by the economic historians.[16]

When we turn to modern times, a little more material has been collected. There is an investigation by the Board of Trade into the wages of domestic servants, and a book on domestic service by Professor Lucy Salmon of Vassar College. It deals of course mainly with American conditions, but cannot be neglected by any English student of the economic relations of the household.

Humanitarianism has prompted studies more or less elaborate of the dietaries and housing conditions of the working classes, especially in towns,[17] but it would be idle to pretend that there has been yet more than a beginning made of the task of determining how for each class of the community its share of the national income as stated in money is translated into the necessaries, comforts, and luxuries of life, into house-room, fuel, food, cleanliness, clothing, insurance, domestic service, recreation, and culture. The generalisations available are of the most meagre description. We can, for instance, say with tolerable certainty that the agricultural labourer spends three-fourths of his income on food, the town labourer two-thirds, the artisan a half, the middle-class man from a third to a fourth; but there is practically no reliable information with regard to very large incomes, or to sums spent on clothing in any section of the community.

Moreover, there is one class—large, growing in importance, and an essential element in modern civilisation—about whose domestic expenditure we have no scientific knowledge at all. This is the class which may be named “the routine brain-workers,” the people who as clerks, book-keepers, salesmen, typists, &c., are responsible for the routine administration of modern commerce. They have been compared to the nervous system, for like that system in the animal body they serve for the communication and the mechanical record of the life of the community on its industrial side. With them may be classed elementary school-teachers, reporters, and the lower ranks of the Civil Service, though I should not be prepared to say that some of these—especially the teachers—ought to be regarded as performing only routine brain-work. But all these workers can be conveniently studied together in that their labour is carried on under somewhat similar conditions—it is sedentary, highly regimented, exhausting to the brain and nervous system, and is generally remunerated by a fixed salary, &c. They earn an income larger than that of the manual labourer, but considerably less as a general rule than that of the professional man. There is a total absence of information as to the domestic expenditure of this class. It is sometimes declared that its less well-paid members suffer as severely from poverty as do sections of the working-class, and that the poor clerk is really much more to be pitied than the well-to-do trade unionist, the skilled manual worker.

But no one has yet attempted to test the truth of this view by the only scientific means, namely, by the collection of precise details as to the domestic expenditure of the routine brain-working class, showing what sums are spent on house-room, food, clothing, &c., and what kind of accommodation is obtained for the money spent. In short, the investigation of domestic expenditure has never yet been carried out in a purely scientific spirit solely for the sake of the resultant knowledge. It has always been undertaken with some special practical problem in view, and is consequently always fragmentary and frequently biassed.

Yet if it is important to know how the wealth of the country is produced, it is of equal importance to know how it is consumed, and that whether the consumption takes the form of porridge and flannelette for the child of a dock-labourer, of drink and admission to a football match for the miner or cotton-operative, or of a gardener, and a holiday in Switzerland for the hard-working doctor or stockbroker. Domestic expenditure should be investigated as impartially by the economist as are the variations of plants or animals by the biologist. His one aim should be the discovery and statement of truth, as complete and as unbiassed as he can make it.

Hitherto, as I have said, this field of research has remained comparatively untouched. In the first place, economists have generally been men, and have naturally devoted their energies to the elucidation of the problems of industry and business which concern men most closely. Few women, on the other hand, have until recently received any training in economics, and it has never occurred to them that the familiar and wearisome problems of the rent, the butcher’s bill, and the children’s clothes, together with the difficulty of finding a satisfactory cook, may have a wider aspect than the narrow and personal one. But even as it is, the few women who have distinguished themselves in the sphere of economics have in a note or a casual remark pointed out distinctions between household management and other branches of industry which cast a flood of light on the whole subject. There is a paragraph in the second volume of “Industrial Democracy”[18] which lays down the difference between the underlying principles of business and of the administration of the home in a few words which might serve as the text for a volume. It is precisely this difference, first clearly indicated by Mrs. Webb, which constitutes the second ground for the common neglect of this branch of economics. A factory or a shop is run for profit; a household simply to provide comfort and convenience for its members. To put it in technical language, in the world of industry we are concerned with exchange values, but in the home with use values alone. From this distinction, overlooked by reason of its obviousness, there flow a large number of consequences which will be discussed later. At present we are only concerned to show that economists, with their eyes fixed on trade and the mechanism of trade, very naturally neglected that section of life in which values, material and immaterial, were being continually created, but for use alone, not for commercial purposes.

The wife who cooks her husband’s dinner, or caters, organises, and keeps accounts for him, is really engaged in work which in any rational interpretation of the word has far more right to be called productive than is much of the labour employed in manufacture or business. But the work accomplished by the wife in the household has never yet received its full acknowledgment from the economists. The truth is that, although they constantly warn students to avoid the vulgar error of confusing money wages with real wages, they themselves have been so biassed by the commercial conception of profit-making that they have almost completely overlooked even the purely economic value of much work, such as cooking, cleaning, and clothes-making, which is carried on within the home, not for profit-making or for a salary, but as part of the duties attaching to the status of wife and mother. It is acknowledged by the economists themselves[19] that although in theory they have set aside a section to be devoted to the discussion of “consumption” as other sections deal with “production” and “distribution” of wealth, yet in practice the treatment of consumption has been meagre and ineffective. This, perhaps, is inevitable—it is certainly regrettable—and women economists would be performing a most useful work if they were to undertake a careful and detailed investigation into the consumption of wealth at different epochs and by different classes of the community, and one, moreover, for which their connection with housekeeping, which is only the practical application of the science of the consumption of wealth, would have already partially prepared them.

There is still another reason why a scientific treatment of the consumption of wealth has been delayed. It could not be developed until medicine and hygiene had provided us with satisfactory standards of the needs of the human body. When food, for example, was still regarded purely as a matter of individual likes and dislikes, it was impossible to discuss at all adequately the sufficiency or insufficiency of the food consumption of a given class. But now that we know that the varying tastes simply express in different ways the need for so much proteid, carbo-hydrates and fats, we have a firm basis on which to work. It is true that it is not yet quite so firm as we could wish; the scientists have not yet succeeded even for a single class in fixing a dietary standard which would be accepted by all in particular, and recently the investigations of Professor Chittenden have suggested that the amount of proteid hitherto thought essential may be excessive. Moreover, little attention has yet been paid to the need of different food for different work. Yet it seems probable, to say the least, that the sedentary worker, using his brain and not his muscles, may require lighter and daintier food than the labourer in the fields or the docks, and may really suffer as seriously if that better food be denied him as does the latter if he fails to secure a sufficiency of coarser and cheaper nutriment. This question would be of great importance in investigating the expenditure of the clerk class. But although the scientists have here failed to provide the students of domestic expenditure with all the data required, yet there is sufficient knowledge of the general principles of dietetics to enable us to base our study of food consumption on a fairly sound basis.

In the same way a standard of housing accommodation establishing the minimum of space per head necessary for health is generally recognised; and on these and similar calculations, correlated with the cost of house-room and commodities, it will be possible to build up a science of consumption which will be really a science and not a series of guesses and vague generalities.

It is true, again, that it is easier to deal with the grades of society practising the roughest and least-skilled labour than with those engaged in the higher forms of brain-work, but we can at all events set ourselves to discover what is the average distribution of the expenditure of men earning £1000 a year, and can afterwards appeal to the hygienists to decide for us what kind of food, house-room, and recreation is essential for a man who makes his living by the higher activities of the intellect. A very close connection between economics and hygiene is essential if the division of our subject that deals with consumption is to be adequately treated.

So, then, a scientific study of the economics of the household would fall into two divisions—(1) an endeavour to describe the industrial development of each country as it affects family life, house-room, food, and clothes; and (2) a descriptive account of the domestic circumstances and the expenditure[20] of each class of the community at the present time. Under each of these headings special sections should treat domestic service, the work of woman beyond the household, and the organisation of household work as compared with different branches of industry and administration. Finally, a supplementary section should set forth the practical applications of the conclusions arrived at, and should endeavour to help the housewife or, it may be, the superintendent of an industrial school, college, or boarding house in the administration of the income at her disposal.

But much more careful investigation into the question of how incomes actually are spent is essential before we can deal satisfactorily with the even more difficult problem of how they ought to be spent. And there is, too, another factor which must be taken into consideration. Economists in defining wealth commonly admit nowadays that it includes collective and immaterial well-being of various kinds.[21] But having made this admission, they straightway put it aside and proceed to discuss wealth as though it consisted exclusively of material exchangeable commodities. Yet clearly the real income of a family is increased if the children have easy access to good free schools or to ample open spaces. It will not be possible to estimate precisely the money value of opportunities of this description. But we should at least notice their presence or absence for each class and for each stage of national development. It is clear that in the present paper no attempt can be made to deal with the problems of the economics of expenditure or of the household save in the merest outline, and therefore the following pages are to be taken simply as a sketch to be filled in by more extensive and more throughgoing investigation later on.

II. HISTORICAL SKETCH OF THE POSITION OF THE HOUSEHOLD IN ENGLAND

English industrial history has been divided into three main epochs with intervening periods of transition. These are (1) the mediæval period, (2) the period extending from Elizabeth’s reign to the reign of George III., and (3) the modern period.

In the first, the typical economic institutions are the manor and the gild; in the second, domestic manufacture and convertible husbandry are predominant; and in the third the factory system and capitalist farming take their places.[22] Trade, too, undergoes a similar evolution. In the first period it is intermunicipal rather than international. In the second period, within each nation trade is free and unfettered, and a considerable amount of territorial division of labour and regional specialisation results. But external trade is regulated by governments on the principles of the mercantile system. In the third period, with the increase and improvement of the means of communication, international trade becomes more and more important, markets are immensely widened, and the economic organisation of society reaches the complexity possessed by it to-day, which reacts in many half comprehended ways on the household and on family life.

The main characteristics of these divisions of English industrial history are, on the whole, clear and well-marked. But the transition periods are more difficult to describe. It has often been pointed out that the two industrial revolutions, as they have been named by some writers, bear a certain resemblance to each other. Both involve a reorganisation of industry which results in increased productivity on the one hand, but in the demoralisation of certain classes of the workers on the other hand. Both therefore require a revision of the system of providing for the destitute. Both, too, produce the most far-reaching effects on home-life and the economy of the household, and influence profoundly the position of women. Both, too, are alike in that it is not easy to fix dates to the periods within which the revolution in industry takes place.[23] But roughly we may regard the late fifteenth century and the early part of the sixteenth as a time of stress and strain, due to the appearance of new methods both in agriculture and in industry, especially in the wool trade; and in the same way the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth was a period of sudden and violent economic transition. In both cases alike the changes in agriculture preceded somewhat the changes in industry, and the revolution made itself felt in different ways and at different times in the various districts of the country. There are still backward areas in the south of England and in the west of Scotland where life has been very little affected, notwithstanding trains and steam-engines, by the alterations in industry which have produced the roaring mills and clattering shipyards of Lancashire and the Clyde.

The task before us, then, is to sketch as clearly as possible from the scanty material available the main features of domestic life at each one of these epochs, and to show how the changes in industry reflected themselves in the life of the household.

(a) The Household in the Mediæval Period

(1) The Serf—his Position and Domestic Arrangements

In the mediæval period, outside the small and scattered towns, the prevailing form of economic organisation was the manor. We have to imagine the surface of England dotted over with stretches of cultivated land, with areas of waste, moorland or woodland intervening. Each stretch of arable land was cultivated more or less in common by groups of serfs, who lived generally in one long village street, with the church and the lord’s hall near at hand. Usually, in addition to the arable land worked on the complicated “three-field” system soon to be described, there were also hay-meadows down by the river, sometimes permanent pasture held in common, while the waste was available for extra pasturage, and for cutting turf and wood for fuel. Each serf possessed, besides, a small croft attached to his house, and sometimes an orchard and rude garden. The arable land was divided into three large fields, not shut in as are our fields by hedges, but lying open. Each field, again, was partitioned into numbers of strips more or less regular in shape, and each serf possessed a certain number of these, not, however, all lying together, but intermixed “mingle-mangle” with the holdings of his neighbours. He was not allowed to cultivate these, or indeed any of the land save his own tiny croft, as he pleased, but was compelled to follow the traditional method of farming according to the customs of his manor. Usually the rotation was wheat or rye in the first year, oats or barley in the second year, fallow in the third year, while the other two fields followed the same course a year and two years later; so that in each year one field was fallow, one grew wheat or rye, and the other oats or barley. The animals belonging to the serfs and their lord were pastured on the arable fields when the crops were taken off, and on the fallow field. The lord of the manor also possessed strips in the common fields, and was regarded as the owner of the common and waste, subject to the pasturage and fuel rights of the tenants. He did not receive rent quite as we understand it, but each serf owed him dues calculated in labour, in kind, and occasionally in money.

For instance, on the manor of Tidenham, in the time of Edward I., one serf worked for the lord for five days in every alternate week for thirty-five weeks in the year, two and a half days every week for six weeks in the summer, and three days every week for eight weeks during August and September (the three festival weeks of Easter, Christmas, and Pentecost were holidays). Then, in addition to this regular weekly work, he could also be required for extra work, commonly called boon-works or precariæ. “He made one precaria called churched, and he ploughed and harrowed a half acre for corn and sowed it with one bushel of corn from his own seed, and in the time of harvest he had to reap and bind and stack the produce, receiving one sheaf for himself on account of the half acre.” And he had to plough one acre for oats. In addition, there were dues in kind—one hen at Christmas, five eggs at Easter, eight gallons of beer at every brewing, and also small payments in money, commuted, one would conjecture, for payments in kind, i.e. one penny for every yearling pig, and one halfpenny for those only of the half year.[24]

In other cases the tenants paid dues of lambs, of fish, of honey, of clews of net yarn, of straw, &c. One of the tenants of the great monastic establishment at Glastonbury had to find thirty salmon, “each as thick as a man’s fist at the tail.”[25] A curious form of labour due is described in the Boldon Book. The tenants of certain manors in Durham had to build each summer a hunting-lodge for the bishop and his retinue when they came to take their pleasure in the moors in the west of Durham.

At different periods and in different districts the subdivisions of the tenants vary greatly, and for complete details the reader must be referred to the special works on the subject. But two classes can usually be distinguished—(1) the villeins, who possessed oxen and worked the larger holdings (often about thirty acres—called virgates or yard lands); and (2) the cotters, who held about five acres, and whose domestic animals consisted of pigs and poultry. In addition there were often found socmen, who were personally free; and, at the other end of the social scale, slaves, who, largely through the influence of the Church, were manumitted before the end of the Middle Ages.

The most striking feature about the manors is that each was almost completely self-supporting. Each manor provided corn, meat, eggs, milk, cheese, poultry, &c., for its own inhabitants. Fuel, and perhaps game and rabbits, came from the waste. The furniture was of rude wood, and the clothes would be sheep-skin and coarse cloth spun and woven from the wool grown on the sheep that were fed on the manor lands. The ordinary serf would very rarely either receive or spend coin of the realm. Salt he would buy and the metal pots and pans used for cooking, and, as Ashley suggests, tar.[26] But the greater amount of the goods required for himself and his family would be produced under what the economists call “natural economy,” i.e. they were made by the people who intended to use them, directly, without the intervention of money or any mechanism of exchange.

Together with this self-sufficiency would go a considerable amount of co-operation. Economists are not yet agreed as to the precise extent to which co-operation was used in the manorial village. But we know that tenants frequently lent their oxen to one another to make up the necessary team; that in some of the Durham manors there was a communal smith, who received payment in the possession of a strip of land; and that the tenants owned a common oven. It was customary, too, for one shepherd or swineherd to guard the sheep or the pigs of the whole community. The village mill, when first established, was also a common boon to the whole body of serfs, but later on the obligation to grind their corn at the lord’s mill and to pay the dues came to be regarded as an onerous burden.

A curious and important person on the mediæval estate was the bee-keeper. Particulars are given of his duties and rewards in one Durham manor by the Boldon Book.[27] He does no regular weekly work, the care of the bees apparently taking the place of this, but he must take part with the other serfs in the boon-works necessary at harvest and other times of pressure. As honey was almost the only source of sweetness in early mediæval cooking, it can be understood why the bee-keeper ranked only a little below the shepherd. The Boldon Book, unfortunately, since its aim is to define the relations between the villeins and their lord, does not tell us whether he superintended the bees belonging to his fellow tenants. On the analogy of the shepherd and swineherd, we should assume that he did.

How, then, are we to describe the domestic life of the various sections of rural society at this time? Unfortunately, very little material exists on which to draw for the account of the household arrangements of the serfs. They have naturally left no account-books; they enter rarely into the literature of the period; there are no remains of their houses or clothing, and it is, in fact, far from easy to decide how they did live. But it seems probable that a rude and dirty plenty, procured by long hours of toilsome open-air labour, was the prevailing characteristic of the serf household. The house would be of clay or wattles or wood, probably without windows—and those certainly unglazed—and with a hole in the middle of the roof to let out the smoke, the fire being placed in the centre of the floor. The furniture must have been rough but solid, its most valuable items being the brass or iron cooking-pots. On the other hand, I do not believe that, in the more prosperous villein households at all events, the level of domestic comfort was so low as has sometimes been represented. Rough cloth was probably woven or sometimes bought. There is one case on record where, in return for a small piece of land, one family undertook to do the weaving for another, and Gasquet mentions[28] that to the common Christmas feast on one of the Glastonbury manors some of the tenants brought their own napkins, “if he wanted to eat off a cloth.” I see no reason to doubt that some at least of the villein households were provided with coarse coverings for bed and table. On the other hand, it seems doubtful whether any form of artificial light was commonly used in the poorer households. The food, too, would show what to us would seem strange contrasts of plenty and of poverty. It would include neither tea nor coffee, neither sugar nor spices, nor yet potatoes. On the other hand, there was probably, save at times of famine, a sufficiency of bread,[29] and eggs and dairy produce would be used in quantities now quite beyond the reach of the ordinary working-man. The butter, it is true, was not of a high standard, for it was usually liquid, but the children must have had milk to drink and cheese and eggs to eat. Even the poorest serfs apparently kept a few fowls, since their dues are so often payable in eggs, and some of the eggs and the chickens would be available for family consumption. But their meat must have been much poorer than ours. Fresh mutton and beef were rarely eaten, except in the case of animals who had died a natural death. The others were much too valuable for draught purposes, for milk or for wool. Among the maxims of an old agriculturist of the thirteenth century we find the following remark: “If a sheep die suddenly, they put the flesh in water for so many hours as are between midday and three o’clock, and then hang it up, and when the water is drained off they salt it and then dry it. But I do not wish you to do this.”[31] In the autumn, animals which it was impossible to keep during the winter, owing to the absence of root-feeding, were killed and salted down. Occasionally, however, fresh pork would be used, and no doubt every now and then a wild beast or bird from the common or waste would find its way into the housewife’s iron pot. The food, then, would be rough and sometimes unwholesome, but on the other hand it contained many most desirable forms of nourishment which are absent from the labourer’s diet to-day, and which are, it might be observed, those specially suitable for children.[32]

The fuel used was wood or peat, or in some cases dried cow-dung.

On the whole, then, the household arrangements of the mediæval serf were primitive, and in times of famine he and his family must have endured great hardships. The winters, too, when the tracks were deep in mud and artificial light was absent or scarce, must have been recurring times of considerable suffering. But on the other hand, fresh air and easy access to the land were benefits hardly valued until in later times they have been lost to whole sections of the population.

(2) The Lord of the Manor—his House and Household

There is more material available for the description of the household of the lord than of his serf. Account-books, directions for household administration, and in the fifteenth century very curious rhymed rules of behaviour and of precedence are available. Naturally, however, it is of the king’s household and of the households of the nobles and of the great monasteries that we know most. Very little can now be discovered of the details of the domestic arrangements of the master in possession of one manor only, and it is not certain that we should be justified in supposing that what we find to be true of the great household will necessarily hold also for the smaller one. For example, in the families of which we have records the great majority of the servants are men, cooking in particular being in the Middle Ages a masculine vocation. But is it safe to assume that the same would be the case in the household of a simple knight? It must therefore be clearly understood that what follows has reference mainly to royal and noble families.

The domestic buildings of all manors were on a more or less uniform plan. They were grouped round a quadrangle, one side of which consisted of the great hall where dinner was served, business transacted, and where servants and the humbler guests slept at night. The door was at one end, usually protected by screens, behind which was another door leading to the buttery, and above which the musicians’ gallery was often placed. Opposite the door was a raised daïs, where stood the table reserved for the master, his family, and important guests. In the body of the hall dinner was served to the rest of the household. A private chamber called the solar or bower, reached by a staircase either inside the hall or placed in the quadrangle outside, was kept for the special use of the lord and his family. There occasionally they took meals, though it was regarded as a sign of luxurious self-seeking to avoid the formality and bustle of the meals in the great hall. In the solar, too, beds were placed for important guests, and any particularly valuable articles of furniture would be kept there. On the other sides of the quadrangle were the chapel, granaries, storehouses, dairies and bakehouses, and the kitchen. This was often placed at a little distance to guard against fire. The cooking was usually carried on at an iron grate placed in the middle of the floor, and pictures show us that sometimes it was even done in the open air. Refuse was carried off by an open drain running across the centre of the kitchen.

As an illustration let me quote an account of a typical manor-house of the twelfth century. “The manor-house of Ardleigh consisted of a hall with bower annexed. Also a kitchen, a stable, a bakehouse, two stores for corn (granges) and a servants’ house. In the hall were two moveable benches, a fixed table, and a buffet.” [33]

In course of time other rooms were added, and the furniture and equipment became more elaborate. But until Elizabeth’s reign the great hall where master and servants dined together was the central feature in the wealthy English home.

The food was derived from the manor, and purchases were only made of such things as could not be produced in England, notably red wine,[34] spices, almonds and rice, all much used in mediæval cookery. Sugar, too, would be bought, when it replaced honey for sweetening purposes. But the corn, meat, milk, cheese, and eggs would be all home-grown, and as it was easier in the state of transport at that time to bring the family to the food than the food to the family, part of the duties of housekeeping consisted in so arranging the sojourn of the household as to draw food-supplies from each manor in the most convenient way. The great Bishop of Lincoln, Robert Grossetête, gives elaborate directions on this head to a widowed friend of his, Margaret, Countess of Lincoln.

“Every year at Michaelmas when you know the measure of all your corn, then arrange your sojourn for the whole of that year and for how many weeks in each place according to the seasons of the year and the advantages of the country in flesh and in fish, and do not in any wise burden by debt or long residence the places where you sojourn.

“I advise that at two seasons of the year you make your principal purchases, that is to say, your wines, your wax, and your wardrobe.”[35]

And there follows a list of the fairs recommended by the pious bishop.

The materials of mediæval food, then, would be similar to the diet of the serfs already described, but would be used in greater plenty and would be supplemented by luxuries imported from the East and bought at the fairs. If we keep in mind these conditions, as well as the leisure and the large supply of labour available, we shall understand why mediæval cooking was so elaborate; for, contrary to ordinary opinion, it was distinguished by a large number of complicated made dishes. Small birds were commonly roasted, but other forms of meat were stewed or minced. They would in this way both be more easily dealt with at the open fire of the mediæval kitchen, and more easily served in the mediæval dining-room, where knives and spoons were the only implements in common use. Moreover, there was what seems to us an extraordinary liking for violent and mixed flavourings and brilliant colouring. Bucknade, for instance, was made of meat hewn in gobbets, pounded almonds, raisins, sugar, cinnamon, cloves, ginger, onions, salt and fried herbs, thickened with rice-flour and coloured yellow with saffron. Here, again, is the recipe for mortrews, a dish mentioned in Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales.”

“Take hennes and pork and seethe them together. Take the flesh of the hennes and of the pork and hack it small and grind it all to dust. Take bread y-grated, and add thereto and temper it with the self-broth[36] and mix it with yolks of eggs, and cast thereon powder fort,[37] and boil it and do thereto powder of ginger, saffron, and salt, and look that it is standing,[38] and flour it all with powder of ginger.” The lavish use of eggs, pork, and chickens in this recipe could be paralleled in many others, and is evidently to be connected with the custom of receiving manorial dues in kind at stated intervals. Hundreds of eggs would be sent in by the tenants at Easter, and the problem of the housekeeper would not be how to lessen the consumption of eggs in order to keep down the bills, but how to get through those in store before they were hopelessly spoiled.

For the earlier period menus are not available, but a curious rhymed treatise on servants’ duties dating from the middle of the fifteenth century, entitled “John Russell’s Boke of Nurture,” has been reprinted by the Early English Lent Society[39] in the volume entitled “Meals and Manners of the Olden Time,” and from it I extract the following:—

This is followed by two other courses rather lighter in character, though still including venison, peacocks, quails, &c., and then comes dessert:

The service in the wealthy mediæval manor was as elaborate as the cooking, at all events in the later period. The Bishop of Lincoln finds it necessary to warn the Countess of Lincoln not to permit slovenliness among her retainers. She is not to allow “old tabards, and soiled herigauts, and imitation short-hose.” But even this widow lady is served with considerable pomp. “Command that your panter[44] with the bread and your butler[45] with the cup, come before you to the table foot by foot before grace and that three valets be assigned by the marshal each day to serve the high table and the two tables at the side with drink. And at each course call the servers to go to the kitchen, and they themselves to go always before your seneschal as far as you until the dishes be set before you, and see that all servants with meats go orderly and without noise to one part and another of the hall to those who shall be assigned to divide the meats, so that nothing be placed or served disorderly.”[46]

In the “Boke of Nurture,” which refers of course to a much later period, the service is even more elaborate, and we gather indeed that the dinner was a social function at which all classes of the community met together. Even the poorest were not forgotten, as there was a special officer whose business it was to distribute alms of broken meats to the beggars waiting at the door. The rules of precedence were most elaborate, and the serving seems on special occasions to have risen almost to the rank of a solemn ritual. In addition, dinner was accompanied by music and sometimes enlivened at intervals by pageants and shows.

Domestic service in these great households was very different from what it is to-day. There was, in the first place, no fixed line drawn as there is now between the menial and the non-menial classes of the community. The higher servants were often people of nearly the same social rank as those whom they served. Sir William de Mortimer was the head-steward of Bishop Swinfield, Sir Gilbert Brydges the steward of Gloucester Abbey.[47] Young men who entered the service of a lord might one day be called on to carve or serve wine, and the next day might sit at meat in the same room.[48]

Through the account-books and the household ordinances of the period, we can trace four grades of household servants—squires or gentlemen, valets or yeomen, grooms, and pages. The last grade had been recently introduced into the royal household in Edward IV.’s time, and they did not eat in hall. “A page etyth in his office or with his next fellow, not in the halle at noe place, taking dayly one lofe, one messe of great meate, half a gallon of ale; one reward quarterly in the counting-house, twenty pence of clothing when the household hathe at every one of the four feasts, one napron of one elle and part of the King’s great rewards given yearly amongst them in household.”[49]

The last quotation illustrates also the method of remuneration. The money received was a very minor and unimportant factor. The servants were paid mostly in kind, and the share of each in food, fuel, and clothing is very fully and carefully stated. The chief porter of the Abbey of Gloucester, for instance, had a chamber next to the abbey gate. His weekly allowance was three white loaves, called myches, and two called holyers, with seven loaves of squire bread; for ale every quarter 3s. 4d. On every flesh or fish day he had a mess of flesh or fish of the first course, as much as was set before two monks. He had a gown every year of the suit of the gentlemen of the Lord Abbot, and in addition 13s. 4d. per annum. These fixed rations of food clothing &c., are called livery, a term now restricted to clothing alone.

It is noticeable that these servants are almost all men. Washerwomen (lotrices) are women, and there are occasionally notices of young girls in attendance on the lady of the house. But so far as our information goes, cooking and cleaning and serving are carried on by men, though mention is made of women pastry-cooks who in monasteries, to avoid scandal, had to be accommodated in a separate kitchen, called the pudding-house.[50] But in the Middle Ages domestic service was not, as it is now, regarded as a menial occupation to be left, save in some of its higher branches, exclusively to women.

I can find no trace at this period of any difficulty in obtaining service. Bishop Grossetête assures the Countess of Lincoln that she can easily obtain servers if she needs them, and the young men addressed in the rhyming exhortations preserved in “Meals and Manners” evidently regard it as promotion almost beyond their hopes to become members of a lord’s household. Whether this would be equally the case if we had information about the smaller households, it is not easy to say. But when we remember that the alternatives were laborious and monotonous work at agriculture or the chance of finding a place in the gilds or fraternities which monopolised the trade in towns at that period, we can believe that the plentiful fare, the lively society, and the not too strenuous[51] work required of a serving-groom or yeoman would be regarded as a prize worth striving for and worth keeping.

It would be interesting, had I more space at my disposal, to discuss mediæval town life and the domestic arrangements of the monasteries, which are very fully and interestingly described in Abbé Gasquet’s book, “English Monastic Life.” But I must content myself solely with one or two extracts illustrating the household furniture of the mediæval town-dwellers.

In 1303, a certain Alan de Bedeford, a baker of London, was sold up for arrears of taxes, and the following were the goods seized by the inexorable tax-gatherer: “One brass pot weighing 18 lbs., value 2s. 6d., and another brass pot weighing 13 lbs., value 21d., and one kettle value 14d., the total whereof amounts to 5s 5d.”[52]

In 1337, an inventory was preserved of the goods of a felon. It was probably exhaustive, and may therefore be taken as indicating with tolerable precision the standard of household comfort of a London burgess at that time. It is too long to quote in full (the list of garments in particular is rather tedious), but it is interesting to note that it includes a mattress, three feather-beds, five cushions, six blankets, seven linen-sheets, four table-cloths, six whole brass pots of varying value and one broken one, one candlestick and two plates of metal, two basins and one washing-vessel, a spit, a frying-pan, and a funnel.[53]

Further study of wills and inventories would yield a fresh store of information with regard to mediæval household equipment, and might not improbably upset some preconceived ideas as to the ordinary standard of life at that time.

(b) The Position of the Household from the Fifteenth to the Nineteenth Centuries

(1) The First Industrial Revolution and its Effects

The fifteenth century and the beginning of the sixteenth century were marked by great economic changes. The manorial system, modified before this period by the gradual commutation of labour dues and especially by the catastrophe of the Black Death, was replaced on the one hand by enclosures for sheep-farming and on the other by convertible husbandry, when the farmer possessed or rented his own separate holding and managed it as he pleased, using the same land alternately for pasturage and as arable.[54] At the same time, the gild organisation of industry was replaced by the system commonly known as domestic manufacture. This spread largely in the country districts, and profoundly influenced home life and the position of women. At the same time both home and foreign trade greatly increased, and “natural economy” was almost entirely replaced by “money economy,” the necessities of life being no longer produced by the family for their own use; men worked instead for payment, and then with the money so earned bought in the market the goods they required.[55] These changes, like the corresponding changes at the end of the eighteenth century, brought greater wealth and pomp to some classes, increased comfort to the bulk of the people, but called into existence a new class of landless labourers, whose needs and importunities finally led to the establishment of the poor-law.

It would require a volume to describe how these changes reflected themselves in the daily life of the people, and at present I must content myself with noting very briefly the main effects of this first industrial revolution.

In the country two classes appeared: the labourer, who, although he might possess a small piece of land of his own[56] or at the least had grazing rights over a neighbouring common, yet depended for his livelihood on the wages paid by his master. So far I have not discovered any reliable source of information with regard to the family expenditure of this class.[57]

Next there was the farmer either renting or owning a farm. Very often farming would be combined with spinning or weaving wool. Agriculture of this kind, partly for subsistence and partly for the market, supplemented by the practice of domestic industries, remained the dominant type in England until the introduction of capitalist farming in the eighteenth century, and indeed can still be found in backward districts. The part played in it by women can be illustrated by a curious account of the duties of the wife of a husbandman given in Fitzherbert’s “Book of Husbandry” (1534).

“First in a morning when thou art waked and purposiste to rise, lyfte up thy hands and blesse thee.... And when thou art up and redy, then first sweep thy house, dress up thy dysshe-board, and sette all things in good order within thy house. Milk thy kye, suckle thy calves, sye up thy mylke, take up thy children and array them, and provide for thy husband’s brekefaste, dinner, souper, and thy children and servants, and take thy part with them. And to ordayne corn and malt to the myll, to bake and brue withal whanne need is. And meete it to the mill and fro the mill, and see that thou have thy measure again beside the toll or else the miller dealeth not truly with the or els thy corn is not drye as it should be. Thou must make butter or cheese whan thou maist, serve thy swyne both morning and evening, and give thy poleyn[58] meat in the morning, and when tyme of the year cometh, thou must take heed how thy duckes henne and geese do lay and to gather up their eggs and when they wax brodie to get them.... And in the beginning of March or a little before is time for a wife to make her garden and to gette as many good seedes and herbes as she can and specially such as be good for the potte and to eat. [Then come lengthy and technical directions for sowing and working up flax and hemp] and thereof may they make shetes, bordclothes, towels, shirts, smocks and such other necessaries and therefore let thy distaff be always ready for a pastime that thou be not idle.... It is convenient for a husband to have shepe of his owne for many causes, and then maye his wife have part of the woll to make her husband and herself some clothes. And at the very least way she may have the locks of the sheep either to make clothes or blankets or coverlets or both. And if she have no wool of her own, she may take wool to spyn of cloth-makers and by that means she may have a convenient living.... It is a wife’s occupation to wynowe all manner of corns, to make malt, to wasshe and wrynge, to make haye, shere corn, and in tiyme of nede to help her husband to fyll the muck-wain or dung-cart, drive the plough, to load hay, corn or such other. And to go or ride to the market, to sell butter, cheese, eggs, chekyns, capons, hennes, pigs, geese, and all manner of corns, and also to bye all manner of necessary things belonging to the household and to make a trewe reckoning and account to her husband what she hath paid. And if the husband go to the market to bye or sell, as they oft do, he then to show his wife in like manner.”

It is interesting to note in this extract the mixture of natural and money economy, the appearance of domestic manufactures, and the energetic co-operation of the wife in the work of the farm. The sixteenth century would have had little sympathy with the sentimentalists who hold that womanhood in itself is a burden so heavy that all active occupations should be forbidden to the married woman.

According to Harrison[59] the standard of comfort among the agricultural classes rose markedly at this time. Chimneys became common, pewter plates and silver or tin spoons are used in place of “tinn platters and wooden spoons.” A farmer thinks his gains very small “if he have not a fair garnish of pewter on his cupboard, with so much more in odd vessels going about the house, three or four feather-beds, so manie coverlids or carpets of tapestry, a silver salt, a bowl for wine if not a whole nest, and a dozen of spoons to furnish up the suit.”

Food, too, according to Harrison, was plentiful and varied. The increase in pasture farming and the decrease in arable land had made meat (often, it is true, salted) cheaper and corn-stuffs dearer, at least in proportion. This tendency can be traced in the menus and accounts of the period, and certainly appears in the following extract:[60] “The artificers and husbandmen make greatest account of such food as they may soonest come by and have it quickliest ready. Their food also consisteth principallie in beef and such meat as the butcher selleth; that is to saie, mutton, veal, lamb, pork, whereof he findeth great store in the markets adjoining, besides souse,[61] brawn, bacon, fruit, pies of fruit, fowles of sundrie sort, cheese, butter, eggs.” A little lower down he notes that venison and a cup of wine are luxuries reserved for special occasions.

It is not easy to estimate the worth of Harrison’s testimony to the social habits of a class which he did not probably know intimately. It is certain, too, that he was not speaking here of the poorest class of labourers,[62] those who later recruited the class eligible for poor-law relief. But even making these admissions, his words seem to be evidence of a standard of comfort higher in some respects than could be attained by the corresponding classes to-day. Chicken, for instance, practically never forms part of the dietary of even the well-to-do urban artisan of the present time.

In the organisation of the wealthy household, the economic changes of the time produced important alterations. The increase in buying and selling made the landlords more anxious to dispose of their surplus produce in the markets, and on the other hand provided new luxuries on which money could be spent. There resulted a tendency, which can be traced in all the household books of the period, to limit the numbers of servants and retainers. At the same time there was a growing desire for privacy, and a widening gulf between the upper and the lower classes of society. Hence the hall, the general assembly-place for the entire household, lost its importance; dining-rooms and withdrawing-rooms for the exclusive use of the family and guests, took its place, and the servants were relegated to their own part of the house. Partly as cause of this, partly as effect, domestic administration ceases to be a career for men of better social rank, a tendency which would of course be intensified by the fact that in commerce, in literature, in exploration, &c., new opportunities were perpetually being opened up. Hence Elizabeth’s reign is a turning-point for the history both of domestic service and of domestic architecture. It was probably about this time that women superseded men as cooks and cleaners, and it is certain that the increase in Elizabeth’s reign of industries worked for profit must have diminished the production for use in the household of many articles of common domestic utility.[63]

(2) Life in the Stuart Period

For 150 years after the death of Elizabeth no startling changes occur in the organisation of the household or in its economic relations. The marked feature of this period is the existence of domestic manufactures, engaging the head of the household and his family, one or two apprentices, and sometimes a journeyman or two. It was common, indeed all but universal, for the small master manufacturers to board and lodge their employees, as it was common for farmers to board and lodge their labourers. The larger households carried on at home many of the operations—baking, brewing, washing, jam-making—which have now passed to the factory. There was a steady growth of domestic luxury and of convenience. The development of commerce made available new commodities, such as tea, coffee, cocoa, and thereby influenced social life. Furniture became more elegant, and perhaps at the same time more stuffy.

It would require much reading and research to elaborate the details of this progress, and for our present purpose it is hardly necessary, as it involved alteration in particulars but not in the general organisation of household economy. The difficulties of finding domestic servants begin, however, to make themselves felt, and are amusingly discussed by such writers as Defoe and Swift. It is at some time during this period that houses are first built in terraces and squares on an identical plan for letting purposes. But there are no sweeping changes, such as mark the eighty years before the accession of Victoria.

(3) The Influence of the Second Industrial Revolution on the Home

In the last half of the eighteenth century agriculture and industry were once more revolutionised, the former by the introduction of capitalist farming, the rotation of crops, and the further enclosure of common fields, commons, and wastes, the latter by the introduction of machinery and mechanical motor power. For a detailed account of the enormous changes consequent on these new methods of production, I must refer the reader to the special treatises on the subject,[64] but we must spend some time in considering the ways in which the home, family life, and the position of women have been modified by these industrial developments.

In the first place, the introduction of machinery meant the growth of the factory system, and in consequence work left the home, which ceased to be the institution where productive industry was carried on, and became instead a centre solely of emotional and domestic life. At the same time, the alteration in the land system made it impossible any longer to combine home weaving, spinning, &c. with subsistence farming; the worker becomes an employee in a business where the capital is owned by his employer, and he depends absolutely on the skill of his own hands for his livelihood.

Nothing could be more curious than to contrast Defoe’s celebrated picture of the wool-weaving districts of Yorkshire[65] with those districts in their present condition. Then the workers, semi-independent, farming small enclosures of two to six or seven acres, laboriously produced cloth by hand processes in their own houses. Now they work in enormous factories, fitted up with machinery which can spin and weave wool both easier and better than in earlier days. They return to their homes for rest and leisure alone. Work for wages and the home are now separated, and, unless the use of cheap electrical power brings about a counter-revolution, are likely to remain so. At the same time, since mobility is in modern economic conditions of prime importance, it is becoming less and less common for the manual worker, or indeed for the citizen of any class, to own his house, and therefore the new trade of the speculative builder comes into existence, its place being taken in some cases, specially in mining districts, by the “company” houses provided by masters for their employees.

These alterations in the framework of society inevitably influenced home life, which was still further affected at a later period by an analogous movement. Not merely the work done for wages left the home, but also many of the commodities formerly produced for its own use by each household came to be made by outside labour.

A very interesting and quite untouched field of inquiry here awaits the economist. Why, for instance, is it customary to bake bread at home in some districts and to buy it from a shop in others? Probably the explanation is to be found in the relative cheapness of fuel. Yorkshire and the North of England are close to abundant coalfields, and in the days before cheap and quick transit the difference in the price of coal in the South and North of England must have been even greater. At a time, too, before the improvement of ovens, owing to the introduction of the iron range and kitchener, the amount of fuel used for baking bread would be even larger than at present. Therefore in the south there grew up a race of housekeepers and servants unskilled in the making of the delicious, crusty home-baked loaf, while in the north, even though conditions have changed, the tradition still remains, and the weekly or bi-weekly baking day is a regular institution. But this theory does not explain why bread is not baked at home in Scotland, even in Glasgow and the districts near it, or in Fife, which are all situated right in the coal-bearing areas.

And at present there is little material for describing how brewing, jam and cake-making, biscuit-making, the making and the washing of clothes, the cleaning of furniture and carpets, &c., passed from the household to the factory and laundry. It is a process which has evidently been much quickened by the growth of town life, itself one of the most important effects of the industrial revolution.[66]

The aggregation of population in towns in the first place made the space available for household operations much smaller than was the case when the kitchen was supplemented by rows of outhouses, a green and a garden. In modern conditions, washing at home results in the discomfort of the whole family, whether that family lives in a single room or in a decent middle-class house of ten or twelve rooms. In the second place, the massing into a comparatively small area of a homogeneous population makes it easy to arrange for other methods of cleansing clothes, either in the working-class districts by the provision of municipal washing-houses, or in the more well-to-do suburbs through the appearance of steam laundries. In the same way, when each household possessed a garden it was natural to pick the fruit and make it into jam. It is a different thing to buy fruit specially for the purpose. Many housewives find that when the cost of the fruit, sugar, and extra fuel is calculated, taking into account also the dislocation of the regular routine of the household caused by the extra work, it pays them better to buy the jam ready-made. On the other hand, the use of machinery, the existence of cheap methods of transit, and the multiplication of grocers’ shops makes it increasingly possible to produce jam in large quantities actually cheaper than it can be made at home, and to distribute it quickly to the consumer.

The same cause, acting within and without the home in different ways, is resulting in a steady transference of these domestic avocations from the household. Moralists often lament this tendency, and attribute it entirely to increased love of ease and leisure among women. But it is no more possible to draw an indictment against a whole sex than against a whole people, and an alteration in custom so widespread as this which we are discussing must have deeper roots than a personal defect of laziness in particular individuals.

This removal of production for domestic use from the home operates, however, in very different ways in different cases. Sometimes the article is produced much more cheaply outside the home than within, owing to the lower cost and greater efficiency of large-scale methods of manufacture. But this is not invariably the case. Laundry-work, for instance, is probably done more cheaply in the private household. The few attempts hitherto made to provide hot cooked food from a central kitchen at a reasonable price have not been successful. On the other hand, no individual household could hope to rival Messrs. Huntley & Palmer as producers of biscuits. The factors which prevent the full economies of the large-scale method of production from being realised in the making of certain commodities are twofold. (1) Some goods are of such a kind that they must be consumed where they are produced. Jam or even plum-puddings can be made in a factory in the North of England and afterwards transferred to London. But roast beef, omelettes, and rice-puddings must be eaten within at least a hundred yards of the place where they are cooked. This obvious fact effectually retains the supremacy of the home in the provision of hot cooked food, and disposes once and for all of the cruder arguments for co-operative housekeeping. (2) Certain commodities must be made for or returned to individual owners. If, for instance, we did not trouble to receive our own sheets and towels from the laundry, but simply made a contract that each week we should be supplied with a certain number, then the washing and sorting could be done wholesale at a much cheaper rate. If we sent our own fruit to the factories to be made into jam, jam would be much more expensive.

Thus the household will compete successfully with outside agencies, in the case of all commodities which must be consumed on the spot, and the outside agencies will have only a small advantage—will do the washing or dressmaking more conveniently, but not much cheaper—when wholesale methods are forbidden by the personal interest of each consumer in one special portion of the commodities dealt with.[67]

Still, regarding the matter from the general economic standpoint, it cannot be denied that the result of the industrial revolution has been to transfer many branches of production both for profit and for use from the home to the factory.

(4) The Position of Women as Affected by the Industrial Revolution

This in its turn affected the position of women, and is probably, if not the sole, at least the most important reason for the discontent and unrest to be traced among women of many different classes in the nineteenth century. But the women belonging to the manual labouring class and the women belonging to the upper classes were influenced in different ways.

The former had always been accustomed to work for their living, indirectly if not directly. On the little farms they looked after the cow, the hens, and the garden. They did the carding and the spinning of flax and of wool. True, these industries were carried on at home, and probably the decent “manufacturer,” then literally a hand-worker, would have regarded himself as disgraced had his wife or daughters needed to go outside his home to find work.[68] But when the factory system came, with the horrible sufferings caused by the transition from one system of industry to another, the women and children always accustomed to toil at home followed their work to the factory, and there, owing to the new methods of competition and to the absence of any regulation of industry, they suffered hardships of overwork and underpayment which seem to the present generation nearly incredible.

Home life for a time almost disappeared, and the suffering and degeneration was only checked by the series of Factory Acts, imposing ever fresh and fresh restrictions on the treatment of women and children.[69] The policy underlying these acts was much criticised at the time, and was indeed not fully comprehended until recently. But it is now all but universally admitted that the Factory Acts have in the main achieved their object, and have greatly improved the position of women in the districts most affected by them; and reformers are constantly urging their extension to fresh trades.

This movement was not understood, and was in consequence opposed by the women of the middle-classes, whose position was affected quite differently by the industrial revolution. They too found their occupations within the home to a large extent destroyed. And in other ways their situation was altered. For some reason not yet explained, there appeared in the middle-classes a surplus of women. This is no doubt partly due to the colonial expansion of the period, which sent young men out to Australia, Canada, and South Africa, while their natural mates remained behind in England. It is not easy to give precise statistics, as our statistical tables make no distinction of classes, but common observation and the description of social life in the novels of the nineteenth century afford evidence of this fact. Some statistics bearing on the subject can be found in Miss Clara Collet’s[70] article, “Prospects of Marriage for Women,” and also in “Die Frauenfrage,” by Lilie Braun, pp. 157 ff. Frau Braun, whose book is marked throughout by characteristic German thoroughness, sums up:[71] “Es hat sich gezeigt, dass die Zunahme der allein stehenden Frauen, die Abnahme der Heiratsfrequenz und die wirtschaftliche Not als Ursache der Frauenbewegung in aller Lände anzusehen sind.”

But it was not merely the decreased chance of marriage which made the lives of middle-class women difficult in the last century. There was also a change in the position of the fathers, which decreased their opportunity for providing for their unmarried daughters. The middle-class man is now less and less frequently at the head of a business of his own, and is more and more frequently a salaried clerk, manager, or engineer.

Formerly the shop or farm when it passed to the eldest son was burdened with the charge of the spinster sisters, who often would help in the dairy or behind the counter. Now, when a middle-class man dies, his hold on the industrial world, so to speak, passes away with him, unless he has been at once able and willing to lay by savings out of his salary, a duty too often neglected. Briefly, therefore, the unmarried woman of the middle-classes is less likely to marry, has less to occupy her at home, and cannot so easily be provided for by her father if she remains a spinster.

Is it then to be wondered at if women insist, in increasing numbers, upon a thorough education as well as the right to enter a profession in which they can be self-supporting?[72] But the first women who decided that a way must be opened by which they could earn for themselves honourable maintenance not unnaturally fell into what we cannot but regard now as regrettable mistakes, however unavoidable these errors may have been at the time. Their great difficulties were to win admission to the universities and permission to practise what had hitherto been regarded as men’s professions. Therefore they dreaded all restrictions liable to be laid upon the entrance of women to occupations, and were led in consequence to oppose the Factory Acts, designed for the protection of women of the working-classes. It is only to-day and only partially that the woman teacher, doctor, or journalist has come to understand that the position and problems of the factory-hand are very different from her own, and that confusion is created if she insists on judging them from her own standpoint.

In the next place, they were almost forced to become masculine and aggressive in their manners and outlook upon life. In particular, the need of conformity to a system of education framed for men and not for women led to an undervaluation of domestic pursuits. It was not realised that in managing a household and in bringing up children there was scope for the most developed character and the finest education.

But with the twentieth century,[73] college-trained women themselves are coming to see that their previous neglect of those principles of science and economics which underlie household administration was unwise and unwarranted. Of that change of attitude, the new courses in home science at King’s College are the firstfruits, and this book is a small contribution to a movement which is destined, perhaps, to revolutionise housekeeping, as a band of devoted women succeeded some few years since in revolutionising the profession of nursing.

The main lines on which the influence of the industrial revolution on women’s position has operated can be but briefly indicated in this very summary sketch. Want of space prevents me from doing more than allude to other aspects of the question, such as the employment of married women, the status of women in government offices, women’s trade unions, homework and sweating, the prevention of infant mortality, the work of women in the administration of charity and in local government, together with many other developments of the one cause—the alteration between the relations of the home and of society due to the changes in our commercial and manufacturing system.

I must turn now to a study of the economics of the household as it actually exists to-day.

III. THE PRESENT ORGANISATION OF THE HOUSEHOLD

To begin with, it is perhaps worth while to notice certain broad distinctions which differentiate the household, considered merely as an economic institution, from other agencies engaged in the production of commodities and services.

One main difference is, as was noticed earlier, that the household produces use-values, and all other organisations (save some public bodies) exchange-values. Or to put the same thing in another way, the industrial world is run to make a profit; the household, on the contrary, is kept up by the contributions of its members, and exists to provide for them the necessaries and comforts of life. None the less is the work of cooking, cleaning, and serving of real economic value when carried on within the household, as people discover when they have to pay for the organisation of the same services in hotels or boarding-houses.

The second great distinction is that while any other business may expand to meet the demands of a growing market, and as a result of the increasing competency of its organiser and work-people, the household is definitely limited in scope by the numbers of the family included within it. Biscuit-makers or jam-makers, to put the matter concretely, may succeed by skilful management in enlarging their businesses until they supply their goods to hundreds of thousands of people, and earn a large profit by doing so. But the most efficient housekeeper continues all her life to organise and cater for the same number of people, and her reward for her good management does not consist in a raised salary or increased profits. It is, in fact, not pecuniary at all, but is the increased well-being of those whom she serves.

Important consequences follow from these two distinctions, some of them desirable, others the reverse. The household is preserved, as it were, as a little oasis in the midst of the surrounding commercialism. There at least exists no temptation to adulteration or sophistication, or to shoddy work intended to sell but not to last. No housewife would be such a fool as to put alum in the bread baked at home, to use decaying fruit in the tarts, or questionable meat in her pies. She can have no object save to provide the best she can for her family with the means at her disposal. This is an enormous advantage, the value of which it is hardly possible to overrate.

But the absence of profit-making has certain disadvantages. It means that while other economic organisations are being constantly spurred to increasing efficiency by the stimulus of competition, the household remains backward. A manufacturer knows to-day that he must use the most up-to-date machinery and employ the most skilled management or be beaten in the race for commercial supremacy. But housekeepers may continue (and do continue) to use old-fashioned ranges or antiquated systems of hot-water heating without any reference to the proceedings of their neighbours. Without doubt it results that new inventions make their way much more slowly in housekeeping than in profit-making industry. How rare, for instance, it is to find properly constructed grates outside very wealthy households. How badly the kitchen, larder, and scullery are planned in relation to one another. In how few cases is any attempt made to utilise electricity for cooking or removing dust, for both of which purposes admirable machines are already on the market.

But there are other factors which also contribute to the backwardness of domestic engineering. The smallness of the household is one. It pays a large hotel, for instance, to buy special machines for cleaning knives, or to instal superheated steam, for washing plates and dishes. But neither the initial expense nor the cost of running could be met out of the funds at the disposal of the small household. Another reason exists in the fact that the average housewife does not distinguish between annual and capital outlay. Unaccustomed to finance, and keeping accounts—if she keeps them at all—in a very amateurish fashion, she fails to understand that capital expenditure, let us say, on one of the little electric vacuum cleaners now on the market might pay for itself in a short time by saving the wages of a charwoman.

(a) The Organisation of the Household as Affected by the Housing Question

Then, finally, few people own their houses, and are therefore disinclined to make an outlay which would benefit their successors rather than themselves. Landlords (who are frequently retired tradesmen or elderly ladies depending on the rent of a row of houses for their sole income) are in their turn unprogressive and unenlightened. It is often hard to induce a landlord of the type indicated to consent to structural changes even if carried out at the tenant’s expense. The builders of new houses, again, are not, to put it mildly, educated in the best schools of household architecture and domestic engineering. It is true that in some suburbs, largely under the influence of the more competent architects employed by the garden city organisations, a marked improvement in domestic building is noticeable. But only too often the hot-water system is inefficient, the ventilation poor, the grates wasteful, and so on. I have never yet heard of a speculative builder who deliberately planned the laying out of the streets in the area which he was developing in such a way that the living-rooms might have a maximum and the larder and pantries a minimum of sunlight. The new roads are usually all set at right angles to the main street, and the houses rigidly planted square to the roads, regardless of the points of the compass.

All these factors, acting together, prevent that general improvement in the construction of houses which is noticeable in other branches of industry. Progress does, of course, take place. The pressure exercised by the local health authorities leads to improved drainage and plumbing; lighting, owing to the recent competition between gas and electricity, has become both cheaper and better. But an intelligent application of science and investment of capital when a house is under construction could easily effect still further improvements.

Since, however, the household is not influenced by the ordinary processes of competition, advance will probably depend on some form of co-operation among tenants. The principle of tenant co-partnership has hitherto been applied only to the construction of working-class houses, but there seems to be no reason why it should be not equally useful among the middle classes. The advantages of the organisation are that it secures to the tenant a well-built house, sometimes specially constructed to meet his wishes, while his complete mobility is not interfered with as it is by ownership of his dwelling. These apparently opposed results are obtained by the formation of a company which is the legal owner of the land and the houses; but no one is allowed to rent a house until he invests a certain amount of money in the company. Thus there are two classes of shareholders—tenant shareholders and ordinary shareholders. If a man wishes to move from the neighbourhood, then he ceases to be a tenant and becomes only an ordinary shareholder, and if he needs the money he can always sell out. Rent is paid in the ordinary way, and so too are dividends on the shares. Thus groups of people are enabled to control the conditions under which they are housed, without being hampered by the possession of a dwelling-house, which in an emergency they may be forced to sell at a serious loss. Minor advantages are greater cheapness of construction owing to wholesale buying of materials, and the provision of a more liberal repair fund than is contemplated by the ordinary landlord. It is possible, too, to provide common tennis courts, children’s playgrounds, pleasure gardens, &c., which are kept up out of the general funds of the company.[74] The “co-partnership tenants’” villages at Bournville, Hampstead, Ealing, &c., are all doing well,[75] and we may venture to hope that if the same principle were applied to the housing of the middle classes, the worst horrors of the dreary and yet pretentious suburbs constructed by the speculative builder would soon be checked.

(b) The Problems of Domestic Service

The position of the domestic servant is the next subject which demands consideration. It is a question which has aroused much acrimonious controversy, mistresses accusing maids of ignorance and inefficiency, maids objecting in their turn to the menial position and lack of freedom involved in domestic service. Yet it is curious to notice that the conditions of this branch of work have been little studied by the economist. The number of domestic servants as enumerated in the census of 1901 was 1,330,783, the largest single occupation in the country.[76] But while dozens of books and blue-books could be named discussing the position of the textile worker or the agricultural labourer, not more than three or four investigators have concerned themselves with the domestic servant, on whose efficiency our health and comfort absolutely depend.

Another curious anomaly is that domestic servants are becoming fewer in proportion to the population, although the level of their wages is very high in comparison with the usual payments for women’s work. Between 1881 and 1901 female indoor servants increased from 1,230,406 to 1,330,783, an increase of 8.2 per cent., while the population increased 25.2 per cent. Actually, then, there was a smaller proportion of the population engaged in domestic service in 1901 then in 1881.[77] What is still more remarkable is that at the younger ages the number has actually decreased. Between the ages 15-20, there is a decrease of 7.3 per cent., while in the number of females living at those ages there is an increase of 28.1 per cent. This suggests that the difficulty of finding servants will intensify as time goes on, as is indeed borne out by observation. Other women’s industries are growing very rapidly. The number of female clerks more than trebled between 1891 and 1901. In the same period, female elementary school teachers increased by over 50 per cent., and the women engaged in hospital and institution service and in workhouses and workhouse infirmaries by 41 per cent. These facts indicate that domestic service is becoming less and less popular and is losing ground, while other women’s industries are gaining.

It is our duty then to consider the causes of this state of things, which cannot be regarded with equanimity. Our steadily increasing wealth ought to make it more and more possible and desirable for more women to specialise in those basic industries of cooking and cleaning, which are of the utmost importance for the right ordering of life.

The question must be treated in reference to the general industrial and social changes of our time. Many ladies, knowing nothing of economics, discuss the matter as one of personal relations only, and when they find themselves annoyed with one incompetent servant after another, content themselves with blaming the servants as individuals without inquiring whether the difficulty has any deeper root. Or they take up a reactionary attitude, and declare that the lower classes are over-educated and too well off, and are in consequence refusing to perform their natural duties. But neither personal blame nor the semi-feudal belief that the one and only rightful destiny of daughters of bricklayers, coal miners, or small clerks is to become cooks or housemaids in the service of their betters will avail to throw any light on the difficulty of obtaining competent domestic workers. We must study carefully and without bias the conditions of that industry as compared with other industries, in order to solve the problem.

In the first place, we may note the advantages of domestic service. It is, as has been already observed, well paid. Some investigations carried out by a group of my students last year led to the conclusion that the ordinary cook, housemaid, or general servant in middle-class households costs her employer in wages, food, house-room, heating, lighting, and insurance about £50 a year.[78] I have been informed by a lady accustomed to deal with servants in a wealthy household, that board wages are usually 14s. 6d. for men servants, and 12s. 6d. and 10s. 6d. for women servants. When we remember that in the ranks from which servants are drawn,[79] a workman is comparatively well off if he is earning 35s. a week for the support of himself and his family, and that a woman who makes £1 a week is a rarity,[80] we should expect to find domestic service one of the industries in which the supply outruns the demand. Again, there is no period of apprenticeship or training necessary. The servant earns from the first day she enters service, and is often carefully trained by a mistress in cooking or waiting at table, only to leave that mistress for a better situation the moment she thoroughly understands her duties. Again, in many households the maids share in the family holidays. They spend a month at the seaside or in the country, having all their travelling expenses paid as a matter of course. Their allowance of personal holidays may not be large, but at all events their wages run on without interruption. These advantages are the more remarkable, when it is considered that they have been attained without the aid of any trade organisations at all. Trade unions for domestic workers have been formed from time to time, but their life has been ephemeral and their membership of the smallest. High wages, practically continuous employment, food and lodging usually of a standard much above that in the servant’s own home—all these are to be found in domestic work. Why, then, does it remain unpopular?

In the first place, the hours are long and irregular. A domestic servant, especially in a place where only one or two are kept, is “on duty” for at least fifteen hours a day—from 7 A.M. to 10 P.M. Even meal-hours are not free from interruption. The thoughtful mistress, it is true, will not summon her maids at dinner-time or supper-time if she can help it, but all mistresses are not thoughtful, and in any case there is the doorbell to be answered. Much of the work is not hard; in a well-managed household there should always be an hour or two of comparative leisure in the afternoon and again in the evening. But the average maid is never sufficiently free through the whole day to go out without asking leave, or to lie down for an hour should her morning work have been unusually heavy. Of some households a much blacker picture could be painted. Not merely do the maids have no leisure, but they are actually hard at work washing, cooking, ironing, serving meals, washing up, carrying coals and hot water, &c., for even a larger period than the fifteen hours which, as noted before, is the minimum of time “on duty.” These hours compare very unfavourably with the six or seven hours’ day of the elementary school-teacher, the eight hours’ day of the Civil servant, and the nine or ten hours worked in factories and in offices.

Next, there is the lack of personal freedom. This may seem a mere sentimental objection not to be weighed in the balance for a moment by sensible persons as against the solid advantages of domestic work. But sentimental objections count more decisively with women than with men. Miss B. L. Hutchins points out in a recent article that respectable girls of the working class often accept quite low wages, provided only their employment is light, clean, comfortable, and affords abundant hours of leisure. And women enter on domestic service exactly at the age at which freedom and some amount of leisure seem more valuable than high wages. Doubtless in later years many sweated drudges have wished that they had become servants instead of entering the jam-factory or the steam-laundry. But at sixteen and seventeen, when the choice was made, the situation appeared very different. I have very little doubt that one of the greatest objections to domestic service is that it removes the young woman from her own class just at the marriageable age, and therefore decreases her chances of marriage, while in some ill-governed households and in hotel and restaurant service she may be subjected to severe temptation. The widening of the gulf between rich and poor and their segregation into distinct districts increases this disadvantage.

Again, there is the fact that domestic service is strangely enough regarded as a peculiarly menial occupation, in itself a mark of a lower social grade. This is indicated by the use of the Christian name, the insistence on a uniform, and the commonness of contemptuous terms such as “slavey.” Refined people are careful to avoid the use even of the word “servant,” replacing it by “maid,” so strong is this connotation of inferiority. Here again we are on sentimental grounds. But it certainly seems undesirable, in view of the spread of doctrines of social equality, that this suggestion of a low social status should cling around the person who undertakes such important duties as cooking and washing.

Another disadvantage is the loneliness of domestic servants. In other occupations women have colleagues and companions. The general servant, coming as she does from a lively even if poor working-class home, with neighbours at hand for gossip in moments of relaxation, may find it very hard to bear up against the restraint and unnatural quietude of her first place,[81] and often ends by returning in haste to the factory industry she had been persuaded to abandon, when she will find the gaiety and lively society of girls and young men of her own age. Even when two maids are kept, they may not be congenial to one another, and one cannot deny that to share work, meals, and often bed with a woman whom one has reason to dislike, is a fate we would all wish to avoid.

Girls of higher status and more intelligence are often turned from domestic service by the fact that it affords little or no opportunity for self-improvement or recreation, or for promotion inside its own ranks. Servants cannot go to lectures or evening classes. The servant’s piano or bicycle is a common theme for jesting in the comic papers. In a large household or in a hotel promotion may be obtained, but the maid who becomes a general servant or a single-handed cook reaches the limit of her increase in income at an early age.

Many of the disadvantages noted do not apply to large households. There companionship is to be found, and promotion may be looked for. The hours are more regular, meals less interrupted, and free time easier to obtain. Hence I was not surprised when I questioned proprietors of clubs, residential hotels, and the mistresses of wealthy households to learn that most of them considered the servant difficulty to be greatly exaggerated. The housekeeper of one suite of residential flats told me she had no trouble at all in getting servants, and that she sent them off at a week’s notice if they proved unsatisfactory. “Even if I cannot get a maid to live in at once,” she added, “I can always supplement the work of the others by an extra charwoman. There are any number of outworkers to be had.” In another residential hotel all the women servants had two evenings a week free from 5 to 10.30. Here, too, there was never much difficulty in obtaining workers.

Another disadvantage of the small as opposed to the large household is that the management is often inefficient, and the equipment poor. In these residential flats, for instance, each suite had its own bathroom and lavatory, and consequently the work of carrying water was reduced to a minimum. I think, too, that the regularity of the discipline is often liked by girls, who find it hard to keep to good ways when they work alone.

On the whole, then, I see no reason to believe that domestic service is unpopular because cooking and cleaning are regarded as disagreeable occupations in themselves. It is the conditions under which it is carried on that are disliked, and if mistresses desire to have better servants, those conditions must be altered. Some of them, it must be admitted, are inherent in the present organisation of the household.[82] Some form of co-operation might obviate certain of these defects; in groups of associated homes, the domestic equipment could certainly be improved, skilled supervision and proper discipline could be more easily carried out, and the maids would have the advantages of shorter and more regular hours and of companionship with their equals. Here again it may be possible to apply the co-partnership tenants’ organisation. Many people, however, not unnaturally dread the lack of privacy and independence which such a mode of life would, they think, entail, and would prefer to endure the disadvantages of the present system rather than lose control over their own kitchen and their own servants. It is too soon yet to express an opinion. Fortunately, at Letchworth, at Brent Lodge, Finchley, and elsewhere, experiments in the provision of associated homes with a common kitchen and a common staff of servants are shortly to be tried. If successful, they will no doubt prove a boon to many people.

In the meantime one can only suggest that mistresses must endeavour individually to mitigate some of the disadvantages of domestic service. It is not higher wages that are needed, but more leisure and more society, and an absence of the foolish snobbery which regards it as an amusing joke that a servant should wish to possess a bicycle or go to a meeting or concert.

The suggestion has sometimes been made that distressed gentlewomen might find a refuge in domestic service. But “lady servants” or “mothers’ helps” only rarely prove a success. Their presence is inevitably a hindrance to the full enjoyment of family privacy, and often enough their gentility is an excuse for incompetence. But in special cases lady servants turn out well, especially as children’s nurses. The most interesting attempt to introduce them into general domestic service is that started by the Guild of the Dames of the Household at Cheltenham. A short period of training is insisted upon, while on the other hand certain privileges not usually conceded to maids must be granted, in particular, a period of two hours each day free from duty. In small and quiet households, specially in those composed of ladies only, a “Dame” would be welcomed in place of the incompetent general servant, or two Dames might take the place of the regulation cook and house-parlour maid. But it would not be easy to have one Dame demanding special privileges and imbued with different traditions in a larger household.[83]

Nor do I see any reason to expect that increased provision for domestic training alone is likely to improve the lot of mistresses who want maids. The training in the elementary schools is often given to children too young to profit by it, and is besides designed rather to enable them to be of use in their own homes than to qualify them to become cooks or housemaids in middle or upper-class households. Again, the girls who attend at the special domestic economy schools are not usually available for ordinary domestic service; the greater number of the students are being prepared either for teaching or for positions as housekeepers and matrons. While untrained girls can find a place and wages without any difficulty, working-class parents are not likely to spend money on training for domestic service; and the numbers for whom scholarships are provided must naturally be limited.