Women's Wage Labour in Rural England, c. 1250-c. 1450

Rodney Hilton’s observations about women’s work recorded in manorial accounts underpin Tine De Moor and Jan Luiten van Zanden’s influential argument that paid work for women expanded significantly after the Black Death. This article assesses the value of English manorial accounts for documenting women’s work. We analyse 1191 manorial accounts from c. 1250-c. 1450 and find that 73 per cent recorded no clear evidence of workers’ gender. Even those that record details about some workers, often also record large groups of unidentified workers undertaking key tasks such as harvest work. These are the ‘known unknowns’ of the article’s title: they make it impossible to quantify change over time. However, manorial accounts do provide evidence that women were an important part of the agricultural labour force on some manors both before and after the Black Death, undertaking a wide range of tasks and sometimes receiving wages that were higher than men’s

Historical demography · Identification (biology) · Wage · Wage labour · Historical Economic and Social Studies · Medieval Architecture and Archaeology · Medieval Literature and History