Tom Johnson’s LRB review (Vol. 48 No. 6 · 2 April 2026; archived) of The Experience of Work in Early Modern England by Jane Whittle, Mark Hailwood, Hannah Robb, and Taylor Aucoin opens with a passage containing a goodly selection of little-known specialized terms:
Adam Smith began his Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations by arguing that the division of labour was the key to the prosperity of advanced economies. It made the production of goods far more efficient, allowing the creation of cheap commodities that could be enjoyed by everyone. ‘The woollen coat,’ he writes, ‘which covers the day labourer, as coarse and rough as it may appear, is the produce of the joint labour of a great multitude of workmen.’ He listed the shepherds, wool sorters, carders, dyers, spinners, weavers, fullers and dressers who ‘must all join their different arts in order to complete even this homely production’. The division of labour wove all these people together in unknowing co-operation, such that ‘the very meanest person in a civilised country’ had at their disposal better stuff than ‘many an African king, the absolute masters of the lives and liberties of ten thousand naked savages’. Civilisation itself consisted in the miracle of specialisation.
Smith was far less interested in what the division of labour looked like in practice. His breezy lists of workmen elide the generations of clever hands and centuries of folk knowledge required to make that coarse woollen coat. To begin with, you needed to know a shearling from a gimmer lamb, or hire someone who did. In 1611 Henry Bankes employed two shepherds, Durington and Blackwell, to value some lambs in Yorkshire; it turned out he was overpaying by sixpence a head. Then you had to set your sheep in a pasture, and send someone, perhaps a young servant like Jacob Jackson of Hurworth in County Durham, to mark their ears so that you knew which were yours (theft was common), and paint them with tar to keep them warm through the winter and spring. In June they would be brought down from the pastures and washed in a river before being sent to the shearing men. If you couldn’t afford sheep of your own, you could go into the fields after the clip and gather the leftover scraps.
Once the wool was off, it needed to be washed. Christine Cooper had to cull ‘about seven todds of very coarse and feeble tarry’ wool from tegs, scouring off the tar and sorting it for carding. The wool wasted in the process was called ‘twickings’ – another chance for the gleaners. Once carded and the fibres smoothed into a fluffy substance known as ‘batt’, the wool could be spun into yarn. Spinning was women’s labour, and women were doing it constantly: in street doorways, while chatting to their neighbours, in the back rooms of their houses while they watched over their infants and kept cauldrons of ale from boiling over. Low-status and badly paid, spinning was so ubiquitous it was simply called ‘work’; the distaff was a symbol of womanhood. Twenty-year-old Joanna Pittman of Cullompton in Devon earned sixpence a week spinning at a neighbour’s house. She was paid by the week ‘but may go from them at every week’s end if she please’. Historians have estimated that between 50 and 65 per cent of the labour required to turn wool into cloth was made up of carding and spinning.
Only after the wool became yarn could it be entrusted to male artisans, and even then with some misgivings. Women were rarely involved in the relatively well-paid labour of weaving, but after hours at the distaff, they knew their stuff. Mary Dawdon of Masham in Yorkshire gave eleven pounds of yarn to James Thompson in August 1695, but when he returned the finished product she was sure he had cheated her. ‘[It] being fine wool she did expect to have again eight yards of fine cloth, the list of the said run web being all white, but … Thompson did bring [her] a much coarser woollen web with a black list, [she] being very certain that it was not her web.’ Once woven, the cloth had to be ‘litted’ or dyed – the spinster Jane Browne was hired to dye some wool green, blue or white in 1630 – and if it was one of the loose-woven ‘old draperies’ such as kersey, it had to be fulled (or ‘tucked’) to draw the fibres closer together, and napped to remove loose hairs from the surface of the cloth, ready for cutting.
Johnson goes on to discuss the difficulty of analyzing work in the premodern era:
Yet there remain significant problems with using data on wages and the organisation of labour to understand the surge in economic growth in the 17th and 18th centuries. This is partly because the data itself is not as sound as it first appears. Premodern records are often incomplete, so historians must make assumptions. In order to calculate annual wages that can be used as the basis for measures of productivity or living standards, for instance, it has often been assumed that people worked a five-day week. Yet we also know that work patterns varied a great deal by season and there was no strict dichotomy between days for labour and days for leisure. Most servants, living in the homes of their employers, were given only half a day off at most. Sunday was a day of rest, but not for everyone: Benjamin Hooper, a shoemaker’s apprentice in Somerset, ran away in 1650 ‘because his master did make him work upon the sabbath days’, cleaning shoes, ‘packing of wares’ and managing the shop. There is a mismatch between the clean threads of modern econometrics and the rough batt of 17th-century labour relations.
A great deal of work, moreover, yielded compensation in forms other than money wages. In 1669 John Corker, a cobbler in Rotherham, was receiving pieces of scrap iron in exchange for ‘mending shoes for the workmen’ and their wives at a forge. He took the iron three miles down the road to a blacksmith in the village of Whiston, whose servant and apprentice weighed and ‘presently wrought [it] up’ in the shop. Fishermen of South Huish in Devon were accustomed to receiving their payment in the form of the catch itself: as many as forty men stood on the shore to haul in the seines of mackerel, and each received his share. The time of year when most rural people worked for wages was the autumn harvest, when every spare hand was needed to reap, gather and bind the crop: customary forms of payment were honoured, as labourers received food and drink from their employers.
Wage data, naturally, only tells us the kinds of labour that were done for wages. And yet in a premodern economy organised around household production, a vast portion of work – most of it done by women – was never compensated and only occasionally recognised. In the 1680s John Wood’s neighbours noted archly that his wife had been entrusted with very few duties: ‘only with the necessary affairs of housekeeping incumbent of a wife to look after … as the taking care to provide meat and other necessaries for the family and the making of butter and cheese and such like’ – the small matter of countless hours at the dairy churn. Anthony Fitzherbert wrote in 1523 of ‘an olde common saying, that seldom doth the husbande thrive without leve of his wyf’.
Historians concerned with measuring growth haven’t been generous in their recognition of women’s work (even today the UN refuses to include housework and care work in its calculations of GDP). […]
It is the great originality of The Experience of Work, a research project led by Jane Whittle and now published with her research team Mark Hailwood, Taylor Aucoin and Hannah Robb, to have found a solution to this problem. Rather than looking at financial records that yield data on wages and prices, they have turned to oral testimonies given before law courts, in which witnesses narrated the circumstances leading up to a crime or conflict. These sources don’t tell us much about wages or prices – they contain relatively few figures – but reveal a great deal about everyday life.
If that kind of thing interests you, you will want to read the whole thing. (Warning: may induce rage if you allow yourself to identify with premodern women.)
The non-winged bat words are of unclear origin: maybe French, maybe Germanic. That the textile senses, batt, batting, stem from the lump and stick senses is also somewhat conjectural. The OED admits that there might have even been three words before, now hopelessly tangled.
I was fascinated to see South Huish appearing at Languagehat. I wonder if I’m the only person here who has actually been to South Huish. I know North Huish much better, though it’s even less well known. I don’t suppose any fishermen are paid in mackerel today.
You may very well be! So is it “Hew-ish,” as one would guess from the spelling?
I would have guessed it was one of the more obscure Shetland islands.
South Uist is in the Hebrides, but is perhaps etymologically unrelated to S. Huish?
Yes “Hew-ish”.
One of the best cliff walks you can find in England goes from Bolt Head to Bolt Tail, which are legally within South Huish (though no one ever called called Bolt Tail South Huish).
North Huish is, guess what, further to the north, and mainly agricultural (no coast). The principal village is Avonwick, which is, or was, mostly the property of the owner of Black Hall, the nearest to a stately home that North Huish can offer, though very small and modest by the standards of famous stately homes. It would probably pass unnoticed if you plonked it down in the gardens of Chatsworth, say. It was bought by my great great great great uncle Hubert Cornish when he retired from being a Judge in Calcutta in the service of the Honorable East India Company. He had no legitimate children, and he left it to my great great great grandfather James Cornish. I am the nearest thing that exists to a direct male descendant, but my great grandmother didn’t inherit it because she got married to someone her father disapproved of because he wasn’t as rich as he thought he ought to be. Anyway, although the present owner is only my third cousin we know her well, and have often been to Black Hall.
Avonwick is on the River Avon, one of the hundred or so (I exaggerate) River Avons you can find in England, called that from the Welsh word Afon, which means river, so they are all River Rivers.
So, now you know why I’ve heard of South Huish and know North Huish very well.
“Batting” is also a stonemason’s term. To be “batted” means that the surface of a stonework block has been decorated (“dressed”) with finely chiselled parallel grooves. (Confusingly, to a bricklayer a “bat” is a piece of a brick, shortened lengthwise, and the original brickbat, not to be further confused with a bat brick…).
Some years ago I noticed this sense was missing from OED, and let them know. I no longer have access, so don’t know whether they took this up.
The OED does have the noun bat in that sense:
But it doesn’t appear to have the verbal sense. (The entries are from 1885.)
In the important area of fantasy etymology, I wonder whether North and South Huish influenced Richard Cowper’s formation of the word “huesh”, meaning “clairvoyance” or “see with clairvoyance”, in his fantasy series The White Bird of Kinship, set partly in a post-sea-level-rise Cornwall. He said he started from “huer” (also “conder” or “b(a)ulker”), a Cornishman stationed at a high point on the coast to watch for schools of herring or pilchard. “Huish” might have inspired his addition of -esh.
Wikipedia answers a question that came to my mind: The schools/shoals of fish are visible because they make the water look bluer. And it says the huer alerted the fishers by shouting “Hevva! Hevva!” as one naturally would.
I like the stories, collected in The Road to Corlay, A Dream of Kinship, and A Tapestry of Time, except that in my opinion the second-last story is marred by implausible sequel-mongering. Some here may remember the first story, “Piper at the Gates of Dawn”, F&SF, 1976.
Richard Cowper’s real name was John Middleton Murry, Jnr., and he was the son of a famous critic. He also wrote mundane fiction under the nickname Colin Murry.
Some here may remember the first story, “Piper at the Gates of Dawn”, F&SF, 1976.
I had pretty much stopped reading sf by then; here’s the relevant issue of F&SF (my favorite mag).
The whole moving or sentimental “Piper” story is readable at Google Books, at least in the U.S.
ETA: “Huesh” doesn’t occur in that story. Also, most of the rest of the trilogy isn’t available there.
School and (that sense of*) shoal are a doublet, but the precise story of the latter is not clear. The word existed in Old English as scolu (“troop, division of an army, multitude, grouping”) but the relevant sense** disappeared from written records for hundreds of years. This may be related to the fact that through much of Middle English, French was the language of military affairs. School, referring to fish, was borrowed from Dutch in late Middle English. Shoal, in the same sense, is of less clear origin. The OED speculates that it may have been a survival that had merely gone unrecorded; or it may have been re-borrowed from Dutch (but why re-borrow it with a sound change, when Dutch and English already both had it with /sk/?); or it might have come from a Flemish dialect that already had (something closer to) the sibilant.
* The other water-related sense of shoal is probably a doublet of later-attested shallow. They may further be related to shell and scale, if the original Germanic sense was “thin.”
** The educational sense, derived from the “grouping” sense, persisted of course.
Coincidence time: It was just yesterday, looking up info on novels about sea level rise, that I came across Cowper/Murry and The White Bird of Kinship. IIRC his father, friend of Lawrence and that ilk, naturally thought it was rubbish.
I planned that.
I wonder whether you’re combining two stories, though. In 1954 JMM Senior was upset by “Colin”‘s first novel, The Golden Valley, based on their family, and it wasn’t published till 1958, the year after Senior died [footnote]. “Piper” was published in 1976, and I’ll be surprised if Junior had written it while his father was still alive.
Mike mentioned the batting tool of stonemasons here in 2013. I wonder if there’s any relation to a sense of the verb that the OED does have, “To fasten by beating”, marked obsolete with two citations from the 1790s from the same source (in two editions) about stone construction.
Related to “batten down the hatches”?
Yesterday I confirmed the Hew-ish pronunciation, and that’s certainly how I and people I know pronounce it, but I suspect that many of the people who live there drop the H, as is common in Devon. There is a saying that goes “‘Accombe, Daccombe, Coffinswell: all begins with a.” (It makes more sense if you put ‘all’ in quotes.) Haccombe, Daccombe and Coffinswell are villages close to Newton Abbot.
-combe is a Devon spelling of a word that David Eddyshaw will recognize as cwm, meaning valley. Apparently it also exists in Brittany, because 35 years ago we had some plumbing work done in our apartment, and the plumber was M. Combe, who said that his name meant valley. (A later plumber that we had had the very appropriate name of
M. Chaudeaux.)
You apparently batten down the hatches by covering them with tarps (British “tarpaulins”) and holding the edges down with battens, strips of wood. The OED says this “batten” comes from “baton”, which the British pronounce almost the same way. It gives nothing farther back than Old French baston.
But Wiktionary says this “batten” comes from Latin battuo, which may ultimately be related to “beat”, whereas “baton” is “Inherited from Old French baston, probably from a Vulgar Latin bastōnem, itself a modification of Late Latin bastum, or possibly noun use of the verb *bastāre, from Ancient Greek βαστάζω (bastázō)” which means lift, carry, touch.
I’m not sure I’ve answered your question.
I thought you battened down a hatch by sticking a batten through a hasp or hasps. (Edit: I might mean “shackles”.) Learn something every day.
@A. C.-B. You will enjoy the old photographs and the comments they have elicited if you search for “North Huish (Scotland) Facebook.” A number of websites will appear.
Well, no, but I’ve learned a lot. 🙂
I’ve been to Hope, also legally within South Huish, and so presumably pretty close to the village on the way there. I didn’t do the walk between Bolt Tail and Bolt Head, but I’m going back to that part of the world next week, so I’ll bear the recommendation in mind. Of interest to connoisseurs of oddly-spelt English placenames in the area is Aveton Gifford [ˈɔːtn̩ ˈdʒɪfə(ɹ)d].
Is that Hope as in ON hóp n./hópr m. “cove”(!)?
Hope is usually (in my experience) called Hope Cove, so according to your etymology it’s Cove Cove, like the many River Rivers and the Tar Tar Pits in Los Angeles.
To Jerry F’s point, if the OED has the right analysis, that would make Johnny Cash’s wordplay lining up “batten” with “Baton Rouge” (noted recently in a comment on another thread) more etymologically defensible.
I’m not sure if I’ve ever actually visited Aveton Gifford, but I’ve certainly been close to it. The pronunciation is not as weird as it may seem when you realize that an alternative name of the Avon is Aune. I hope you enjoy your visit next week. Let us know if you do the walk, and if so if you agree with my comment on it. It must be at least 40 years since I did it.
Hope is apparently from Old English hop, ‘small enclosed valley’, so not Cove Cove.
Same Germanic word, I guess, but different meanings.
Actually, I learn that ‘cove’ can mean “sheltered valley” as well, so even if they in this case have different meanings, they are examples of parallel development – the basic concept being something like “sheltered space”.
We did (h)ope back in 2005.
Thanks. I wasn’t here in 2005, but I should have noticed the revival in 2021.
I left a comment there, also emending my hope comment above.
the The Tar tar pits
The actual site of the tar pits uses the name “Rancho La Brea.”
Yes, I’ve been there. But third parties often call the place “the La Brea tar pits”.
I know I do.