Twickings, Batt, Work.

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.)