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The Labor-Leisure Relationship in Stuart England and Its American Colonies Author(s): Nancy L. Struna Source: OAH Magazine of History, Vol. 7, No. 1, History of Sport, Recreation, and Leisure (Summer, 1992), pp. 15-18 Published by: Organization of American Historians Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25162850 . Accessed: 16/04/2014 16:27

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The Labor-Leisure Relationship

in Stuart England

and its American Colonies

Nancy L. Struna

One of the lesser known themes in

the social histories of Stuart En

gland and the early English colonies on the

mainland of North America involves lei sure and labor. This essay focuses on the

"problem" of the residual preference for

leisure during the Stuart era, its effect on

the trading company outposts like

Jamestown, and the transformation of the

labor-leisure relationship in both

England and the colonies in the 1620s

and 1630s (1). Like generations of ordinary

English men and women, some citi

zens of Stuart society preferred lei sure to labor, a cultural pattern that interfered with the goals of both

reformers in the old world and plant ers in the new. In time, however,

reform-minded advocates of a new

labor order gained ascendancy in

England. By the 1630s, they also did so in the colonies, where labor ac

quired a new meaning and undermined

the residual leisure preference. In the

process, these English immigrants trans

formed not only the general history of

Anglo-America but also the particular his

tory of leisure and recreation.

This story begins in England at the

opening of the seventeenth century. James

I had just ascended the throne, and from

Elizabeth he inherited a land that was in

dire straits. Since 1540, the population had

increased from three to four million and the

country was unable to cope with even the

simplest consequences?increased de

mands for food, clothing, and shelter?of

the ongoing agricultural and industrial revo

lutions. Large estates had been divided and subdivided among yeomen, husbandmen, and renters, and many men and women

were set adrift. With the royal treasury

nearly bankrupt, heated parliamentary de

The early seventeenth-cen

tury reformation of labor

also had to be a reformation

of leisure.

bates ensued. Experiments undertaken to

increase grain yields, mining, and local

crafts turned into for-market manufactures.

Eventually, of course, the benefits of these

practices would come?especially secure

and sufficient supplies of food and a wide

array of manufactures?but they would not

develop soon enough to help many Stuart

citizens.

A solution to one aspect of this eco

nomic and social chaos had, however, al

ready developed among a group of men

who had been involved in the increasingly

important exploration and colonization movement. About two decades before

James became king, Walter Raleigh and the two Richard Hakluyts, uncle and

nephew, set up an English outpost on the

mainland of North America, with the aim

of securing resources for English indus

tries and work for England ' s un- and under

employed. The project on Roanoke

island ended mysteriously, but the

dream of improving the economy of

the old world by developing the new

one survived. Faced with the same

needs, interests and problems at the

beginning of James's reign, Richard

Hakluyt the younger worked with a

group of merchants, the London

Company (the Virginia Company) to do just that.

In 1607, the London Company sent two groups of men to establish a commercial outpost in Virginia,

which later became the settlement of

Jamestown. Thirteen years later, the same

company, in concert with a group of West

Country merchants, did precisely the same

thing; it sent two groups of men to what

became Plymouth in Massachusetts. In

1623, another trading company, the

Dorchester Company of Adventurers, sent

two groups of men to found a commercial

plantation at Cape Ann. And so the move

ment continued, through the establishment of Salem between 1625 and 1628.

Summer 1992 75

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In all cases the outposts were unmiti

gated disasters. None of the plantations

produced the desired furs, fish, minerals or

timber for export. Additionally, death

rates were extraordinarily high, some

times reaching ninety percent. At fault, of

course, were the companies' populating

policies and, by extension, the people whom

they sent to achieve their "noble endes"

(2). One group consisted of "planters,"

generally the sons of nobles and some

landed gentlemen, who went to govern the

outposts. The other group was made up of

the real workers?peasants, debtors, crimi

nals and unskilled laborers?who were to

provide the labor in building, planting,

mining, fishing, and trading with Native

Americans for furs. Unfortunately, espe

cially for the colonists themselves who

died in droves, neither of the groups was

prepared for its tasks or for the harsh

reality of life in a different environment

and climate. As most contemporary sources suggest, the gentlemen-planters

and the company servants did everything but work. They ran away to live idly

among the Native Americans or they just lived in idleness; they bowled in the streets;

they played games and hunted when they should have been constructing shelters or

planting crops. In short, they behaved as

did their contemporaries at home, mani

festing what Peter Mathias has called a

leisure preference.

In late Elizabethan and early Stuart

England, many people enjoyed a variety of

recreations?ranging from animal baiting contests to ball games to carnivalesque

dancing and even to illicit sexual encoun

ters which had a great deal of meaning for

them, more so perhaps than did work. In

deed, there is virtually no evidence to sug

gest that many yeomen, artisans, servants,

and laborers preferred work over recre

ation. As long as there were few consumer

goods to purchase and little incentive to

save, most people worked just enough to

earn or produce enough to insure day-to

day existence. Real energy went into church

and community gatherings, to festivals and

games, to respites and alehouse visits.

What English governors observed as

the "problem" of the leisure preference and

insufficient labor existed for some time, with various governments trying to resolve

it in various ways. Invariably they failed, to the great dismay of particular segments of English society. In fact, in places as far

flung as Chester and York in the north, to

Manchester and Shrewsbury in the mid

lands, to Southampton and Salisbury in the

south, two major blocs of people emerged who found fault with both popular recre

ations and the governments' efforts to regu late labor and leisure. One group worked to control the disorder endemic in many local recreational scenes and to contain the

incidences of theft, drunkenness, assaults, and sexual improprieties. In northern and

central England, this relatively moderate

coalition consisted of gentlemen who could no longer afford the expense of patroniz

ing traditional festivals and festivities, own

ers and managers of agricultural and indus

trial enterprises, and pragmatic politicians who recognized that the suppression of

local recreations also translated into asser

tions of local control.

To the east and in some sections of the

south, on the other hand, were more ideo

logically-bound reformers. Some even

called themselves "new men." A fairly diverse lot in terms of occupation, they often shared a particular brand of Protes tantism which had no room for personal license and little respect for the residual

"libertie" to recreation (3). These "Calvin

ists" believed that the spiraling numbers of

vagrants and enclosure and food riots were

not the stuff of ordinary, traditional social

disorder. They also feared that the

economy was on the verge of collapse and

that the sins of immorality, imprudence, and idleness threatened to unleash "the

great wrath of God [which] hangeth over

us." Consequently, where they dominated, as in Essex and Sussex, they lashed out

against simple village games "for fear of the

tumult of the people," at the "superfluous numbers of idle wakes," and at mixed danc

ing, which was the "storehouse and nursery of bastardy" (4). In Stafford, magistrates even turned may poles into fire ladders.

Despite their differences, these two

groups of opponents of popular recreations

generally agreed that such practices stood

in the way of a more orderly and produc tive social and economic order. They also

generally agreed on two goals of this new

order. First, they wanted to reconstruct

England as an economically productive and efficient country with adequate sup

plies of food, textiles, and other industrial

goods for home consumption, as well as for

export. Second, they sought to restructure

relations among people and to base the

foundations of social discipline not on

inherited privilege but on the productive

capabilities and talents of competitive in

dividuals. A third goal was sought only by the Puritans. They intended to create a

godly, moral society in which Englishmen and women were responsible to and for one another.

Proponents of the new economic and

social vision called for new approaches to

the problems of labor. First, there was the

matter of men and women who could not or

would not work. The solution was to

criminalize vagrancy and jail offenders, and establish work houses and expand the

system of apprenticeship. The second prob lem was one of excess labor, one remedy for which was to ship England's surplus human resources across the Atlantic to mine

the new world's natural resources. A third

issue involved the structure of labor and the

government of the workplace. To solve

this, industrial and agricultural reformers

expanded the old system of apprenticeships and servitude. They put into place emer

gent proto-bureaucracies, with foremen and

overseers responsible to farm and factory owners as well as for their hired and inden

tured underlings. The reorganization of labor required

more than just a set of old and new mecha

nisms imposed on laborers by employers, however. In fact, as the later histories of

England and America suggest, laborers

could only become significantly more pro ductive once they conceived of new ends

for work, especially in terms of consump tion. This connection lay some years in the

future; but another interpretation of work

began to emerge, especially among Cal

vinists who explained and explicated the

"calling" doctrine. At its core was the

notion that labor was more than just neces

16 O AH Magazine of History

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sary; it was a social duty. The message was

appealing. Yeomen, gentry, merchants,

mine and factory owners, and crafts people,

among others, began to accept the proposi

tion that labor, theirs as well as their ser

vants, did produce tan

gible outcomes and that

it could mean the dif

ference between secu

rity and poverty. They wanted to improve their standard of liv

ing, to make their small

businesses successful,

and to achieve politi cal power and influ

ence. Moreover, they

recognized another

side of the argument: that thrift and frugality and hard work were

meaningless if idleness

and waste persisted and

if the discipline of work

and the workplace were not reinforced by a parallel discipline in

leisure.

The early seven

teenth-century refor

mation of labor, then,

also had to be a refor

mation of leisure. This

in part helps to account

for the sometimes vi

cious assault by the

"industrious sort" on

popular recreations, one

phase of which was

played out in the con

troversy surrounding

King James's "Decla

ration of Sports" in

1617 and 1618. This

royal edict forbade rec

reations on Sunday

mornings but permit ted them in the after

noon, a compromise

which pleased few people. However, the

movement to reform leisure and labor also

helps to account for growing strength of the

Sabbatarian movement, especially as that

emerged after 1620. The strict Sabbath was

a necessary component of a rigorous and

disciplined work life: it was a day of rest, the

one day of rest in a week of work days.

Finally, in 1625, after more than a century

The Bettmann Archive

The High and Mightie Com mendationofthcverrueofaPoc

ofGWo?/o.

Full of wit without ofFence,of mirth without obfixnitie, of pleafure without fcurrUitie, and

of good conte? without diftafte.

Whcreunto is added theralbiit batteil fought be. twecne the Norfolk Cock and the

WisbkhCock.

written \ifti?mm1U?i#.

LONDON, Printed for F. Owfer, T, *B*fer,an<

M DC XL 11.

This woodcut from 1642 illustrates some of the recreational activities challenged by reformers in

English society.

of foiled attempts, a law defining the Sab

bath as a day free from labor, unnecessary travel, and "unlawful sports" gained the

assent of Parliament and the King (5).

In practice, the strict Sabbath was more

austere than the law mandated. The statute

had not proscribed lawful recreational prac tices, but some of the "industrious sort"

carried the attack on recreations beyond the

limits of the law by

attacking all recre

ations. In part, of

course, this was a mat

ter of morality and so

cial order; even lawful

recreations resulted in

crime, drunkenness,

and fornication. But

the attack apparently also drew upon some

reformers' interpreta

tion of the relationship of sporting practices to

labor. In the late six

teenth century, Henrie

Bullinger, a Swiss

Protestant, suggested

that active sports were

forms of bodily labor.

As such, he concluded,

neither they nor any other recreations that

detracted from bodily rest and service to God

should occur on the

Sabbath. Several En

glish Puritans, includ

ing Richard Green

ham and Nicholas

Bownde, came close

to replicating Bullin

ger's position. Still

others, like William

Perkins, argued that some "moderate" rec

reations benefitted la

bor (6). Perkins took the

relationship between

labor and recreations

a step farther when he

declared that recre

ations should only oc

cur on days of labor. Non-puritans, most

notably Francis White, the Anglican bishop of Ely, eventually followed suit. In 1635

he clearly stated that recreation, especially

Summer 1992 17

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among servants, "belongs not to rest, but to

labour." As such, he continued, servants'

recreations "must be granted on days of

labour" and not on the Sabbath. Shortly thereafter, official support for this position

emerged. In 1644 Parliament, now a fun

damentally non-royalist, reformist Protes

tant body, illegalized two remaining Sun

day recreational traditions: festivals of

wakes and ales. Three years later the same

body acted more directly on White's rec

ommendation: it designated the second

Tuesday in each month as a day of "recre

ation and relaxation" (7). This new law,

plus the Sabbath legislation, enabled the

reformers to control leisure; and in the

context of the persisting leisure prefer ence, the control of leisure was ultimately control of labor and laborers.

Now we can return to the colonies,

where two kinds of supporters of the new

labor order secured land, first in Virginia after 1618 and then in New England and

Maryland after 1628. One group consisted

of landed proprietors, merchants, and mid

dling rank planters who came to dominate

in the Chesapeake, while the second group consisted of more radical ideologies, many of them Puritans in New England. Both

groups, derived from the "industrious sorts"

in England, came for land and brought with

them significant numbers of servants and

laborers. For several reasons, however,

neither group endured the dilemma of the

traditional leisure preference that the trad

ing companies had experienced. First, few

of the new migrants acquired their servants

and laborers from among the "poorer sorts."

Instead, their workers were less affluent

relatives, neighbors, skilled crafts people, and laborers, many of whom shared the

interests and aspirations of the free men

and women. Second, the traditional En

glish master-servant relationship acquired a vitality unknown in England. Indentures

and apprenticeships were normative and

even normal relationships. The contracts

had specific provisions for both labor and

leisure behaviors; the system of bondage was enforced both by the weight of per sonal relationships and by institutions like

the courts and churches. Third, the condi

tions of labor were different than they were

in England. The simple fact of the matter

is that the colonies did not have un- and

under-employment; labor was scarce. Fi

nally, and perhaps most important for the

servants, at the end of their servitude lay the prospect of land?and the wealth that

depended on it.

The arrival of members of the new

labor order in the colonies, as well as the

material conditions of North America, ended the unfettered leisure of ordinary colonists. Virtually no evidence exists to

suggest that either laborers or their masters

regularly took time from work to play games, to visit with passersby, or to go to

a tavern or alehouse for mid-day or

evening

meals and a game or two; and this pattern is probably not simply a function of incom

plete records. In fact, one account of the course of work makes the point quite dra

matically. This is a ballad about the expe riences of a female indentured servant in

Virginia, appropriately subtitled "The Dis

tressed Damsel." Since she had arrived

from England, the piece began, "the axe

and the hoe have wrought my overthrow."

For five years, she had known only "sor

row, grief and woe." Each dawn brought a

common regime: "So soon as it is day, to

work I must away;" and what play she had

was only "at Plow and Cart." In all, her record ended, "in misery I spend my time

that hath no end" (8). Thus, in the second quarter of the

seventeenth century, the course of recre

ations among Englishmen and women on

the mainland of North America became a

constricted version of traditional English

practices. By the 1630s, contests against the Native Americans had virtually ceased,

while animal baits and ball games emerged

only after mid-century. Wrestling, cudgel

ing, fencing, ninepins, pitching the bar, and even poaching

were also conspicu

ously rare. Even the recreations that did

occur were not as commonplace or as

stylized as were their old world corollaries. On rare occasions, some colonists did play

cards and gamble, but neither practice occurred within the extensive network of

alehouses and festivals that existed in En

gland. Only members in the Virginia Coun

cil, the small and powerful advisory body

to the royal governor, raced horses, which

remained few in number. Hunting, for

which equipment did exist, lacked the gran deur and the gore of the sport in England. In all, few sports that were common in

contemporary England regularly punctu ated life in the colonies. And so it remained until the final decades of the century.

?ndnotes 1. This article is drawn from the author's

forthcoming book, Sport and the

Changing Relationship of Work and

Leisure in Early America. Only the sources quoted here are cited.

2. Richard Hakluyt, "Discourse of West ern Planting," in The Original Writ

ings and Correspondence of the Two

Richard Hakluyts, ed. E.G.R. Taylor,

2 vols. (London, 1935), II: 282.

3. L.A. Govett, The King's Book of Sports (London, 1890); Samuel R. Gardiner,

The Constitutional Documents of the

Puritan Revolution, 3d ed. (Oxford,

1906), 99-103; James Tait, "The Dec

laration of Sports for Lancashire,"

English Historical Review 32 (Octo ber 1917): 561-68.

4. David Underdown, Revel, Riot and Re

bellion: Popular Politics and Culture

inEngland, 1603-1660 (Oxford, 1985), 50-51 ; William Harrison, The Descrip tion of England, ed. George Edelen

(Ithaca, N.Y., 1968), 36; John

Northbrooke, "Distractions of the Sab

bath" (London, 1579), 175-76.

5. Christopher Hill, Society and Puritan

ism in Pre-Revolutionary England (London, 1964), 161.

6. William Perkins, Works, 3 vols. (Lon

don, 1616-1618), I, 774-775.

7. Francis White, "A Treatise of the Sab

bath-day" (London, 1635), 234; Hill,

Society and Puritanism, 197.

8. Quoted in Nancy F. Cott, ed., Root of Bitterness (New York, 1972), 31.

Nancy L. Struna is Associate Professor in

the Department of Kinesiology and Affili ate Associate Professor in the Department

of History at the University of Maryland,

College Park. She has published several

articles on sport and colonial America.

18 O AH Magazine of History

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