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Women's Work Reconsidered: Gender and Wage Differentiation in Late Medieval England Author(s): John Hatcher Source: Past & Present, No. 173 (Nov., 2001), pp. 191-198 Published by: on behalf of Oxford University Press The Past and Present Society Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3600844 Accessed: 27-06-2015 15:45 UTC

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DEBATE WOMEN'S WORK RECONSIDERED:

GENDER AND WAGE DIFFERENTIATION IN LATE MEDIEVAL ENGLAND

The debate over whether working women enjoyed a 'golden age' in the later middle ages has become livelier in recent years, as fundamental disagreements have arisen over the extent and signi- ficance of any advance in status and material well-being. The parameters of the debate have also become less well defined, as new contributors have widened the range of criteria used to judge welfare and standards of life, resulting in confusion as well as contention over what constituted improvement, as well as how great any improvement was. Sandy Bardsley's article focusing on the wages working women earned makes a number of useful contributions which will help to clarify some areas of doubt. Her thorough analysis of the demesne accounts of Ebury manor and the records of prosecutions for breaches of the Statutes of Labourers in the East Riding of Yorkshire has thrown more light on the extremely wide range of wages which were paid for a day's work, and how pay varied according to gender, age and health. Most importantly, she mounts a convincing case against those who have claimed that after the Black Death adult women working on farms came to earn daily wages which were the equal of those paid to adult men, and she shows how evidence of wages paid to gangs which included workers of both sexes, and of some higher-paid women earning as much for a day's work as some lower-paid men, has been misinterpreted as equal pay for women.

All of these findings are welcome and valid. But such is the complexity of this field, and the intermittent and ambiguous evidence surrounding it, that much doubt and confusion remain. Debates about the scale and significance of changes in the position of women in society are bound to continue, but if we ask precise and manageable questions of the evidence, in this instance that

' Sandy Bardsley, 'Women's Work Reconsidered: Gender and Wage Differentiation in Late Medieval England', Past and Present, no. 165 (Nov. 1999).

? The Past and Present Society, Oxford, 2001

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192 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 173

which throws light on the economic status of working women, the scope for disagreement will be narrowed. Did women's wages increase in the era of labour scarcity after the Black Death? If so, by how much? Did women's wages advance relative to men's wages? Did women achieve equal pay? Did the range and quality of the employment opportunities open to women improve?

Even these questions, however, are not necessarily as straight- forward as they appear at first sight. Equal pay, or rather unequal pay, which is a central theme of Bardsley's paper, is an ambiguous concept that needs careful definition. Does it mean equal pay for equal amounts of time spent working at a task, or equal pay for equal amounts of work completed? In the later middle ages, as today, there were two main types of contract for remunerating hired workers: payment according to the time spent working (time-rates), and payment according to the amount of work done (piece-rates). Although piece-rate contracts were extremely common, Bardsley concentrates almost exclusively on time-rates, and the evidence she presents (and there is very much more besides) points unerringly to the daily wages of women in agricul- ture being significantly lower on average than those paid to men employed working on the same tasks. The persistence of this female-male wage gap Bardsley confidently ascribes to the tri- umph of 'patriarchal structures' over 'demographic crisis', and to the power of a 'convention of wage differentiation' which enabled women, along with other members of the 'second-rate' workforce, to be denied equal pay.2 Had Bardsley looked more closely at the abundant evidence of piece-rate payments for agri- cultural tasks she might have hesitated to draw this conclusion. For it indicates that male and female workers received the same pay for the same amount of work, when they were paid by the piece. After the Black Death women as well as men were employed to reap and bind corn in the fields and thresh and winnow it in the barns, and they were paid by the number of acres they reaped or bushels they threshed. Rates of pay might vary according to the difficulty of the task, for some grains were easier to work with than others, but as a general rule they did not vary according to the gender of the worker.3

2 Ibid., 5, 29. 3 We know that after the Black Death women as well as men were commonly

employed to reap and bind and to thresh and winnow grain (see, for example, S. A. C. Penn, 'Female Wage-Earners in Late Fourteenth-Century England', Agric. Hist. Rev.,

(cont. on p. 193)

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WOMEN'S WORK RECONSIDERED 193

The productivity of labour is a fundamental determinant of wages. Farmers employed labourers to get work done, and the cost of accomplishing that work was uppermost in their minds when they made decisions about which particular labourer to hire and what wage to pay him or her. A competently reaped field or threshed and winnowed bushel of wheat was not worth less to a farmer because the task had been completed by a woman. However, speed of working is a prime consideration when pay- ments are made by the day rather than by the quantity of work performed, as also is the number of hours worked, which is why wages paid by the day will tend to vary in accordance with the productivity of the workers.

A large number of jobs on the medieval farm involved hard manual labour;,the performance of which depended on brute strength and often also on stature. Strength and reach are attri- butes possessed in greater abundance by men, and because of this they are able to accomplish such tasks with greater average speed than women. Historical evidence of the superior average produc- tivity of men in the performance of a range of heavy agricultural tasks is not hard to come by, and in the contemporary world it is overwhelming. Joyce Burnette's article on the female-male wage gap during the Industrial Revolution is indispensable, and it provides an abundance of relevant information and good sense. 4 Data collected by the US army to measure the physical perform- ance of the sexes, for example, reveals that the largest gap occurs in lifting and moving external objects, with men able to lift on average around twice as much as women.5 This is exactly the capacity which results in appreciably higher male productivity in much agricultural labouring, and also helps to explain why it was extremely rare for women to be employed to dig, build stone walls or plough. Women could reap well with a sickle, but they did so more slowly than men. Estimates from England in the 1830s and 1840s indicate that a man could reap three-quarters of an acre in the same time it took a woman to reap half an acre.6 That productivity rather than gender discrimination was the main

(n. 3 cont.

xxxv, 1987), but nowhere in the abundant data on piece-rate wages is there anything to indicate that all workers were not paid the same wages for the same amount of work.

4 Joyce Burnette, 'An Investigation of the Female-Male Wage Gap during the Industrial Revolution in Britain', Econ. Hist. Rev., 2nd ser., 1 (1997).

5 Ibid., 274-5. 6 Ibid., 275.

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194 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 173

reason why male reapers appearing before East Riding justices in the 1360s were paid higher average daily wages than female reapers is further supported by the testimony of the remarkable Alice George, recorded by John Locke in 1681, who 'was reckoned rather amongst the tall than short women. .... and she said she was able to have reaped as much in a day as any man, and had as much wages'.7

The productivity of many women who worked as day labourers is also likely to have been constricted by the need to care for their families and to work in the house, which could leave them with fewer hours in the fields each day, and with the responsibility of looking after children while at work. Although little or no trace of these perpetual female chores can be found in medieval manorial documents, they do occur in literary texts and in the records of later centuries. 8

Bardsley cites mowing as a key example of the exclusion of women from higher-paid positions, and states that 'Social conven- tion dictated that only men could wield the long-handled scythe'. 9 Yet the efficient wielding of the long-handled scythe demanded unusual strength, stature and skill, and inexpert mowing lost the farmer money in depleted crops. Hence, it was not only women but the vast majority of men who were excluded from employ- ment as mowers, and the premium wages which this occupation usually commanded. '0

Differentiation between workers and their wages, based on perceived variations in productivity and skill, has been a com- monplace of casual labour markets throughout history. Workers hired and paid by the day were selected by employers according to their fitness, abilities and willingness; in other words according to how much work they were able to do in the time. Piers the Plowman acted like any sensible farmer when:

7 Quoted in Peter Laslett, The World We Have Lost (London, 1965), 109. 8 There is a brief discussion of how the duties of childcare could shape women's

employment opportunities in Judith M. Bennett, Women in the English Medieval Countryside: Gender and Household in Brigstock before the Plague (Oxford, 1987), 270-1. Burnette has collected evidence from the mid-nineteenth century, as Gilboy and others have for the eighteenth century, and found that the need to perform household chores meant that 'women usually worked fewer hours than men': Burnette, 'Investigation of the Female-Male Wage Gap', 268-9.

9 Bardsley, 'Women's Work Reconsidered', 11 and n. 20. 10 David Stone, 'The Productivity of Hired and Customary Labour: Evidence from

Wisbech Barton in the Fourteenth Century', Econ. Hist. Rev., 2nd ser., 1 (1997), 650-1.

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WOMEN'S WORK RECONSIDERED 195

At heighe pryme peres * let the plowe stonde, To ouersen hem hym-self; * and who-so best wroughte, He shulde be huryed ther-after * whan hervest-tyme come. "

On the other hand, workers with special skills only earned pre- mium wages when working on tasks which called for them, and mowers, or any other craftsmen, earned only the going rate for unskilled labour when working as common labourers. 12 If labour was scarce the less able could find work, but they would be paid lower daily wages, for the same reason that lords objected when tenants owing labour services sent a boy to do a man's work.

But wage discrimination rather than wage differentiation - that is, the paying of lower wages to workers who are equally productive on account of their gender or other characteristics - is neither rational nor efficient. In fact, systematic discrimination of this type is extremely hard to sustain in competitive markets such as those prevailing for agricultural labour in later medieval England, where in every locality scores of farmers, peasants as well as lords, sought to employ some labour from time to time. The situation implied by Bardsley, that women's labour was both excessively cheap and reluctantly and sparingly used by farmers, is hard to sustain. For, if the female-male wage ratio was lower than the productivity ratio, farmers who employed women would have lower costs than those who did not, and the latter would also suffer an additional handicap when seeking to hire sufficient labour in a time of labour scarcity. Custom and prejudice, rather than supply and demand, can only dictate wages when the occupa- tion is shielded from competition. Discrimination is more com- patible with monopolistic markets. ' Thus, in contrast to the relatively free market operating for casual agricultural labourers, in medieval towns women were systematically barred by legal and institutional means from serving apprenticeships, from working as journeymen and operating as master-craftsmen. In the countryside, too, there is scant mention of female thatchers, tilers, carpenters or plumbers, although they often served as

" William Langland, The Vision of William Concerning Piers the Plowman, ed. W. W. Skeat (Oxford, 1869), 71.

12 R. H. Britnell, 'Specialisation of Work in England, 1100-1300', Econ. Hist. Rev., 2nd ser., liv (2001), 9.

13 Burnette, 'Investigation of the Female-Male Wage Gap', 260-2; Joyce Burnette, 'Testing for Occupational Crowding in Eighteenth-Century British Agriculture', Explorations in Econ. Hist., xxxiii (1996); Gary Stanley Becker, The Economics of Discrimination, 2nd edn (Chicago, 1971).

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assistants in these crafts. It would appear that young female assistants were denied the training that was routinely given to young men, which is an example of what is termed 'pre-market discrimination', and the absence of women as supervisors is yet another reflection of a dominant patriarchy which excluded women from serving in manorial offices and positions of authority.

The range of occupations open to women and the wages they earned were determined by changes in supply and demand as well as by custom and prejudice. When arguing against significant improvements in the status and fortunes of women after the Black Death, Bardsley is in danger of confusing two issues which ought to be kept distinct, namely changes in the absolute and in the relative economic status of women. Though the degree of any betterment may be disputed, it is undeniable that peasant women, as individuals and as members of households and families, shared in the general improvement which took place in real wages and material standards of living as wages rose and food and land became cheaper, and there can be no doubt that the number and range of jobs that were open to them expanded during the scarcity of labour which prevailed over much of the later middle ages. 14

Whether female wages also improved relative to male, either when they were performing the same task alongside men or because the pay for tasks traditionally performed by women rose disproportionately, is a separate issue. Bardsley maintains that 'While the wages of unskilled workers may have increased relative to those of skilled workers, the wages of female workers relative to male workers remained constant'. " This too may be doubted. The Ebury and East Riding data that Bardsley relies on to support her argument for the stability of relative levels of remuneration during the later middle ages, though informative in some other respects, simply will not bear the weight of the conclusions that are placed on them. Gender differentiation in medieval wages is

14 For recent summaries, see Mavis E. Mate, Women in Medieval English Society (Cambridge, 1999), 27-34; Jim Bolton, 'The World Upside Down: Plague as an Agent of Economic and Social Change', in Mark Ormrod and Phillip Lindley (eds.), The Black Death in England (Stamford, 1996), 70-7. There is a severe lack of data on female wages, but Thorold Rogers concluded, without presenting his detailed evi- dence, that the pay for tasks generally performed by women, such as washing and shearing sheep, planting beans, gathering stubble, etc., doubled in the course of the fourteenth century: J. E. T. Rogers, A History of Agriculture and Prices in England, 7 vols. (Oxford, 1866-1902), i, 280-2.

15 Bardsley, 'Women's Work Reconsidered', 29.

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WOMEN'S WORK RECONSIDERED 197

an area in which much more research needs to be done, but such evidence as we do possess is suggestive of a narrowing of the differentials between male and female rates of pay after 1350, which would be in accordance with the conditions prevailing in this labour market. Bardsley accepts that women gained increased employment as craftsmen's helpers, yet disregards the clear evi- dence of the disproportionately steep increase in helpers' pay which Rogers and Beveridge and their successors have produced. David Farmer's recently published measure of the ratio between helpers' and craftsmen's wages rises spectacularly from 0.44 in the 1300s to 0.58 in the 1400s, and to 0.71 by the 1460s. 16

Also lending circumstantial support to a narrowing of differen- tials after c.1350 is evidence that the female-male wage gaps so far found in England in the later middle ages are very low in comparison with those prevailing in other periods and places. Bardsley has calculated that for a variety of tasks later fourteenth- century women labourers in agriculture earned 70 per cent or more of the rate paid to the average male worker, a ratio which is confirmed by additional evidence of harvesters' wages in Sussex and Essex in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.17 By contrast most of the female-male wage ratios collected by Burnette for English agricultural labour in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries are below 0.5, and none exceeds 0.6; and in the later nineteenth century the average ratio falls from 0.48 to 0.42. Comparable data collected from the the North and the South of the United States in 1860 give a ratio of around 0.6. 18

Bardsley's argument that women's wages 'remained a consist- ent proportion of male wages across the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries' rests very heavily on surviving records of wages paid for general labouring at Ebury in the 1330s, but these lack detail and hence are extremely difficult to interpret. 19 Ideally one would wish them to provide clear evidence of the wages paid for per- forming the same task at the same time of the year, but instead

'6 Rogers, History of Agriculture and Prices, i, 321; Sir William Beveridge, 'Wages in the Winchester Manors', Econ. Hist. Rev., vii (1936), 42; Edward Miller (ed.), Agrarian History of England and Wales, iii, 1348-1500 (Cambridge, 1991), 479.

7 Bardsley, 'Women's Work Reconsidered', 11-15; Mate, Women in Medieval English Society, 30; L. R. Poos, A Rural Society after the Black Death: Essex, 1350- 1525 (Cambridge, 1991), 214.

18 Burnette, 'Investigation of the Female-Male Wage Gap', 258-9, 276-7. 19 Bardsley, 'Women's Work Reconsidered', 4, 24 (table 4), 29.

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the Ebury data comprise an extremely wide span of wage rates, ranging from Id. to 312d. per day for males and from 11/2d. to 21/2d. per day for females, which were paid for a host of unknown tasks. Sadly, therefore, like cannot be compared with like. Taking the simple average of these daily rates, as Bardsley has done, produces a wage of 2.16d. per day for males and 1.58d. for females, and a female-male wage ratio of 0.73. But if the modal wage is taken instead of the mean - that is, the wage paid to the greatest number of labourers, rather than the average wage paid to all labourers - the female-male wage ratio falls to a more conventional 0.6. We clearly need to collect much more and much better data before we can be certain whether or not wage differen- tials narrowed in the course of the fourteenth century.

Outcomes in medieval labour markets, as in most other mar- kets, were determined by the interaction of social and customary forces on the one hand, and economic forces on the other. Customary pressures and sectional interests had a major impact on the extent to which women were permitted to participate in employment, and on the nature of that participation. Women were routinely denied training and were prohibited from joining guilds and working in many craft occupations even if they pos- sessed the requisite skills. But rural labour markets were freer and more competitive than those in towns, and the collapse of population after 1348 unleashed economic forces of immense power which helped to subvert prejudices. The labour of women became more highly valued in a time of scarcity, as the Ordinance of Labourers recognized as soon as plague first struck, when it required every able-bodied woman to make herself available for hire under threat of imprisonment. 20 Yet much of the work on offer in the countryside was heavy manual labour which militated against the employment of women and precluded them from competing on equal terms. Even in the limited field of agricultural labouring there is still much to learn before we are able adequately to reconstruct and explain the experiences of women in the later middle ages.

Corpus Christi College, Cambridge John Hatcher

20 The ordinance of 1349 is printed in English Economic History: Select Documents, ed. A. E. Bland, P. A. Brown and R. H. Tawney (London, 1914), 164-7. The require- ment for women to work was reiterated in succeeding statutes.

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