Child Day-Labourers in Agriculture: Evidence from Farm Accounts, 1740-1850

"Child labour has long been an important issue in discussions of the Industrial Revolution. While pessimists point to the employment of children as one of the inhumane aspects of industrialization, optimists reply that child labour was not new, just more visible in the factories than it had been before. Unfortunately, since most of historians’ attention has been focused on factory employment, little data is available on child labour in alternative types of employment. While parliamentary reports provide good data on children working in factories, information from other industries is more limited, making it difficult to know if factory work was unusual. Information on child labour in agriculture is available from the middle of the nineteenth century, from census returns, and from parliamentary reports such as the 1843 report on Women and Children in Agriculture. Before the 1840s, however, it is more difficult to say how many children worked in agriculture. This paper uses a sample of English farm accounts from 1741 to 1849 to examine the extent of and trend in child labour among agricultural day-labourers. The data used in this paper is a sample 189 annual observations of farm wage accounts, from 62 different farms between 1741 and 1849. The distribution of the sample in time and space is described in Table 1. In order to use farm wage accounts to study child labour, I need some method for distinguishing children from adults. Males and females are easily distinguished by their first names, but the age of a worker cannot be determined from the name. Some records identify boys, but this is not consistent enough to provide an accurate measure of child labour. It is possible to determine the ages of workers from the 1830s or 1840s by matching them to the census manuscripts, but this method is time-consuming, identifies the ages of only about half of the workers, and is not available for earlier records. In this paper I use the wage to identify which workers must have been children. I have constructed wage profiles for workers from two farms by matching workers from the wage accounts to census manuscripts. (See “How Skilled Were English Agricultural Labourers in the Early Nineteenth Century?” available at http://persweb.wabash.edu/facstaff/burnettj/Homepage.html.) The results are shown in Figures 1 and 2. Based on these wage profiles, I define boys as those males earnings one-half the adult male wage or less, and I define girls as those females earning three-fourths or less of the adult female wage. Based on the wage profiles constructed, males in the “boys” category should be approximately 16 years of age and younger, while females in the “girls” category should be approximately 14 years of age or younger. (Both Kirby and Rahikainen examine children below age 15) Using this method, it is possible that some of those identified as children were really elderly individuals who are paid the same low wages as children. "