Work, reward and labour discipline in late seventeenth-century England

In June 1692, Sir Richard Newdigate of Arbury near Nuneaton (Warwick-shire) condemned the indolence of one of the agricultural labourers who was employed on his estate. William Suffolk, he noted, ‘lyes abed and will not work’. Complaints of this kind were entirely characteristic of an economic context in which, for the first time in well over a century, the fortunes of employers, and especially of landlords, were being undermined by falling rents, stagnant prices and increasing wages. Because labour was in relatively short supply in late seventeenth-century England, it was believed that ‘the very fabric of society could be threatened, not just by rising wages and costs, but by a swelling independence among the working masses, which commonly manifested itself in a refusal to engage wholeheartedly in unremitting toil’. There was, accordingly, a growing consensus, emerging among the propertied elite in the century after 1650, about the ‘utility of poverty’. Employers, magistrates and political economists alike agreed both in print and in the administration of social policy that ‘the higher the wages labourers and artisans received, the less they worked, and that, while low wages bred industry and diligence, high wages bred laziness, disorderliness and debauchery’. This, then, was a particularly troubling time in the long history of labour relations and it presented particular challenges to employers who sought not only to recruit, retain and discipline the labour force but also to incentivise productivity among their employees.