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January « 2025 « Top of the Campops: 60 things you didn't know about family, marriage, work, and death since the middle ages

Top of the Campops: 60 things you didn't know about family, marriage, work, and death since the middle ages

Archive for January, 2025

The vulnerability of non-marital births

Thursday, January 30th, 2025

Alice Reid

A previous blog charted trends in non-marital conceptions and births in England from 1550 to the present. It argued that although many couples engaged in sexual intercourse before marriage, in most cases when a woman fell pregnant she and her partner married swiftly, so that the majority of extra-marital conceptions were born within marriage. Not all pregnant women were able to marry however, giving rise to extra-marital births, or ‘illegitimate’ children.

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Working from home in the past

Thursday, January 23rd, 2025

Amy Erickson

In the spring of 2020, when the government asked anyone who could conduct their paid employment remotely to do so for fear of a novel coronavirus, working from home – or WFH as it came to be known – was a novel concept. It seemed strange because since the 20th century we think of paid work as taking place outside the home – in a factory, an office, a shop, a hospital, a school or university. But in historical terms, working outside a home (not necessarily one’s own, but someone’s home) is a relatively recent phenomenon.

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The growth of the service sector

Thursday, January 16th, 2025

Leigh Shaw-Taylor 

The service sector, also known as the tertiary sector, comprises all workers not making a physical product. This includes shopkeepers, wholesalers, publicans, hotel workers, people working in financial services, health and social care workers, professional services, and transport workers. 

The UK economy today, like that of all rich countries, is dominated by the service or tertiary sector. According to the 2021 census, fully 76 percent of the labour force is now in the tertiary sector. But when did the service sector become dominant, and when did it begin to grow? Many people think the growth of the service sector is a recent phenomenon, starting perhaps in the 1950s and picking up speed as Britain de-industrialised from the 1970s. However, new long-run data on male occupations collected by the Occupational Structure of Britain c.1379-1911 project tell a different story. 

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Were all workhouses Dickensian? Indoor relief under the Old Poor Law (1601-1834)

Thursday, January 9th, 2025

Jeremy Boulton and Samantha Williams 

Ask most people about workhouses, and they will probably associate them with Dickens’s Oliver Twist (1837-8); that is, with grim Union Workhouses erected under the New Poor Law (1834) which supposedly produced segregated, oppressive, regimented institutions designed to deter all but the most desperate from applying for poor relief.  

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When did England and Wales industrialise?

Thursday, January 2nd, 2025

Leigh Shaw-Taylor

The secondary sector, as discussed in a previous blog, consists of anyone who makes a physical product. It includes manufacturing, construction, and utilities. Manufacturing includes village artisans like carpenters or blacksmiths, and weavers working at home, as well as any industrial workers employed in factories. 

What proportion of the male labour force would you think worked in the secondary sector at the beginning of the 18th century? 10 percent? 20 percent? 30 percent? The Occupational Structure of Britain c.1379-1911 project has established that as early as 1701 the figure was already remarkably high, at 43 percent. 

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