The Labor-Leisure Relationship in Stuart England and its American Colonies

Nancy L. Struna

Reprinted from the OAH Magazine of History
7 (Summer 1992). ISSN 0882-228X
Copyright (c) 1992, Organization of American Historians
 

Like generations of ordinary English men and women, some citizens of Stuart society preferred leisure to labor, a cultural pattern that interfered with the goals of both reformers in the old world and planters 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 acquired a new meaning and undermined the residual leisure preference. In the process, these English immigrants transformed not only the general history of Anglo-America but also the particular history 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 demands for food, clothing, and shelter--of the ongoing agricultural and industrial revolutions. 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 debates 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 economic and social chaos had, however, already 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 industries 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 movement continued, through the establishment of Salem between 1625 and 1628.

In all cases the outposts were unmitigated disasters. None of the plantations produced the desired furs, fish, minerals or timber for export. Additionally, death rates were extraordinarily high, sometimes 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, criminals and unskilled laborers--who were to provide the labor in building, planting, mining, fishing, and trading with Native Americans for furs. Unfortunately, especially 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, manifesting 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 encounters which had a great deal of meaning for them, more so perhaps than did work. Indeed, there is virtually no evidence to suggest that many yeomen, artisans, servants, and laborers preferred work over recreation. 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 midlands, to Southampton and Salisbury in the south, two major blocs of people emerged who found fault with both popular recreations and the governments' efforts to regulate 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 patronizing traditional festivals and festivities, owners and managers of agricultural and industrial enterprises, and pragmatic politicians who recognized that the suppression of local recreations also translated into assertions of local control.

To the east and in some sections of the south, on the other hand, were more ideologically-bound reformers. Some even called themselves "new men." A fairly diverse lot in terms of occupation, they often shared a particular brand of Protestantism which had no room for personal license and little respect for the residual "libertie" to recreation (3). These "Calvinists" 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 dancing, 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 productive 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 supplies 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 individuals. 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 problem 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 emergent proto-bureaucracies, with foremen and overseers responsible to farm and factory owners as well as for their hired and indentured underlings.

The reorganization of labor required more than just a set of old and new mechanisms imposed on laborers by employers, however. In fact, as the later histories of England and America suggest, laborers could only become significantly more productive once they conceived of new ends for work, especially in terms of consumption. This connection lay some years in the future; but another interpretation of work began to emerge, especially among Calvinists who explained and explicated the "calling" doctrine. At its core was the notion that labor was more than just necessary; 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 proposition that labor, theirs as well as their servants, did produce tangible outcomes and that it could mean the difference between security and poverty. They wanted to improve their standard of living, to make their small businesses successful, and to achieve political power and influence. 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 seventeenth-century reformation of labor, then, also had to be a reformation of leisure. This in part helps to account for the sometimes vicious assault by the "industrious sort" on popular recreations, one phase of which was played out in the controversy surrounding King James's "Declaration of Sports" in 1617 and 1618. This royal edict forbade recreations on Sunday mornings but permitted them in the afternoon, 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 of foiled attempts, a law defining the Sabbath 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 practices, but some of the "industrious sort" carried the attack on recreations beyond the limits of the law by attacking all recreations. In part, of course, this was a matter of morality and social order; even lawful recreations resulted in crime, drunkenness, and fornication. But the attack apparently also drew upon some reformers' interpretation of the relationship of sporting practices to labor. In the late sixteenth 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 English Puritans, including Richard Green-ham and Nicholas Bownde, came close to replicating Bullin-ger's position. Still others, like William Perkins, argued that some "moderate" recreations benefitted labor (6).

Perkins took the relationship between labor and recreations a step farther when he declared that recreations should only occur 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 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 fundamentally non-royalist, reformist Protestant body, illegalized two remaining Sunday recreational traditions: festivals of wakes and ales. Three years later the same body acted more directly on White's recommendation: it designated the second Tuesday in each month as a day of "recreation and relaxation" (7). This new law, plus the Sabbath legislation, enabled the reformers to control leisure; and in the context of the persisting leisure preference, 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 middling 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 trading 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 English 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 personal relationships and by institutions like the courts and churches. Third, the conditions 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. Finally, 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 incomplete records. In fact, one account of the course of work makes the point quite dramatically. This is a ballad about the experiences of a female indentured servant in Virginia, appropriately subtitled "The Distressed 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 "sorrow, 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 recreations 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, cudgeling, fencing, ninepins, pitching the bar, and even poaching were also conspicuously 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 England. Only members in the Virginia Council, 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 grandeur and the gore of the sport in England. In all, few sports that were common in contemporary England regularly punctuated life in the colonies. And so it remained until the final decades of the century.

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 Western Planting," in The Original Writings 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 Declaration of Sports for Lancashire," English Historical Review 32 (October 1917): 561-68.

4. David Underdown, Revel, Riot and Rebellion: Popular Politics and Culture in England, 1603-1660 (Oxford, 1985), 50-51; William Harrison, The Description of England, ed. George Edelen (Ithaca, N.Y., 1968), 36; John Northbrooke, "Distractions of the Sabbath" (London, 1579), 175-76.

5. Christopher Hill, Society and Puritanism in Pre-Revolutionary England (London, 1964), 161.

6. William Perkins, Works, 3 vols. (London, 1616-1618), I, 774-775.

7. Francis White, "A Treatise of the Sabbath-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 Affiliate Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of Maryland, College Park. She has published several articles on sport and colonial America.