ABSTRACT
The children are out of school but they are helping to get in the harvest as they have been helping to get in the hay. Until 1870 children, especially boys, were extensively employed in agriculture at an early age; sometimes only casually, often when growing older as annually hired hands, virtually always in some capacity in the harvest fields. Farmers saw schooling as a drain on their immediate labour supply and educated children as a threat to their labour supply. H. C. Darby suggests that one of the contributory causes of the agricultural depression was, in the Fens, the difficulty of obtaining juvenile labour. In 1849 in Oxfordshire the number of schools was only 33, one for every 4, 900 of the population. In Berkshire it was lower, only 25, one school for every 6, 200 of the population. In Buckinghamshire, it was estimated that there were 36, one for every 4, 500 of the population.
