ABSTRACT
One of the many problems which we encounter when looking back at early modern England lies in our conception and definition of work Despite feminism’s efforts to redefine work, we still tend to see work as a paid activity which takes place outside the home and which defines an individual’s identity. This conception of work belongs to the post-industrial world and the model it provides is not necessarily applicable to economies and societies which are organised differently. Economic historians have described such activity in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as proto-capitalism: a period of very gradual transition from feudal economic organisation and production (mainly rural and agricultural) towards capitalist industrialisation (urban, mechanised and characterised by large-scale capital accumulation and transfer and wage labour).1 The conception of men and women’s work in this period utilised ideas and language from a variety of conceptual and political sources: religious definitions of a vocation; feudalist ideas of the three orders of man (labourers, fighters and priests) and of agricultural organisation through households; medieval trading guilds’ conception of craft and apprenticeship; urban authority’s regulation of the rootless poor, in forcing masterless men or women into service; feudal hierarchies of service (to lord, mistress, master); Protestant views on the family; and more market-orientated conceptions and practices, based on a cash and wage economy.
