ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the local world constructed the experience of those who lived and worked in rural England. Women, or the majority of them who married, spent a greater part of their lives in the home. Their work was domestic labour, and their rural world was probably very different from that of their menfolk. A huge Norfolk wheat farm was classically the most intensive user of labour in the 1850s and 1860s yet market gardening obviously employed more workers ‘per acre’, while sheep farming, which probably had the largest acreage per unit, employed hardly any workers. Less obvious were the complexities of regional farming and working patterns. The farmers, so the labourers thought at least, sought gentility by separating themselves from their men and women servants. A farmer like John Simpson Calvertt was totally separated from his workers physically, economically and socially.
