A Craftsman's Day

Thatcher in County Kildare.

 

 

When I talk to my elderly neighbours here in Ireland about the jobs they did, or read their memoirs, one of the most striking differences is the enthusiasm for their jobs. They spoke of shaping wood and iron and leather in ways everyone could see and respect. Saddlers and scutchers, farriers and felters, cobblers and cordwainers – even grave-diggers and churchbell-ringers spoke of their jobs with an enthusiasm I rarely see today.

“I jump out of bed on a Sunday morning for my ringing day,” said bell-ringer Leslie Taylor. “I am the elected ringing master, chosen by my fellow ringers who are members of the society. This is a happy coincidence of loyalty and pleasure. I’m one of the people who have in one way or another serviced the cathedral in some way since its foundation in 1038. ... I’d like to die in the belfry … when I’m ringing.”

It’s worth examining why most people in traditional societies spoke so proudly of their jobs and modern people do not, since work would seem to be one area where life has unarguably improved in modern times. My elderly neighbours grew up in what we would consider extreme poverty; Patty Bolger said the local factory paid ten shillings (about 30 euros or $36 in 2023) per week, a fraction of the US minimum wage. Decades further back were the long hours, unsafe and toxic surroundings, and other horrors we remember from Charles Dickens and Upton Sinclair, which caused workers to form unions and force through labour laws. Again, many things have improved, and for that we should be grateful.

Victorian factories and coal mines, though, were a historical anomaly, appearing only with the discovery of fossil fuels. Before the mid-1800s in Britain, and the mid-1900s in Ireland, most people were farmers or craftsmen like the elders I interviewed. Also, when people today compare them to modern jobs, we are weighing them against our own office jobs in the First World, not those of the near-slaves that made our clothes and laptops.

If we compare our eight-hour day in a cubicle to the 15-hour day of a Victorian factory worker, both working corporate jobs for hourly wages, of course we come out far ahead. As Jaques Ellul pointed out, though, we can’t compare our office job to the day of a village craftsman, who chooses his own tempo and rhythm, who mentors and is aided by apprentices or children, and who stops to chat with passers-by. We can praise the progress from 1850 to 1950, he said, but “we cannot say with assurance that there has been progress from 1250 to 1950. In so doing, we would be comparing things which are not comparable.”

Ellul was assuming that a traditional craftsman would be working 15 hours in a day off and on, and of course you might argue that most traditional peoples were farmers and not craftsmen. Yet historian James Thorold Rogers estimated that medieval peasants – whom we think of as the most menial peoples of the most backward age – worked no more than eight hours a day, a figure backed up by several other studies. Labourers rarely worked an entire day for a lord; half a solar day’s work was considered a full working day, so peasants who worked sunrise to sunset were credited for two days’ work. Medieval Christians,  moreover, had so many holidays – in the literal sense of “holy days” – that Nora Ritchie calculated they only worked half as many days per year as modern Americans. 

In Dublin into the 20th century, craftsmen continued to keep such flexible hours, as former master cooper Daniel O’Donnell recalled. “Coopers were well-paid craftsmen,” he said. “... you could go in to work whenever you liked provided that you could make your own week’s wages for yourself. You made so much for each cask. And you could go home whenever you wanted.” Walter Love, who drove a cart around his rural area, said that “the thing I liked best of all was the freedom. You were your own boss .. I was tired at the end of a hard day, but I was usually happy and when I think back the thoughts are usually happy ones.”

More information:

Walter Love, The Times of Our Lives, p. 24

 James E. Thorold Rogers, Six Centuries of Work and Wages (London: Allen and Unwin, 1949), 542-43. 

H.S. Bennett, Life on the English Manor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960), 104-6; 

Douglas Knoop and G.P. Jones, The Medieval Mason (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1967), 105; 

R. Allen Brown, H.M. Colvin, and A.J. Taylor, The History of the King's Works, vol. I, the Middle Ages (London: Her Majesty's Stationary Office, 1963); 

Edith Rodgers, Discussion of Holidays in the Later Middle Ages (New York: Columbia University Press, 1940), 10-11; 

C.R. Cheney, "Rules for the observance of feast-days in medieval England", Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 34, 90, 117-29 (1961); 

Nora Ritchie, "Labour conditions in Essex in the reign of Richard II", in E.M. Carus-Wilson, ed., Essays in Economic History, vol. II, (London: Edward Arnold, 1962).