L - Labourer

Talk to anyone researching their family history and if they tell you they don't have a tree filled with Ag Labs - they are probably fibbing. 

We all hope to find someone illustrious in our trees, but most of us come from good working class stock. Farm labourers, miners, tradespeople, domestic servants. Most of us read church records and see Labourer as the occupation given on baptismal and marriage records. Sometimes a trade or a specific type of labourer appears to give a clue about the type of work that ancestor carried out. When we scour the pages of census', especially earlier ones, we see family after family listed as Ag Labs or Farm Labourers.

So what did an Agricultural Labourer do ?

Pretty much anything and everything that a farm hand might do today. The more skills they had, the more wages they might earn. These ancestors of ours weren't no hopers doing menial unskilled work because it was all that they were fit to do. They were capable, fit and knowledgeable about all things agricultural; they came from generations in the same role and familiar with working with animals and cropping. They followed this career path because it was what their families had done for generations and most probably it was the only choice in rural England. Some boys might have become blacksmiths, farriers, bakers, cheesemongers, butchers, coachmen or millers - but many of those trades were passed through families too. Some agricultural workers may have found they had stronger skills in one area compared to another and seen an opportunity to improve their status in society.

Their skills included ploughing, harrowing, rolling, sowing seed, tending and weeding a variety of crops, harvesting with a scythe, sickle and spade as well as laying up and threshing during the winter. There were animals to be milked, herded and shorn. Some would have needed to assist shepherds with lambing and calving. They would have also been required to assist with farm maintenance, tree trimming, building drystone walls, trimming and laying hedges, cutting, drying and stacking hay, fencing and making gates, making or mending roofs which might be slate, tile or thatch and pointing brickwork. Farm roads, tracks and paths all need to be maintained as well as ditches, culverts and ponds. They would need to have good meteorological skills too, recognising the changes in the weather and the benefits or dangers that might bring for their crops and animals. That's quite a job description. 

Some moved around the country with or without their families following the different harvests and cycles in the farming year. Others stayed for generations in one parish.

Usually gaining a subsistence living require the efforts of the whole family. A labourer's wife would be responsible for their own poultry, often a house cow as well her day to day domestic duties. Often, she might accept paid work of this nature, or for weeding vegetables, fruit picking, binding sheaves and stooking at harvest time or picking stones.

Children contributed as well, scaring birds, picking stones, weeding fields and plaiting straw. Older girls would help with domestic chores and handcrafts, boys from about the age of seven worked alongside their fathers in the fields. School for the children of labourers was almost unheard of until at least 1870. They might have been spared for an hour each week to attend Sunday School, but even if there was a charity school near to where they lived, they couldn't be spared from the farm work to attend.

So next time you see Ag Lab next to your ancestor's name, don't roll your eyes and think "another one", be proud. See if you can find out what types of things they might have been skilled in. Did a son or grandson become a threshing machine operator, a sawyer, a thatcher or a miller ? Perhaps the skills required to branch out on their own were skills they learned working alongside their father or grandfather.