Blog by Dr Nicholas Collins

 

I’ve always been fascinated by a deceptively simple historical question: what did ordinary people in the past actually do all day? It’s a relatable topic, but it can be surprisingly difficult to study, and it’s only in the last few years that historians have hit upon answers in an unlikely place: witness statements given during legal investigations. In recounting what they had seen, witnesses often gave incidental glimpses into their daily lives. Take Alice Grimeshaw, who came across the aftermath of a fight when she “went up to ye Alehouse to look for a little lad of hers” in Lancashire in 1700; or Thomas Fisher, who in Somerset in 1840 “put together several sacks of apples in a heap in my orchard”, only to witness another man stealing them a couple of days later. These witness statements – known to historians as depositions – survive in England from Tudor times onwards. There are hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions of them, and they offer unparalleled insights into the lives of ordinary people.

That is more or less where my PhD research started in 2021. I read around 7,000 depositions from Somerset, Gloucestershire, Cheshire, and Lancashire for the period 1700-1850, and constructed a database of who was doing what. At this point I should say that I did not invent this method. In the last few years historians have used it study several different countries across Europe, but they have all been interested primarily in what work were people were doing. I wanted to cast my net a bit wider: to think about the things people did alongside work, particularly leisure. What I found, as I set out in my new article for Cultural and Social History, was surprising.

In 1701, Henry Holden of “went…to Longe moor to see a match at foot ball play”. A few years later, in 1707, George Pauly was “drinking with some friends”, while a little later again, in 1730, Joseph Turner was “in Company w[i]th several others playing at Cards”. If you’re thinking that these examples don’t sound so very different from what we might do with our spare time today, I would agree with you. Remarkably, these activities from three hundred years ago seem familiar, and the situation is no different at the end of the period I studied. In 1843, William Indoe “was bowling at the New Inn…and got my trousers torn”; the following year, George Evans “was not very well having been out drinking”, so he “got up about ten o’clock on that morning and thought I would take a walk”. In 1848 Henry Jones and his companions were at a pub, “drinking there for an hour or two” and then “dancing”. We might expect to move from the pub to a club before the dancing starts, but the basic activity is familiar enough. Whichever way I looked at the depositions, whether focusing on individual examples like these or counting the totals of different kinds of activities, the story was the same. What people did for leisure changed surprisingly little between 1700 and 1850.

Of course, there were exceptions. Cockfighting, a brutal blood sport in which birds were made to fight each other, only appeared in the earliest depositions, and was banned in the 1830s. Some new activities also appeared; a classic was commercialised horse racing, recounted by James Tyrer and John Shaw, who “drank some ale together at Aintree Hurdle Race” in 1843. Overall, though, the evidence from the depositions, which offer the best insights into the lives of ordinary people we are ever likely to get for much of this period, is clear: continuity in leisure far outweighed change.
A couple of other things stood out. The first is that by far the most common type of leisure was sociable drinking. Interestingly, this only occasionally involved getting drunk. Intoxication was sometimes mentioned, but it was rare enough to suggest that it was not usually the goal when drinking with friends. The second concerns gender differences. You might have noticed that all of the examples of leisure I have given have been men. This partly reflects the reality of historical leisure, and partly a bias in the sources. Women are under-represented in the depositions, accounting for only around a quarter of the activities I recorded. Even taking that into account, though, women did have less leisure time than men, because they worked longer hours. Including unpaid work, my best estimate is that the gap was around two hours per day. For both these reasons there are fewer examples of female leisure in the depositions but, perhaps surprisingly, those which do occur are generally similar to male leisure. In 1779, Alice Platt “together with four other young women, who were her acquaintances, went to take a walk, towards Ardwick Green, about a measured Mile from the Town”, while in 1702 Elizabeth and Joane Arthur were “drinkeing together with Jaine Arthur their sister in Law & others”. Leisure also took place in mixed groups, as when John Goodier, James Goodier, Samuel Charlton, and Martha Goodier were “returning in company together” having “been to see some Friends”.

These are all the kinds of things I had hoped to learn when I started this research. I wanted to know how the industrial revolution affected people – not just their work, but also the rest of their lives. What I certainly didn’t expect in 2021 was that by the end of my research people would be predicting another industrial revolution, centred around AI. For anyone worried by that prospect, my research might offer reassurance. Work was dramatically reshaped in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, at least for some people, but leisure was not. The joy of sociability, whether shaped around drinking, sports, exercise, or games, continued more or less unchanged. These are vital parts of our lives, and I suspect that, whatever happens to our experiences of work over the next few years, we will cling to them just as fiercely as our ancestors did.

If you’re interested in depositions, you can see some examples here:
https://humanities-research.exeter.ac.uk/womenswork/courtdepositions/