Working days in a London construction team in the eighteenth century: evidence from St Paul's Cathedral

Abstract

This article provides new information and data on the work and pay of skilled and semi-skilled men on a large London construction project in the early 1700s. It offers firm-level evidence on the employment relation in the construction industry at the time and sheds some light on the number of days worked per year and per week, showing that employment was more irregular and seasonal than current estimates of income infer. The patterns are considered in the context of new debates about industriousness and economic growth.

Job Tenure and Unskilled Workers before the Industrial Revolution: St Paul’s Cathedral 1672–1748

“…That a major building project should introduce similar mechanisms is consistent with arguments about the creative potential of early-modern administrative elites in the face of shocks (Dittmar and Meisenzahl 2020) and novel challenges in scale and scope (Harris 2020). Our findings also contribute to an emergent theme in the economic history of real wages and labor markets, which examines varying types of employment contracts, duration of employment, and working days per year (Humphries and Weisdorf 2019; Gary 2019; Stephenson 2020b; Ridolfi 2019).…”

“…Other places, such as the dockyards, may have developed similar systems of hiring to St Paul’s, but it is impossible to test whether the same trends in tenure and hiring occurred. However, the records of the contractors who operated such sites also tentatively indicate a positive relationship between tenure and the annual number of days worked (Stephenson 2020b, p. 424). Those contractors worked on private and publicly funded projects.…”

The Working Week in the Long Nineteenth Century: Evidence from the Timings of Political Events in Britain

“…However, other scholars have argued that the early modern working year was actually much shorter than is conventionally assumed. Judy Stephenson (2020), for example, used records from a masonry firm working on the construction of Saint Paul's Cathedral in the early eighteenth century to argue that workers faced a highly irregular working year, with demand for labour operating as the key constraint. 3 While this suggests that there was the potential for increased working, other historians have argued the case more directly.…”

“…However, by framing her findings in the language of "resistance", she returns to a quasi-Thompsonian perspective, seeing absenteeism as evidence of working class agency in the face of industrial capitalism. Interestingly, two recent studies from eighteenth century London -one of masons working on the construction of Saint Paul's Cathedral from 1700 to 1709 (Stephenson 2020), and another of clerks at the Bank of England in 1783 (Murphy 2017) -found no evidence of Saint Monday at all in those particular (and somewhat unusual) workplaces.…”

Real Urban Wage in an Agricultural Economy Without Landless Farmers: Serbia 1862-1910

“…38 This is the number considered by Karl Gunnar Persson and Paul Sharp to have been quite common for the European pre-industrial societies, seePersson and Sharp, An Economic History of Europe: Knowledge, Institutions and Growth, 600 to the Present, Cambridge University Press, 2015, p. 75. Ridolfi (2019, p. 597) also assumes a year of 200 working days for the 17 th and 18 th century France Stephenson (2019). finds that London construction workers in the early 18 th century worked 180 days.…”