THE EMPLOYEES OF DURHAM PRIORY, 1494-1519

A PROJECT FUNDED BY THE LEVERHULME TRUST, 1996-9

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This project, funded by the Leverhulme Trust, was undertaken between 1996 and 1999 by Dr. R.H. Britnell, Dr. C.M. Newman and Professor A.J. Pollard. The documentary research was carried out by Dr. Newman. The first publications from the project are Christine M. Newman, 'Employment on the Priory of Durham Estates, 1494-1519: The Priory an an Employer', Northern History, XXXVI:1 (May, 2000), pp. 43-58; Christine M. Newman, 'Work and Wages at Durham Priory and its Estates, 1494-1519', Continuity and Change, 16 (2001), pp. 357-78.

Report

Sources and methods

The research employed the accounting and rental material of Durham Priory to survey the characteristics of the priory's employment structure during the priorate of Thomas Castell (1491-1519). The bursar's accounts, from which the greatest quantity of information is derived, are available for 22 out of these 25 years (all except 1502-3, 1516-17 and 1517-18). The bulk of the evidence is found in expenditure noted under the headings Expense Necessarie and Reparaciones. Complementary evidence survives in the accounts of several other obedientiaries, namely the almoner (available for 14 years in this period), the hostillar (5 years) and the commoner (4 years), though these accounts are shorter and record significantly fewer employees (Table 1). The identification in the accounts of a considerable number of employees by name creates a rare opportunity to plot the employment record of individuals from year to year. Altogether 2,484 separate job entries have been identified across the accounts analysed, of which 2,048 provide details of named employees. The majority of these jobs, 1,650 in all, are in the accounts of the bursar. Since many jobs involved more than one person, the number of references to individuals is much greater than the number of jobs. The names and occupational status of 560 individuals were identified. Background information concerning some of these individuals (almost all men) was recovered from priory rentals of the period.

All recorded jobs have been entered into a relational data base constructed in Microsoft Access. Details recorded were 1. names of employees, where available; 2. descriptions of employees' status, where given (famulus, serviens, socius, etc.); 3. type of work; 4. location of work; 5. total duration of work, where known; 6. total payment for the job; 7. rate of payment where specified; 8. circumstantial details where available. The data was analysed in accordance with a prepared set of questions relating to the characteristics of the employment made available by the priory, designed to assess both the significance of the Priory as an employer and to isolate the characteristics of employment as experienced by individual employees. All the principal questions proved capable of being answered, though the results were far from being what we had thought, since we had expected much more continuity of employment amongst the Priory's workforce. There were far fewer 'careers' to be reconstructed than we had expected. Because of the monastic character of the employer, ther were hardly any women employees to be found in the accounts, so the study is concerned only with the wages of men.

Difficulties

The data in the account rolls proved to be consistent in their high quality and the problems of entering and interpreting the information proved slight. The chief area where judgement was called for was in the disaggregation of wage rates in the case of team work or jobs involving masters and servants. In the case of timed individual payments, or payments citing day rates or week rates, precise rates of pay were directly knowable. Where two or more employees were employed on equal terms (payments 'to X and Y') the total payment for the job was divided equally between them. When a master was employed with a stipulated number of servants it was in most cases an easy matter to deduce the rates of pay on the assumptions (a) that the servants were paid less than the master, (b) that the daily wage was calculated in whole pence, (c) that day wages ranged between 2d. and 6d, 2d being very unusual outside agriculture. Data which resulted in unambiguous results has been used without further ado. For example a master and two servant receiving 11d a day between them is interpreted as 5d for the master and 3d each for the servants, since only this result satisfies the operating assumptions. Very few cases could not be resolved according to these rules, and any errors that arise from their application will be insignificant for the interpretation of the results.

Another uncertainty arose from awareness that some larger construction projects may have been accounted for outside the regular obedientiary accounts, which include principally 'normal' expenditure, including repairs and maintenance to existing buildings. However, Prior Castell's time was not a period of great building works in Durham, and the projects known to have been associated with him - like the surviving College Gatehouse - were of a modest scale. This objection to the completeness of the data would therefore not be enough to overturn the principle conclusions to be derived from the data base, given that any such construction work would have been ephemeral.

Principal Research Results

(1) The number of wage-earners receiving more than £1 a year in wages from the bursar was a small group of fewer than 20 each year. There was not much overlap between the bursar's employees and those of other departments of the Priory, and the employees who did best out of employment across departments were the same small group who constituted the elite of the bursar's wage force. About 73 percent of the bursar's employees earned less than £1 in any one year and so cannot have been largely dependent on the Priory for their livelihood. Durham Priory was not the universal source of employment that its prominence in the history of the city would have seemed to suggest.

(2) The priory offered regular or frequent employment to very few. There was a list of 40-60 estate officials and pensioners, with a few skilled craftsmen, who received fixed annual payments. Most of these people received ‘retainers’ that were less than a living wage, though some received wages on top for specific tasks. Only a tiny group of craftsmen was ever paid for 51 or 52 weeks of the year.

(3) The Priory's principal craftsmen were employed at numerous places both within Durham and on the Priory estates elsewhere and were apparently sent out from Durham as a trusted task force, mostly for construction and repair work. Agricultural employees, however, were usually local people not associated with employment in Durham itself. This part of the research does not appear in either of the articles currently written.

(4) Even for many of its most skilled waged workforce, employment was neither regular nor guaranteed, which means that most of those named in the accounts have no continuous work record. Out of 562 priory employees identified across the departments between 1494 and 1515 only 138 had any sort of association with the priory in five or more different years, and some of these were employed for a particular job only once a year. These were by definition the most stable part of the priory workforce, yet even among this group diversity of employment was common; over a third of the total, were paid for more than one type of work, often at differing levels of skill and differing wage rates. It is difficult to say much about the remaining 424 employees of the priory during these years, since they feature too little in the accounts for any pattern to be perceptible.

(5) In the bursars' accounts for the period 1494-1519, only 41 jobs were paid at a weekly rate, and most of the instances related to carpentry work. Payment by the day was much more common. In the bursars' accounts, entries relating to 370 jobs give details of daily wage rates. More evidence can be found in the accounts of the almoner, the hostillar and the commoner which, together, provide details of a further 143 jobs in this category. The bulk of the tasks paid by the day (300 out of the 370 in the bursars' accounts and almost all those in the accounts of other obedientiaries) involved construction and repair work upon the numerous properties that were held by the obedientiaries.

(6) In common with wages generally in this period, those of the Durham Priory employees remained stable during the period in question, and the hierarchy of employment changed little (Table 2). In the top category came activities that were paid 5d or 6d a day (mostly plumbers and masons); the wages of the servants or famuli of such men usually received 3d or 4d. A second category of crafts (which included rough masonry, walling, pointing, plastering, daubing, and thatching) generally received lower rates of remuneration of 4d. or 4½d a day, famuli or servants generally receiving only 3d. In the building and craft trades it was unusual to find labourers earning less than 3d per day. In general maintenance and agricultural labouring, however, wages rarely rose above this level and could go lower.

(6) The rarity of references to payments of food and drink suggests that most employment was for cash only. The wages stipulated in the Act of 1495 were lower than those usually received by the Durham Priory employees, which again suggests that provision of meat, drink and board was not, generally, included. This is in keeping with the findings for other northern towns.

(7) Most tasks paid by the day (300 out of the 370 in the bursars' accounts and almost all those in the accounts of other obedientiaries) involved construction and repair work upon the numerous properties that were held by the obedientiaries. Masonry work, wall construction and repair, daubing and plastering, pointing, carpentry, glazing, plumbing, roof tiling, thatching and general labouring tasks all featured, together with a number of allied tasks. These included the quarrying and transportation of stone, the gathering of ling and drawing of straw for thatching purposes and the preparation of the wattles and spars used in wall construction. The remainder of the day work involved agricultural tasks such as mowing, haymaking and ploughing and to general estate maintenance - ditching, fencing repairs and the clearing out of wells, springs and mill ponds.

(8) Solitary work was not uncommon and accounts for 46.8 of the jobs whose characteristics are recorded (Table 3). Plumbers, smiths, wheelwrights, glaziers and tilers often worked alone, and so did many employees engaged in minor repairs. The employment of a single craftsman and assistant or assistants was, by contrast, uncharacteristic of the sort of employment offered by the priory, and this type of contract is represented in only 8.2 percent of cases where the structure is known. It did not occur at all in agricultural work. Team work accounts for 39.0 per cent of cases, and this figure may understate its importance since over half the 'unknown' category of jobs was in agriculture, where team work was common. Building and construction work characteristically needed more than one pair of hands on a job, and was commonly carried out by two or more craftsmen with subordinate assistants; the need for co-operation resulted from the need to shift building materials. Over half of all walling jobs (of both stone and wattle and daub) were contracted to a team. Given the number of employees in these work teams, this was clearly the normal work experience for an employee of the Priory.

(9) Priory employees were only loosely uncommitted to particular structures of work, or to any particular position within structures. Even the priory's highest-paid craftsmen were prepared to move around to some extent within the pay structure, though they seem never to have settled for less than 4d. Those who on occasion earned top wages for skilled work would at other times accept a lower rate of pay for a task requiring less skill. Craftsmen who acted as principles in some contracts were secondary members of a team in other cases, apparently subordinate to one of their fellows. Within the lower wage bands it is possible to identify servants or general labourers who nevertheless also contracted for construction work at higher rates of remuneration than they normally received.

General conclusion

The employment offered by Durham priory was irregular and piecemeal for all but a handful of leading employees, most of whom were involved in the repair and maintenance of buildings. Rates of pay were structured, and working arrangements too to some extent, in accordance with different types of work, but individual careers were much more unpredictable, and it is difficult to find regularity of work and pay even amongst the Priory's most favoured employees. Most employees were hired occasionally for only a brief period, and could not have depended upon the Priory for a livelihood. In this respect the Priory's records illustrate a feature of the late medieval labour market and work experience that has probably not received as much attention as it deserves. Wage rates were high by later sixteenth-century standards, and it is in that respect that the later fifteenth century, and the early sixteenth may be reckoned a Golden Age of labour. Yet this was not a labour market characterised for most people by fixed employment, settled patterns of works or predicable career prospects. Durham Priory workers may have had individual limits to what they were prepared to do, but much of the time they were taking what they could get.