Farm servants in North Wiltshire: the evidence of hiring fairs, 1837–1860

Our understanding of several important aspects of farm service in the nineteenth century remains limited. What share of servants lived in? How important were payments in kind? How well did servants fulfil their contractual obligations? To answer these and related questions this article explores a large body of new evidence specifically dedicated to farm servants: registers from two north Wiltshire hiring fairs, documenting 11,000 hiring agreements from 1837 to 1860. The fairs were introduced to facilitate the hiring of dairymaids, and declined when the collapse of cheese-making made them vulnerable to the fair abolition campaign. Farmers hired almost all their servants at their major local fair, while servants used it for less than a third of their job moves. The article shows how a creative use of a traditional institution supported progressive agriculture; adaptation to its needs required flexibility in terms of employment, but the incidence of non-residential service was limited numerically and selective by gender.