ly, but Gilboy's indices suggest that in Lancashire in the first half of the eighteenth century they rose by almost 40 per cent. Regional and occupational variations could clearly be very wide, and the use of retail rather than wholesale prices reduces the scale of improvements, but there can be little doubt that the gains were substantial in many places and significant almost everywhere.(30)Furthermore, it is likely that concentration upon male real wage-rates severely understates the scale of the improvements which took place in the incomes of the labouring and artisan classes. The tightening of the labour market, which pushed wages higher in the face of falling subsistence costs, must have also meant that more work was available for those who sought it. Moreover, family incomes were far from being solely dependent upon the earnings of male heads of households, and from the later seventeenth century the opportunities for the gainful employment of women and children improved markedly.(31) The general increase in the demand for labour encouraged the employment of women and children in hitherto almost exclusively male occupations, but probably of even greater significance was that this was an era when `the production of new consumer goods absorbed an increasing quantity of the nation's economic resources' and much of the employment in these rapidly expanding sectors was part-time and based in the home, thus of direct benefit to wives, children and the elderly.Joan Thirsk has calculated that in order to satisfy home and foreign demand for stockings in the 1690s, more than 15 per cent of labouring and pauper families could have supplemented their living by knitting. Yet knitting stockings was only one of perhaps a hundred or more by-employments available from the later seventeenth century, as the number of consumer products proliferated and their range ever widened. Much of this work was undoubtedly relatively poorly paid -- in 1673 a reti...
