wer kind of people' in 1751, he explained: `Besides the actual expense of attending these places of pleasure, [there is] the loss of time and neglect of business'. Alcock concurred, citing the simple pleasure of tea-drinking and castigating the `considerable loss of time [which] attends this silly habit ... a circumstance of no small moment to those who are to live by their labour'. In the words of Edgar Furniss: `The fair, the gathering at the alehouse, were denoted as nuisances and suppressed as such, not alone, nor principally, because they bred riot and disturbance but also because they appeared most obviously to relax the industry of the labouring body'.(47) When subsistence needs had been satisfied, men and women were the more easily enticed away from labour by such entertainments. Gower was exasperated by rustics who `desire the leisures of great men'; Langland railed against those who haunted brewhouses as if they were churches; and Robert Rypon, prior of Durham and contemporary of Chaucer, condemned the amount of time which the lower orders devoted to useless and unnecessary occupations such as shooting in the butts, drinkings, chess and dice-playing, and gossiping and coarse jesting, to which other moralists added more active sports such as wrestling and football.(48)Thus, there is abundant evidence of how labourers and artisans were thought to behave, but it is appropriate now to examine the issue from the perspective of the workers themselves, although even on the level of elementary theory this is a far from straightforward task. There is the basic problem of what constituted labour and leisure. Voluntary leisure time has to be distinguished from involuntary: work cannot be performed if there is no demand for it. What constituted labour is also problematical in a society in which many members possessed or had access to their own means of production (plots of land, basic industrial equipment and such), in which a significant...
