mal expectations of rational behaviour in a market economy endow the individual worker with a strong desire to maximize income and an almost infinite variety of enticing goods upon which to spend his money. According to these parameters we are instructed that, with the exception of the very well-remunerated, as wages rise so more work will be offered by each worker, because each increase in wages makes leisure more expensive and therefore less attractive. Consequently, it is only at high rates of income, after successive increases in earnings and work-time and decreases in leisure-time have taken place, that the value placed upon leisure will eventually match and then exceed the attractions of further work and the acquisition of yet more goods.But what is reported by contemporaries as happening in the later seventeenth century and the first half of the eighteenth is that the labour-supply curve of the poorer members of society began to bend backwards at relatively low levels of income, and it was this preference for leisure over income among those who possessed very little which drove employers to distraction and commentators and political economists to bouts of mercantilistic moralizing. Was such behaviour irrational? How might it be explained?As a first step, one might question whether the rationality which requires that the maximization of satisfaction be achieved primarily through income and consumption should be applied to the pre-industrial world. Work, consumption and leisure have social and cultural as well as economic dimensions. The manner in which later seventeenth and eighteenth-century men and women assessed the utility of work, leisure and consumables was in large measure derived from the practices and value systems of their working and living environments. The persistence of irregular work habits drew strength from a tradition of discontinuous working which had been nurtured over the centuries by the prevalence of self-em...
