ployment and piece-rate work, by the uneven phases of the farming year, by the rites, recreations and holy days of the seasons, and by the impact of recurrent sharp vicissitudes in agricultural output, prices and business activity. Moreover, in the immediately preceding era of surplus population, continuous employment had been especially difficult to obtain and, perhaps, owing to a lack of adequate nutrition, also often difficult to sustain.The disutility of most work was also high, since it consisted in the main of hard manual labour or unpleasant and repetitive tasks. The incentive to perform such work after basic needs had been satisfied depended largely upon what could be purchased with the additional income. But, although the consumption of non-essentials by the lower social strata undoubtedly increased as their range widened progressively in the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and their prices often fell substantially in real terms, the cost of many items in terms of the labour needed to acquire them does appear to have remained sufficiently high to have dissuaded the majority of workers from engaging fully in `rampant consumerism'.(50) The lack of convenient means of saving and investing surplus income also acted as a discouragement to the maximization of earnings in good times. Indeed, there is more than a little truth in the notion that in the centuries before the industrial revolution men and women worked irregularly from necessity when times were bad and irregularly from choice when times were good.E. P. Thompson, in a towering contribution to our understanding of the `moral economy' of work and leisure in a `task oriented' rather than a `time oriented' society, judged that the `irregular labour rhythms', which prevailed when most men were in control of their own working lives, `help us to understand the severity of mercantilist labour doctrines as to the necessity for holding down wages as a preventative against i...
