A public lecture by Dr. Steve Hindle, Director of Research at the Huntington Library

Wednesday, November 6, 2013 | 7:00pm
Fletcher Challenge Theatre (1900)
SFU Harbour Centre
515 West Hastings Street

The social relations of production in agriculture remain one of the great underexplored areas in the economic history of early modern England. Although there has been increasing historiographical interest in the calculation of wage rates, there is little understanding either of the practices and rhythms of agricultural of work or of the meaning and value of rural labor to those who undertook it. In this paper Steve Hindle explores these issues from the perspective of a historian using art historical evidence, specifically through a discussion of the dynamics of labor relations amongst harvest workers as depicted in the margins of Edward Haytley’s 1744 painting of the Montagu family at their estate at Sandelford Priory, near Newbury (Berkshire). By combining a close reading of the painting—and especially of the dress and the demeanor of the laborers—with an analysis of the Montagu correspondence held in the Huntington Library, Haytley’s depiction of harvest work at Sandelford can be placed into the context of debates about the improvement of the landscape, about the leisure preferences of the laboring poor and about the utility of poverty in seventeenth and eighteenth century England.

This lecture is free and open to the public. Reservations are recommended; RSVP online at www.sfu.ca/reserve or by email to fass@sfu.ca.