This valuable collection of essays seeks to bring to rural servants the same degree of attention that historians have given to domestic servants in an urban context. Like their urban counterparts, servants in the countryside lived in the households where they worked; they were predominantly young, unmarried and bound by custom or contract to remain for an extended period. Rural service, however, was distinguished by participation in a wide range of agricultural as well as domestic tasks. These might involve year-round activities for which training and long-term attention was required, such as care of livestock and dairy production. In this they were distinct from day labourers, employed for harvest work and at other busy times in the year and usually for less skilled work. The authors set out to revisit the work of earlier research into rural societies, notably that of John Hajnal, Peter Laslett and Ann Kussmaul, using their findings as a springboard for their own investigations. They draw on traditional sources, but also on previously neglected ones, such as the intriguing mini-biographies of the deceased, written up by the priests of Vasterlas, which Cristina Prytz uses to flesh out the lives of servants in seventeenth-century rural Sweden.

A new and complex picture of service in Europe emerges with many variations and departures from the earlier model. Thus, while male servants characteristically dominated rural service elsewhere in Europe, Hanne Osthus shows us that in Norway, throughout the eighteenth century, women and girls easily outnumbered the men. The link between service and late marriage, so much a part of the Laslett and Hajnal conception of the European Marriage Plan (EMP) cannot be sustained everywhere. Nor did time in service invariably allow young people to break with their own family ties, accumulate material goods and set up independent households with marriage partners of their choosing. Thijs Lambrechts finds that in sixteenth-century rural Flanders many servants retained strong links with their families, returning home for family weddings and sending both wages and goods for parents and siblings, rather than building up their own nest eggs. Others acquired the skills necessary for later life before, not after, they entered service. Servants’ lives were everywhere heavily controlled. Nevertheless, even in Scandinavian countries, where the letter of the law was most prescriptive, it was not always enforced with rigour. Nor were servants without agency. Jane Whittle finds that wages in early seventeenth-century England might exceed the legal rates set in the Quarter sessions; some workers were able to bargain for higher wages even when labour was readily available.

The findings are well supported by tables and charts. Yet the human story behind them is not forgotten. In sixteenth-century rural Flanders, Griete had saved an impressive third of her cash wages when she left the service of Joos De Crane to marry. Less fortunate was sixteen-year-old Claudine Boirault in eastern France, who in the service of Widow Chauvent, had ‘no wages in money but only her living and a few clothes of no value’. Jeremy Hayhoe records the extreme youth and vulnerability of many servants in Eastern France: for example, Adéline Fermier was an eight-year-old orphan, and Gabriel, aged twelve, could not say where he had been born. Finally, students of the subject will be grateful for the editor’s introduction, which reviews the current scholarship on rural servants and admirably justifies the need for further research.