Time and Work in Rural England, 1500–1700*
Time and Work in Rural England, 1500–1700*
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英格兰乡村的时间和工作，1500 年至 1700 年*
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发表时间：
2020
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通讯作者：
Mark Hailwood
中科院分区：
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作者：
Mark Hailwood
“不匆忙，不谨慎，不关心生产力。这就是雅克·勒戈夫（Jacques Le Goff）对工业化前农村劳动生活的时间性的描述。在大肠正如P·汤普森的著名论点所说，只是随着工厂和工业时代的到来，英国工人的不稳定节奏才突然被一种新的命令所取代，即由时钟控制的长时间和有规律的工作时间。这是一个关于前工业化和非工业化城市以及工业化到来时的影响的争论不休的论题。然而，很少有人仔细研究它对工业化前英格兰农村时间与工作关系的描述。因此，本文提供了第一个广泛的实证研究的时间意识和工作相关的时间使用在16世纪和17世纪的英格兰农村。这篇论文是通过引用普通男女在法庭上的证词来完成的，这些证词往往揭示了这些人是如何告诉时间的，以及他们是如何使用时间的，由此得出的结论是，这一时期的英国农村社会具有相对较高的时钟意识，日常工作模式遵循的节奏比汤普森论文所允许的更为一致和有规律。因此，本文认为，我们需要质疑的假设，即长时间和工作纪律的“现代性”没有根源于“传统”的英国农村生活。
‘Free of haste, careless of exactitude, unconcerned by productivity.’ This is how Jacques Le Goff characterized the temporality of pre-industrial rural working life. In E. P. Thompson’s famous argument, it was only with the arrival of the factory and the industrial age that the erratic rhythms of English working people were abruptly swept away by a new imperative for long and regular working hours controlled by the clock. It is a thesis that has been much debated in relation to pre- and non-industrial cities, and with regard to the impact of industrialization when it arrived. There has, however, been very little scrutiny of its account of the relationship between time and work in rural England before industrialization. This article therefore offers the first extensive empirical study of both time consciousness and work-related time-use in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century rural England. It does so by drawing on the testimony that ordinary women and men gave before the courts, testimony that often divulged both how those people told the time of day, and how they used it. What emerges is that English rural society in this period had a relatively high degree of clock-time awareness, and that everyday patterns of work followed more consistent and regular rhythms than Thompson’s thesis allows. As a consequence, the article argues that we need to question the assumption that the long hours and work discipline of ‘modernity’ had no roots in ‘traditional’ English rural life.