Glossary · History
Truck system
Also written cider allowance, payment in kind. Each is a name for the same thing, which is why none of them has an entry of its own.
Definition
The practice of paying farm labourers partly in cider rather than wholly in money. It was widespread in the West Country and the three counties and was progressively outlawed by the Truck Acts of the nineteenth century.
- Subject
- History
- Also written
- cider allowance, payment in kind
In more detail
The allowance was substantial — often quoted in the region of two to four pints a day, with more at harvest — and it tied a worker’s drink supply to his employer. It was defended as customary and attacked as a driver of dependence and of rural drunkenness, and it is one reason cider consumption figures for the period are not comparable with modern ones.
Its abolition changed the economics of farm cider directly: a drink produced as a wage cost became a drink that had to be sold.
Related terms
Terms that belong to the same part of the subject, or that this one is routinely confused with.
Cider
Farmhouse cider
Cider made on the farm that grew the fruit, traditionally in small volumes for the farm’s own use and local sale, and by extension any cider made in that manner.
Milling and pressing
Ciderkin
A weak drink made by soaking pressed pomace in water and pressing it again, historically supplied to farm workers and to households as an everyday beverage of low strength.
History
Temperance movement
The nineteenth and early twentieth-century campaigns against alcohol consumption, which reshaped cider-producing regions by attacking the truck system, promoting unfermented juice, and in some countries removing orchards.
Equipment
Hogshead
A cask size long used for cider. Cask sizes were never fully standardised across trades and regions, and a cider hogshead was not necessarily the same volume as a beer or wine one.
History
Devonshire colic
An epidemic of lead poisoning in the eighteenth-century West Country, traced to lead used in cider mills, presses and vessels, and identified as such by the physician George Baker in 1767.
Where to go next
- Cider glossary — The whole vocabulary, by subject and A–Z.
- Comparisons — Terms that are only really clear when set against the thing they are not.
- Search — Finds terms by their aliases and by their spellings in other languages.
Sources
What this page rests on. Where a source is marked as registered rather than read, CiderHQ is recording that the body is authoritative on the subject without claiming to have worked through the document itself. See our evidence policy for what each state means.
Somerset Rural Life Museum — cider collections
South West Heritage Trust · museum · retrieved 2026-08-24
Hereford Museum of Cider collections and interpretation
Hereford Cider Museum Trust · museum · retrieved 2026-08-24