Cider as part of the agricultural wage

A farm in an orchard county made cider for its own household and for its workforce. Labourers, both those living in and those hired by the day, received a stated allowance of cider as part of their terms. The cash element of the wage was set on the understanding that the drink came with it, so the allowance was not additional generosity but a component of the payment.

The scale rose and fell with the work. Nineteenth-century accounts and farm records describe an everyday allowance measured in a few pints a day, increasing sharply during haymaking and harvest when the hours were long and the work heavy. Reported quantities vary widely between farms and between commentators, and any single figure repeated as typical should be treated with suspicion.

Because the allowance was drawn from the farm’s own casks, it also determined how much cider the farm had to make. An orchard was not a sideline in this system; it was part of the wage bill, and its acreage was set by the size of the workforce as much as by the market for the drink.

Paying in cider converted a crop into wages without passing through cash. For a farm short of coin — the usual condition of an English farm before the later nineteenth century — that was an advantage in itself, and it insulated the wage bill from the price of grain and the state of the harvest.

It also had a disciplinary function. A labourer whose drink came from the farm had a reason to stay on good terms with the farmer, and a hiring that included cider was worth taking. Where an employer also let a cottage, the labourer’s housing, drink and income all issued from the same source.

The argument farmers made publicly was different: that heavy field work required drink, that cider was wholesome, and that men expected it. All three were said sincerely and none of them is a full account of why the practice suited the payer.

Cider made in this quantity was not made carefully. It was pressed from whatever fruit the orchard gave, fermented in whatever casks the farm had, and drunk young because there was nowhere to keep it. Sourness, cloudiness and outright spoilage were ordinary, and the second and third pressings — pomace watered and pressed again — produced a thin drink of low strength expressly for the field.

That thin ciderkin or water-cider is an important qualification to any calculation of how much alcohol a labourer consumed. A gallon of small cider and a gallon of strong farmhouse cider are very different quantities of alcohol, and the sources rarely distinguish them.

In some districts, and for a long period, the vessels and the practice also carried lead, with consequences treated separately under Devon colic. The cider of the farm allowance is the cider that poisoned people.

Nineteenth-century reformers, temperance campaigners and parliamentary commissions on agricultural labour returned repeatedly to the cider allowance. Their objections were that it kept wages low in cash terms, that it produced habitual heavy drinking among men and sometimes boys, and that it left families dependent on a farmer’s goodwill for part of their subsistence.

Defenders replied that the custom was ancient, that the men wanted it, and that abolishing it would simply cut real wages. Both positions had substance. Where the allowance was withdrawn without a compensating rise in cash pay, labourers were worse off, which is one reason the practice proved durable.

It is possible to describe this arrangement without either sentimentality or outrage, and the attempt is worth making. The cider allowance was a normal feature of a low-wage rural economy, it was defended and resented at the same time by the people inside it, and it left behind both a drinking culture and a body of ill health.