How Saucy did it Make the Poor? The Straw Plait and Hat Trades, Illegitimate Fertility and the Family in Nineteenth-Century Hertfordshire

The straw plait and hat industry provided considerable employment for women and children in south and west Hertfordshire in the nineteenth century, but was absent in much of the north and east. Many contemporaries felt it had a deleterious effect upon morality and the stability of the family, and its regional specificity within Hertfordshire allows these propositions to be tested through a comparative analysis of illegitimacy and examination of the family circumstances of young straw workers. It is discovered that illegitimacy ratios often give a misleading impression, failing to take into account the size of the population ‘at risk’, while illegitimacy rates suggest only minor differences between straw and non-straw areas, a more noticeable feature of the data being the generally higher illegitimacy rates found in Hertfordshire’s small towns. Nor does the evidence suggest that the industry led to early break up of families. The rise and decline of illegitimacy in England between the late eighteenth and late nineteenth centuries presents a continuing conundrum, and while the growth and decay of the straw industry offers little explanatory value, this article suggests that the changing conditions in the agricultural labour market may have more relevance to counties such as Hertfordshire. ‘The farmers complain of it, as doing mischief, for it makes the poor saucy, and no servants can be procured, where this manufacture establishes itself.’ (Arthur Young, 1804). I The straw plait and hat trades were of considerable importance to the economies of Hertfordshire and Bedfordshire, and to parts of Buckinghamshire, Essex and Suffolk, in the nineteenth century. Straw plaiting and hat making was already established in the seventeenth century, grew in the eighteenth, benefited prodigiously from the