Occupation

Middling households were working households – units of production as well as consumption within and around which there were often shops, workshops, store rooms and warehouses, studies and closets for accounting and storage. Business is hard to disentangle from domestic life, and the stock of shops intermingles with household objects in inventories for these properties. Many such objects connect work done for the household to commercial production, and it is often hard to tell into which category their use fell. Production was in middling DNA – not only farming, woodwork or metalwork, but also cheese, candles, rope and other items that would be useful within the home, but were made on a larger scale so that they could be sold to other households. Across these varied activities, husbands, wives, children, servants and apprentices were working in these houses all day long.

Occupational skill was a crucial part of middling identity – the route to financial success and the increased status that came with it. You will see evidence here of how middling individuals wove the tools of their trade into their material and visual culture, producing a language equivalent to the gentry’s armorial one of coats of arms, but unique to their status and celebrating the skill and hard work on which it was based. There is information about the tools they used in their work, and their attitudes towards them. You will also find evidence for the different kinds of occupation in which these individuals might be engaged – the craft practices, growing professions, and ‘creative careers’, available mainly to men but also occasionally to women – and the training, expertise and finances on which they were based.