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centuries, were hit hard by falling demand and the competition from draperies elsewhere in Europe, causing massive unemployment. One of the responses to the decline was a shift in focus to the luxury industries, dependent on highly skilled labour, artisan creativity and fashionable refinements. The added value of human capital in this sector was high, difficult to replace and less subject to short-term economic changes. Fuelled by growing domestic demand as a result of rising standards of living, specialised artistic and luxury crafts blossomed in many of the larger towns
of broader political and cultural contexts. 43 Wales in the 1930s, like the rest of Britain, dealt with the impact of the Depression and mass unemployment, and some areas faced near starvation. 44 Yet such contemporary realities are absent from both Morton and Thompson’s narratives. Morton’s views on Wales are not only reflective of his overall approach to the history of the British Isles, but also show an understanding of the importance of local tradition which encapsulated ideas about identity and place linked through tangible objects. The Nest abduction
the Flemyngs there take away the living of English people’, he said, he ‘purposed to have cut off their thumbs or hands, so that they should never have helped themselves again by the means of crafts.’ 96 In chapter 6 we explained how London’s craft guilds failed to keep up with the competition of aliens in the capital during the later fifteenth century, and thus faced the spectre of unemployment. The craft associations where Shawe hoped to find his allies were exactly those which, since the early fifteenth century, had been petitioning the crown for more
‘that bases religion on a biological concept of race and continues to promote a radical völkisch racial ideology along with ideas of racial and religious purity and purification’). 43 The eco-fascist views of its members, along with their focus on neo-tribalism, and the target audience of white men living in mostly rural areas (affected by substance abuse, mental illness, unemployment, and incarceration) strongly resonate with one of the oldest heathen organisations in the US, the so-called Odinist Fellowship . Founded by the Dane Else Christensen in 1969 as a
quickly in this system, but suffered financial losses in the long run because inflation shrank the real value of money made on the leases. Scottish trade started to grow again in the 1530s, only to contract once more with the English invasions of the 1540s. Whatever the overall extent of economic expansion in the sixteenth century, it did not keep pace with population growth, and unemployment and vagrancy became increasingly
hour and again when the vineyard owner inquires of those whom he found at the eleventh hour why they stood idle all day (Matt 20:3, 6). Discrepancies in the Pearl version of the parable differentiate these workers from those targeted by fourteenth-century labour laws and the context of the parable from a situation of a labour shortage. Instead, the poem suggests a situation of unemployment, in which surplus labourers wait for work and defend themselves from the charge of idleness. Conversing with potential employees before hiring them, the vineyard owner inquires why
, 199–202 in the same issue. 64 Hatcher, ‘Debate: women’s work reconsidered’, 193. 65 S.A.C. Penn, ‘Female wage earners in late-fourteenth century England’, Agricultural History Review 35 (1987), 1–14. 66 J. Langdon, ‘Minimum wages and unemployment rates in medieval England: the case of Old Woodstock, Oxfordshire, 1256–1357’, in B. Dodds and C.D. Liddy (ed.), Commercial activity, markets and entrepreneurs in the middle ages (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2011), pp. 25