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By Root 1348 0

to that as well. Some of these men, and their dependants, would in more normal times have formed part of the harvest-sensitive population – those whose subsistence was threatened by rising prices and falling wages during a harvest failure. This may be one factor in an explanation for the absence of recorded famine deaths in the later 1640s: the first years of sustained dearth in which England had slipped the shadow of famine.45 That and, of course, the huge death toll of the years immediately preceding it.

This demand for men must have affected the labour market as a whole. Given that the armies were drawn disproportionately from the labouring population, this is likely to have pushed wages up more generally by withdrawing a measurable proportion of the labouring population from the labour market. In September 1645, for example, there were 18,600 men in the New Model; following the harvest 2,000 men, mainly infantry, were recruited to an army whose overall size we do not know, although in December it contained 14,000 men. The New Model at 14,000 men represented 3 per cent of the male population between 15 and 24, and a little more than 1 per cent of the male population between 16 and 64.46 To these figures for the New Model in 1645 would have to be added about the same number of parliamentary soldiers in other armies, and similar numbers serving in the royalist armies: in May of that year Charles had 40,000 men in arms, about half of them in garrisons.47 After the war, the military establishments were more stable, paid more regularly and less exposed to traumatic loss. In May 1647 there were 21,480 in the army, 14,000 of them infantry. Infantry numbers then rose to 16,000 in February 1648, 20,200 in May 1649 and 24,000 the following spring. These infantry figures represent between 3 and 5 per cent of the male population aged 15–24, 1 and 1.5 per cent of the male population between 15 and 59.48 The effects of this must have been particularly felt at harvest-time, pushing wages up and augmenting the market for food by increasing the non-agricultural population. At Myddle Hill, in Shropshire, in September 1642, Sir Paul Harris was offering a very generous 4s 4d per week to soldiers, with likely consequences for the supply of harvest labour.49

Again this might be relevant to the dearth of the late 1640s since, it seems, most famine in this period arose not from an absolute failure of food supply, but from a failure of exchange entitlements:50 soldiers and agricultural labourers may have had better exchange entitlements as a result of a significant transfer of wealth via national taxation, with benefits to their dependants, resulting in a smaller harvest-sensitive population.

As we have seen, construction work on fortifications was not always achieved by forced or voluntary labour. Men from Upton, Nottinghamshire, seem to have been paid both to construct the massive earthworks at Newark in 1644 and, two years later, to take them down. In the spring of 1644 they were paid 8d per day, comparable with the pay of a foot soldier or for a day mowing hay in Lincolnshire during the 1620s.51 Thomas Catrowe seems to have had employment as a carpenter in the ‘service of the commonwealth’ for at least eleven years after 1643, employing ‘under him several workmen’, particularly in the maintenance of Tilbury Fort. Quarter, as distinct from free quarter, might have been a useful income, another transfer from the taxpayer to the relatively poor. Joane Johnson quartered Col. Thomas Lanes for ‘a long time’ around 1644 and his case for payment of arrears of pay rested in part on what he owed to her: on this argument he secured £16 of the £20 owing to him (although he subsequently sued her to recover the money for his own use).52

The Queen’s Sconce, part of the civil war defences of Newark

Wounded soldiers were often quartered, and the burden and difficulty of dealing with severely wounded men was regarded with alarm. Soldiers” pay was supposed to cover these costs, but of course that was not reliable. Nonetheless, caring for the wounded