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General => The Common Room => Topic started by: Scottsearcher on Tuesday 11 October 11 18:57 BST (UK)
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An ancestor, in just about the rural middle of Lincolnshire, is described as a 'cottager'. What precisely does this signify?
Thanks for your thoughts
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Usually a cottager was an agricultural labourer who lived in a cottage that was probably owned by a farmer or landowner - they usually did not have much (if any) land of their own.
Alexander
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As said previously a 'cottager' would have been an agricultural labourer living in a 'tied' cottage
Nothing to do with the meaning of Cottager today!!!! ;D
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Thanks, both of you for your replies.
I've been doing a little family history for quite a while but this is the first occasion I've come across this term even though there are plenty of Ag. Lab.s in most of my lines.
Why was this one different?
Thanks again
Jackie
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an agricultural labourer living in a 'tied' cottage
The job and the accommodation are linked, so if the person loses the job they also lose the accommodation.
'Ordinary' Ag labs would be renting the accommodation from someone who they may or may not work for. They may work seasonally for several different people depending on what work is needed, to earn the money to pay the rent.
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Also many ag. labs lived in Tents, which has been queried somewhere else on this site.
Those not in either tied accomodation or local housing would have moved around the countryside following the work through the season, taking their family with them. A very transigent lifestyle and some were still living like this within my living memory and I am 57. :)
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Thanks for your replies.
What a truly awful existence. Literally Tents as in canvas structure? I watched the final 'Who do you think you are?' last night - Tracey Emin. I know that some semi-itinerant workers were offered 'trailers' (wooden, wheeled structures, a little like gypsy caravans) if their work took them away from home but this idea of Tents shows a whole new dimension.
I'd always assumed that all Ag. Lab.s were in effect cottagers and the intinerant lifestyle, following hiring fairs included some sort of accommodation.
Regards
Jackie
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A number of "Cottagers" are included in the 1852 Poll Book for Lincolnshire. I assume they must have met the requirement to hold freehold land valued at min. £10 in order to vote. In light of previous comments is this unusual?
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I have a vague recollection, someone will correct me if I am wrong, that prior to Parliamentary Enclosures, cottagers had a house and a small "garden" area but crucially had common rights to graze a few animals and collect other benefits from commons. They had no land in open fields but they may have worked for farmers sometimes if they wished, at harvest etc. One of the criticisms of enclosures was that people who had been independent lost their common rights and were reduced to becoming ag. labs., probably still living in their cottages.
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Usually a cottager was an agricultural labourer who lived in a cottage that was probably owned by a farmer or landowner - they usually did not have much (if any) land of their own.
I think an earlier, perhaps medieval term, was Cottar ?
My wife has an ancestor from a farming family in southern Northumberland ; the children appeared at about 18-monthly intervals, each time in a different farm in Shotley parish.
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The folk who moved around were provided with a tied cottage on a yearly basis, usually from autumn, when some might go to hiring fairs to find a new master and move a greater distance. If they had their own cottage they would be more inclined to stay in one parish.
I would look at your cottager's position in the village landscape: on the main street, edge of the village or somewhere else. Some cottage properties have irregular shaped boundaries which were literally encroachments on commons that were permitted in earlier times. They are less likely in the "Midlands Trangle", Lincolnshire is marginal to this. There were some good parish studies of enclosure in Lincolnshire published perhaps 40 years ago which may show examples. Ask your local studies library.
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This resonates with me as I have ancestor who was an ag lab in Lincolnshire in 1841. His stepmother was a cottager and the head of the household. In 1851 she is lsited as a widower, but the stepson becomes a farm labourer.
This family had been in the same village since the 1600s.
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In mid-nineteenth century Lincolnshire "cottager" typically meant a very small farmer whose holding (whether owned or rented) was too small to constitute a full-time job for an able-bodied man and who therefore also worked as an employee for someone else. Generally, but not invariably, the side job was as a farm labourer.
You can find a detailed article on this subject in the Interest Groups/Local History/Features section of the website of the Society for Lincolnshire History and Archaeology.
The meaning of the term varied greatly according to time and place; so dictionaries cannot be relied on.
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This family stayed in the same village until the late 1800s, living in and working on the same estate.
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As far as I remember I haven't come across the term "cottager" in my own Kent research. Like BillyF, my people mainly stayed put in the same village once they married. I have just been working on the local newpapers here (1839 today) and the report about the Agricultural show prizes includes lists of men being awarded sums of money for having worked for the same employer or his predecessors for 50 years.