Plants and Fossils: Household Fuel Consumption in Hampshire and the West Riding of Yorkshire 1750-1830

The price and availability of different fuel sources shaped the material lives of English people during the Industrial Revolution. Fuel prices affected the location of industries, population growth and whether poorer people could afford to cook their own food. Fuel supplies were highly regionalized in this period and few people had access to wood, peat and coal at comparable prices. Depending on the community, people consumed wood, peat, local coal or non-local coal, the prices of which always differed. National averages or price-wage series do not reflect these diverse experiences. This dissertation offers a new perspective on living standards of the labouring poor by examining the role of regional environments and emphasizing their impact. It does so with a comparative analysis of Hampshire and the West Riding of Yorkshire, two of the most geographically diverse English counties. Evidence is derived from fuel purchases of Overseers of the Poor and sales records of collieries, along with contemporary observations, the 1831 Census, court records of fuel theft prosecutions and the heights of prisoners in the West Riding House of Correction. These sources indicate that wood prices tripled in inland northern Hampshire between 1750 and 1830 and made cooking prohibitively expensive for most households. Purchased wheat bread increasingly became the staple food in that region. Meanwhile, coal was very cheap where it was mined and fuelled industrial expansion on the Yorkshire coalfield. Population growth was higher in this manufacturing region and residents continued to cook their own food but came to suffer from the smoke arising from such fires. The regional perspective of this dissertation indicates that living standards declined for most labouring poor English people during the Industrial Revolution, but for regionally different reasons.