Domestic or small workshop scale: Thompson is referring here to the fact that early production, especially early textile production, was done in small workshops or households with limited production capacities. Individuals might move between tasks and machines in order to complete the entire production process (or there might be a division of labor between certain kinds of work, like spinning and weaving which was generally divided by gender, but not the specialized division of labor that Adam Smith discussed in the Wealth of Nations)

Putting-out system: The term can refer to any variety of subcontracting work, though Thompson is specifically using the term in reference to a system of textile production common in early modern England and Northern Europe. In this system textile merchants would provide rural spinners and weavers the raw material (wool or yarn) to turn into yarn/thread and then weave into clothes. The spinner and weavers generally owned their own machines and were paid by the piece when the work was completed. As Thompson notes, rural spinners and weavers usually split their labor between textile work, farm work, and other domestic chores.  Thus a work day might entail hours of spinning interspersed with other activities. The putting-out system did not immediately disappear with the advent of the mechanized textile production, but rather increased and speed up their labor in order to compete.

Images of work from 17th century You can get a glimpse of some depictions of work in the 17th century in the paintings in this digital exhibit at the Met.

Saint Monday: An early modern practice of “extending” the weekend into the first day of the week, Monday. The “Saint” used in the term is a reference  to group of individuals recognized by the Catholic and Anglican churches as saints and are attributed special powers and honored by specific days within the religious calendars. Within different communities and countries, certain saints were further recognized by having their days marked as holidays. By adding the Saint to Monday, workers and other celebrants thus created their own impromptu saint and saint’s day, thereby providing justification for taking the day off within a cultural and religious system that recognized saint’s days as legitimate festival days.  It should be noted that most individuals would have worked all or part of Saturday, so the periodic addition of a Monday off would have given workers two days off in a row.

“le dimanche est le jour de la famille…” can be read as “Sunday is for family, Monday for friendship.” Sunday would have normally been reserved for family activities and, depending on the population, religious obligations.

Old Potter, “When I was a Child”: A reference to an autobiographical work by Charles Shaw, who published the work under the pseudonym Old Potter. The autobiography offers a first hand account of child labor in the pottery industry in the mid-nineteenth century.

Calendar of day of festivals: A calendar of religious festivals and saint’s days used in early modern Europe (especially Catholic Europe and Anglican England) to note the days on which holidays were to be observed. The calendar helped to break up the year between periods of work and periods of religious observance and holidays. You can find an example of an early modern Anglican calendar here along with a description of the kind of activities that accompanied certain festival days. Probably the closer equivalent that we have in modern times is Mardi Gras (Shrove Tuesday) as celebrated in New Orleans and St. Patrick’s Day.

enclosure movement: A process of land consolidation that occurred in England over a series of centuries, beginning in the sixteenth century and continuing into the mid-nineteenth century. In the process smaller pieces of common land that had once been used by a wide range of people, were consolidated into larger holdings, fenced in and deeded as private property. Rural peasants who had formerly depended on the land for grazing livestock and small-scale farming were now deprived of these means of subsistence. The result was an increase in rural poverty, dislocation, and eventual urbanization. Sir Thomas More makes an early reference to the impact of the enclosure movement in Utopia when he refers to “sheep who eat men”–a reference to the sheep who had been placed on former common land by the new landowners.

Sir Mordaunt Martin