Bondagers

A significant, if transient element in the population of the Border villages during the 18th and 19th Centuries were the females outworkers, or ‘bondagers’, who were employed to labour in the fields of the region’s agricultural estates. The use of such female bondagers as agricultural labourers was especially prevalent in south-east Scotland and extended into north Northumberland.

The system is recorded in the Scottish Borders as early as 1656, when it is documented that a hind was bound to provide a women whose labour at harvest paid the rent of his house, and to be on call as a day labourer whenever required (Fenton 1976). In the mid 19th century the rate for such labour was about 10d a day.

The bondager’s work was regarded as paying the rent of the cottage in which the hind’s family lived and it was the hind’s responsibility to supply this labour, either in the shape of female relatives able to do the work or, if necessary, by engaging one or two women or girls to ‘live in’. As well as making a major contribution to the local agricultural economy these women were noteworthy for their distinctive costume, which has been the subject of detailed study (Thompson 1977). By the turn of the 19th Century the Bondage System had finally fallen into disuse, although the term bondager persisted till the end of the First World War.