Plants and Fossils: Household Fuel Consumption in Hampshire and the West Riding of Yorkshire 1750-1830
Bibliographic record
Abstract
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.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".