The hardships suffered by the women of the wage-earning class proved fatal to their children. Gregory King estimated that there were on an average only 3½ persons, including father and mother in a labourer’s family though he gives 4.8 as the average number of children for each family in villages and hamlets.[168] Another writer gives 3 persons as the average number for a labourer’s family.[169] The cases of disputed settlements which are brought before Quarter Sessions confirm the substantial truth of these estimates. It is remarkable that where the father is living seldom more than two or three children are mentioned, often only one, though in cases of widows where the poverty is recent and caused as it were by the accidental effect of the husband’s premature death, there are often five to ten children. In Nottingham, of seventeen families, who had recently come to the town and been taken in as tenants, and which the Council wanted to eject for fear of overcrowding, only one had four children, one three, and the rest only two or one child apiece.[170] Footnote 168: King (Gregory), _Natural and Political Observations and Conclusions_, p. 44, pp. 48-9. Footnote 169: _Grasier’s Complaint_, p. 60. Footnote 170: _Nottingham, Records of the Borough of_, Vol. IV., pp. 312-5, 1613. In fact, however large the birth-rate may have been, and this we have no means of ascertaining, few children in the wage-earning class were reared. Of those who reached maturity, many were crippled in mind or body, forming a large class of unemployables destined to be a burthen instead of strength to the community. This appalling loss and suffering was not due to the excessive work of married women but to their under-feeding and bad housing. Probably the women of the wage-earning class actually accomplished less work than the women of the husbandman class; but the latter worked under better conditions and were well nourished, with the result that their sons and daughters have been the backbone of the English nation.