ON THE PRICE OF LABOUR. 



disposition on the part of the employers of labour to alleviate 

 the distress of the peasantry by granting of their own accord 

 higher rates, having now ceased. The plenty of the seasons, 

 after the last scarcity of 1321 down to the incidence of the 

 Great Plague, was continuous and remarkable. Its nearest 

 parallel in the period before us is that of the last twenty years 

 of the same century, though the abundance of these times is far 

 exceeded by that of the first seventy years of the fifteenth 

 century, v 



VThe immediate effect of the Plague was to double the wages 

 of labour; in some districts, to raise the rate even beyond this. 

 The Plague began in August 1348, in the south-west counties. 

 It does not seem to have affected the kind of task-work before 

 us in the year of its incidence. In the next year, however, the 

 fullest effect is induced, and the rates paid are those of panic 

 or compulsion, since in the eastern, midland, and southern 

 counties they are unparalleled, not only before, but afterwards, 

 except in one place, in 1370, where sixpence was paid for 

 wheat and twopence for oats. Such an occasional rate may be 

 assigned to some local visitation of extraordinary severity, or 

 perhaps to the quality of the grain; just as in 1347 (vol. ii. 

 p. 607. i.) threshing is said to be paid on one estate at high 

 rates because the corn threshed badly. The twenty years also 

 between 1361 and 1380 were marked throughout the country by 

 high rates. In the last twenty years, hov/ever, of the fourteenth 

 century there was a considerable fall, for, as we have seen 

 above, the period was one of abundant harvests. 



No kind of wages could represent, I think, more distinctly 

 and more fully the natural relations of supply and demand than 

 that on which I have been commenting. The labour of 

 threshing the three kinds of corn-growing grasses differs with the 

 difficulty there is in detaching the seed from the husk, and the 

 graduated rate of payment expresses this difficulty with perfect 

 fairness. Threshing is, if it be not indeed a thing of the past, 

 that kind of agricultural labour which, in this country of un- 

 certain weather, is always tke cheapest, because it must be 



