266 ON THE PRICE OF LABOUR. 



carried on in-doors, and may be performed when other labour is 

 impossible. 



If the reader will turn to the table of decennial averages at the 

 conclusion of this chapter and examine the inferences arrived at, 

 as to the actual rise in the rate at which threshing is paid in the 

 period up to 1350 over the several divisions of England, he will 

 find that the increase due to the Great Plague is 32 per cent, for 

 wheat, 38 per cent, for barley, in per cent, for oats, in the 

 eastern counties. In the midland the proportions are 40, 69, 

 and in. In the south 33, 38, and 75. In the west 16, 41, 

 and 44. In the north 32,43, and 100. These per-centages, 

 however, require some explanation. 



The most notable rise is that in the price for threshing oats. 

 But, in the first place, the rate paid for this service was previously 

 exceedingly low, and, as might be expected, the dearth of hands 

 was more effectual on services paid at low than those at high rates. 

 We shall see hereafter that this rule was strikingly exemplified 

 in the wages paid for women's work. Before the Plague women 

 were employed in harvest work, in reaping stubble after the 

 corn was cut (for the thresher or for litter), in hoeing, in planting 

 beans, in washing sheep, and sometimes in waiting on the 

 thresher and tiler. In general they are paid a penny a day, 

 though their wages are occasionally lower than this. After the 

 Plague, however, though female labour is comparatively rare, 

 they are seldom paid less than twopence, often as much as 

 threepence ; that is, the rise in the rate of their wages is from 

 100 to 200 per cent, on the previous scale. 



Again, great as the rise is, it is made apparently more con- 

 siderable by the fact that it became common in the latter part 

 of the fourteenth century to pay the same rate all round. No 

 doubt in this uniform scale the price of threshing wheat is un- 

 duly depressed, that of doing the same service on oats unduly 

 enhanced. 



The incidence of the Plague was general, but it possibly 

 affected the more thinly-peopled districts less heavily than it 

 did those in which population was more dense. On the whole 



