274 ON THE PRICE OF LABOUR. 



especially as assistants to thatchers. The corn appears to have 

 been cut rather high upon the stalk, and the stubble was either 

 left as a manure., or, if needed, reaped again to thatch stacks 

 and barns f . This, again, was frequently women's labour. Esti- 

 mated proportionately, their services were not badly paid. If 

 we reckoned a penny a day, the earliest rate of payment made 

 to women, as equal to &d. in present money, the female 

 members of a peasant's household who were engaged in out- 

 door work got relatively as good wages as women get now who 

 are employed upon farms. After the Plague, however, the 

 wages paid women as thatchers' helps are doubled, and before 

 the end of the period are increased by 135 per cent. We shall 

 see hereafter that a similar rise takes place in other branches 

 of female employment. 



The rise in the thatcher's pay is 48 per cent, j in that of the 

 thatcher and man, when the payments are put together, 79 

 per cent. This is a somewhat scantier increase than that 

 which is recorded for the two services taken separately, but is 

 easily accounted for by the fact that where the payment is 

 joint the help was generally, if not always, the wife or daughter, 

 or perhaps the young son of the person hired, and in such cases 

 we might expect that a slightly lower rate of remuneration 

 would be accepted. But the general inference remains as 

 before, an inference which might be, I think, fairly expanded 

 into a law or principle regulating the price of labour : that 

 when, by any series of causes or by any one dominant cause, 

 the demand for labour far exceeds the supply, the largest rise 

 will take place in such kinds of labour as, first, are required on 

 particular emergencies; and secondly, which were, before the 

 scarcity occurred, paid at the lowest rates. In other words, a 

 scarcity of labour affects the cheaper kinds of labour more fully 

 than it does those which are most expensive. 



We next come to mechanical labour. In transcribing the 

 information supplied in the second volume into a tabular form 



f Thus Walter de Henley advises that stubble should never be cut or mown, except it be 

 urgently needed for thatching. 



