ON THE PRICE OF LABOUR. 285 



customary with women employed in ordinary offices. Can it 

 have been that the watching was of a religious character? 



The reader will find a few examples of payments made for 

 artistic and literary labour. The clerk who wrote the account 

 to be submitted to the lord, generally, if the account were of 

 ordinary length, got half a mark for his trouble ; and as these 

 accounts were rendered from almost all the manors, the autumn 

 brought its harvest of profit to such persons as had sufficient 

 skill in penmanship and account-keeping for this business. Of 

 a similar but a higher character are the payments made at 

 Oxford in the year 1308 for noting an antiphonary (by which, 

 I presume, is meant writing such musical notation as the age 

 employed), for illuminating a gradua'.is, for doing the same 

 service by a missal and an antiphonary, and for writing in the 

 great letters at the commencement of the paragraphs, which 

 the inferior scribe left in blank, and which were among the 

 highest efforts of medieval caligraphy. Similar payments are 

 made at the same place in the year 1366; and the sum of 29^. 

 is given in 1370 for the labour of writing the third part of 

 Nicholas de Lyra's Bible. So vol. ii. p. 612. i., the Countess 

 of Clare keeps a writer engaged for sixteen weeks in writing a 

 book entitled " Vitas patrum." One would like to know what 

 was the purpose of hiring an Oxford clerk at Farley in 1320 

 to translate, it appears, Hebrew into Latin b . 



In 1275 a painter was hired to decorate the chamber of 

 Roger Bigod, Earl of Norfolk, the artist being supplied with 

 colours. This takes place at Lopham, a brief or order being 

 addressed to the bailiff by the Earl. Again, an image is 

 painted in Maldon church by the order of the warden of 

 Merton at the cost of 501., and New College goes, in 1400, 

 to the expense of \ ly. <\d. for providing a canopy for the 

 high altar, and for painting an angel at the door of the church 

 which was frequented by its tenants in Aldgate. 



h Vol. ii. p. 579. iii. Could it have been some instrument which, long after the expul- 

 sion of the Jews, had a legal interest ? It is said that the Jews were never totally excluded 

 from Oxford, and that Hebrew was always studied in this University. 



