300 ON THE PRICE OF LABOUR. 



of artizans, on the contrary, we see that it promoted the divi- 

 sion of labour, and elevated the worker in metals and similar 

 substances into a capitalist, while before he generally took the 

 raw material from his employer and worked or fashioned it at 

 a payment for labour only. 



The Statute of Labourers may indeed have produced some 

 effect on farm labour. I seem to detect its operation from a 

 fact which I have frequently noticed in the accounts after the 

 Black Death. Entries of payments on certain rates are can- 

 celled, and lower sums are substituted for them. For instance, 

 at Clarette in 1349, wheat is entered as threshed at 5^., but $d. 

 is substituted. In the next year, wheat, rye, peas, and vetches 

 are first said to be threshed at 6*/., barley at 3^., oats at id. ; 

 for these %\d.^ i|^., and \d. are substituted. In the same year 

 reaping barley is altered from is. id. to u., and similar changes 

 or erasures on these and other estates are found. Occasionally, 

 but rarely, artisans' labour is marked by similar alterations in 

 amounts. Of course in the tables which I have constructed 

 I have not taken the figures which have been cancelled, but 

 those which are substituted. But I cannot help thinking that 

 these changes point to evasions of the statute, and that perhaps 

 the labourer was compensated to the full extent of the previous 

 entry, but in some covert way, or by some means which would 

 not come within the penalties of the statute. Thus there 

 might be larger allowances at harvest-time, or the permission 

 to make fuller use of common rights, or, as I have seen in the 

 case of a shepherd, a licence to turn his sheep into his lord's 

 pasture, or some analogous equivalent to a necessary but illegal 

 money payment. We have seen, however, that even taking 

 the substituted entries, a great rise was effected, and we know 

 first that this rise was in direct contravention of a law, created 

 in the interest of those who employed labour, and who might 

 come within the risk of the penalties which they had been 

 instrumental in enacting; and next that the wages of many 

 kinds of the labour enumerated in the statute were never 

 affected by it at all. 



