CHAPTER XXIX. 



ON THE PURCHASING POWER OF WAGES. 



THE reader will now be able to interpret for himself what 

 was the power which any given sum possessed for procuring 

 the necessaries and conveniences of life, and the extent to 

 which the mass of the community was enabled to obtain the 

 various objects which labour produced at home and commerce 

 supplied from abroad. But I shall attempt in the present 

 chapter to give as precise an account as I can, from the prices 

 of the more important articles treated in the preceding chap- 

 ters, of the way in which a given annual income might be 

 distributed, especially with the purpose of comparing the con- 

 dition of those who live by wages at three or four periods 

 in English history ; that is to say, in the period preceding the 

 Plague ; in that which followed it ; in the middle of the 

 eighteenth century; in the first twenty years of the nine- 

 teenth; and at the present time. 



The reader will have recognized, if he has had the patience 

 to follow the investigation into the several commodities 

 whose -money-values are exhibited in the tabular statements 

 appended to the previous chapters, that the multiple by which 

 we must seek to interpret ancient prices will vary very con- 

 siderably with the object which has to be examined. Thus 

 there will be one multiple for wheat and the other kinds of 

 grain ; another for meat and those ordinary products of agri- 

 cultural labour which may be considered the secondary neces- 

 saries of life ; a third for clothing ; a fourth for tools and 



