690 ON THE PURCHASING POWER OF WAGES. 



the labourer was, considering the low price of provisions, well 

 paid, could live in plenty, and accumulate wealth. 



Perhaps the best kind of evidence, (now that such concrete 

 cases have been considered,) by which we may estimate the 

 rise in the price of the principal necessaries of life, is to take 

 such articles, not subject to taxation, as are priced in one of 

 Arthur Young's tours c . 



Arthur Young, I may perhaps inform some of my readers, 

 was a most careful and diligent collector of facts. His num- 

 bers may always be relied on, his averages are exact, and his 

 facts are copious. But he was, despite these powers of obser- 

 vation, an exceedingly bad reasoner, and his economical infer- 

 ences are perfectly worthless. 



According to this authority, the average rate of wages taken 

 from seventy-seven places lying on the north-eastern road from 

 London, is js. $\d. the week; this amount including extra pay 

 in harvest and hay-time. The average price of bread is \\d. 

 the four-pound loaf, 6\d. the pound for butter, 3^. for cheese, 

 d. all round for meat. When these prices are compared with 

 those of the fourteenth century, we find that corn is about 

 eight times dearer, butter about twelve times, cheese about 

 six times, meat about twelve times. 



Now if, reverting to the calculation made above in p. 290, 

 we take the wages of a farm hand, exclusive of the earnings 

 of his wife and child, which I have introduced in the calcula- 

 tion, at ^2 10*., the agricultural labourer in the last half of 

 the fourteenth century received one-seventh of the nominal 

 money wages possessed by the labourer in Young's time, while 

 he purchased many of the necessaries of life at one-twelfth the 

 price of the seventeenth century, and bread at one-eighth ; for 

 taking wheat at 481. in Young's time, and at 4!^. the four-pound 

 loaf, wheat at 5*. lod. would have made the loaf about a frac- 

 tion above a halfpenny, or to be exact, -531 of a penny. The 

 reader, however, will recollect that I have estimated the corn 

 allowances at prices of inferior or mixed grain, and that there- 



c Northern Tour, vol. iv. p. 274 seq. edit. 1771. 





