CHAPTER XVII. 



ON THE PRICE OF LABOUR. 



THE deficiency of information as to agricultural operations, 

 and as to farm products in the period before me, is again ex- 

 emplified in the record of such labour prices as are relevant to 

 the agriculturist's operations. The prices of farm labour are 

 tolerably copious and continuous during the first seventy years 

 of the fifteenth century, are found occasionally up to the first 

 third of the sixteenth, and thereafter cease. Only one kind of 

 agricultural labour is found almost uninterruptedly that which 

 I have called unskilled labour, the value of which, as we shall 

 find, corresponds closely to that of the mason's and thatcher's, 

 or of his help, though it is slightly higher. 



But I see no reason to conclude that the general inference as 

 to the prices of labour which I shall be able to derive so abund- 

 antly from the record of wages paid to artisans, could vary 

 materially when I contrast agricultural wages with those earned 

 by carpenters, masons, and others. The day labourer in hus- 

 bandry, whose necessary services the legislature attempted to 

 secure at moderate cost by the various statutes of labourers in 

 the first instance, and finally by the Act of 6 Eliz., earns 

 always rather more than the artisan's help, but about fifty per 

 cent, less than the artisan, and though, towards the conclusion 

 of the period, the payment for his services rises rather more 

 than that of the mason's or thatcher's labourer does, it rises so 

 little, relatively to other prices, that I am constrained to believe 

 that the hind's wages became, towards the end of the sixteenth 

 century, hardly sufficient for subsistence, and that the enact- 



