490 ON THE PRICE OF LABOUR. 



ment of a poor-law was necessarily involved in the lamentable 

 change of condition which he experienced. 



In my earlier volumes I was able to tabulate certain kinds 

 of labour, viz. the threshing of a quarter of wheat, barley, peas 

 or beans, and oats, according to the various great districts into 

 which England might be divided. I am disposed to believe 

 that as such a division of the country was useful and suggestive 

 then, so it would have been, even if the evidence were forthcom- 

 ing, superfluous now. The fifteenth century was, as I have often 

 shown, the golden age of the English labourer. Prices were 

 low, and subsistence was plentiful. But the price of land was 

 high, and the price of labour was also high. Land was greatly 

 distributed, or held by very numerous tenants, even when it was 

 not purchased, on very easy terms ; for a substantial and pros- 

 perous yeomanry was founded during the troubles of the great 

 war of succession, and on the suicide of the English aristocracy 

 of the old regime. After the Tudor settlement the country 

 became even more prosperous, though the government was des- 

 potic, till the extravagance of Henry the Eighth, the disturbance 

 of the social system, owing to the destruction of the great 

 monastic corporations, and the creation of a rapacious, insolent, 

 and greedy aristocracy, and most of all the issue of a base cur- 

 rency at a most critical period in the economical history of 

 England, caused widespread suffering, and, as we shall see, put 

 the heaviest burdens, as might indeed be expected, on the 

 labouring poor. 



During the prosperous epoch of English labour, the price 

 paid for the service of the labourer was uniform as well as high. 

 I detect but little difference in the wages of the husbandman, 

 wherever he was hired, from the extreme east to the farthest 

 west of England, from the north to the south. In this uni- 

 formity there is one marked exception. The wages of labour 

 are always much higher in London and its neighbourhood than 

 they are elsewhere during the whole of the fifteenth century, 

 and the early part of the sixteenth. In the table of prices 

 given below, which consists of payments for artisans' labour, it 



