

ON THE PRICE OF LABOUR. 50 1 



In all kinds of mechanical labour, it is occasionally difficult 

 to determine whether the labourer was not fed as well as paid. 

 Sometimes the fact that he is maintained at the common 

 table of the college, the monastery, or the king's house is 

 declared, and this while he is paid the full rate of wages 1 . 

 At other times it is clear that the cost of maintenance is 

 deducted from his wages, which are thereupon a penny or 

 twopence a day less than the ordinary rate. Occasionally it 

 seems that the labourer is regularly boarded all the week 

 through, and has all the advantages, while he is employed, of 

 those who are on the foundation of the college or monastery. 

 Such, for example, is the case at Hickling priory. Wages in 

 Norfolk are generally high, and reasonably so, for Norfolk had 

 been and remained the principal manufacturing county in 

 England. But at Hickling the money wages, even of artisans, 

 are abnormally low. The labourers have regular commons in 

 the religious house. I have therefore been constrained to omit 

 all the Hickling entries from my averages. 



Again, it is not to be expected that common carpenters' 

 work 2 , hired in country places for ordinary farm purposes, or 

 analogous objects, and therefore pretty continuous all the year 

 through, would be paid at as high rates as were offered to 

 workmen employed in framing the floors and roofs of collegiate 

 and monastic buildings, or for carrying on royal works. A 

 country carpenter, living on the spot, and rarely employed, if 

 employed at all, on finer and more difficult work, would not 

 get such good wages as the founder of All Souls paid when he 

 was constructing the buildings of his college ; Merton College, 

 when it was building its bell-tower ; Bishop Waynfleet, when 

 he was engaged in similar work at Beeding or Oxford ; or 

 Henry the Eighth, when he entered on the extensive and costly 

 constructions of his numerous manors and palaces. Such 



1 See e.g. Vol. Ill, p. 597. 



2 It will be obvious that, as all houses, except those of the rich, were constructed on 

 timber frames, and faced with lath and plaster, the services of the carpenter were in 

 constant requisition. 



