726 ON PRICES GENERALLY BETWEEN 1401 AND 1582. 



on the renewal of leases with the old rents unchanged, except 

 in so far as such a rent is modified by the statute of Elizabeth. 



That the small freeholder and the tenant of an estate at 

 customary rents was mulcted indirectly by the usurpation of 

 commons and other enclosures is plain from the complaints of 

 the time, and the ineffectual remedies proposed. It is possible 

 that these curtailments of his ancient rights may have nearly 

 deprived him of all the advantages which a rising market in 

 corn, cattle, and farm produce gave him ; but it cannot, I think, 

 be doubted that the yeoman and husbandman on a fixed rent 

 were the persons who suffered least from the rise in prices 1 . 

 To them labour was relatively cheaper, and what they had to 

 sell was relatively dearer. Under such circumstances, it is not 

 surprising that the yeomen of England increased in numbers 

 and importance, and ultimately, when the spirit of the people 

 was effectually roused, united in order to resist the authority of 

 the Crown, as it was interpreted in Stewart times by Church- 

 men and lawyers. 



I purpose to deal with the condition of the labouring classes, 

 by which I mean those who lived by wages, in the next chapter 

 one, but it may be observed here that as the agriculturist 

 proper, to judge from the relation found to exist between values 

 in the last forty-two years of this period, was best off under the 

 altered state of things, so the labourer was the worst off. The 

 wages of labour, taken collectively, exhibit the least rise of all 

 articles of value, except the unimportant eleventh head in the 

 foregoing table. Nor did matters mend as time went on. In 

 1588 the harvest was abundant, for in Oxford the price of wheat 

 was 14$-. i\d. This was the last occasion on which it fell to 

 what would have been fifty years before a famine rate : and only 

 very rarely, three times in the sixteenth, and once in the seven- 

 teenth (1654), did it after this date fall below 20 s. a quarter. 



1 This fact is quite consistent with the poverty of the Crown, and the inelasticity of 

 the revenue. It is always very difficult to raise a revenue from taxes on agriculture. 

 Hence agricultural communities are taxed by a levy on rents, or by excises and customs 

 on consumption. 



