730 ON PRICES GENERALLY BETWEEN 140! AND 1582. 



and is nearly doubled in 1552; solder rises permanently in 

 1547 ; pewter vessels in 1548. But brass or copper utensils, of 

 which the religious houses had plenty, became dear from other 

 causes as early as 1540. The natural price of these articles 

 does not suffer a permanent rise till 1560, and even after this 

 date is liable to frequent fluctuations. 



The miserable rise in the wages of labour needs a more 

 careful scrutiny. The only way in which it seems possible to 

 illustrate this is by comparing it with the price of food, 

 especially wheat. As I have often said, our forefathers lived 

 on wheaten bread, and would have scorned, at least in the 

 south, rye cake as heartily as the French soldier of the legend 

 contemned Pumpernikel. The most obvious way in which the 

 contrast may be exhibited is to supply a table, from 1520 on- 

 wards, of the price of wheat, and the week's wages of such 

 kinds of labour as are found in p. 515 sqq. } and may serve for 

 a continuous aggregate. The most convenient elements of 

 the labour rate are, the average payment of the carpenter, 

 the mason, his labourer, the pair of sawyers, the tiler, the 

 thatcher's man, and the unskilled labourer, by the week. 

 As in other calculations, fractions beyond the farthing 

 are added or rejected as they are more or less than half the 

 divisor. It is also necessary to take the value from the aver- 

 age of all the eight items, when the particular kind of labour is 

 not represented in any given year. E.g. in 1522, the pair of 

 sawyers are reckoned, though they do not appear in the annual 

 register, at is. o\d. or 6s. $d. a week. It will be seen that in 

 this calculation five are artisans, if the undersawyer may be so 

 reckoned, and three are < unskilled,' that is, in the legal sense of 

 the time, workmen who had not been apprenticed, i.e. five- 

 eighths of the total is artisan, three-eighths agricultural, or equi- 

 valent to agricultural, labour. When the wages are of London 

 labour only, the item is reduced to the average of that kind of 

 labour for a few preceding years. 



