732 ON PRICES GENERALLY BETWEEN 1401 AND 1582. 



I have taken the year 1520, because the reader will find, on 

 turning to the annual entries and averages, and the decennial 

 a-verages, that in the most important of these items the rate of 

 wages is practically identical through the whole of the fifteenth 

 century, and for the first twenty years of the sixteenth. There 

 are indeed years and decades of years in which the price is 

 slightly higher or slightly lower than the average, and it is clear 

 that common or unskilled labour secures through the course of 

 the century or more, though with trifling fluctuations, rather 

 better terms. The other variations are to be assigned to 

 transient or trivial causes, to exceptional demand, or the 

 reverse, and to summer and winter rates. 



I purpose in a subsequent chapter to deal with the purchasing 

 power of wages at the two epochs into which I have divided 

 the years of my present enquiry, and therefore do not now com- 

 ment on the continual relations of the figures in the foregoing 

 table. It is sufficient to point to the fact that during the period 

 1520-47 there is very little variation in the quotient which is 

 the average wages of the eight kinds of labour which have been 

 added together and divided. There are slight traces of higher 

 rates being paid in dear years, as in 1527, 1535, and 1536. 



The first rise discernible is in 1548. The price of wheat 

 was very low in 1547, singularly low, considering the fact that 

 in 1546 Henry had issued coins containing only one-third of 

 their weight fine, a debasement which was never carried lower 

 till 1551, when an issue was made by Somerset and the rest at 

 only one-fourth fine 1 . Nor were the years 1546 and 1548 dear. 

 It is not improbable that the goodness of the seasons may have 

 blinded Henry and his executors to the effects of that which 

 they were doing, and in their eyes have justified the expedient. 



In 1548 the rate of wages on the average is over 3^. a week, 

 and from this time it never falls below 3^. In 1559 it 

 becomes permanently 4^-. at least. Three times in the remain- 

 ing twenty-three years it is 5^. and upwards. But throughout 



1 Essays on Money and Exchanges, by Henry James, ii. 104. See :ilso Tooke's History 

 of Prices, vol. vi. p. 370 sqq. 



