KING AND PEASANT. 75 1 



revenue, and almost his independence in the early years of 

 the Stuart family, the landowner was gradually able to take 

 advantage of the diffusion of agricultural skill, and to employ 

 all the force of law to increase his rents at the expense of the 

 tenant first, and of the general public afterwards. The manu- 

 facturer or merchant, up to the time at which my volumes 

 conclude, a small factor in the system, was gradually to become 

 the prime cause of wealth to all. But the labourer was to get 

 poorer and poorer, and to earn the least share of the opulence 

 in the future, till in our own day, thanks to the energy with 

 which he has employed his liberty to form labour partnerships, 

 and the general discretion with which he has used and studied 

 his powers ; to the free trade which he tardily, but in the end 

 fully, saw was the charter of his economical liberty ; and lastly, 

 to some acts of legislation, which have given him assistance 

 against the fraud or the folly of his employers, the artisan has 

 made material progress. Unluckily, his brother, the agricultural 

 labourer, has been unable to attain the beneficent results of 

 combination ; and has, by a perverse and unnatural alliance 

 between ignorant landowners and equally ignorant tenants at 

 will, been made less efficient and increasingly scarce. The last 

 forty-two years of my present period are the commencement 

 of the change. 



The average wages of an artisan between 1401 and 1540 are 

 3.?. a week ; those of a labourer in husbandry, or unskilled 

 labourer as I have called him, more to distinguish him from the 

 artisan than to state a fact of which I should affirm the con- 

 trary, are zs. There is no doubt that the best farm hand of the 

 fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was, as far as his particular 

 calling was concerned, as good and as varied a workman as the 

 farm hand was in rural England before he had an opportunity 

 of escaping from his ill-paid labour, as he is described in 

 Elizabeth's proclamation, p. 121. 



Now the cost of maintaining labour is given over and over 

 again in the accounts of the third volume. It was necessarily 

 dearer in London than it was in country places. It was more 



