756" ON THE PURCHASING POWER OF WAGES. 



number of hours in the working day was thus limited, it is easy 

 to see that an artisan might be able to employ his extra hours 

 in some other calling or in odd jobs, no record of the earnings 

 of which has been preserved. 



It may be worth while here to collect the evidence as to the 

 amount of work done and money earned by one of the masons 

 on Merton tower. Thomas Wykes receives at the rate of 

 ^s. 4d. a week for thirty-eight weeks in the year, and 2^. lod. 

 for the remaining fourteen, in the year 1449-50, February to 

 February. In the second week of April he works for only 

 three days (Easter day was on April 13 in 1449), in tne third 

 and fourth five days only. During the first week in June 

 (Whitsunday was June i) he again works for three days only; 

 for the third week of July for three days only, when there 

 could have been no religious reason. At Christmas time he 

 does no work for three weeks, perhaps having taken a holiday, 

 as one of his fellows works on the third week. The whole of 

 his money wages during the year are 6 ijs. 6d. Besides 

 Sundays, he does no work in twenty-nine days in the year, of 

 which ten appear to be of voluntary absence. The mason of 

 1551-82, at io\d. a day, working for the same time, and at an 

 analogous reduction during the fourteen weeks, would have 

 earned 10 iSs. 4\d., that is, a little less than 1-6 to i. 



I reckoned that the earnings of the owner, free or by copy, 

 of an estate of twenty acres, with of course a homestead, at 

 about 4 a year in the time which preceded the Great Plague, 

 and that it exceeded this amount after that event. Such 

 earnings would not have been less in the fifteenth and part of 

 the sixteenth centuries. But an artisan earned in money 

 wages at least fifty per cent, more than the peasant proprietor. 

 If a labourer at 2s. a week was employed in husbandry for the 

 same time that Wykes was, his earnings would be 4 14^. a 

 year, an amount which corresponds with the estimate which 

 I made of the gains of a peasant on a twenty-acre holding. 

 During the last thirty-two years of the period comprised in 

 these volumes, the wages of a labourer in husbandry would 



