CHAPTER XXIII. 



LABOUR AND WAGES. 



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THE rates of wages paid to labour, under the machinery 

 of the quarter sessions assessments, taken in connection with 

 the cost at which the necessaries of life could be procured, are 

 of profound interest to the student of social and economical 

 history. I do not purpose in the present chapter to interpret 

 the wages of labour by the price of the common necessaries of 

 life. This topic will be most conveniently handled after I 

 have dealt with the prices comprised in the hundred and 

 twenty years 1583-1702 inclusive and an attempt is made to 

 compare and systematise the evidence. At present I shall 

 merely deal with the history of wages in the period before me, 

 and especially with those forces which the employers of labour, 

 through the agency of parliament and the machinery of the 

 quarter sessions, put into motion with a view to effecting that 

 victory over labour which for more than two centuries they had 

 vainly attempted to achieve. 



Two acts of government had effectually delivered the 

 English labourers into the hands of their employers and left 

 them helpless. These were Henry's crime of base money, and 

 the confiscation of the guild lands, projected by Henry and 

 carried out immediately after his death by the guardians of 

 his son. Every one knows that the forced issue of base 

 money inflicts far more serious loss on those who live by 

 wages than on any other class. The guild lands were really 

 the benefit societies of the middle ages, i.e. were the principal 



