LABOUR AND WAGES. 615 



which labour should be remunerated, had no mind to put on 

 themselves and their rent-paying tenants such sums for 

 agricultural produce as would effectually debar any rise in 

 rent. It may be added too, that the classes who were well 

 above the labourers, and had securely become the masters of 

 the future, were all (as Stafford's pamphlet, published at about 

 the commencement of the period before me, testifies) severely 

 pressed by the unaccountable and inconvenient rise in prices 

 which followed on the restoration of the currency. So they 

 concluded, as they have concluded ever since, that the farmer 

 and the peasant must be stinted, in order that the resources 

 of the landowner should suffer no loss. 



At a time too, when there was much open country, on which 

 fowling was practised, when most peasants had their plots of 

 ground, and there were considerable and valuable commonable 

 rights of pasture, the spoliation of which was only just begun, 

 the regulation of money wages might not seem so great a hard- 

 ship. It is conceivable, in brief, that working for money wages 

 was a bye-industry, and that in general the labour of the 

 peasant was occupied about his holding, and other incidental 

 but important industries. This seems to be confirmed by the 

 Act of 1589, which prescribes that no new cottage should be 

 built unless four acres of land were annexed to it. The Act 

 seems to have been obeyed, for Arthur Young complains of it 

 as a hindrance to good husbandry, nearly two centuries after it 

 became law 1 . There is consequently some apology which can 

 be made for those who devised 5 Eliz. cap. 4, though it is 

 perfectly certain that it effected the degradation of the English 

 peasant. But there is no apology for those who, when the 

 result became manifest and the beggary of the peasant be- 

 came a social problem of the most serious kind, continued to 

 enforce its provisions with severity. 



Only a few of these quarter sessions assessments survive, 

 though I have searched for them in all directions. It is said 

 that they were issued yearly, and in all counties, by which is 

 1 It WM repealed in 1775. 



