6l8 LABOUR AND WAGES. 



parts of England, as my reader may verify by examining 

 Houghton's Northern averages. In cheap years however it ap- 

 pears that wheat was dearer in the North than it was in the 

 South. It seems also that certain of the necessaries of life were 

 cheaper in the North, perhaps because the habits of the 

 people were more simple, or even more coarse. The cus- 

 tomary standard of living, as every economist knows, has a 

 good deal to do with the customary rate of wages. I mention 

 this that no one may charge me with exaggerating the case 

 against the justices. 



Now in my Six Centuries of Labour and Wages (p. 389) I 

 pointed out that, under the Act of 1495, the wages permitted 

 to be given to labourers and artisans (the year being cer- 

 tainly a cheap one) would have allowed an agricultural 

 labourer to purchase three quarters of wheat, three of malt, 

 and two of oatmeal with fifteen weeks' labour, and that an 

 artisan could have achieved the same result with ten weeks' 

 labour 1 . I took these three quantities as representing in the 

 most concrete and convenient form what was the purchasing 

 power of wages at that time. I assumed that the peasant 

 and the artisan work 300 days in the year. It is quite pos- 

 sible that they did not get so much employment, perhaps 

 that they worked more days, or on certain occasions increased 

 their earnings by bye-employments, by the labour of their 

 wives, their sons, and their daughters. But in calculations such 

 as I am making, provided you take what it may be conceived 

 the workman could not do without, the comparison is made 

 more obvious, if the fewest and simplest factors are taken. 

 In a later chapter I shall hope to show how the workman 

 did probably spend his earnings. In the present I am only 

 seeking to point out how far, under the quarter sessions 

 scales, he could procure certain objects, viz. a fixed quantity 

 of wheat, malt and meal, with a year's labour. 



1 Arthur Young, Eastern Tour, vol. i. p. 466, considers a quarter of wheat and 

 two of rye an excessive amount for a labourer with his wife and two children by 

 the year. 



