LABOUR AND WAGES. 621 



holidays. The full wages of the best-paid artisan are 

 and deducting the Saturday's half-pay, 9 3^. ^d. But the 

 stock of provisions before referred to would have cost in the 

 spring of 1595, when the Lancashire magistrates were inter- 

 preting * the plenty or scarcity of the time and other circum- 

 stances necessarily to be considered,' no less than 2,6 is. 4*/., 

 and would therefore have required more than two years' labour 

 from the peasant, and over seventy-one weeks' work from the 

 artisan. Just a hundred years before, these necessaries could be 

 procured by the artisan with ten weeks' labour, by the peasant 

 with fifteen. Hartlib expressly states that in years when the 

 harvest was bad the people starved, and it is difficult to see 

 how they could have possibly subsisted on the justices' scale. 

 I may admit that I have never registered such low wages as 

 these. But I have little information from Lancashire, and 

 even Shuttleworth at Gawthorp, from whose accounts I have 

 made some extracts, pays better wages than his fellow justices 

 prescribe. 



The next assessment is for Rutlandshire, dated April 28, 

 1610. The source of the table is the eleventh volume of the 

 Archaeologia. In this scale the wages of the husbandman are 

 to be *]d. daily from Easter to Michaelmas, and 6d. from 

 Michaelmas to Easter. Mowing is to be io</., haymaking 

 and reaping 8d. Women's labour is only priced for the hay 

 and corn harvests, for the former at 5*/., the latter at 6d. As 

 regards artisans, the chiefs of the craft, as chief joiners, master 

 sawyers, free masons, are to have from Easter to Michaelmas 

 is. a day, from Michaelmas to Easter generally &/., in a few 

 cases iod. ' A master carpenter who is able to draw his plot/ 

 i. c. plan the woodwork of a house, * and to be a master of work 

 over others,' is to have i s. id. for the summer half of the year, 

 and icd. during the shorter days. The contributor of this 

 schedule to the Archaeologia appears to have examined the 

 high constable's accounts of hiring between 1626 and 1634, and 

 states that this scale was still in operation. If my reader will 

 refer to vol. iv. p. 1 20, he will find that this assessment does 



