LABOUR AND WAGES. 625 



justices sat. The price of the stock this year is therefore 

 1$ us. 4d. The wages of the peasant then for fifty weeks, 

 taking the harvest rate at the maximum, are 14 iqs. ; and 

 again the Suffolk peasant could earn his stock of provisions 

 with the wages of five weeks to spare. 



My last schedule, taken from the Archaeologia, xi. 208, is an 

 assessment made at Warwick, * after the close of Easter,' i.e. 

 about April 8, 1684, Easter Day being that year (old style) on 

 March 30. In this scale the wages of the agricultural labourer, 

 except in harvest time, are set at 8d. a day ; in the summer 

 half of the year, reaping and mowing at is., and the former 

 work when done by the woman being set at 8d. In the winter 

 half the wages of the peasant are to be yd. The free mason 

 is to have is. 4d. in summer, I s. $d. in winter ; the other master 

 artisans is. in summer, nd. in winter. I cannot but infer, 

 from the persistence with which the penalties of Elizabeth's 

 Act are insisted on in the Warwickshire assessment, which is 

 signed by several well-known local names, that the scale was 

 reactionary. In the spring of 1684 wheat was 365., malt 

 igs., and oatmeal 62s. a quarter. The cost of the stock is 

 now 14 iqs., exactly what it was in 1682. With the 

 harvest wages the labourer in husbandry is to get g i$s. 

 6d. t the artisan taking an average between the highest 

 and lowest pay, winter and summer the aggregate is 16 

 i;j. 6d. In Warwickshire then the peasant was nearly 

 twenty weeks behind, the artisan nearly six weeks to the 

 good. 



No one who examines the action of these quarter sessions 

 assessments will doubt that the justices entirely ignored that 

 part of the Act of 1563 which bade them take into account 

 the current prices of food and clothing when they fixed the 

 wages of labour. The Government and Parliament had been 

 engaged for more than two centuries in a struggle with the 

 workman, and had signally failed in the attempt at forcing 

 down his wages. Prices were low, and wages remained un- 

 affected. In the Wages Act of 1495 the Government had 



VOL. v. s s 



