626 LABOUR AND WAGES. 



virtually yielded to the situation, when they recognised as 

 legal what had been long customary. 



I repeat that, in itself, there was nothing strange in the 

 attempt to fix wages by law. The Assise of Bread and Beer 

 was intended to stereotype the wages of bakers and brewers. 

 Corporations, civil and academical, were permitted to regulate 

 prices, as well as to watch over quality. But except in times 

 of occasional panic, the law did not attempt to fix the price at 

 which corn should be sold, though it often did the price of 

 meat. On the chance of a rising market depended, as was 

 seen at that day, the hope of a rise in rents. And when the 

 cost of everything rose with the price of corn, the other 

 chance of a rise in rents was in stinting the earnings of the 

 labourer and the profits of the farmer. 



We may probably acquit the Government and Parliament 

 of Elizabeth of designing to depress the wage-earning classes 

 by means of the machinery which they devised under the Act 

 of 1563. At any rate, the instructions which they gave the 

 justices imply that their intention was to establish a sliding 

 scale of wages, the quantity of which should annually rise and 

 fall according to fluctuations in the cost of food and other 

 necessaries. But that the Government should have thought 

 that the Order upon whom this function was imposed would 

 take these matters into consideration, would attend to the 

 varying circumstances which should have modified the scale, 

 or would have exercised their authority in justice to the work- 

 man, says but little for their intelligence. The working 

 classes, owing to a variety of circumstances, the great rise in 

 prices being the dominant factor in the situation, were now at 

 the mercy of the employer, and the arbitrator between work- 

 man and employer was found in the person of the landlord, 

 whose interest it was to grind wages down to the lowest and 

 squeeze as much rent as possible out of the tenant. The 

 agricultural literature of the seventeenth century bears witness 

 to the tenacity and ubiquity with which the latter design was 

 carried out, for it is a universal complaint. The history of the 



