6 28 LABOUR AND WAGES. 



them the power to consult their own interests, and they con- 

 sulted nothing else. But the Civil War brought some relief to 

 the lot of the wage-earner, as will be seen both from the 

 assessments of 1651 and 1655, which the justices did not 

 venture on disturbing after the Restoration. But in the 

 assessments of 1682 and 1684 the former instincts are revived. 



The Act of 1563 was the most powerful instrument ever 

 devised for degrading and impoverishing the English labourer. 

 When it had done its work effectually, the custom of publish- 

 ing the assessments was dropped a few years before the 

 abolition of this and the other labour Acts in 1825. There is 

 no record of any debate on this alteration of the law. It is 

 probable that the legislature believed that the spirit of the 

 working classes was completely broken, and that the law of 

 constructive conspiracy, which the dicta of judges had made 

 so dangerously wide, was relied on as quite sufficient for the 

 purpose of checking any attempt at combination with the 

 object of improving wages. I may add that the rates fixed 

 during the Commonwealth remained practically unchanged, 

 and continued, as one can see from Arthur Young's Tours, to 

 be the ordinary wages received down to the last quarter of 

 the eighteenth century, if not even longer. 



The comparative generosity of the Midland and Southern 

 justices, and the extreme harshness of the Northern magistrates 

 (well illustrated by the ferocious language of the last assessment 

 which I have seen, that of the Lancashire magistrates on 

 May 22, 1725), probably brought about that general migration 

 from the more oppressed to the more favoured counties, and 

 led to the enactment of the law of parochial settlement, which 

 was the other powerful agent in degrading the labourer. The 

 facts of the case are given in my Six Centuries, p. 396. All 

 the circumstances are illustrated by the statistics of the poor- 

 rate and hearth-tax, at the conclusion of the seventeenth 

 century, printed above, pp. 120-123. The law had done its 

 best to make the English labourer a serf without land. Even 

 now he has hardly the courage to exercise or the experience 



