LABOUR AND WAGES. 633 



were a fraction over 6s. a week, and those of the ordinary 

 carpenter a fraction under this amount. But from the begin- 

 ning of the seventeenth century they begin to slightly mend. 



I am disposed to connect this rise with the plague of 1603, 

 to say nothing of the visitations of 1592 and 1593. Now 

 according to Graunt \ who summarised the evidence supplied 

 by the bills of mortality, the deaths by plague, within the 

 district which was known by this name, were, in 1592, n,53 5 

 in J 593> 10,662 ; but in 1603, 30,561 ; the population of London 

 and its liberties in 1631 being, according to a census taken in 

 August, 130,178 ; and in 1661, 179,000. It should be added 

 that the former census was taken by the wards. One does not 

 know how many were the deaths in other places, under this 

 visitation, but it is clear, from the regulations drawn up by 

 Merton College in 1603, that it was particularly severe in 

 Oxford, so severe as to induce the residents in the College to 

 utterly seclude themselves from the outer world. In 1625 the 

 plague was even more deadly in London, 35,417 being reported 

 to have perished by it ; while in 1636, 10,460 deaths were set 

 down to this cause. In 1625 there is evidence from the Mag- 

 dalen College (Oxford) accounts that the plague prevailed in 

 the University, that there was alarm about it in 1641, and in 

 1643 at Oxford, and that in 1665 the plague was especially 

 deadly at Cambridge and Winchester. The conditions of life in 

 London were no doubt worse than elsewhere, for if the pro- 

 portion of deaths to births had ruled all over the kingdom, 

 England would have been depopulated. For example, in 

 1651 the deaths in London were, if I can trust Mr. Corbyn 

 Morris, who had access to the register, and wrote exactly a 

 century later, double the births. 



Even if this mortality prevailed in country towns and 

 villages in a modified degree, it is hard to see how all the 

 quarter sessions in all the counties could have prevented a rise 

 in wages. That the machinery of the Act of 1563 had its 



1 Captain John Graunt't book on the bills of mortality was printed in 1676. 

 He was a fellow of the Royal Society. 



