634 LABOUR AND WAGES. 



effects cannot be doubted ; else after these visitations the 

 phenomena of the fourteenth century would have reappeared, 

 when the forces of Government were baffled in the efforts 

 they made to keep down wages. My first Essex assessment 

 is in 1651, when the rise had been effected and in great part 

 acknowledged. But during a few years, in the second decade 

 of the seventeenth century, I have a few labour prices from 

 Theydon Gernon in this county. For instance, in 1616 the 

 owners of this estate pay a tiler and help at the rate of 2s. 6d. 

 a day, in 1617 a slater at 2,s., in 1618 women haymakers &/., 

 in 1619 a mason and his man 35., rates constantly in excess 

 of the county scale of 1651. But though some generous or 

 just employers evaded the assessment, it does not follow that 

 its provisions were inoperative. 



It is not by any means easy to define the exact time at 

 which the rise was effected and subsequently recognised by the 

 county authorities. In the case of the ordinary carpenter 

 there is a slight rise in every decade, till at the end of the 

 period the rate of wages is double that at which it stood in 

 the first. Here however I must inform my reader, and I 

 have taken care to note it in the tables which follow, the 

 record is more or less affected by London prices from 1678 

 onwards. The wages which least of all represent London 

 influences are those of sawyers and tilers, and in husbandry 

 that kind of labour which was rarely affected by London 

 rates, viz. digging, hedging and ditching, the best-paid labour 

 other than harvest-work among the peasantry. On the other 

 hand, it should be stated that the London artisan or 

 labourer had no opportunity of improving his money wages 

 by cultivating small plots of land, by commonable rights or 

 by bye-products, but had to rely almost entirely if not 

 exclusively on his employer's payments. 



On the whole, the most marked rise in wages is in the 

 decade 1643-52, and generally speaking this rise was main- 

 tained, in some cases increased, in the following decade. Now 

 as I have frequently stated, the first of these decades had the 



