638 LABOUR AND WAGES. 



hires two carpenters, and includes 'the allowance for beer,' 

 id. a day each, in the wages they pay. If the practice were 

 usual, this would make, though not in an advantageous form 

 to the labourer, an addition of a shilling a week to his wages. 

 But I think that I should have been able to discover it more 

 frequently, had the custom been common, in the note of a 

 commutation. 



Even when wages were reduced to a minimum by the efforts 

 of those whose interest it was to effect this result, and who 

 were armed by the law with powers and penalties against the 

 reluctant workman, some wages must be customarily higher 

 than others. I cannot of course assert that it was possible 

 for any workmen to secure such constant employment, as would 

 justify me in inferring that on an average such artisans and 

 labourers as might procure continuous employment, actually 

 did obtain it. I can only say that I find no difference in the 

 rate of wages when engagements are long and when they are 

 short. Still some employments are in their nature more sus- 

 ceptible of continuity than others. Frost does not necessarily 

 interfere with a carpenter's or sawyer's work as it does with 

 that of a mason and bricklayer, and whether the workman 

 has or has not a margin over bare subsistence, the remunera- 

 tion of a precarious occupation would generally be in excess 

 of one which may be continuous. This fact is brought out in 

 the averages. In the first sixty years, the best carpenter gets 

 \i\d. a week less than the best mason, in the last sixty is. \\d. 

 The common carpenter gets $d. a week less than the common 

 mason in the first sixty years, and the reversal of this relation 

 in the last sixty years of the period is due to the scarcity of the 

 common carpenter's work by the side of the common mason's* 

 and by the effect of the London wages, entries from which 

 have filled up many gaps in the record of ordinary carpenters' 

 wages. The bricklayer in the seventeenth century had only 

 local employment, but the same contrast may be made between 

 him and the sawyer. 



Sawyers' work was either by the day or by the piece. If by the 



