WAGES AND PRICES. 795 



But the facts are more suggestive if one takes those figures 

 which designate the rise in the price of provisions from 1583 

 to 1642, and compares them with the price of labour. Here 

 it will be found that the rise in the former is in the aggregate 

 of twelve articles 108 per cent., of the latter 32 per cent. It 

 must have been at such a time especially that the workman 

 was pinched, and most of all, when, his wages being unaltered, 

 or even less than the average, he had to undergo the misery 

 of such years as 1586, 1596, 1597, 1608, 1617, 1622, 1625, 

 1630, 1632 and 1637, to be succeeded by the long famine 

 of 1646-51. It is no wonder that the Fellows of Merton 

 College, as their register (1596) tells us (vol. vi. p. 662), resolved 

 to make a weekly grant from their resources in aid of the 

 poverty which grew more heavy every day, and to continue 

 it till the next harvest should come to hand. 



Having divided the period before me into two equal por- 

 tions, and having compared the prices with those of 1541-82, 

 and with each other, it remains that I should attempt to find 

 out at what periods the old prices were finally enhanced. 



I have several times referred to the dear decade, 1643-52. 

 It contains the highest price of all kinds of grain (except the 

 leguminous plants), of hay, of candles, of salt (till the heavy 

 excise was laid on salt at the end of the seventeenth century), 

 and of such cloth as was regularly purchased. It would seem 

 then that the exceptional dearness of the- time was to be 

 assigned mainly to bad harvests, for the articles which are 

 now dearer than in any part of the period are either agri- 

 cultural produce, or the manufacture of agricultural produce, 

 or an article which like corn depended on the same cause 

 which renders agricultural produce abundant, a full supply 

 of direct solar heat, for salt was, and continued to be till the 

 end of this century, a product of solar evaporation. 



I should therefore have concluded that the sole cause of 

 this temporary and great exaltation of prices was entirely the 

 effect of bad grain harvests, had it not been for the fact that 

 in most other commodities, though this decade is not the 



