ON THE PURCHASING POWER OF WAGES. 825 



confiscated and their organisation proscribed, but they were 

 handed over to the merciless regulations of the justices' quarter 

 sessions. 



In my fourth volume, p. 731, I gave an account of the con- 

 trast between the price of corn and the average of a week's 

 wages, taken from the recorded payments made to the 

 following workmen the average carpenter, mason, pair of 

 sawyers, and tiler, who may be considered as representing 

 skilled labour; and the mason's, carpenter's, or bricklayer's 

 labourer, the tiler's or thatcher's help, and the best paid 

 agricultural labourer, that is a good hedger, ditcher, or digger. 

 I have continued this contrast in the annexed table, in which 

 I have given the wheat prices of the hundred and twenty 

 years of the present period, and the rate of wages actually 

 paid under those several heads, reduced to a similar average. 

 In doing this, as there are occasional but not numerous gaps 

 in the evidence, I have filled up the few vacant years by 

 striking a mean between the two nearest entries of the same 

 kind of labour, in order to supply the void, it being entirely 

 certain that such wages were paid, though no entry is extant, 

 and it being equally certain that, were the evidence hereafter 

 discovered, it would not modify my results by the fraction 

 of a farthing. I have however avoided the entries of London 

 labour, as the circumstances are totally different, the justices 1 

 assessment not applying to the metropolis, and the rate of 

 wages for many reasons being necessarily higher (66 per 

 cent.) than that paid in country places. It will be seen 

 from this table, that so far was it the case from wages being 

 made to conform ' to the plenty and the scarcity of the time/ 

 that wages are not infrequently lower in dear than in cheap 

 years, as though the necessity of the labourer earning his 

 bread in hard times was made a plea for stinting him of wh.u 

 had been his previous wages. My reader will also be able 

 to recognise the decided increase which was made in his 

 wages at the epoch of the Commonwealth. 



