92 Rents, Wages, and Profits in Agriculture 



minimum ; the lord of the manor exacted 

 all the labour that he could use, arid in 

 return allowed ^only what was necessary to 

 keep the workers in a condition to per- 

 form their duties and keep up their 

 numbers. More than two centuries after 

 the Conquest we find in a work, that has 

 been well described as a landlord's manual 

 or handbook, that the steward of a great 

 estate is to report as regards the servile 

 tenants these are the words : " How much 

 each of them has, and what he is worth, 

 and to what amount they can be tallaged 

 without reducing them to poverty and 

 ruin." Surely the idea of a bare minimum 

 subsistence wage could hardly be expressed 

 with greater clearness or ferocity. And not 

 only was the natural rate of wages in the 

 sense of the real return to labour reduced 

 in this way to starvation point, but in 

 all sorts of ways the personal freedom of 



