450 JOURNAL OF THE PLYMOUTH INSTITUTION. 
thoroughly familiar with the work in hand. Nothing came of his 
visit except the payment aforesaid, which, like the other payments 
quoted, may be reckoned at five or six times the amount stated in 
present value. ‘The wages of a working tinner or “ spader” were 
then but 2s. a week, so that the 16s. 10d. was by no means an 
unreasonable fee even for Forsland and his men. 
It has been doubted whether any class of labourers was paid so 
low as this in the reign of Elizabeth ; but the evidence is con- 
clusive. In the Corporation Accounts I find such notes as these :— 
1591-2. Six days pay to two men that served the paver, 4s. 4d., 
i.e, 2s. 2d. each per week ; three labouring men six days, 12s., 7.e. 
4s. per week; four labourers five days, 13s. 4d., ze. also 4s. per 
week. In the next year masons were paid 9d. each per day, while 
in 1596-7 a carpenter had 1s. ld.* Four shillings is the highest 
figure specified for ordinary labourers in the town. In the country 
the rate was then, as now, much lower. Sir Walter Raleigh, in a 
speech in Parliament in 1601, claimed that his exercise of the 
pre-emption of tin had increased the pay of the working tinner 
from 2s. to 4s, Cock’s MS. (1586) puts the wages of the hired 
tinner at £3 a year, or 2d. a day, out of which the poor labourer 
had to find himself. So too Beare in The Bailiff of Blackmore.t 
Westcote,t writing some forty years later, says that no labourer 
in hard work or hardship equalled the spader or tinner, “ bread the 
coarsest ; cheese the hardest; drink the thinnest ;” and Risdon,§$ 
repeating and confirming this, says, ‘‘ his apparel is coarse, his diet 
slender, his lodging hard, his drink water, and for lack of a cup 
he commonly drinketh out of his spade or shovel, or some such 
thing.” 
We have no direct information whither Forsland went ; but it 
was evidently beyond the immediate outskirts of the town. Taking 
the topography of the district into account, I do not see where he 
could well have gone, if not to the Meavy, but that is merely an 
inference upon which I desire to lay no stress. Nothing then came 
of his work beyond the payment; but it was undoubtedly the first 
* In 1506-7 2d. a day was paid for labour, while masons had 4d. ; yet in 
1511-12 masons’ labourers had 6d. a day, because it was harvest-time. In 
1521 a carpenter had 7d. a day. 
+ British Museum Additional MSS. 6713, copied by Hoblyn. 
+ “View,” p. 53. 
§ “Survey,” p. 11, ed. 1811. 
