ays! EARNINGS OF AGRICULTURAL LABOURERS. 


labourer whose usual wages are 12s. per week would amount 
to about £4 10s. 
Few allowances in kind are made to ordinary agricultural 
labourers, though beer or cider and some food, or the value of 
these things, is frequently given to them during haymaking 
and corn harvest. In Northumberland and Durham the men 
are sometimes provided with free cottages and potatoes, and 
their coals are carted and, in some cases, given free. North- 
umberland farmers sometimes keep a cow for a man for about 
3s. a week all the year round, but this practice is dying out 
as the labourers prefer to take all their wages in cash. 
Generally speaking whereallowances form part of the earnings 
they may be said to consist chiefly of cottages let free or at a 
low rent, frequently with small gardens ; rough firing or fuel 
carted free; milk; straw for pigs; in certain counties a daily 
allowance of beer or cider; and in some cases free potato 
grounds, though these are more frequently let to the labourer 
ata low rent. As regards cottages, while it is true that in 
the larger number of counties the ordinary agricultural 
labourers do not get cottages rent free, there are in every 
county numerous cases where they hold their cottages 
at low or nominal rents. The estimate of the Assistant 
Commissioners to the Royal Commission on Labour as to the 
value of a cottage and garden as an addition to wages where 
norent is paid ranged from £2 12s. to £5 4s. a year, the 
usual sum being 44, and the information furnished to the 
Labour Department tends to confirm these estimates. 
To obtain, therefore, an accurate idea of the earnings of the 
ordinary agricultural labourer in different parts of the country 
the extra money payments and allowances, to which reference 
has just been made, must betaken into account and added tothe 
actual weekly cash wages. Returns showing the sums earned 
by ordinary labourers in 1898, including weekly cash wages 
and total earnings during the year from all sources, were 
obtained by the Labour Department from 887 farmers in all 
the counties of England except Northumberland, Durham, 
Cumberland, Westmorland and North Lancashire, while for 
the five last-named districts similar details reiating to the 
hinds and married men, as the case may be, were obtained 
