would not certainly enable him to purchase security against want in his old age.[1] In the years in which the price of wheat rose high above the average as a result of scarcity, as in 1660, 1681, and 1694, the condition of the agricultural laborer, which was always impoverished, became deplorable because the advance in the cost of bread was not considered in the assessment of wages. The amount received by him for his work was the same in 1610, when wheat sold in the market for thirty-five shillings and two and a half pence a quarter, as it was in 1564, when wheat sold at about nineteen shillings a quarter.[2] In 1684, when the price of wheat was fixed at thirty-seven shillings and four and a half pence by the magistrates of Warwickshire, his wages were increased but one penny a day. The high rents established by landowners in England in the seventeenth century have been attributed to their systematic efforts to cheapen every form of agricultural labor;[3] the smaller the wages of the tiller of the soil, the larger would be the profits of the farmer and the greater his ability to pay the high rent which was the condition attached to his tenure.
Confined to his native parish as to the limits of a
- ↑ “And now let me turn back and look upon my poore spirited countrymen in England and examine first the meanest, that is the poore ploughman, day labourer and poore Artificer, and I shall find them labouring and sweating all dayes of their lives; some for fourteen pence, others for sixteen, eighteen, twenty pence or two shillings a day; which is the highest of wages to such kind of people, and the most of them to end their dayes in sorrow, not having purchased so much by their lives labour as will scarce preserve them in their old days from beggery.” This was in 1649. Bullock’s Virginia, p. 44.
- ↑ Rogers’ History of Agriculture and Prices in England, vol. V, pp. 97, 98.
- ↑ This is the opinion expressed by Professor Rogers.
of the general condition of the English laborer in the seventeenth century, which is necessarily very brief, I have followed Professor Rogers. See, however, Professor Ashley’s criticism of Rogers’ conclusions in Pol. Sci. Quarterly, vol. IV, p. 381; see also Hewins’ English Trade and Finance.
