in the character of hired laborers. Payment of wages was not unusual even during the supremacy of the Company. Adam Dixon, a master caulker living in the Colony in 1622, was remunerated for his work at the rate of thirty-six shillings a month.[1] In 1623, as we learn on the authority of George Sandys, the wages generally received were one pound of tobacco in addition to food each day,[2] but this amount was considered to be very onerous, being much in excess of the sum paid to the same class of persons in England at this time. It was not very long before Sandys is found writing to a friend in London and urging him to procure indented laborers to be sent to Virginia, as the wages paid in the Colony were intolerable. A maid was engaged by Sir Edmund Plowden in 1648, at the rate of four pounds sterling annually, payable in merchandise valued at its first cost in England;[3] three years later, he declared that he was unable to hire for thirty days a servant supplied with clothing for less than two hundred pounds of tobacco. It was at this time that John Weekes of York agreed to work during two months for William Light of the same county in return for a bed, a bolster and blanket, and a pair of pot-hooks.[4] In 1649, annual wages ranged from three pounds sterling to ten or their equivalent in tobacco.[5] If the laborer had come over at the expense of his employer, the amount of his remuneration was diminished by his being required to return the sum spent in meeting the charges of his passage, but this was carefully proportioned to the four years covered by the
- ↑ Abstracts of Proceedings of the Virginia Company of London, vol. I, p. 188.
- ↑ Sandys to Wrote, Neill’s Virginia Vetusta, p. 123.
- ↑ Archives of Maryland, Judicial and Testamentary Business, vol. 1637-1650, p.224.
- ↑ Records of York County, vol. 1638-1648, p. 321, Va. State Library.
- ↑ Bullock’s Virginia, p. 52.
