to the same conditions, the artificers enumerated being saddlers, tanners, farriers, shoemakers, tailors, smiths, carpenters, masons, tilers, pargeters, carters, and others. (6) Food must be sold at reasonable prices. (7) Alms are strictly forbidden to ablebodied labourers. (8) Any excess of wages taken or paid can be seized for the king's use towards the payment of a fifteenth and tenth lately granted. The statute provides for the difference between summer and winter wages, and guards against the emigration of the town population to country places in summer. In answer to complaints from the employers of labour, the Statute of Labourers is sonstantly re-enacted, with accumulated penalties and precautions,-penalties sometimes laid on the labourer only, sometimes or the employer, sometimes on both. An attempt, which was, I believe, premature, was made to enforce apprenticeship in handicrafts at the beginning of the fifteenth century, with the view of making the agricultural labourers an ever-increasing residuum, and thereby securing cheap labour for the tenant and the lord.

The statute of Labourers may have induced some slight effect on the wages of farm labourers. The peasantry were under the eye of the lord's steward or bailiff, and might have been denounced and punished if they claimed more than the law allowed them. But they had great power of combination, a power which they used, perhaps, in a manner which made it very difficult to enforce the statute, for the enforcement of it is given to the manor court, where the goodwill of the tenants was essential to harmonious action between lord and tenants. This combination the statute called the "malice of servants in husbandry." But there was the pretence of submission to the statute in the bailiff's rolls, which might have been taken in evidence. After the Black Death, payments are frequently entered in these rolls, at a particular rate, and this a very exalted one. These payments are drawn through with a pen, and a less sum substituted. Thus, in 1349, on one estate, the bailiff enters 5d. as the price at which wheat was threshed. A line is drawn through the figure and 3d. substituted. In the next year, wheat, rye, peas, and vetches are threshed at 6d., barley at 3d., oats at 2d. But a pen is drawn through these rates, and 21d., 11⁄2d., and 1d. are substituted. In

the same year, barley is reaped at 1s. 2d. at first, but the sum is altered to 1s. Very many of these instances could be quoted. Occasionally, but rarely, the hirer of labour makes similar changes in artizans' labour, as though to show obedience to the statute.

I cannot help thinking that these transparent erasures are simulated, and that they point to evasions of the statute. The labourer, if he did not receive his full money wages, was compensated in some covert way to the full extent of the previous entry, and by some means which would not come under the penalties of the law, and the process by which these penalties might be enforced. There might be larger allowances at harvest time, a more liberal concession of common rights, or, as I have often seen, a license given to a shepherd to turn his own sheep into the lord's pasture, or some analogous equivalent to a necessary, but, under the statute, an illegal money payment. Even though we take the substituted entries, we shall find that a great rise in the wages of labour was effected. We know that this rise was in direct contravention of the law, -a law created in the interest of those who employed labour, and, therefore, who wished to have it cheap, and who might be within the risk of the penalties imposed on employers for violating that law which they had probably been instrumental in enacting, but were compelled to incur. Besides, the wages of many kinds of labourers whose callings were enumerated in the statute were not affected by the law at all. These men took their full increase. It was no marvel that Parliament constantly complained that the Statute of Labourers was not kept. The marvel is that they did not see that it could not possibly be kept. But the straits in which the capitalist landowner found himself were sufficiently serious for any one; and the landowner might be pardoned for believing, that if he could fix, as he thought he could, the price of provisions and materials, he could also fix the price of labour. He clung to this delusion for centuries, and at one time he seemed to have achieved what he desired. But he paid for his remedy in a far more ruinous way than that of giving what would have been in the end cheaper labour than he actually procured.

I mentioned in a previous chapter that the rate of profit

derived from agricultural operations, after all charges had been deducted and an average allowance had been made for rent, when the occupier was also lord, was about 20 per cent. on the capital invested, about 2 per cent. being represented by the rents of assize and manorial receipts. This estimate has been taken from an actual balance-sheet, in a year of average, or rather more than average, fertility, but when the price of stock was, on the other hand, rather high, and so returned more than the ordinary profit to the farmer. Still, it will be remembered that the superintendence by the bailiff was a heavy charge on the owner's profits, or, at least, was a charge from which the small proprietor was free. It will be obvious that, with such a rate of profit before them, landowners, who possessed by inheritance a large amount of live and dead stock, would naturally cultivate their land themselves. There was, indeed, no way in which they could use their property to equal advantage.

In the year which I have taken, 1332-3, the outlay, though in some particulars large, is, on the whole, very much an average. The charges which come under the head of necessary expenses are rather high, but the bad debts are very low, and the cost of labour is so small as to suggest that some part of the regular cost of farm labour must have been omitted or put under another head. In another year we shall find a large cost incurred for fittings to the mill; in a second, a serious loss in customary or ordinary rents; in a third, a heavy loss of stock, and the consequent necessity of large purchases. An enormous quantity of cider was this year produced from the orchard, and, therefore, the spring must have been mild and the summer genial. On the whole I cannot but think that the year was in no way exceptional, and that the rate of profit on agricultural operations was neither unduly exalted nor unduly depressed.

Now if we take the balance-sheet of the same estate in the year 1350-1, we shall see the full effects of the loss of life and the scarcity of hands which ensued from the plague. The whole family of the bailiff, as I have more than once said, had perished. The rents of assize have sunk to one-third their former amount. The fulling-mill is abandoned; there is no tenant for it. No one will give more than 22s. for the corn-mill-the previous rent

having been 50s.; and next year there is no tenant to be found at all. The exits of the manor are a little more than a fourth of the sum previously received, and the profit of the court is not a tenth. The harvest had been poor, for notwithstanding the loss of population, the price of wheat was 50 per cent. above the average, and the crop was small, the sales being less than two-thirds of the earlier year. The profits of the dairy are about three-fifths of those in 1332, and about half the amount of stock is sold.

On the other hand, the expenses are very heavy. The outlay is cut down; but little is spent on repairs, nothing but what is absolutely necessary in order that farm operations should be carried on is bought. Labour in harvest time and in the manor house costs three times what it did in 1332. There is a great increase in the cost of all services, and of such articles as depend mainly on labour for their manufactured value.

He

The expenses exceeded the receipts. The new bailiff, however, possesses a quantity of wool, the accumulations of two years. had no doubt kept it in hand in the hopes of more remunerative prices. He had good reason for this caution, for wool had been sold at little more than three-fifths the money value which it realised in 1332. Then there were some of the chattels of the deceased bailiff and his family, which could hardly be reckoned among the profits of the farm, but an accidential escheat. Without them the profit for the year is only 4 per cent., with them it is 5. In all these calculations I have taken corn and stock at their average prices for the year, when the actual value of any item is not given, as is of course the case with anything except what is actually bought and sold. In the next year the owners of the estate did not lose heart, they sowed a larger breadth of corn than usual, and strove to carry on their operations, only to meet with a second failure. Four years later, in 1354, there were lower prices and greater plenty. But the old rates of profit on such farming operations as had been carried on by the capitalist landowner had entirely passed away, never to be recovered, at least to their full amount. Sooner or later, labour must be hired at the old prices, or a new system must be adopted.

Although I am by no means convinced that the erased figures were not paid to the labourer, and that the substituted amounts

were, I have always assumed that the after-thought was the real payment. Even under these circumstances the rise in agricultural labour was enormous; and if, as we are told, the young and healthy were the principal victims of the disease, the quality of the labour must have been considerably deteriorated.

In the autumn of the year 1349, the fullest effect is induced, on the price of agricultural labour, in the Eastern, Midland, and Southern Counties. The cost of threshing wheat is nearly doubled in the first division, that of barley and oats considerably more than doubled. In the Midland and Southern Counties the rise is even greater for wheat and barley, but oats, in the south, are still threshed at the old rates. The price in the west is raised, but in a far less degree, and, indeed, it appears that Western England did not suffer so much from the disease and the consequent paucity of hands as the greater part of the rest of the country did. But the prices of this year are panic rates. Even if the Statute of Labourers had not been passed, a fall would have ensued, though the price of labour, proclamations and statutes notwithstanding, did not ever fall to its old rates.

If we take the whole period from 1350 to 1400, when the prices paid for labour had been steadied by custom, and examine the divisions of England which it will be convenient to take, we shall find that the final rise in the prices of threshing, taking the three principal kinds of grain together, is 60 per cent. in the Eastern Counties, 73 in the Midland, 48 in the Southern, 37 in the Western, and 59 in the Northern. The most notable rise is that in the payment for threshing oats. But the prices paid for this service had been very low, and, as may be expected, the dearth of hands told far more on low-priced labour than it did on high-priced. This is strikingly illustrated in the price of women's labour. Before the plague, women were employed in field work, as in reaping straw after the corn was cut, in hoeing, in planting beans, in washing sheep, and sometimes in serving the thatcher and tiler. Generally they are paid at the rate of a penny a day, but sometimes less. After the plague, women's labour is rarely recorded, but they are seldom paid less than twopence, sometimes as much as threepence, a day. The same facts are observed in boys' labour, which becomes much dearer.