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labourer in the last decade of the nineteenth century would be only too glad to obtain such payment.1 Nor need we be surprised that the bailiff only gets 31s. 8d. (equivalent to some £19) a year, always supposing that his employer kept within the statute, though this is unlikely; for it is characteristic of the Middle Ages that superior servants and workmen were paid but little above the average of those whom they superintended. But, as a matter of fact, there are plenty of instances of bailiffs getting far higher wages, such as from £3 and £5 to over £9 per annum.3 And when we come to consider that the average income of a country gentleman was only about £20 per annum in Henry VI.'s days, it is evident that the bailiff was very well paid indeed, and that there was even no such enormous disproportion between the effective incomes of the labourer and the squire as there is to-day.

§110. Purchasing Power of Wages.

But it is useless to mention the rates of wages unless we can estimate at the same time their purchasing power; and when we do so, we see that they were amply sufficient, even taking the statutory rates, to purchase for the labourer and artisan an abundance of good and cheap food. An artisan earning 5d. or 6d. a day, or an agricultural labourer earning 3d. or 4d.,5 could get plenty of bread, beef, and beer at very low prices. For beef was only d. a pound, and mutton d.; strong beer only 1d. a gallon, and table-beer a halfpenny. The price of corn averaged a little under 6s. a quarter, and other kinds of grain were equally cheap; 1 In Notts from £7 to £16 per annum are wages quoted in Royal Commission on Labour Report, Agric. Labourer, I. B. V. 127.

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2 It certainly was so with artisans. Rogers, Hist. Agric., iv. 502-504. See wages quoted from manorial accounts by Rogers, Hist. Agric.,

i. 287, iv. 119 (where the statutory wages are also mentioned).

This was the income qualifying a country gentleman to be a J.P. by the 18 Henry VI., c. 11.

"These wages are those laid down by the 6 Hen. VIII., c. 3, the lower rates being paid in the winter. 6 Stow's Chronicle, p. 568.

7 Assize of Brewers, from a MS. in Balliol College, Oxford, quoted by Froude, History, i. 24.

8 The average from 1260-1400 A.D. is 5s. 10ąd. a quarter; from 1401 to 1540 it is 5s. 11d. Rogers, Six Centuries, p. 330.

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chickens cost 1d. or 2d., and a pig or goose only 4d.1 The cheapness of provisions is seen from the fact that 6d, or 8d. a week was an ordinary estimate for the board of a workman,2 and 2d. a day or 1s. a week was liberal. Indeed, the good food enjoyed by the "common people" was the wonder of all foreigners. "What common folk in all this world may compare with the commons of England in riches, freedom, liberty, welfare, and all prosperity?" is the question in one of Henry VIII.'s State papers; and chroniclers tell us that the food of "artificers and husbandmen consisteth principally in beef, and such meat as the butcher selleth, that is to say, mutton, veal, lamb, pork, whereof one findeth great store in the markets adjoining"; 5 while "souse, brawn, bacon, fruit, pies of fruit," and "fowls of sundry sorts" were to be found in most workmen's homes. Surely it is sufficient evidence of the prosperity of the working classes when food of this description was so easily within their reach. In fact, it is pretty clear that the close of the fourteenth century witnessed the beginning, and the fifteenth century the continuance, of an era to which the oppressed labourer of later times might well look back with admiration and regret. Holidays were frequent, and if a man lost his wages during them, there was generally plenty of extra work, well paid, in harvest time to compensate for loss of time elsewhere. The Saturday half-holiday, lost subsequently and only recently restored, seems to have been universal. In the leisure time thus falling to his lot, the agricultural labourer could work upon the land which then invariably went with

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1 Stafford, State of the Realm, quoted by Froude, History, i. 23. 2 Rogers, Six Centuries, p. 328.

4 State Papers, Henry VIII., Vol. II. p. 10.

5 Harrison, Description of England, p. 282.

3 Ib., p. 329.

Ib. He adds, "in feasting it is incredible what meat is consumed and spent." His book was written in the sixteenth century, but it shows that the condition of the working classes was fairly good even then, after the troubles of Henry VIII.'s reign, and therefore was probably quite as good in the fifteenth century.

7 Froude, History, i. 28, reckons one day in every twenty; and it is evident that sometimes holidays were paid for. Rogers, Six Centuries, 327. 8 Mowers could then get 8d. a day. Privy Purse Expenses of Henry VIII. (Froude, i. 28).

9 Mrs Green, Town Life in the Fifteenth Century, ii. 133.

his cottage, while in every parish there were large ranges of commons, waste-land and forest, which gave him fuel for nothing, where his pigs might pick up mast and acorns or his geese feed freely, and where, if he had a cow, he might send her to graze. "So important was this privilege considered, that when the commons began to be largely enclosed, Parliament insisted that the working-man should not be without some piece of ground on which he could employ his own and his family's industry.": The "allotments" of the nineteenth century labourer, with their sometimes excessive rentals,2 are a poor recompense for such privileges. In those days, if contemporary evidence goes for anything, England was once in reality "Merrie England," and life, even if unrefined, was coloured with broad, rosy English health.3

§ 111. Drawbacks.

There were, however, of course, several drawbacks in this pleasant era, as more than one critic has lately told us.* The ordinary hardships of human life were in many respects greater than they are now-disease was more deadly, and the risks of life more numerous; but from this very fact the extremes of poverty and wealth were less widely distinguished and less acutely felt; and, although it cannot be asserted that people did not occasionally die of want in very bad times, yet the grinding and hopeless poverty, just above the verge of actual starvation, so often prevalent in the present time, did not belong to medieval life. The chief ordinary hardships to be encountered were in the winter, for, owing to the absence of winter roots, stock could not be kept except in limited quantities, and the

1 1 By the Act 31 Eliz., c. 7, every cottage was to have four acres of land attached to it. For the points of the above description, cf. Froude, History, i. 28.

2 Rents of 358. an acre, 22s. 6d. an acre, 11s. for one rood, 21s. for nearly half-an-acre, are quoted in Statistics of Midland Villages (1891-2) in the Economic Journal, Vol. III., No. 9.

* Froude, History, i. 46.

Cf. Denton, Fifteenth Century, 105; Jessop, Coming of the Friars, 89, &c. (who, however, seems to refer to the thirteenth century); and Cunning. ham, i. 346, 347.

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Rogers, Six Centuries, 78.

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only meat procurable was that which had been previously salted.1 It is certain that much of medieval disease is traceable to the excessive use of salted provisions. The houses, too, were rudely built of mud, clay, or even wattled material, for brickmaking was a lost art, and stone was only used for the manor-houses and the dwellings of the wealthy. But food, as we saw, was abundant and cheap, and the cost of living was not more than one-tenth of what it is at the present day. Nor were the houses quite so poorly furnished as some would have us think. Pictures, hangings, cushions, and feather beds were not unknown in the houses of plain country parsons with a salary of something like £6 a year. It is probable that even the houses of the peasants were, compared with the degree of luxury and comfort then attainable, no worse furnished proportionately than they are now; and anyone who has seen Ann Hathaway's cottage at Stratford-on-Avon must admit that, as buildings, the dwellings of the labourer of to-day are often no improvement on those of the sixteenth century.

But two hardships there undoubtedly were, which perhaps were more severe in medieval times than now. They were famine and plague. The accounts of mediæval famines have no doubt been much exaggerated, and those that occurred were chiefly local, but it is obvious that when means of communication were less perfect than they are now, individual villages might often suffer severely, while in other parts of the country there was plenty. Yet after all it is doubtful whether there was any more real scarcity than there is to-day; for deaths from sheer starvation are common enough among us even now; and against the evidence of famine must be set the evidence of general 1 Rogers, Six Centuries, 95.

2 Ib., 97.

3 "A penny in terms of the labourer's necessities must have been nearly equal to the present shilling." Froude, History, i. 26.

See the very valuable quotation in Froude, History, i. 41, of the furniture of the Parson of Aldington, Kent, from an MS. in the Rolls House. Cf. also Stubbs, Const. Hist., III. xxi. 555.

* See Cunningham, Growth of Industry, i. 346, who quotes Holinshed and Stow.

6 This is obvious from a comparison of prices, which rarely show such variations as would correspond with the terrible descriptions of chroniclers.

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plenty as being the normal condition of existence. would say that famines occurred regularly in England in the last decade of the nineteenth century, yet if one merely went by depositions at coroners' inquests a very good case might be made out by a critic of our civilisation. On the other hand, pestilence1 was undoubtedly more common than now, and, of course, owing to lack of medical skill, more deadly; but to talk of "chronic typhoid in the towns and leprosy all over the country "2 as the normal state of things, is to give a totally wrong impression of the risks of mediæval life. If our forefathers were more exposed to disease, the rude vigour of their constitutions, and the coarser texture of their nervous system, rendered them more impervious to its ravages. Probably, at least in the rural districts, the risks of life were not much greater than now, and though a great pestilence occasionally swept off its victims with tragic suddenness, there was probably not so much general ill-health and liability to death by easily thrown-off diseases as at the present day.

1 Cf. Rogers, Six Centuries, 331, 335-337.

2 Cunningham, Growth of Industry, i. 347, uses these words. Against them may be put Rogers' remark (Six Centuries, i. 331) that "if abundant evidence as to the rate of wages and silence as to loss of life [in manorial accounts] are to go for anything, it did not create a sensible void in the number of labourers."

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