This is not

at about £8, 4s., and the cost of living, which now included house rent, formerly unknown, at £8, thus leaving a very narrow margin for contingencies. Daily wages were1 (in 1563) for artisans, 8d. a day in winter and 9d. in summer; for labourers, 6d. in winter and 7d. in summer, and in harvest-time occasionally 8d. or even 10d. very much more than the wages paid at the close of the fifteenth century 2 (viz., artisans 3s. a week and labourers 2s.), but the price of food had risen almost to three times the old average, while wages had only risen in the propor3 tion of 1 to 1.72. Moreover, a new system was in this reign introduced for arranging wages.

§ 153. Assessment of Wages by Justices.

The celebrated Statute, by which this system of the legal arrangement of wages was introduced, has rightly been called a monumental work of legislation.5 "Taken in conjunction with the Poor Law of the same year, which was, however, subsequently modified, it forms a great system for controlling both the employed and the unemployed; all the experience of preceding reigns is gathered together, and the principal statute was so well framed that it continued to be maintained for more than two centuries." It certainly had an immense, controlling influence upon the destinies of the working classes, though opinions have differed widely as to whether that influence was beneficial or otherwise. Before discussing this point, however, we will briefly examine the provisions of this famous Act.

The preamble is remarkable in that, unlike all previous Statutes of Labourers, it shows a tender concern for the welfare of the labourer, and expresses a fear that his wages may occasionally be too low. It states that the wages and allowances rated and limited in many of the said

1 From the proclamation of Elizabeth for the county of Rutland in 1563. Rogers, Hist. Agric., iv. 121.

2 Above, p. 173.

The Act 5 Eliz., c. 4 (1563).

3 Rogers, Hist. Agric., iv. 757.

5 Cunningham, Growth of Industry, ii. 38.

6 Ib.

statutes (ie., the old Statutes of Labourers) are in divers places too small and not answerable to this time, respecting the advancement of prices of all things belonging to the said servants and labourers," and "the said laws cannot conveniently, without the great grief and burden of the poor labourer and hired man, be put into good and due execution." This sudden change of attitude on the part of the legislature is most instructive, and even has its humorous side. It shows a complete change of tactics in dealing with the working classes, but one cannot help feeling some lurking doubt as to whether all these honeyed words were genuine. After all, the object of this statute was the same as that of the older ones, namely, to give fixity to wages; and it is so unusual to find one class legislating in favour of another without some adequate motive that one cannot help thinking that there was something behind all this generosity. Nor is the motive far to seek. It was to place the regulation of wages not merely in the hands of Parliament, whose methods were necessarily slow and cumbersome, but in the hands of the employers of labour, or at least in the hands of a class who would sympathise with employers. Briefly, wages were in future to be fixed by the justices of the peace in quarter sessions, and both employers and employed were bound to abide by the assessments thus made. There could be little doubt that the employers would abide by them readily enough, for the local justices of the peace were sure to be either employers themselves or drawn from the same rank in life; and the severe penalties imposed upon those who disobeyed the assessment were hardly likely to be incurred by any except the working classes. The generous preamble of the Statute thus resulted in an enactment which, if it could only be enforced, was likely to place the workmen entirely at the mercy of their employers. Of course employers might be, and no doubt often were, men of good and honest heart, and wishful to do the best for their labourers; but it was, to say the least, placing a great temptation in their way to give them the authority to fix a rate of wages to which all were

compelled by law to adhere. It is true that this assessment of wages was no hard and fast rule, but was to vary itself with the fluctuations in the prices of provisions; and the inventors of this kindly scheme expressed a pious hope that "it might yield the hired person, both in the time of scarcity and in the time of plenty, a convenient proportion of wages." But it is to be noted that they added nothing to the statute to make this hope effectual in practice. All they remark is that the justices should take into account, in fixing wages, the price of food "and other circumstances necessary to be considered "—a somewhat vague recommendation; and the "hired person " had very little voice in the matter.

It may be going too far to characterise this assessment scheme as one outspoken writer does-as "a conspiracy concocted by the law and carried out by the parties interested in its success," and we may give the employers and legislators of Elizabethan days credit for the highest and kindest intentions in a general sort of way; but no one except a Utopian optimist can shut his eyes to the fact that this ingenious system gave even the best of employers a direct interest in keeping the assessment of wages for his district as low as possible; and, human nature being what it is, no one can be surprised if his pocket often tended to get the better of his generosity. And, as a matter of fact, this was of course the case. It is absurd to talk about our forefathers as if they were more than human; and experience of human nature shows that it is liable to succumb to temptations far less than those which the Act of Elizabeth placed before its administrators.

§ 154. The Working of the Assessment System. Modern historians are nothing if not controversial, and consequently no one need be surprised to find that this Statute is alternately belauded as having been intended to do a real kindness to the working classes and decried as a legal conspiracy to do them an injury. This aspect of the question has been already dealt with sufficiently, but the same 1 Thorold Rogers, Six Centuries, p. 398.

controversy exists as to whether the Act was ever properly effective. It is amusing to find apologists for it declaring that, after all, it was never really enforced;1 and, amid the usual contradictions of economic as of other history, it is occasionally hard to find the truth. But it certainly seems to be the case that, in spite of the continued increase in the price of the necessaries of life, the wages of labour did conform to the justices' assessments, and that these assessments were too low to give the labourer an opportunity of really comfortable subsistence.2 The effect of the Statute was not felt so keenly as long as his wages were supplemented by the ownership of a small plot of land or by rights of common; but when the enclosures of the eighteenth century took these away from him, the labourer was indeed badly off.3 At any rate, if the intention of the Act of 1563 was really to raise wages, it was a failure in this respect, for "the machinery it created " (as an historian naively remarks who takes a very favourable view of it) "had not sufficed to raise wages according to the scarcity of the times" in the century following. This is not surprising; the marvel would have been that wages should have risen when the administrators of the Act were so closely interested in keeping them down. But there can be no dispute that, whether owing to the assessment or not, wages steadily declined in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, taken as a whole, as the following tables 5 will show, though, of course, in so long a time there were naturally periods of slight improvement. The only question that arises is: how was it that for once a Statute of Labourers achieved its object when similar statutes had in previous reigns been so ineffectual?

The reasons for this are several. The labourer had been already weakened (as we saw 6) in the reigns of Elizabeth's father and brother by the debasement of the currency, the change from tillage to sheep-farming, and the 1 Cunningham, Growth of Industry, ii. 199, 200.

2 Rogers, Six Centuries, p. 353.

* Cunningham, Growth of Industry, ii. 195.

3 Ib.

5 Compiled from Rogers, Six Centuries, ch. xiv. pp. 387-398. Above, pp. 206-218.

inoperative at almost all times. Note.-Dr Cunningham, Growth of English Industry, ii. 43, 195, 359, remarks that the assessment of wages was practically He quotes the preamble to the Act 1 James I., c. 6, which complains that Elizabeth's Act was in 1604 not regarded, and seems to think that altogether it had little effect. It is quite possible that assessments were not regularly made, and when made were occasionally not strictly adhered to, but in face of the fact that so many exist (cf. Rogers, Hist. Agric. and Prices, v. 618 and vi. 685, and Cunningham, Growth of Industry, ii. 199, notes), it seems certain that they must have been made fairly often, and even if not strictly adhered to, they would form a kind of standard to which wages generally would approximate. At any rate, it is a significant fact that real wages were exceedingly low during the latter part of the sixteenth and early part of the seventeenth century (Cunningham, u. s., ii. 43), and that wages were never raised by Elizabeth's Act (ib., ii. 195); and in Henry Best's Rural Economy in Yorkshire in 1641 (ib., ii. 198) it is mentioned that "the constable is to let them (i.e., master and servant) know what wages the statute will allow," which seems to show that, even when not absolutely adhered to with strictness, the statute had a very considerable influence in regulating wages. Later in the eighteenth century it fell into desuetude, like other regulations of industry, though it was never forgotten (cf. the second resolution of the famous meeting of the Berkshire justices at Speenhamland; Cunningham, u. s., ii. 494. But for this see below.