A mower with meat earned 5d.,
without meat 10d. a day; a man reaper with meat 4d., without 8d.; a
woman reaper 3d., and 6d.

As the price of corn and meat was three times what it had been in the
fifteenth century, and the labourers' wages, taking into consideration
his harvest pay, not quite double, the Rutland magistrates hardly
observed the spirit of the Act. Rutland, moreover, judging by the
assessments of the time, was a county where agriculture was very
flourishing; and thirty years after we find in Yorkshire that the
winter wages of the labourer were 4d. and the summer 5d. a day: that
is, he had little more wages than in the fifteenth century, with
provisions risen threefold. At Chester at the same date his day's
wages were to be 4d. all the year round.[248] In 1610 the Rutland
magistrates at Oakham[249] decreed that an ordinary labourer was to
have 6d. a day in winter and 7d. in summer, the same wages as in 1564,
yet wheat in that year averaged 32s. 7d. a quarter. A bailiff by the
year was now advanced to 52s., a manservant of the best sort, equal no
doubt to the chief servant in husbandry, to 50s., a 'common servant'
to 40s., and a 'mean servant' to 29s., but all without livery. At
Chelmsford, in 1651, there was a very different rate fixed, the
ordinary labourer getting from 1s. to 1s. 2d. a day; but this seems to
have been exceptional, as at Warwick in 1684 he was only to have 8d.,
and as late as 1725 in Lancashire 9d. to 10d. a day.[250] In 1682, by
the Bury St. Edmunds assessment, a common labourer got 10d. a day in
winter and 1s. in summer, and a reaper in harvest 1s. 8d. By the year
a bailiff was paid L6, a carter L5, and a common servant L3 10s., of
course with food.[251] These figures clearly prove that the wages
fixed by the magistrates were often terribly inadequate, though it
must be said in their defence that the great rise in prices probably
struck them as abnormal and not likely to last. It should be
remembered, too, that besides his wages the labourer and his family
had often bye industries such as weaving to fall back upon, and in
most parts of England still a piece of common land to help him.

FOOTNOTES:

[238] _Description of Britain_, iii. 2.

[239] _Transactions of the Royal Historical Society_ (New Series),
xvii. 235.

[240] Moryson, _Itinerary_ (ed. 1617), iii. 179.

[241] _Archaeologia_ xiii. 371.

[242] In 1650 it was much cultivated about London.

[243] _Collections on Husban