ournals 12 and 13.

[28] _Sermons_, p.101.

[29] See HARRISON, p. 318. At the beginning of the century farms let for
four pounds a year, which in 1576 had been raised to forty, fifty, or a
hundred. The price of produce kept pace with the rent. The large farmers
prospered; the poor forfeited their tenures.

[30] The wages were fixed at a maximum, showing that labour was scarce, and
that its natural tendency was towards a higher rate of remuneration.
Persons not possessed of other means of subsistence were punishable if they
refused to work at the statutable rate of payment; and a clause in the act
of Hen. VIII. directed that where the practice had been to give lower
wages, lower wages should be taken. This provision was owing to a
difference in the value of money in different parts of England. The price
of bread at Stratford, for instance, was permanently twenty-five per cent.
below the price in London. (Assize of Bread in England: _Balliol MS_.) The
statute, therefore, may be taken as a guide sufficiently conclusive as to
the practical scale. It is of course uncertain how far work was constant.
The ascending tendency of wages is an evidence, so far as it goes, in the
labourer's favour; and the proportion between the wages of the household
farm servant and those of the day labourer, which furnishes a further
guide, was much the same as at present. By the same statute of Henry VIII.
the common servant of husbandry, who was boarded and lodged at his master's
house, received 16s. 8d. a year in money, with 4s. for his clothes; while
the wages of the out-door labourer, supposing his work constant, would have
been L5 a year. Among ourselves, on an average of different counties, the
labourer's wages are L25 to L30 a year, supposing his work constant. The
farm servant, unless in the neighbourhood of large towns, receives about
L6, or from that to L8.

Where meat and drink was allowed it was calculated at 2d. a day, or 1s. 2d.
a week. In the household of the Earl of Northumberland the allowance was
2-1/2d. Here, again, we observe an approach to modern proportions. The
estimated cost of the board and lodging of a man servant in an English
gentleman's family is now about L25 a year.

[31] Mowers, for instance, were paid 8d. a day.--_Privy Purse Expenses of
Henry VIII._

[32] In 1581 the agricultural labourer, as he now exists, was only
beginning to appear. "There be such in the realm," says Stafford, "as live
only by the labo