g beer, such as we now buy for eighteenpence a gallon, was then a
penny a gallon;[26] and table-beer less than a halfpenny. French and German
wines were eightpence the gallon. Spanish and Portuguese wines a shilling.
This was the highest price at which the best wines might be sold; and if
there was any fault in quality or quantity, the dealers forfeited four
times the amount.[27] Rent, another important consideration, cannot be
fixed so accurately, for parliament did not interfere with it. Here,
however, we are not without very tolerable information. "My father," says
Latimer,[28] "was a yeoman, and had no lands of his own; only he had a
_farm of three or four pounds by the year_ at the uttermost, and hereupon
he tilled so much as kept half-a-dozen men. He had walk for a hundred
sheep, and my mother milked thirty kine. He was able, and did find the king
a harness with himself and his horse. I remember that I buckled on his
harness when he went to Blackheath field. He kept me to school, or else I
had not been able to have preached before the King's Majesty now. He
married my sisters with five pounds, or twenty nobles, each, having brought
them up in godliness and fear of God. He kept hospitality for his poor
neighbours, and some alms he gave to the poor; and all this he did of the
said farm." If "three or four pounds at the uttermost" was the rent of a
farm yielding such results, the rent of labourers' cottages is not likely
to have been considerable.[29]

Some uncertainty is unavoidable in all calculations of the present nature;
yet, after making the utmost allowances for errors, we may conclude from
such a table of prices that a penny, in terms of the labourer's
necessities, must have been nearly equal in the reign of Henry VIII. to the
present shilling. For a penny, at the time of which I write, the labourer
could buy as much bread, beef, beer, and wine--he could do as much towards
finding lodging for himself and his family--as the labourer of the
nineteenth century can for a shilling. I do not see that this admits of
question. Turning, then, to the table of wages, it will be easy to
ascertain his position. By the 3rd of the 6th of Henry VIII. it was enacted
that master carpenters, masons, bricklayers, tylers, plumbers, glaziers,
joiners, and other employers of such skilled workmen, should give to each
of their journeymen, if no meat or drink was allowed, sixpence a day for
the half year, fivepence a day for the other h