been essentially different in this
respect." Principles of Political Economy, p. 293, 1st edit. He
conceives that the earnings of the labourer in corn were unusually low
in the latter years of Edward III., which appears to have been effected
by the statute of labourers (25 E. III.), immediately after the great
pestilence of 1350, though that mortality ought, in the natural course
of things, to have considerably raised the real wages of labour. The
result of his researches is that, in the reign of Edward III., the
labourer could not purchase half a peck of wheat with a day's labour;
from that of Richard II. to the middle of that of Henry VI., he could
purchase nearly a peck; and from thence to the end of the century,
nearly two pecks. At the time when the passage in the text was written
[1816], the labourer could rarely have purchased more than a peck with a
day's labour, and frequently a good deal less. In some parts of England
this is the case at present [1846]; but in many counties the real wages
of agricultural labourers are considerably higher than at that time,
though not by any means so high as, according to Malthus himself, they
were in the latter half of the fifteenth century. The excessive
fluctuations in the price of corn, even taking averages of a long term
of years, which we find through the middle ages, and indeed much later,
account more than any other assignable cause for those in real wages of
labour, which do not regulate themselves very promptly by that standard,
especially when coercive measures are adopted to restrain them.

[730] See these rates more at length in Eden's State of the Poor, vol.
i. p. 32, &c.

[731] In the Archaeologia, vol. xviii. p. 281, we have a bailiffs account
of expenses in 1387, where it appears that a ploughman had sixpence a
week, and five shillings a year, with an allowance of diet; which seems
to have been only pottage. These wages are certainly not more than
fifteen shillings a week in present value [1816]; which, though
materially above the average rate of agricultural labour, is less so
than some of the statutes would lead us to expect. Other facts may be
found of a similar nature.

[732] See that singular book, Piers Plowman's Vision, p. 145 (Whitaker's
edition), for the different modes of living before and after harvest.
The passage may be found in Ellis's Specimens, vol. i. p. 151.

[733] Fortescue's Difference between Abs. and Lim. Monarchy, p. 19. The
passages