The quality of the wine sold was looked into from time to time, and when found tainted, or unwholesome, "according to the antient customs of the city," the heads of the vessels were broken up, and the wines in them put forth open into the kennels, in example of all other offenders. Guildhall MS. Journals 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 £5 a year. Among ourselves, on an average of different counties, the labourer's wages are £25 to £30 a year, supposing his work constant. The farm servant, unless in the neighbourhood of large towns, receives about £6, or from that to £8.
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 2½d. 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 £25 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 labour of their hands and the profit which they can make upon the commons."—STAFFORD'S Discourse. This novel class had been called into being by the general raising of rents, and the wholesale evictions of the smaller tenantry which followed the Reformation. The progress of the causes which led to the change can be traced from the beginning of the century. Harrison says he knew old men who, comparing things present with things past, spoke of two things grown to be very grievous—to wit, "the enhancing of rents, and the daily oppression of copyholders, whose lords seek to bring their poor tenants almost into plain servitude and misery, daily devising new means, and seeking up all the old, how to cut them shorter and shorter; doubling, trebling, and now and then seven times increasing their fines; driving them also for every trifle to lose and forfeit their tenures, by whom the greatest part of the realm doth stand and is maintained, to the end they may fleece them yet more: which is a lamentable hearing."—Description of England, p.318.
[33] HALL, p. 581. Nor was the act in fact observed even in London itself, or towards workmen employed by the Government. In 1538, the Corporation of London, "for certain reasonable and necessary considerations," assessed the wages of common labourers at 7d. and 8d. the day, classing them with carpenters and masons.—Guildhall MSS. Journal 14, fol. 10. Labourers employed on Government works in the reign of Hen. VIII. never received less than 6d. a day, and frequently more.—Chronicle of Calais, p. 197, etc. Sixpence a day is the usual sum entered as the wages of a day's labour in the innumerable lists of accounts in the Record Office. And 6d. a day again was the lowest pay of the common soldier, not only on exceptional service in the field, but when regularly employed in garrison duty. Those who doubt whether this was really the practice, may easily satisfy themselves by referring to the accounts of the expenses of Berwick, or of Dover, Deal, or Walmer Castles, to be found in the Record Office in great numbers. The daily wages of the soldier are among the very best criteria for determining the average value of the unskilled labourer's work. No government gives higher wages than it is compelled to give by the market rate.
[34] The wages of the day labourer in London, under this act of Elizabeth, were fixed at 9d. the day, and this, after the restoration of the depreciated currency.—Guildhall MSS. Journal 18, fol. 157, etc.
[35] 4 Hen. VII. cap. 16. By the same parliament these provisions were extended to the rest of England. 4 Hen. VII. cap. 19.