What every reader of the Thirteenth Century seems to be perfectly sure of is that, whatever else there may have been in this precious time, at least the workmen were not well paid and men worked practically for nothing. It is confessed that, of course, working as they did on their cathedrals, they had a right to work for very little if they wished, but at least there has been a decided step upward in evolution in the gradual raising of wages, until at last the workman is beginning to be paid some adequate compensation. There is probably no phase of the life of the Middle Ages with regard to which people are more mistaken than this supposition that the workmen of this early time were paid inadequately. I have already called attention to the fact that the workmen of this period claimed and obtained "the three eights"—eight hours of work, eight hours of sleep and eight hours for recreation and bodily necessities. They obtained the Saturday half-holiday, and also release from work on the vigils of all feast days, and there were nearly forty of these in the year. After the vesper hour, that is, three in Summer and two in Winter, there was no work on the Eves of Holy-days of Obligation. With regard to wages, there is just one way to get at the subject, and that is, to present the legal table of wages enacted by Parliament, placing beside it the legal maximum price of necessities of life, as also determined by Parliamentary enactment.
An Act of Edward III. fixes the wages, without food, as follows. There are many other things mentioned, but the following will be enough for our purpose:
| Work | Shillings | Pence |
| A woman hay-making, or weeding corn for the day | 0 | 1 |
| A man filling dung-cart | 0 | 3-1/2 |
| A reaper | 0 | 4 |
| Mowing an acre of grass | 0 | 4 |
| Threshing a quarter of wheat | 0 | 4 |
The price of shoes, cloth and provisions, throughout the time that this law continued in force, was as follows:
| Item | Price | ||
| Pounds | Shillings | Pence | |
| A pair of shoes | 0 | 0 | 4 |
| Russet broadcloth, the yard | 0 | 1 | 1 |
| A stall fed ox | 1 | 4 | 0 |
| A grass fed ox | 0 | 16 | 0 |
| A fat sheep unshorn | 0 | 1 | 8 |
| A fat sheep shorn | 0 | 1 | 2 |
| A fat hog two years old | 0 | 3 | 4 |
| A fat goose | 0 | 0 | 2-1/2. |
| Ale, the gallon, by proclamation | 0 | 0 | 1 |
| Wheat, the quarter | 0 | 3 | 4 |
| White wine, the gallon | 0 | 0 | 6 |
| Red wine | 0 | 0 | 4 |
An Act of Parliament of the fourteenth century, in fixing the price of meat, names the four sorts of meat—beef, pork, mutton and veal, and sets forth in its preamble the words, "these being the food of the poorer sort." The poor in England do not eat these kinds of meat now, and the investigators of the poverty of the country declare that most of the poor live almost exclusively on bread. The fact of the matter is, that large city populations are likely to harbor many very miserable people, while the rural population of England in the Middle Ages, containing the bulk of the people, were happy-hearted and merry. When we recall this in connection with what I have given in the text with regard to the trades-unions and their care for the people, the foolish notion, founded on a mere assumption and due to that Aristophanic joke, our complacent self-sufficiency, which makes us so ready to believe that our generation must be better off than others were, vanishes completely.
It is easy to understand that beef, pork, mutton, veal and even poultry were the food of the poor, when a workman could earn the price of a sheep in less than four days or buy nearly two fat geese for his day's wages. A day laborer will work from forty to fifty days now to earn the price of an ox on the hoof, and it was about the same at the close of the Thirteenth Century. When a fat hog costs less than a dollar, a man's wages, at eight cents a day, are not too low. When a gallon of good ale can be obtained for two cents, no workman is likely to go dry. When a gallon of red wine can be obtained for a day's wages, it is hard to see any difference between a workman of the olden time and the present in this regard. Two yards of cloth made a coat for a gentleman and cost only a little over two shillings. The making of it brought the price of it up to two shilling and six pence. These prices are taken from the Preciosum of Bishop Fleetwood, who took them from the accounts kept by the bursars of convents. Fleetwood's book is accepted very generally as an excellent authority in the history of economics.
Cobbett, in his History of the Protestant Reformation, has made an exhaustive study of just this question of the material and economic condition of the people of England before and since the reformation. He says: