wages are about the same; and compared with (say) 1495, food was three, or even four, times dearer. Another assessment, in Essex in 1661, allows 1_s._ a day in winter, and 1_s._ 2_d._ in summer, for ordinary labour. But, in 1661, the price of wheat (70_s._ 6_d._ a quarter) was just double the price of 1610 (35_s._ 2⁠½_d._). The labourer was worse off than ever. Another typical assessment is that of Warwick, in 1684, when wages of labourers are fixed at 8_d._ a day in summer, 7_d._ in winter; of artisans at 1_s._ a day. At this period Professor Rogers reckons the yearly earnings of an artisan at £15, 13_s._; of a farm labourer at £10, 8_s._ 8_d._, exclusive of harvest work; while the cost of a year’s stock of provisions was £14, 11_s._ 6_d._ It is true that at this period the labourer still possessed certain advantages, such as common rights, which, besides providing fuel, enabled them to keep cows and pigs and poultry on the waste. Their cottages, too, were often rent free, being built upon the waste, while each cottage, by the Act of Elizabeth, was supposed to have a piece of land attached to it, though this provision was frequently evaded. But yet it is evident that, even allowing for these privileges, which, after all, were now being rapidly curtailed, the ordinary agricultural labourer—that is, the mass of the wage-earning population—must have found it hard work to live decently. By the beginning of the eighteenth century his condition had sunk to one of great poverty. The ordinary peasant, in 1725, for instance, would not earn more than £13 or about £15 a year; artisans could not gain more than £15, 13_s._; while the cost of the stock of provisions was £16, 2_s._ 3_d._ Thus {121} the husbandman who, in 1495, could get a similar stock of food by fifteen weeks’ work, and the artisan who could have earned it in ten weeks, could not feed himself in 1725 with a whole year’s labour. His wages had to be supplemented out of the rates; and there was but little alteration in these rates till the middle of the eighteenth century. But about that time (1750) he had begun to share in the general prosperity caused by the success of the new agriculture and the growth of trade and manufactures. The evil, however, had been done, and although a short period of prosperity, chiefly due to the advance made by the new agriculture, cheered the labourer for a time, his condition after the Industrial Revolution again rapidly deteriorated, till we find him at the end of the eighteenth century and for some time afterwards in a condition of chronic misery. [37. As to the alleged futility of these assessments see _Industry in England_, p. 257.] CHAPTER V COMMERCE AND WAR IN THE SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES