The belief of contemporaries that the real incomes of labouring and artisan households were rising from the mid-seventeenth century finds ample support from a wide range of quantitative and qualitative sources. Inevitably, the most robust data, if not the most representative, are the day wage-rates of adult male building workers. Using the research of Gilboy, William Beveridge, and Henry Phelps Brown and Sheila Hopkins, Donald Coleman concluded some twenty years ago that the money paid each day to building workers rose by some 45-50 per cent between the mid-seventeenth and the mid-eighteenth centuries.(25) These venerable data have a distinct southern bias, but Donald Woodward has recently published additional series which show building wage-rates in many northern towns rising over the same period by broadly comparable proportions.(26) Data on the pay of agricultural labourers are frustratingly sparse and fail to encompass the fringe benefits which farm workers so often received, but such information as we have points in a similar direction.(27) The plentifulness of basic provisions and the frequency of exceptionally ‘cheap years’, so often alluded to in contemporary sources, is confirmed by statistics assembled by historians which show that after sharp rises in the 1630s and 1640s the direction of food prices was distinctly downwards. The price of a quarter of wheat calculated in the form of a national average, for example, fell from just under 44s. in the 1640s to 37s. (-15.6 per cent) in the 1650s, and in the 1680s it was just over 30s. (-30.9 per cent). The 1690s was a high price decade, when wheat averaged almost 42s. per quarter, but in the 1730s and 1740s it cost less than 30s.(28)
Calculating the costs of providing a basic subsistence diet is a hazardous and necessarily imprecise undertaking which has given rise to a wide range of estimates. The most recent calculations, based upon the retail prices of bread, cheese, beef and oats in Hull and Lincoln, reveal a steady fall between the 1650s and the 1680s amounting to 30 per cent; the cost of a daily diet rose in the 1690s, but even so it was still more than 20 per cent below what it had been four decades earlier. The combined effect of rising wage rates and falling subsistence costs in these two northern towns between the 1630s and the 1690s reduced the number of days which building labourers and craftsmen needed to work in order to feed themselves or their families by 35-50 per cent.(20) Naturally, the scale of the improvement in real wages which is claimed elsewhere varies in accordance with the quality and origin of the data used and the methods applied to them: the southern-based Phelps Brown and Hopkins real wage index, for example, registers only a modest rise in the course of the late seventeenth century, but over the hundred years from the 1650s to the 1740s it appreciates by almost 35 per cent. Real wages in London appear to have increased relatively slowly, but Gilboy’s indices suggest that in Lancashire in the first half of the eighteenth century they rose by almost 40 per cent. Regional and occupational variations could clearly be very wide, and the use of retail rather than wholesale prices reduces the scale of improvements, but there can be little doubt that the gains were substantial in many places and significant almost everywhere.(30)
Furthermore, it is likely that concentration upon male real wage-rates severely understates the scale of the improvements which took place in the incomes of the labouring and artisan classes. The tightening of the labour market, which pushed wages higher in the face of falling subsistence costs, must have also meant that more work was available for those who sought it. Moreover, family incomes were far from being solely dependent upon the earnings of male heads of households, and from the later seventeenth century the opportunities for the gainful employment of women and children improved markedly.(31) The general increase in the demand for labour encouraged the employment of women and children in hitherto almost exclusively male occupations, but probably of even greater significance was that this was an era when `the production of new consumer goods absorbed an increasing quantity of the nation’s economic resources’ and much of the employment in these rapidly expanding sectors was part-time and based in the home, thus of direct benefit to wives, children and the elderly.
Joan Thirsk has calculated that in order to satisfy home and foreign demand for stockings in the 1690s, more than 15 per cent of labouring and pauper families could have supplemented their living by knitting. Yet knitting stockings was only one of perhaps a hundred or more by-employments available from the later seventeenth century, as the number of consumer products proliferated and their range ever widened. Much of this work was undoubtedly relatively poorly paid — in 1673 a retired Halifax collier found the 2d. a day he earned carding wool derisory, although his productivity may have been low because he lacked experience and dexterity — but even such poorly paid employment boosted a household’s income, most significantly, its disposable income.(32) Daniel Defoe claimed from observations in Norfolk and Taunton in the 1720s that a child as young as four or five `could earn its own bread’ in the local textile industries, and that a Derbyshire lead miner’s wife could earn 3d. a day washing ore, which is about the same amount that a woman might earn spinning wool on a wheel for cloth- or hose-making.(33)
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Consequently, when these rising subsidiary incomes are added to the more easily demonstrable increases in the pay of adult males, and combined with the deflation of food prices over much of this period, the emphasis placed by contemporaries upon the relative prosperity of the lower orders and their ability to support themselves by working less than full weeks would appear to be validated.
IV
The observed habits of the labouring and artisan masses, and the interpretation put upon them by contemporaries, were not unique either to England or to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.(34) Echoes are, of course, to be found around this time in a number of European countries, but it is perhaps the era of severe labour shortage in the aftermath of the Black Death of 1348-9 which provides the most telling parallels. In fact, the diagnoses proffered and the prescriptions advocated in these two widely separated periods are in many respects remarkably similar, as indeed is the language in which they were expressed. The essence of a substantial part of the edifice of observation, theory and policy on labour and wages which we characterize as `later mercantilist’ was in evidence in the later fourteenth century.
It is doubtful that Joseph Townsend, writing in 1786, had in mind William Langland’s Piers Plowman, composed more than four centuries before, when he observed of the poor that `it is only hunger which can spur and goad them on to labour’, and that the `wisest legislator will never be able to devise a more equitable, a more effectual, or in any respect a more suitable punishment, than hunger is for a disobedient servant’.(35) But Townsend’s language as well as his sentiments bear an uncanny resemblance to Langland’s lengthy discourses on the unique ability of hunger to transform idlers and beggars into willing workmen. Langland admonished the labourers of his own day, when Hunger was sleeping,(36) for their greed and indolence and their defiance of the king’s statutes: `Ac whiles hunger was her maister. there wolde none of hem chyde / Ne stryve ageines his statut, so sternliche he loked’.(37) The fact that both Langland and Townsend dwelt upon the salutary effects of a scarcity of food upon the poor of their times is no random coincidence, for the relationship between hunger and industry, and plenty and idleness, was an integral part of the writings of both periods.(38) Thomas Mun (1664), perhaps mindful of the famine of 1661, reflected that `penury and want do make a people wise and industrious’. Similarly, when real wages plunged downwards in the harvest failures of the third quarter of the eighteenth century, observers such as William Temple (1770) and Thomas Pennant (1772) were swift to remark that `idling the whole day together … never happen[s] when wheat and other necessaries are dear’ and that until `famine pinches they will not bestir themselves’.(39)
The tenor of contemporary reflections on the well-rewarded labouring classes of later fourteenth-century England is that they pursued `their own ease and greed’ and `served their masters worse from day to day’; thus, these reflections have much in common with the general opinion of the behaviour of their successors three centuries later. And if the diagnoses of the ills besetting the labour markets in the two eras had much in common, so too did the favoured remedies. Since those who would employ labour were, in the words of the Hertfordshire justices in 1687, faced with the `Licentious humours of some servants … [who] will not work but at such times and in such manner as they please’,(40) it was natural that means should be sought to compel the idle to work. Accordingly, in addition to the enforcement of the Statute of Artificers, a prominent place was accorded in the writings of the second half of the seventeenth century and the first half of the eighteenth to schemes designed to promote the duty to labour, backed up with a variety of coercive measures, including the denial of outdoor relief to the able-bodied and incarceration for inveterate idlers.(41) The Ordinance and Statutes of Labourers enacted during and after the Black Death had likewise made it an offence punishable by imprisonment for any man or woman, `of whatsoever condition, free or servile, able-bodied and under the age of sixty years, not living by trade nor exercising a certain craft, nor having of his own whereof he shall be able to live, or land of his own, in the tilling whereof he shall be able to occupy himself, nor serving another man’, to refuse employment.(42) Moreover, this legislation sought to restore not only the wages but the prices ruling prior to the Great Pestilence, just as the main thrust of `mercantilist writings’ was to argue `that the cost of subsistence must form the norm to which the rate of wages ought to be adjusted’.(43)
The close similarities between the thought of these two periods, despite the three centuries and more which separated them, also extend far into the consequences which were believed to flow from excessively high real wages. When the grand jury of Worcestershire made a presentment in 1661 in which they found `the unreasonableness of servants’ wages a great grievance, so that the servants are grown so proud and idle that the master cannot be known from the servant, except it be because the servant wears better clothes than his master’, they were echoing, almost to the word, the sentiments voiced by the Leicester monk, Henry Knighton, who observed of the years after the Black Death, `the lesser people were so puffed up in those days … that one might scarcely distinguish one from another for the splendour of their dress and adornments: not a humble man from a great man, nor a needy from a rich, nor a servant from his master’.(44) Many commentators in the later period favoured regulating dress by law and voiced the same concerns as the architects of the sumptuary statute of 1363 about `the outrageous and excessive apparel of divers people against their estate and degree’.(45) Nor was disquiet over the ways in which the poorer sort spent their enhanced incomes restricted to better food and clothing. According to John Gower, writing in the late 1370s, `the peasant pretends to imitate the ways of the freeman’, and had developed an appetite for `luxuries’, including beds and pillows, while for Thomas Alcock, writing in 1752, the `unnecessary expence of the poor’ included smoking and chewing tobacco, taking snuff, tea-drinking, the wearing of `ribbons, ruffles, silks and other slight foreign things’, and `dram-drinking’.(46)
High real wages also enhanced the ability of the lower orders to participate in unsuitable leisure pursuits, which duly made their regulation a priority in both periods. The revival of interest in the Reformation of Manners in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries may well have sprung as much from a desire to increase industriousness as from the puritanical predilection to stamp out drunkenness and other `ungodly’ pursuits, which had been the guiding motive behind its former incarnation in Elizabethan and early Stuart times. When Henry Fielding denounced the `too frequent and expensive diversions among the lower kind of people’ in 1751, he explained: `Besides the actual expense of attending these places of pleasure, [there is] the loss of time and neglect of business’. Alcock concurred, citing the simple pleasure of tea-drinking and castigating the `considerable loss of time [which] attends this silly habit … a circumstance of no small moment to those who are to live by their labour’. In the words of Edgar Furniss: `The fair, the gathering at the alehouse, were denoted as nuisances and suppressed as such, not alone, nor principally, because they bred riot and disturbance but also because they appeared most obviously to relax the industry of the labouring body’.(47) When subsistence needs had been satisfied, men and women were the more easily enticed away from labour by such entertainments. Gower was exasperated by rustics who `desire the leisures of great men’; Langland railed against those who haunted brewhouses as if they were churches; and Robert Rypon, prior of Durham and contemporary of Chaucer, condemned the amount of time which the lower orders devoted to useless and unnecessary occupations such as shooting in the butts, drinkings, chess and dice-playing, and gossiping and coarse jesting, to which other moralists added more active sports such as wrestling and football.(48)
Thus, there is abundant evidence of how labourers and artisans were thought to behave, but it is appropriate now to examine the issue from the perspective of the workers themselves, although even on the level of elementary theory this is a far from straightforward task. There is the basic problem of what constituted labour and leisure. Voluntary leisure time has to be distinguished from involuntary: work cannot be performed if there is no demand for it. What constituted labour is also problematical in a society in which many members possessed or had access to their own means of production (plots of land, basic industrial equipment and such), in which a significant proportion of production, both for self-consumption and for sale, took place within the household, and in which a significant proportion of the labour force combined household production with work for wages. By no means all of the time spent away from paid employment was
`wasted on idling’: those with smallholdings raised crops and kept poultry and animals, while the landless could glean corn and collect fuel, and produce a variety of goods to be consumed within the household or even sold. Indeed, it is possible that much so-called ‘leisure’ might have yielded a greater marginal return than time spent working for wages. Nor did a day off work necessarily mean the loss of a full day’s production. As Adam Smith was to confirm in the 1770s, the working of short weeks by the self-employed or by those paid by the piece could simply mean that they chose to cram five or six day’s production into four.(49) At the same time, the amount of work which individuals sought was conditioned by far more than personal inclination, the level of wages and the price and attractiveness of goods. It varied according to stages in the life-cycle, which for most brought rising then falling numbers of dependent mouths to feed and bodies to clothe, and increasing then diminishing reserves of energy and strength.
Most significantly, conventional economic analysis is of limited rather than decisive assistance in any evaluation of the accuracy of contemporary assertions. The backward-sloping labour-supply function, although in many respects a simple concept to accept in social terms, is much more difficult to comprehend within the laws of neo-classical economics, by which the normal expectations of rational behaviour in a market economy endow the individual worker with a strong desire to maximize income and an almost infinite variety of enticing goods upon which to spend his money. According to these parameters we are instructed that, with the exception of the very well-remunerated, as wages rise so more work will be offered by each worker, because each increase in wages makes leisure more expensive and therefore less attractive. Consequently, it is only at high rates of income, after successive increases in earnings and work-time and decreases in leisure-time have taken place, that the value placed upon leisure will eventually match and then exceed the attractions of further work and the acquisition of yet more goods.