estates rarely came into the market for the smaller freeholders to buy.1 It is also certain that this result was accelerated by the fact that small farms no longer paid under the old system of agriculture, and the new system involved an outlay which the yeoman could not afford. The yeomanry were superseded by capitalist farmers and agricultural labourers. Farming on a large scale became more necessary, and this again assisted in extinguishing the smaller men, for large enclosures were made by the landed gentry in spite of feeble opposition from the yeomen, who, however, could rarely afford to pay the law costs necessary to put a stop to the encroachments of their greater neighbours. Later on, at the beginning of the nineteenth century (especially in 1801) the burden of the ever-increasing poorrates a direct consequence of the Poor Law and assessment system introduced by the Act of Elizabeth 5-largely aided in their ruin, for since the labourers were not and could not be maintained by the wages which their employers paid them, it followed that the small holders were taxed for the benefit of the large farmers. The finishing stroke to a rapidly decaying class was given by the fall in prices after the great Continental War (1815), following on the inflation of previous years; and as their small properties came into the market and no holders of their own class appeared to take their place, their lands went to swell the large farms that were now the typical feature of British agriculture. Here and there an occasional representative of a once large and worthy body of men still remains (1895), but the English yeoman of the days of Henry V. and Queen Elizabeth, as a class, has disappeared entirely."

§ 170. The Rise in Rent.

The farmer, meanwhile, was heavily taxed for his land, and though the high prices which he obtained for his corn up to

1 Toynbee, u. 8., p. 64; and Lecky, History, i. 196.

2 Toynbee, p. 65, and Cunningham, u. s., ii. 480.

3 Cunningham, ii. 364, 480.

Cf. the case of Pickering, Yorks; Marshall's Yorkshire, p. 54; Toynbee, Ind. Rev., p. 65.

.7 Ib.,

5 Above, p. 262.
P. 479.

8 Ib.

9

9 Cf. also Lecky, History of the Eighteenth Century, i. p. 196.

1

the repeal of the corn laws enabled him to pay it, his rent was certainly at a very high figure. The rise had begun, as we have seen, after the dissolution of the monasteries in the sixteenth century, though in that period it was slow. But Latimer asserts that his father only paid £3 or £4 for a holding which in the next generation was rented at £16, the increased figure being only partially accounted for by the general rise in prices. In the seventeenth century, according to King, rents were more than doubled, and the sixpence per acre of medieval times must have seemed almost mythical. The Belvoir estate, the property of the Dukes of Rutland, who are spoken of as indulgent landlords, forms a good example of the rise of rent in the two following centuries. In 1692 land is found rented at 3s. 91d. an acre, and a little later at 4s. 1d. By the year 1799 the same land had risen to 19s. 3 d., with a further rise in 1812 to 25s. 83d. In 1830 it was at 25s. 1ąd., but in 1850 had risen to 38s. 8d., that is about ten times the seventeenth century rent. This enormous rise could not have been due solely to increase of skill in agricultural industry, but was partly derived from artificial conditions imposed by the corn laws, and partly from increased economy in production, this economy often meaning the oppression and degradation of the agricultural labourer.

§ 171. The Fall in Wages.

This degradation was, if not brought about, yet at least greatly assisted by the system of assessment of wages which we noticed in Elizabeth's reign, a system under which the labourer was forced by law to accept the wages which the justices (generally the landed proprietors, his employers) arranged to give him. It is not the business of an historian to make charges against a class, but to put facts in their due perspective. Therefore without comment upon the action of the justices in this matter I shall merely refer to one or two of these assessments and show their effect upon the condition of labour, especially of agricultural labour, Above, p. 270.

1 Above, p. 213.

2

Rogers, Hist. Agric., v. 29; cf. also Six Centuries, p. 479.

3

which occupied, till Arthur Young's time, more than onethird of the working-classes.1 Speaking generally for the end of the sixteenth century, we may quote Professor Rogers' remark, that "if we suppose the ordinary labourer to get 3s. 6d. a week throughout the year, by adding his harvest allowance to his winter wages, it would have taken him more than forty weeks to earn the provisions which in 1495 he could have got with fifteen weeks' labour, while the artisan would be obliged to have given thirty-two weeks' work for the same result." 2 I have already given a table 3 of some of these assessments, and we may take in detail, as an example, the one made by the Rutland magistrates in April 1610. The wages of an ordinary agricultural labourer are put at 7d. a day from Easter to Michaelmas, and at 6d. from Michaelmas to Easter. Artisans get 10d. or 9d. in summer, and 8d. in winter. Now, the price of food was 75 per cent. dearer than in 1564, while the rate of wages was about the same; and compared with (say) 1495, food was three, or even four, times dearer. Another assessment, in Essex in 1661, allows 1s. a day in winter, and 1s. 2d. in summer, for ordinary labour. But, in 1661, the price of wheat (70s. 6d. a quarter) was just double the price of 1610 (35s. 2 d.). The labourer was worse off than ever. Another typical assessment is that of Warwick, in 1684, when wages of labourers are fixed at 8d. a day in summer, 7d. in winter; of artisans at 1s. a day. At this period Professor Rogers reckons the yearly earnings of an artisan at £15, 13s.; of a farm labourer at £10, 8s. 8d., exclusive of harvest work; while the cost of a year's stock of provisions was £14, 11s. 6d. It is true that at this period the labourers still possessed certain advantages afterwards lost, such as common rights, which, besides providing fuel, enabled them to keep cows, pigs, and poultry on the waste. Their cottages, too, were often rent free, being

1 That is 2,800,000 out of 8,500,000 in 1769; Young, Northern Tour, iv. 417-419, 364.

2

Rogers, Six Centuries, p. 390.

3 Above, p. 257.

4 Six Centuries, p. 395.

"Cunningham, Growth of Industry, ii. 487; and Young, Annals of Agri

culture, xxxvi. 516.

2

built upon the waste, while each cottage, by an Act of Elizabeth, was supposed to have a piece of land attached to it, though this provision, after being frequently evaded, was finally repealed in 1775. 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. There was, however, a short interval of higher wages during the Civil War and the commonwealth,3 the rise being due not only to the demand of all sorts of stores for the contending armies, but also to the demand for men to recruit their forces. Artisans could get 2s. 6d. a day instead of 6d.,5 and the rise thus brought about did not immediately disappear. But prices were still rising steadily, and wages did not follow them closely enough to prevent great distress among the working-classes. At the end of the seventeenth century starvation rates of pay are complained of by the well-known Sir Matthew Hale (1683), and twenty years before that the increase of pauperism had necessitated the passing of that Act of Settlement which afterwards became so unpleasantly celebrated." There are historians who maintain that the Elizabethan system of assessment of wages was not responsible for these evils; but even if not responsible it certainly encouraged them; and not even the most enthusiastic admirers of that unfortunate Act can deny that wages were never affected by it beneficially, but continued to decline with remarkable persistency. By the

2 The 31 Eliz., c. 7.

1 Young, Farmer's Letters, i. 205 (edn. 1771). Rogers, Hist. Agric., v. 98; Cunningham, Growth of Industry, ii. 194. See Parl. Hist., ii. 10.

A quotation from Reasons for a Limited Exportation of Wool, 1677, in Smith's Chronicon Rusticum, i. 257.

Provision for Poor (1683), p. 18.

The 13 and 14 Charles II., c. 12. Briefly it gave a parish power to remove a new comer within 40 days, and send him back to the parish where he was legally settled, if he was likely to require relief from the rates. This practically chained the labourer to his native parish. See below, p. 416, and cf. Fowle, Poor Law, p. 64.

* Cunningham, Growth of Industry, ii. 200, remarks: "During this period there were considerable fluctuations of prices; the Cambridge wheat rents for 1654-5 are at 24s. 94d., and those for 1658-59 at 52s. 24d. Yet though

beginning of the eighteenth century the condition of the labourer had sunk to one of great poverty. The ordinary peasant, in 1725, for instance, would not earn more than about £13 or £15 a year; artisans could not gain more than £15, 13s.; while the cost of the stock of provisions was £16, 2s. 3d.1 Thus 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.2 His wages had to be supplemented out of the rates; and there was but little alteration in these wages 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. Whereas in the seventeenth century his average daily wages had been 101d., and the price of corn. 38s. 2d., in the first sixty years of the eighteenth century wages had risen to 1s., and the price of corn was only 32s.3 The evil, however, had been done, and although a short period of prosperity, chiefly due to the advance made by the new agriculture and manufactures, cheered the labourer for a time, his condition after the Industrial Revolution deteriorated again rapidly, till we find him at the end of the eighteenth century, and for some time afterwards, in a condition of chronic misery.

the price of corn was doubled in this brief period, the Bedford justices do not seem to have felt called upon to make any new order or to try to enforce a different rate of wages." This is not surprising; it merely illustrates what I have remarked before about the temptations of the Assessment Act to employers (above, pp. 255, 256). Yet Dr Cunningham seems to think the assessment system had no influence on wages. 1 Rogers, Six Centuries, p. 398. 2 Ib.

3 Toynbee, Industrial Revolution, p.67.