The Condition of the Wage-Earners The condition of the agricultural labourer had very much improved since the beginning of the century.In the seventeenth century his average daily wage had been 101/4d.,while the average price of corn had been 38s.2d.During the first sixty years of the eighteenth century his average wages were 1s.,the price of corn 32s.Thus,while the price of corn had,thanks to a succession of good seasons,fallen 16per cent,wages had risen to about an equal extent,and the labourer was thus doubly benefited.Adam Smith attributes this advance in prosperity to 'an increase in the demand for labour,arising from the great and almost universal prosperity of the country".but at the same time he allows that wealth had only advanced gradually,and with no great rapidity.The real solution is to be found in the slow rate of increase in the numbers of the people.Wealth had indeed grown slowly,but its growth had nevertheless been more rapid than that of population.
The improvement in the condition of the labourer was thus due to an increase in real and not only in nominal wages.It is true that certain articles,such as soap,salt,candles,leather,fermented liquors,had,chiefly owing to the taxes laid on them,become a good deal dearer,and were consumed in very small quantities;but the enhanced prices of these things were more than counterbalanced by the greater cheapness of grain,potatoes,turnips,carrots,cabbages,apples,onions,linen and woollen cloth,instruments made of the coarser metals,and household furniture.Wheaten bread had largely superseded rye and barley bread,which were 'looked upon with a sort of horror.'wheat being as cheap as rye and barley had been in former times.Every poor family drank tea once a day at least -a 'pernicious commodity,'a 'vile superfluity,'in Arthur Young's eyes.Their consumption of meat was 'pretty considerable';that of cheese was 'immense.'In 1737the day-labourers of England,'by their large wages and cheapness of all necessaries,'enjoyed better dwellings,diet,and apparel in England,than the husbandmen or farmers did in other countries.'The middle of the eighteenth century was indeed about his best time,though a decline soon set in.By 1771his condition had already been somewhat affected by the dear years immediately preceding,when prices had risen much faster than wages,although the change had as yet,according to Young,merely cut off his superfluous expenditure.By the end of the century men had begun to look back with regret upon this epoch in the history of the agricultural labourer as one of a vanished prosperity.At no time since the passing of the 43d of Elizabeth,wrote Eden in 1796,'could the labouring classes acquire such a portion of the necessaries and conveniences of life by a day's work,as they could before the late unparalleled advance in the price of the necessaries of life.'
Nor were high wages and cheap food their only advantages.
Their cottages were often rent-free,being built upon the waste.
Each cottage had its piece of ground attached,though the piece was often a very small one,for the Act of Elizabeth,providing that every cottage should have four acres of land,was doubtless unobserved,and was repealed in 1775.Their common rights,besides providing fuel,enabled them to keep cows and pigs and poultry on the waste,and sheep on the fallows and stubbles.But these rights were already being steadily curtailed,and there was 'an open war against cottages.'consequent on the tendency to consolidate holdings into large sheepfarms.It was becoming customary,too,for unmarried labourers to be boarded in the farmers'houses.
On the whole,the agricultural labourer,at any rate in the south of England,was much better off in the middle of the eighteenth century than his descendants were in the middle of the nineteenth.At the later date wages were actually lower in Suffolk,Essex,and perhaps parts of Wilts,than they were at the former;in Berks they were exactly the same;in Norfolk,Bucks,Gloucestershire,and South Wilts,there had been a very trifling rise;with the exception of Sussex and Oxfordshire,there was no county south of the Trent in which they had risen more than one-fourth.Meanwhile rent and most necessaries,except bread,had increased enormously in cost,while most of the labourer's old privileges were lost,so that his real wages had actually diminished.But in the manufacturing districts of the north his condition had improved.While nominal wages in the south had risen on the average 14 per cent.,here they had risen on the average 66 per cent.In some districts the rise had been as great as 200 per cent.In Arthur Young's time the agricultural wages of Lancashire were 4s.6d.-the lowest rate in England;in 1821 they had risen to 14s.It may be roughly said that the relative positions of the labourer north and south of the Trent had been exactly reversed in the course of a century.
