In the harvest months they were allowed to work by the piece, and might earn considerably more;[1] so that, in fact (and this was the rate at which their wages were usually estimated), the day labourer, if in full employment, received on an average fourpence a day for the whole year. Allowing a deduction of one day in a fortnight for a saint's day or a holiday, he received, therefore, steadily and regularly, if well-conducted, an equivalent of something near to twenty shillings a week, the wages at present paid in English colonies: and this is far from being a full account of his advantages. Except in rare instances, the agricultural labourer held land in connection with his house, while in most parishes, if not in all, there were large ranges of common and unenclosed forest land, which furnished his fuel to him gratis, where pigs might range, and ducks and geese; where, if he could afford a cow, he was in no danger of being unable to feed it; and so important was this privilege considered, that when the commons began to be largely enclosed, parliament insisted that the working man should not be without some piece of ground on which he could employ his own and his family's industry[2] By the 7th of the 31st of Elizabeth,
- ↑ Mowers, for instance, were paid 8d. a day.—Privy Purse Expenses of Henry VIII.
- ↑ In 1581 the agricultural labourer, as he now exists, was only beginning to appear. 'There be such in the realm,' says Stafford, 'as live only by the labour of their hands and the profit which they can make upon the commons.' Stafford's Discourse. This novel class had been called into being by the general raising of rents, and the wholesale evictions of the smaller tenantry which followed the Reformation. The progress of the causes which led to the change can be traced from the beginning of the
