Wage-Rates and Prices: Evidence for Population Pressure in the Sixteenth Century

Abstract

In an earlier paper2 we gave estimates showing that the basketful of consumables which the English building craftsman could buy with a day's pay began about 1510 to contract progressively, and by 1630 had shrunk to perhaps as little as two-fifths of what it had been through much of the fifteenth century. Since the builder's labourer suffered equally, and he may be regarded as representative of unskilled wageearners at large, there is reason to believe that the decline was not peculiar to building but afflicted other wage-earners too. It was catastrophic. So far as we know, there is nothing like it anywhere else in wage history. Yet one can read a great deal about the sixteenth century without finding any mention of it, and with some reason, for there was no great outburst to set historians looking for a great social constriction as its origin. Did it really happen in anything like the severity that the figures suggest? If it did, what caused it ?