Seven Centuries of Unreal Wages
The Unreliable Data, Sources and Methods that have been used for Measuring Standards of Living in the Past
Editors John Hatcher University of Cambridge Cambridge, UK
Judy Z. Stephenson Wadham College, University of Oxford Oxford, UK
Palgrave Studies in Economic History
Chapter 9: This chapter was originally published in Commercial Activity, Markets and Entrepreneurs in the Middle Ages, Essays in Honour of Richard Britnell, edited by B. Dodds and C. Liddy (Boydell Press, 2011)
Chapter 10: This chapter was originally published in Experiencing Wages; Social, and Cultural Aspects of Wage Forms in Europe since 1500, edited by P. Scholliers and L. Schwarz (Berghahn Books, 2006)
ISBN 978-3-319-96961-9 ISBN 978-3-319-96962-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96962-6
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1 Introduction 1
John Hatcher and Judy Z. Stephenson
3 The Tyranny of Numbers: Are There Acceptable Data for Nominal and Real Wages for Pre-modern China? 71
Kent Deng and Patrick K. O’Brien
4 What Is Wrong with the History of Wages: Or the Divide in Economic History—A Reappraisal Suggested by Eighteenth-Century Milan 95
Luca Mocarelli
5 In Search of the Average Craftsman: Understanding Skilled Work and Wages in the Early Modern Building Trades and Wider Economy 117
Judy Z. Stephenson
v
2 Seven Centuries of Unreal Wages 15 John Hatcher
Contents
6 The Pay of Labourers and Unskilled Men on London
Judy Z. Stephenson
7 What Is a Money Wage? Measuring the Earnings of Agricultural Labourers in Early Modern England
Craig Muldrew
8 Seasonal Patterns of Agricultural Day-Labour at Eight English Farms, 1835–1844
Joyce Burnette
9 Unreal Wages: Long-Run Living Standards and the ‘Golden Age’ of
John Hatcher
vi Contents
Building Sites,
143
1650–1770
165
195
Century 227
the Fifteenth
10 Cash, Wages, and the Economy of Makeshifts in England, 1650–1800 267 Craig Muldrew and Steven King Index 307
List of Contributors
Joyce Burnette Wabash College, Crawfordsville, IN, USA
Kent Deng London School of Economics and Political Science, London, UK
John Hatcher University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK
Steven King University of Leicester, Leicester, UK
Luca Mocarelli Department of Economics, Quantitative Methods and Business Strategy, University of Milano-Bicocca, Milan, Italy
Craig Muldrew University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK
Patrick K. O’Brien London School of Economics and Political Science, London, UK
Judy Z. Stephenson Wadham College, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
vii
List of Figures
Fig. 2.1 Daily real wage rates of ‘unskilled building workers’ and GDP per head, 1270–1870. (From: British Economic Growth, 1270–1870, p. 258, Fig. 6).
Fig. 3.1 Urban Prices of Rice per Picul (Shi) in Jiangsu Province, 1740–1910. (Source: Yejian Wang (2013). Note: Prices of the Ninth Month, in silver tael. Rice in picul (shi). Locations are seats of governments of named prefectures)
Fig. 3.2 Urban Prices of Rice per Picul (Shi) in Zhejiang Province, 1740–1910. (Source: See Fig. 3.1. Note: the same as Fig. 3.1)
29
75
75
Fig. 3.3 Silver Purchasing Power Index (1646 = 100),* 1640–1910. (Source: (1) Before 1693, based on Ye Mengzhu (1981, vol. 7, pp. 153–4), Yao Tinglin (1982, pp. 43–156). (2) During 1693–1722, based on Department of Archives, Palace Museum (1976, pp. 1–293). (3) During 1723–1735, based on Ch’üan and Kraus (1975, pp. 145–8). (4) After 1736, based on Wang, The Database of Grain Prices. Note: * The index represents the amount of rice one silver tael was able to buy. Data are from Jiangsu Province of the Lower Yangtze) 81
Fig. 3.4 Rice Prices at Harvest Times in the Yangtze Delta, 1630–1870. (Sources: Ye Mengzhu (1981), Yao Tinglin (1698), Ch’üan and Kraus (1975). Note: Taels/shi of the second grade rice, autumn prices)
82
ix
Fig. 5.1 Distribution of day rates paid to men listed as masons, Kempster team 1700–1709 St Paul’s. (Source: TNA C106/145)
124
Fig. 5.2 Average number of days worked by craftsmen on day rate of 28d (average = 92), Kempster’s team, St Pauls, 1700–1709. (Source: TNA C 106/145) 127
Fig. 6.1 Labourers day rates in d per day as compiled by Allen (2001, 2013). (Source: https://www.nuffield.ox.ac.uk/people/sites/ allen-research-pages/)
Fig. 6.2 No. of tides worked per week by ‘gin men’. London Bridge April 1735–March 1736. Average = 7.6. (Source: London Metropolitan Archive CLA/007/FN/05/61)
Fig. 6.3 No. of tides worked per week by ‘gin men’ at London Bridge 1745–1748, showing seasonal peaks, and break in work September 1748. (Source: London Metropolitan Archive CLA/007/FN/04/01)
146
155
155
Fig. 6.4 Real wage comparisons, Labourers, London and European cities 1600–1800 with London nominal silver wages reduced by 25%, g/Ag. per day on the vertical axis and a 50 year moving average on the horizontal axis. (Source: https://www.nuffield.ox.ac.uk/media/2138/labourersxls.xls with London figures deflated) 159
Fig. 8.1 Total employment by week. (Note: Male-equivalent days are equal to days worked by men plus half of days worked by women and children. Piece-rate payments are smoothed over three weeks) 200
Fig. 8.2 Employment at John Bragg’s farm at Sadborrow, Dorset, 1838 201
Fig. 8.3 Employment at James Edwards’ farm in Fyfield, Hampshire, 1835 202
Fig. 8.4 Employment at William Scorer’s farm near Lincoln, 1838 202
Fig. 8.5 Employment at Apley Park, Shropshire, 1844 203
Fig. 8.6 Employment at the Windham estate in Felbrigg, Norfolk, 1841 204
Fig. 8.7 Employment at Featherstone Castle estate farm in Northumberland, 1844 205
Fig. 8.8 Employment at Wagstaff & Ward’s farm in Nottinghamshire, 1841 205
Fig. 8.9 Employment at Farm House farm near York, 1838/39 206
x List
Figures
of
Fig. 8.10 Timmer’s seasonal pattern compared to total employment of eight farms
207
Fig. 8.11 Geography and the timing of the seasonal peak 208
Fig. 8.12 The seasonality of male wages 215
Fig. 8.13 Wage and employment peaks at Featherstone Castle, Northumberland. (Note: Male and total employment are measured on the left axis; wage is measured on the right axis) 216
Fig. 8.14
Wage and employment peaks at Home Farm near York 217
Fig. 8.15 Wage and employment peaks at Edward’s farm in Hampshire 217
Fig. 8.16 Wage and employment peaks at Wagstaff and Ward’s farm in Nottinghamshire 218
Fig. 8.17 Wage and employment peaks at Wm. Scorer’s farm near Lincoln 219
Fig. 8.18 Wage and employment peaks at Felgrigg, Norfolk 219
Fig. 8.19 The seasonality of female wages 220
Fig. 9.1 Changes in the equivalent of the wage rate of a building craftsman expressed in a composite physical unit of consumables in Southern England, 1284–1954. (From Henry Phelps Brown and Sheila Hopkins, A Perspective of Wages and Prices (1981), p. 19)
230
Fig. 9.2 Real agricultural and building labourers’ day wages, 1209–1869. (From G Clark, ‘The long march of history: farm wages, population, and economic growth, England 1209–1869’, Economic History Review, 2nd ser. lx, (2007), 109) 230
xi List of Figures
List of Tables
Table 3.1 Urban nominal wages paid in coins (Wen) by employers in the private sector, 1740–1820
Table 3.2 Rural wage rates recorded for provinces, Wen per year, 1735–1835
Table 3.3 Seasonality in government wage rates for builders, silver taels per day
Table 3.4 Payments to workers employed in state-run textile workshops
Table 3.5 Stipend payment and a family’s livelihood
Table 3.6 Exchange rates between copper wen and silver tael, 1670–1847
Table 4.1 Wages for workers in the building sector 1757–1796 (soldi per day worked)
Table 4.2 Wages paid to those in charge of building sites 1757–1796 (soldi per day worked)
Table 4.3 Wages of workers in the building sector 1757–1796 (soldi per day worked)
Table 6.1 Day rates recorded paid to labourers and unskilled men at St Paul’s Cathedral, by contractors and the clerk of works (Cathedral) directly. 1675–1725
Table 6.2 Tide carpenters gin men teams 12 April 1754–3 April 1755
Table 6.3 London, 1750, g./Ag
76
79
80
83
83
85
100
101
102
150
156
159
Table 7.1 Change in day wages rates over time as estimated by Phelps Brown and Hopkins and Gregory Clark 171
xiii
Table 7.2 Batchelor’s estimate of a labourer’s earnings including harvest from 1808 176
Table 7.3 Numbers of servants compared to day labourers in the 1760s from Arthur Young 178
Table 7.4 Rates of work calculated from wage assessments 181
Table 8.1 Farm characteristics 198
Table 8.2 Employment of women and boys during harvest. Per cent of total male-equivalent days 209
Table 8.3 Numbers of named workers, by days worked in the year 212
Table 8.4 Percentage of days worked by regularity of worker 213
Table 8.5 Variation in wages and employment compared 221
Table 9.1 Estimates of the economic performance of peasant households using conventional wage data 242
Table 9.2 Estimates of the economic performance of peasant households using revised wage data 245
Table 10.1 Forms of circulating currency in the eighteenth-century economy 273
xiv List of Tables
1
Introduction
John Hatcher and Judy Z. Stephenson
The welfare and quality of life of people in the past is one of the most important areas of historical enquiry and the standard of living of populations is one of the leading measures of the economic performance of nations. Wages, and the living standards that are derived from them, have been at the heart of economic and social history since the nineteenth century and have featured prominently in many of the discipline’s great controversies and debates. Just as more than half a century ago Hartwell, Hobsbawm and a host of others disagreed about the welfare of the working classes in industrial revolution England,1 so Postan, Harvey and Hilton disputed the severity and causes of the subsistence crises of the early fourteenth century.2 Statistics claiming to measure living standards by the price of labour and its subsistence are necessary underpinnings for economic ideas about relative development and ‘poverty and progress’
J. Hatcher (*)
University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK
e-mail: mjh1001@cam.ac.uk
J. Z. Stephenson
Wadham College, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
e-mail: judy.stephenson@wadham.ox.ac.uk
© The Author(s) 2018
J. Hatcher, J. Z. Stephenson (eds.), Seven Centuries of Unreal Wages, Palgrave Studies in Economic History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96962-6_1
1
J. Hatcher and J. Z. Stephenson
across the globe, commentaries and explanations of the advancement of northern Europe and the backwardness of the south after 1700, the speed of technological change and the Great Divergence between Asia and north-western Europe. Indeed, it has increasingly been argued that measurements of real wages are all that is needed to work out an international development pecking order, since ‘[a] high wage economy was likely to be industrialized; a low wage one was not’.3
Wages and real incomes also supply the statistical backbone for enduring Malthusian ideas about the lack of progress before industrialisation, for studying inequality and whether growth was led by consumption or production.4 They have played a crucial role in helping to provide explanations of many complex areas of social and demographic history, such as the reasons why populations rise and fall and the relative roles played by birth and death rates, the impact of industrialisation on the welfare of the working classes, the causes and consequences of changes in diet, nutrition and health, the incidence of social protest, the dispensing of charity, the operation of the poor law and much more besides.
Yet, how reliable are the wage and income data that for decades have provided the long-run measurements of the standard of living that underpin such vast sweeps of history? The chapters in this volume add materially to a rising tide of evidence and argument that indicate that they are unreliable and beset by weaknesses, biases, inaccuracies and misapprehensions. While also rehearsing long-standing criticisms, these chapters present a wide range of powerful new evidence and reasons why the virtually universal dependence on the now conventional historical wage rates and real wages, embodied in such recent landmark works as Robert Allen’s 2001 study of the real wages of European building workers from the middle ages to the First World War, Gregory Clark’s 2007 study of the real wages of English casual agricultural labourers from 1209 to 1869, and the Great Divergence debate, is misguided.5 At its core, this book challenges the fundamentals of the construction of ‘real wages’ across seven centuries and many countries of the world, and questions whether the sources and methodology currently used are capable of providing reasonably accurate knowledge of the welfare of populations of the past. It also suggests a range of improved methods and new data for revising the existing series and compiling new.
2
Prices and consumption are, of course, essential components of any calculation that turns money wages into real wages and thence into standards of living, and they receive attention in many of the following chapters. However, the balance of this book is tilted towards the study of wages and the income derived by working people from their labour. This is because the need for substantial improvements in the recording of prices, the analysis of household budgets and the construction of baskets of goods tailored to the consumption habits of people with differing levels of income has been widely accepted and is being addressed, whereas knowledge and understanding of wages and incomes have lagged behind as historians and economists cling to notions developed in the 1950s and before of the representativeness of day wages largely restricted to the fields of building and agricultural labouring.6
Clear bias in the most popular sources has habitually been ignored in the search for more data to feed advancing econometric modelling. The accounts kept by big, rich institutions are the most consistent, continuous and prolific for the recording of wages and prices, but unfortunately they are not representative of the generality of employers and employment or of consumers and consumption. The character of these institutions meant that they tended to hire certain types of workers to perform certain types of work on particular terms of employment, and to purchase and consume goods and services that were exceptional in quantity, kind and price. Moreover, the extraction of data from the accounts of the past requires considerable care because the paymasters, comptrollers, auditors, bailiffs and treasurers who kept them were not adhering to any general accounting standards. There were no reporting conventions, nor were there any regulated bodies who monitored the gathering of consistent and correct statistics. Records were kept by officers for the purposes of their own organisations, and the results are as varied and as idiosyncratic as one might expect. However, all too often the difficulties inherent in such records have been brushed aside as the burgeoning literature continues to treat them as if they provide accurate records of pay and earnings.
The easy availability of a relative abundance of seemingly precise and consistent data in the form of a male daily wage paid in cash has triumphed over confronting the formidable difficulties set in the way of
3
Introduction
J. Hatcher and J. Z. Stephenson
gaining a more accurate picture by tackling sub-contracting, piece rates, bonuses, non-pecuniary rewards and supplements, by-employments, seasonal variations in the availability of work and the wages received for it, the substantial contributions made to most household budgets by the earnings of women and children, the subsistence and profits made from holding land and livestock and much more besides. The over-reliance on what are taken to be a precise and easily manipulated male day wage has also led to an exaggeration of the importance of wages and wage labour, especially in pre-modern centuries and economies. Not only was a considerable amount of hired labour, and in some industries the majority, paid by the piece rather than by the day, the bulk of labour powering huge swathes of the economy, and in particular farming, came from family enterprises and the self-employed and relied heavily on female labour as well as male.7 More than this, the social, moral and customary context of the wage was vitally important. Even when the records state the precise sum paid for a day’s work, it does not necessarily mean that it was paid promptly and fully in cash, or that it comprised the whole of the transaction.8
The study of historical living standards has been blighted by a widening gulf between the ability to process huge quantities of data and the quality of the data that are processed. Since the 1960s many fields of economic history have been revolutionised by ‘cliometrics’—the use of statistics, economic theory, econometric analysis and data processing—to marshal and interpret huge accumulations of data in order to resolve great historical questions. The cliometric revolution has always had overenthusiastic promoters who have asserted that ‘what cannot be counted does not count’, a sentiment that if adhered to would leave vast gaps in the historical canvas, as well as its extreme detractors who have opposed and shunned all serious quantification. A more balanced judgement recognises that cliometrics has achieved a great deal and has the potential for doing further good in the future. At its best it has brought strong economic reasoning, a ruthlessly empirical focus, and fresh insights into long-settled ideas and debates in economic and social history which, when combined with appropriate innovative statistical techniques, have opened up new analytical possibilities. Approaching the third decade of the twenty-first century, it is easy to forget that statistical techniques now
4
taken for granted were simply not conceived, let alone available for the most of the twentieth.
Many of these advances have placed renewed emphasis on the fundamental role played by wages and prices in the performance of economies. But, as the historiography demonstrates, the answers cliometrics produce are only as good as the quality of the data fed into the process and the judgment exercised by those who do the processing. As the tools of econometric analysis have advanced so has the appetite for data to practise on. This has often led to a lack of discrimination in its collection, with quantity taking precedence over quality. Unfortunately, many of the collections that continue routinely to be used for the analysis of living standards were produced in the late nineteenth or early twentieth centuries by teams of research assistants who combed rapidly through masses of historical records extracting brief entries of wage payments but little of their context, while some data in well-used collections have only ever been presented in processed or manipulated form.
Notwithstanding these and other limitations, the aims of those who would see wages as indicators or drivers of economic and social development have become ever more ambitious. Recently, Jan Luiten van Zanden has claimed that ‘Relative prices are the DNA-prints of an economy. They are basic units of information that reflect and define its structural features. They tell us about relative scarcities, and are the incentives that guide economic behaviour.’9 Yet, even if against all the odds, it were to be found that wages and prices in the past did play a role in the operation of economies and societies comparable to that played by DNA in life on earth, the current wage and price data do not come anywhere near meeting the accurate observable stable constructs required to act as economic and social DNA. This deficiency is all the more apparent in van Zanden’s study because his data are not confined to the verified wages of construction workers in a single country within a restricted time period, but include wages and wage differentials of highly variable accuracy extracted from a miscellany of sources of uneven quality and consistency spanning the six centuries after c.1300 in more than a dozen European countries and regions and a number of non-European countries, such as India, China, Japan, Russia, Korea and Indonesia.
5
Introduction
J. Hatcher and J. Z. Stephenson
Paradoxically, the publication in the mid-1950s of two papers by Henry Phelps Brown and Sheila Hopkins presenting seven centuries of the daily wage rates of building craftsmen and labourers and the prices of a range of basic consumer goods inspired a surge in the use of their and similar data to calculate real wages and living standards despite the fact that the authors made clear that they could serve no such purpose.10 However, in the last few decades some important, albeit relatively neglected, contributions to wage scholarship have amplified and extended the reservations of Phelps Brown and Hopkins. Donald Woodward’s seminal contributions in the 1980s and 1990s to the history of the building industry and its workforce are reviewed later in this introduction and elsewhere in this book, and in 1996, while presenting a new series of London wages, Jeremy Boulton pointed out that Phelps Brown and Hopkins’ observations for labourers’ wages in the sixteenth and seventeenth century averaged but three a year.11 In 2003, a collection of essays on the cultural and social context of wages edited by Peter Scholliers and Leonard Schwarz (from which we draw an important essay below) stressed non-pecuniary reward, credit, subsistence and social structure among factors that had a profound influence on incomes and welfare.12 In 2010, Bruno Blonde and Jorg Hanus, in a paper entitled ‘Beyond Building Craftsmen’, cast doubt on the almost universal use of building workers as representative of ‘average’ workers by showing that, in the south Netherlands city of ‘s-Hertogenbosch during the early and mid-sixteenth century, the scale of the decline in the real income of building labourers was ‘surprisingly atypical’.13 Two years later a challenge was made to one of the fundamental tenets of long run living standards by questioning the truly extraordinary levels of real income believed to have been widely enjoyed in the ‘golden age’ of the fifteenth century, and subsequently new output-based estimates of welfare have deemed GDP per head in the period to have risen far less vertiginously than prevailing views of real growth.14 In addition, recent studies by Jane Humphries and Jacob Weisdorf have opened up important new perspectives on real wages by collecting and interpreting data on the remuneration of farm servants on annual contracts. They reveal that the proven annual earnings of farm servants lagged for
6 * * *
centuries far below the speculative amounts commonly assumed to have been earned each year by casual agricultural labourers, thus casting doubt on the common assumption that casual agricultural labourers were able to find full employment year-round at the high wage rates reported by Thorold Rogers, Gregory Clark and others. Humphries and Weisdorf have also helped to close the yawning gap in knowledge of women’s wages by providing a long-run series of the remuneration of female farm servants.15
John Hatcher’s opening chapter sets the tone for this volume by launching a full-frontal assault on the virtually universal dependence on illusory estimates of living standards across many centuries and a multitude of countries. It demonstrates, using largely English evidence, that these crucial measures have been built on extremely narrow and flimsy foundations consisting of unreliable long-run series of the day wages paid to males employed on large-scale ‘heritage’ building projects and to predominantly part-time agricultural labourers that have been converted into earnings by combining them with casual and conflicting speculations on the number of days they worked each year. Among the many threads disentangled in this chapter is the misguided belief that these highly-selective data can serve as proxies for average incomes and hence the living standards of whole populations across seven centuries of profound economic and social change. Attention is also drawn to the wholesale neglect of the contribution of wives and children to household income and of the millions of self-employed and non-wage earners to national income.
A damning verdict on the quality of the data used to measure nominal and real wages in pre-modern China is delivered by the chapter by Kent Deng and Patrick O’Brien, ‘The Tyranny of Numbers’. This judgment has devastating implications for the debate over the ‘when’, ‘why’ and ‘how’ of the ‘Great Divergence’ in economic development between Western Europe and the Chinese Empire, which has become increasingly centred on wages. Despite the fact that the proportion of wage dependent labour in the Chinese workforce was too small to be representative of the labour market or for labour productivity in the economy as a whole, estimates of the purchasing power of the pay for an unskilled labourer have repeatedly been used as a shorthand for gauging the degree
7
Introduction
J. Hatcher and J. Z. Stephenson
of industrialisation and working out a definitive international pecking order. Iconoclastically, the authors conclude firmly that ‘most of the evidence recently marshalled for the Great Divergence Debate comparing levels and trends in real wages between Qing China and Western Europe is not fit for purpose’ and that ‘the assumption that the statistics in print could serve as proxies or plausible conjectures for average standards of living, labour productivities or levels of industrialization could only satisfy those who believe that any number is better than no number’.
The steep decline in the real wages of building workers in eighteenthcentur y Milan is a long-established phenomenon and their experience has been used in many comparative studies of European living standards to demonstrate that wages were low in Italy. However, Luca Mocarelli’s forensic re-examination of the evidence in his chapter, ‘What is Wrong with the History of Wages’, reveals that the fall in the living standards of Milan builders has been grossly exaggerated. He exposes numerous problems with the sources, which do not record the wages that the building workers actually received and systematically exclude valuable payments in kind and other significant benefits that they enjoyed. What is more, the scale of increase in the costs of subsistence has been substantially overstated by previous historians who used the wholesale prices of grains when in reality it was the retail price of bread that mattered and this rose far less as it was regulated by the city authorities. Mocarelli ends by questioning the sense of building up a picture of living standards in Italy based on wage and price series that are so flawed that the use of averages, interpolations or sophisticated regressions cannot render them more reliable.
Builders’ wages occupy a preeminent place in the historiography of living standards and it is a pity that copyright issues have prevented the reprinting in this volume of Donald Woodward’s prescient paper of 1981, ‘Wage Rates and Living Standards in Pre-Industrial England’.16 Not only does it contain a wealth of information on the building industry and the working practices and remuneration of its workforce, it concludes trenchantly that, ‘A comparison of the daily wage rate earned by building craftsmen, working on large-scale contracts, with the price of a basketful of commodities can tell us little about the fortunes of the majority of
8
workers in such a society’. Woodward’s judgment, based on a thorough investigation of the operation of the industry, showed that typical craftsmen outside of grand building projects were not wage-earners pure and simple but worked on their own account, and commonly employed assistants, supplied raw materials and were paid by the job rather than by the day. Furthermore, such builders usually had significant additional sources of income. Woodward’s findings were reinforced and strengthened in his subsequent book, Men at Work: Labourers and Building Craftsmen in the towns of Northern England, 1450–1750. 17 Yet, his clear demonstrations of the limitations of builders’ day wages have gone largely ignored in the pressing desire to use the bountiful supplies of these data to calculate general living standards. Ironically, the day wages that Woodward provided from northern towns, with strict reservations, were soon averaged and inserted into the standard nominal and real wage time series.
The next two chapters by Judy Z. Stephenson on building in London in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries confirm and amplify many of Woodward’s findings, but they also go much further in providing irrefutable evidence of fatal flaws in the current series of wage rates that substantially overstate the remuneration received by skilled, semi-skilled and unskilled builders at this time. She shows that all the wages recorded by previous historians were not, in fact, ‘wages’. They were the amount charged by contractors to clients for ‘day work’. Men were paid different amounts varying by skill and building stage. Day work was only one type of building contract. In others, labour was charged for as part of work done, and so the ‘day wages’ that all pre-industrial English living standards research rests on are accurate neither for the wage, nor the numbers of men or days worked. Stephenson shows in her second chapter that the use of ‘building labourers’ as representative of the ‘unskilled’ worker is misleading and exposes a huge gap in our understanding of the skill premium by showing that the real unskilled wage may have been as little as half current estimates.
Turning to the other leading source for the estimation of living standards, the wages of casual agricultural labourers, the next chapter, Craig Muldrew’s, ‘What is a Money Wage? Measuring the Earnings of Agricultural Labourers in Early Modern England’, conducts a persuasive
9
Introduction
J. Hatcher and J. Z. Stephenson
and highly subversive investigation into the form of the wage for agricultural labour in early modern England and in doing so throws much new light on labourers’ earnings. Using a wide range of detailed evidence, including a series of informative case studies, Muldrew undermines the accepted practice that treats the remuneration of casual farm labourers as sums paid promptly in cash, and their real wage as calculable by reference to the cost of a universal fixed basket of food and other consumables which can be precisely presented as an index in long-run series. Instead the acute shortage of small denomination coins reinforced the treatment of the stated money wage as the basis for more negotiable means of payment. The production on many farms of beer, cider, bread, dairy products, vegetables and meat, and the availability of a variety of facilities useful to employees, meant that the provision of food and other benefits in kind, including free or discounted grazing, gleaning, firewood and so on, were commonplace. The credit granted by labourers to employers who delayed the payment of money owed to them, meant that they had in turn to raise credit from those who supplied them with goods and services. It is also notable that the concession of meals and cheap food by farmers to their labourers during periods of high food prices helped to moderate falls in their nutrition and welfare.
Joyce Burnette in ‘The Seasonality of Agricultural Employment’ examines the variations in employment and wages occurring within the year for day-labourers in the decade 1835–1844. By measuring the number of days worked by men, boys, and female workers each week of the year at eight farms throughout England, she finds that agriculture in the midnineteenth centur y was still a highly seasonal industry. At the peaks, which mostly occurred at the hay or grain harvests, employment was anywhere from 40 to 190 per cent more than average. However, although male wages were highly seasonal in Norfolk, rising 83 per cent during harvest, by this time they were less seasonal elsewhere and overall were not strongly correlated with changes in employment. Burnette’s chapter further strengthens scepticism about claims that well-paid year-round work was available for most casual agricultural labourers, a case that also been made by detailed empirical studies by A. Hassell Smith and C. Yamamoto and many others.18
10
The final two chapters span the period from the later middles ages to 1800. ‘Unreal Wages’ argues that the renowned ‘Golden Age’ of the fifteenth century has been exaggerated. The surge in the prosperity of the lower orders resulting from high wages, low food prices and easier access to cheap land was undoubtedly extraordinary, but not as prodigious as has customarily been assumed. Furthermore, contrary to the common belief that the economic fortunes of the labouring classes can be taken as a proxy for the living standards of the population as a whole, the scale of improvement in their good fortune was not widely shared by those in the rest of society who did not derive their incomes solely from wages or their subsistence solely from the market. Argument and evidence are also provided that the criticisms made in this chapter of the compilation, interpretation and application of real wage indices have implications that stretch far beyond the fifteenth century.
The title ‘Cash, Wages and the Economy of Makeshifts, 1650–1800’ neatly summarises the subject matter of the closing chapter by Craig Muldrew and Steven King. It demonstrates how the economic system in this period, and the entrepreneurs who operated within it, was inhibited by a shortage of cash, a labour market that was inextricably tied up within a complex economy of makeshifts and a remuneration system pervaded by customary entitlements and distorted by complex credit networks. The failure of the supply of coinage to keep up with strongly rising population and the rapid growth of wage-earners in the proliferating factories and workshops of the period had a major impact on the form of the wage and on the operation of charity and the poor law which were used to tide workers over the often very lengthy periods while they waited to receive cash. A cash wage paid promptly and in full settlement of the work that had been done was an ideal and largely unrealisable concept.
The evidence, analyses and arguments put forward in recent years and by the authors of the chapters of this book pose formidable challenges to what are among the most crucial and habitually used sets of data employed in the writing of economic and social history across the centuries and the world. If these challenges are judged to be valid, even in part, the ramifications will be considerable. Fortunately, there is substantial scope for the improvement in both the data and the methods applied to them.19
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Notes
1. The early years of the debate are surveyed in Taylor ed. (1975), The Standard of Living in Britain During the Industrial Revolution.
2. Surveyed in Campbell ed. (1991), Before the Black Death.
3. K. Deng and P. K. O’Brien, ‘The Tyranny of Numbers’, Chapter 3 below.
4. Clark (2007), A Farewell to Alms, pp. 1–16.
5. Allen (2002), ‘The Great Divergence in European Wages and Prices from the Middle Ages to the First World War’; Clark (2007), ‘The Long March of History’; Broadberry and Gupta (2006), ‘The Early Modern Great Divergence’; Allen et al. (2011), ‘Wages, Prices and Living Standards in China 1738–1925 in comparison with Europe, Japan and India’.
6. It should also be noted that the chapters in this book do not deal in detail with alternative measures of the standard of living and welfare, such as height, health, education and forms of government. For these approaches see Crafts (1997), ‘Some Dimensions of the ‘Quality of Life’ during the British Industrial Revolution’ and Floud et al. (2011), The Changing Body: Health, Nutrition and Human Development.
7. For the vital contribution of female labour see Burnette (2011), Gender, Work and Wages and Erickson (2008), ‘Married Women’s Occupations in Eighteenth-Century London’.
8. See the chapters below by C. Muldrew and S. King and C. Muldrew.
9. van Zanden (2009), ‘The Skill Premium and the ‘Great Divergence’
10. See below, pp. 23–4, 27, 107, 233.
11. Boulton, (1996) ‘Wage Labour in Seventeenth Century London’, p. 268.
12. Scholliers and Schwarz eds (2003), Experiencing Wages: Social and Cultural Aspects of Wage Forms in Europe. See also the chapters by C Muldrew and S King and C Muldrew below.
13. Blonde and Hanus (2010) ‘Beyond Building Craftsmen’.
14. Broadberry et al. (2015), British Economic Growth 1270–1870, pp. 257–8, 264
15. Humphries and Weisdorf (2015), ‘Wages of Women in England, 1260–1850’; Humphries and Weisdorf (2017), ‘Unreal Wages? Real Income and Economic Growth in England’
16. Woodward (1981), ‘Wage Rates and Living Standards in Pre-Industrial England’.
17. Woodward (1995), Men at Work.
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18. Hassell Smith (1989), ‘Labourers in Late Sixteenth-Century England’; Yamamoto (2004), ‘Two Labour Markets in Nineteenth-Century English Agriculture’.
19. See, for example, below, pp. 45–53 and pp. 123–36.
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