ses 'board' was also given. The sailor's pay was 5s. a
week with board. Even compared with skilled labour on shore the
sailor of the Armada epoch was well paid. Thorold Rogers gives,
for 1588, the wages, without board, of carpenters and masons at
10d. and 1s. a day. A plumber's wages varied from 10-1/2d. to
1s.; but there is one case of a plumber receiving as much as
1s. 4d., which was probably for a single day.

[Footnote 78: Mr. Halliday Sparling, in the article already referred
to (p. 651), says twice; but Mr. Oppenheim seems to think that
the first increase was before Elizabeth's accession.]

Delay in the payment of wages was not peculiar to the Elizabethan
system. It lasted very much longer, down to our own times in
fact. In 1588 the seamen of the fleet were kept without their
pay for several months. In the great majority of cases, and most
likely in all, the number of these months was less than six. Even
within the nineteenth century men-of-war's men had to wait for
their pay for years. Commander C. N. Robinson, in his 'British
Fleet,'[79] a book that ought to be in every Englishman's library,
remarks: 'All through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it
was the rule not to pay anybody until the end of the commission,
and to a certain degree the practice obtained until some fifty
years ago.' As to the nineteenth century, Lord Dundonald, speaking
in Parliament, may be quoted. He said that of the ships on the
East Indies station, the _Centurion's_ men had been unpaid for
eleven years; the _Rattlesnake's_ for fourteen; the _Fox's_ for
fifteen. The Elizabethan practice compared with this will look
almost precipitate instead of dilatory. To draw again on my personal
experience, I may say that I have been kept without pay for a
longer time than most of the people in Lord Howard's fleet, as,
for the first two years that I was at sea, young officers were
paid only once in six months; and then never in cash, but always
in bills. The reader may be left to imagine what happened when
a naval cadet tried to get a bill for some L7 or L8 cashed at
a small Spanish-American port.

[Footnote 79: London, 1894.]

A great deal has been made of the strict audit of the accounts
of Howard's fleet. The Queen, says Froude, 'would give no orders
for money till she had demanded the meaning of every penny that
she was charged.' Why she alone should be held up to obloquy
for this is not clear. Until a very recent period, well within