alf; or fivepence-halfpenny
for the yearly average. The common labourers were to receive fourpence a
day for half the year, for the remaining half, threepence.[30] In the
harvest months they were allowed to work by the piece, and might earn
considerably more;[31] 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.[32] By the 7th of the 31st of Elizabeth, it
was ordered that no cottage should be built for residence without four
acres of land at lowest being attached to it for the sole use of the
occupants of such cottage.

It will, perhaps, be supposed that such comparative prosperity of labour
was the result of the condition of the market in which it was sold, that
the demand for labour was large and the supply limited, and that the state
of England in the sixteenth century was analogous to that of Australia or
Canada at the present time. And so long as we confine our view to the
question of wages alone, it is undoubted that legislation was in favour of
the employer. The Wages Act of Henry VIII. was unpopular with the
labourers, and was held to deprive them of an opportunity of making better
terms for themselves.[33] But we shall fall into extreme error if we
translate into the language of modern political economy the social features
of a state of things which in no way correspond to our own. There was this
essential difference, that labour was not looked upon as a market
commodity; the gov