Note e — Chapter IX · [a] (continued 2)

Mr Malthus observes on this that I "have overlooked the distinction between the reigns of Edw. III. and Henry VIII. (perhaps a misprint for VI.), with regard to the state of the labouring classes. The two periods appear to have been essentially different in this respect." Principles of Political Economy, p. 293, 1st edit. He conceives that the earnings of the labourer in corn were unusually low in the latter years of Edward III., which appears to have been effected by the statute of labourers (25 E. III.), immediately after the great pestilence of 1350, though that mortality ought, in the natural course of things, to have considerably raised the real wages of labour. The result of his researches is that, in the reign of Edward III., the labourer could not purchase half a peck of wheat with a day's labour; from that of Richard II. to the middle of that of Henry VI., he could purchase nearly a peck; and from thence to the end of the century, nearly two pecks. At the time when the passage in the text was written [1816], the labourer could rarely have purchased more than a peck with a day's labour, and frequently a good deal less. In some parts of England this is the case at present [1846]; but in many counties the real wages of agricultural labourers are considerably higher than at that time, though not by any means so high as, according to Malthus himself, they were in the latter half of the fifteenth century. The excessive fluctuations in the price of corn, even taking averages of a long term of years, which we find through the middle ages, and indeed much later, account more than any other assignable cause for those in real wages of labour, which do not regulate themselves very promptly by that standard, especially when coercive measures are adopted to restrain them.