9. Unreal Wages: Long-Run Living Standards and the ‘Golden Age’ of the Fifteenth Century

Most notably the differences of interpretation between M M Postan (‘The fifteenth century’, Economic History Review, 9, 1939 and ‘Some economic evidence of declining population in the later middle ages’, Economic History Review, 2nd ser., ii, 1950) and A R Bridbury (Economic Growth: England in the Later Middle Ages, 1962).

For notable recent contributions to this field by Richard Britnell see: The Closing of the Middle Ages? England 1471–1519 (Oxford, 1997); Daily Life in the Late Middle Ages (Stroud, 1998); Britain and Ireland 1050–1530: Economy and Society (Oxford, 2004).

For England see, for example: J E T Rogers, The History of Agriculture and Prices, vii volumes (Oxford, 1866–1902); W H Beveridge, Prices and Wages in England, vol 1: the Mercantilist era (1939); E H Phelps Brown and S V Hopkins, ‘Seven centuries of building wages’ and ‘Seven centuries of the prices of consumables, compared with builders’ wage-rates’, Economica, 23, 87 (1955) and Economica, 23, 92 (1956) reprinted in Henry Phelps Brown and Sheila Hopkins, A Perspective of Wages and Prices (1981); D L Farmer, ‘Prices and Wages’, in H E Hallam (ed), Agrarian History of England and Wales, ii, 1042–1350 (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 716–817; D L Farmer, ‘Prices and Wages, 1350–1500′, in E Miller (ed), Agrarian History of England Wales, iii, 1348–1500 (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 431–525; John Munro, ‘Prices and Wages’ in Rudolph M. Bell and Martha Howell, eds., ‘The Medieval and Early Modern Data Bank’,, www.​scc.​rutgers.​edu/​memdb; Robert C Allen, ‘Annual series of nominal wages, consumer price indices and welfare ratios’, www.​nuffield.​oxford.​ac.​uk/​users/​allen:​ G Clark, ‘The price history of English agriculture, 1200–1914′, Research in Economic History, 22 (2004); G Clark, ‘The long march of history: farm wages, population, and economic growth, England 1209–1869′, Economic History Review, 2nd ser. lx, (2007).

The higher rate of increase found by Clark is largely due to his plausible adoption of a substantially lower level of real wages before the Black Death than that calculated by Phelps Brown and Hopkins.

The author is preparing an article that provides more detailed criticisms of current estimates of English real wages before the nineteenth century and presents new methods and data for estimating long-run changes in real incomes and living standards.

Hence: R. C. Allen, ‘How prosperous were the Romans? Evidence from Diocletian’s Price Edict (301 AD)’, Oxford Department of Economics Discussion Papers (2007); Walter Scheidel, ‘Real wages in early economies: evidence for living standards from 2000 BCE to 1300 CE’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 53 (2010); S. Özmucur and S. Pamuk, ‘Real wages and standards of living in the Ottoman Empire, 1489–1914’, Journal of Economic History, 62 (2002).

For a notable exception see D. Woodward, ‘Wage rates and living standards in pre-industrial England’, Past and Present, 91 (1981). Concentrating on building craftsmen in the early modern period, Woodward argues convincingly that the daily wage rates of building craftsmen and the price of a basket of commodities cannot provide an accurate guide to their fortunes by showing that they were not wage earners but small independent businessmen who made money from a variety of sources including the employment of apprentices, the supply of raw materials and sometimes from small scale farming. He also stresses our ignorance of the number of days they worked and of the income brought in by other members of their households. Woodward’s arguments were extended and amplified in Donald Woodward, Men at Work: Labourers and building craftsmen in the towns of northern England, 1450–1750 (Cambridge, 1995).

See, for example, the transmutation of the purchasing power of a day’s wage into a ratio of full-time annual income to annual subsistence costs in Allen, British Industrial Revolution, chapter 2 ‘The high-wage economy of pre-industrial Britain’.

T R Malthus, Principles of Political Economy, 2nd edtn. (1826), c.IV, sec. IV, p. 204 (cited by Phelps Brown and Hopkins, Perspective of Wages and Prices, p. 61).

Steve Hindle provides an extremely perceptive and well-documented picture of spasmodic and fragmented labour markets in the countryside of early modern England: On the Parish? The Micro-Politics of Poor Relief in Rural England, 1550–1750, (Oxford, 2004).

Ibid., pp. 468–71. Clark acknowledges the seriousness of a range of issues connected with the use of piece-rate payments for threshing as a surrogate for day wage rates, including the fact that the ratio of day wages to threshing payments per bushel change substantially over time. He adopts a number of strategies to bring the threshing rates back into line including positing an increase of around 40 per cent in the labour productivity of threshers, who threshed 5.1 bushels a day from 1209–139 but a commendable 7 bushels per day from 1350–1525; from 1525 onwards, however, the productivity of the threshers apparently sank progressively below the pre-Black Death level (‘Long march of history’).

Clark, ‘Long march of history’,100. Clark, however, is only following Beveridge, Farmer and others in relying heavily on the remuneration for these tasks.

D. Young, ‘Servants and labourers on a late medieval demesne: the case of Newton, Cheshire, 1498–1520’, Agricultural History Review, (1999), 158–9. Around the same time cash stipends were 16 s at Elevethall manor, Durham, and from 8 s–13 s 4d at Millom, Cumberland (ibid., 152–3).

For example, Farmer writes that, because of an inability to answer a series of basic questions adequately, ‘it seems a little incautious to hail the fifteenth century as the “golden age of the English labourer”’ (‘Wages and prices’, AHEW, iii, pp. 490–1). Mavis Mate notes that in the fifteenth century ‘Earnings…did not always rise together with wage rates’ and that outside of harvest time ‘workers might be hired for just a few days’ (‘Work and leisure’, in A Social History of England, 1200–1500, ed. R. Horrox and W. M. Ormrod (Cambridge, 2006), pp. 286–7).

D Farmer, ‘The famuli in the later middle ages’, in Progress and Problems, ed. Britnell and Hatcher, pp. 235–6; Newman, ‘Work and Wages’, 361; Christine Carpenter, Locality and Polity: a study of Warwickshire landed society, 1401–1499 (Cambridge, 1992) p. 57.

Bruce M. S. Campbell (2007), Three centuries of English crops yields, 1211–1491, WWW document. URL http://​www.​cropyields.​ac.​uk, last accessed 10/12/2009.

Eona Karakacili, ‘English agrarian labor productivity rates before the Black Death: a case study’, Journal of Economic History, 64 (2004): 24–60; H Fox, ‘Exploitation of the landless by lords and tenants in early medieval England’, in Z Razi and R M Smith (eds), Medieval society and the Manor Court (Oxford, 1966), pp. 544–5; C Thornton, ‘The determinants of land productivity on the bishop of Winchester’s demesne at Rimpton’, in B M S Campbell and M Overton (eds), Land, Labour and Livestock: Historical Studies in European Agricultural Productivity (Manchester, 1991), pp. 205–6.

Not surprisingly attempts to calculate labour productivity using the purchasing power of nominal wages of around 3.5–3.7d produces decidedly eccentric results. See, for example, the huge surge in the productivity of threshers, reapers and mowers in the fifteenth century claimed in Clark, ‘Long march of history’, 112).

Applying identical methods to comparable data drawn from averages across the first half of the fourteenth century reveals a contrasting set of circumstances in which a farmer cultivating 20 acres of arable would have ‘earned’ around 2.5d per day when the daily wage of an agricultural labourer was just 1.5d.

Farmer, ‘The famuli’, in Britnell and Hatcher (eds), Progress and Problems, p. 236. Harold Fox has written of the tied labourers’ cottages found on many manors in the south-west of England, as indicating ‘some degree of debasement of the condition of some labourers in the so-called “Golden Age” of labour’ (AHEW, iii, pp. 735–7).

Above, p.

Labour economics is a relatively new field and primarily applicable to modern economies; there are many reasons why its laws should not be applied indiscriminately to preindustrial labour markets (J. Jacobsen and G. Skillman, Labour Markets and Employment Relationships: A Comprehensive Approach (Oxford, 2004), pp. 1–12).

H. Kitsikopoulos ‘Standards of living and capital formation in pre-plague England: a peasant budget model’, Economic History Review, 2nd ser. liii (2000).

Clark, ‘The long march of history’, Tables 1, 99–100.

Above, p.

Landless labourers are assumed to have worked for hire for 150 days rather than 260 days, of which 30 were paid at 4d per day and 120 at 2.5d; 5-acre householders worked for 140 days (20 at 4d and 120 at 2.5d); and 10-acre householders for 100 days (15 at 4d and 95 at 2.5d). In the next stratum the cultivation of 18–20 acres are assumed to have required the full labour of the male householders. It has been assumed that the same number of days were worked by each category of landholder in the early fourteenth century, and that the rate of pay averaged 1.5d per day, but it is likely that the availability of paid employment at this time was significantly lower than in the later fifteenth.

For a recent account of the improvement in the labour conditions of women in the later middle ages see T. de Moor and J. L. Van Zanden, ‘Girl power: the European marriage pattern and labour markets in the North Sea region in the late medieval and early modern period’, Economic History Review, 63 (2010).

This paradox is discussed without questioning the validity of conventional real wage estimates in G. Clark and Y. van der Werf, ‘Work in progress? The industrious revolution’, Journal of Economic History, 58 (1998), 830–1 and J de Vries, The Industrious Revolution: Consumer Behaviour and the Household Economy, 1650 to the present (Cambridge, 2008), pp. 90–1.

L Shaw-Taylor and E A Wrigley, The Occupational Structure of Britain, 1379–1911 (http://​www.​geog.​cam.​ac.​uk/​research/​projects/​occupations/​abstracts); S H Rigby, ‘Urban population in late medieval England: the evidence of the lay subsidies’, Economic History Review, 2nd ser. 63 (2010).

Such a massive improvement in the material standards of comfort and convenience available over the 400 years make it extremely difficult to conduct a meaningful comparison of standards of living using traditional methods, as Phelps Brown noted. See J.B. DeLong, ‘Cornucopia: increasing wealth in the twentieth century’, National Bureau of Economic Research Working Papers, 7602, March 2000.

The phrase used by Clark and van der Werf in ‘Work in progress’, 830.

For statistics showing the proliferation of smallholdings see John Hatcher and Mark Bailey, Modelling the Middle Ages; the history and Theory of England’s Economic Development (Oxford, 2001), pp. 44–6 and Dyer, Standards of living, p. 126. For discussion of the existence of labour surpluses that were far too substantial to have been absorbed by secondary employments see Hatcher and Bailey, Modelling the Middle Ages, pp. 43–55, 134–7. Calculations of the supply and demand for labour on Ramsey Abbey manors in the later thirteenth century suggests that even on the most cautious estimates underemployment would have approached 30 per cent (I am grateful to James Gill for this information).

As Engels noted ‘the normal diet of the individual worker ….varies according to his wages’ and both the quantity and quality eaten increased with income: F. Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845), ed. and trans W O Henderson and W H Chaloner, Oxford, 1845, p. 45 (cited in Allen, Industrial Revolution, pp. 28–9). For evidence of improving diet in the fifteenth century see C Dyer, ‘Changes in diet in the late middle ages: the case of harvest workers’, Agricultural History Review, 36 (1988). For the existence of leisure preference in the later middle ages see John Hatcher, ‘Labour, leisure and economic thought before the nineteenth century’, Past and Present, 160 (1998), 76–80; G Persson, ‘Consumption, Labour and Leisure in the Late Middle Ages’ in: K. G. Persson (ed), Manger et Boire au Moyen Ages (Nice, 1984); Dyer, Standards of Living, pp. 224–5.

Precise measurement of the cost of industrial products is bedevilled by the difficulties of ensuring that like is compared with like, but we may be confident that the average increase of around a third in the prices of nails, salt and cloth between the early fourteenth century is not an exaggeration of inflation in the sector as a whole. For the prices of nails and salt see Farmer, ‘Prices and wages’, AHEW, iii, pp. 512–6; for the price of cloth see Clark, ‘Long march of history’, p. 108 and John Munro, ‘Prices and Wages’ in Rudolph M. Bell and Martha Howell, eds., ‘The Medieval and Early Modern Data Bank’, www.​scc.​rutgers.​edu/​memdb

I am indebted to James Davis, Mark Bailey and Jo Sear for informing me of the results of their researches into the local markets of late medieval East Anglia.

For example, real wages are central to the ‘Great Divergence’ debate: K Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton, 2000); R C Allen, ‘The great divergence in European wages and prices from the middle ages to the First World War’, Explorations in Economic History, 38 (2001); S Broadberry and B Gupta, ‘The early modern great divergence: wages, prices and economic development in Europe and Asia, 1500–1800, Economic History Review, 59 (2006).

Some would see the potential to unlock far more information from these basic data. For example, Gregory Clark believes that by ‘using day wages, we can build up a picture of English agricultural history that presents an internally consistent picture of the real wage, the MPL (marginal product of labour), output per farm worker, national population, the share employed in agriculture, and agricultural efficiency in general, from 1200 to 1869’ (‘Long march of history’, 127).

For a brief description of the two phase theory and the role of real wages in it see Allen, ‘Real Wage Rates (historical trends): real wages and economic growth in developed countries’. For a more detailed analysis of Malthusian theory and preindustrial economies see Hatcher and Bailey, Modelling the Middle Ages, pp. 21–65.

Real GDP per head data currently being produced from estimates of output, wealth and population size show a modest but generally cumulative trend growth in the half millennium between the later thirteenth century and the mid-nineteenth century (S. N. Broadberry, B.M.S. Campbell, B. van Leuwen, and M. Overton, British economic growth, 1300–1850: Some preliminary estimates, Working paper, University of Warwick, 2010).

For sizes of landholding on individual manors see, for example: AHEW, iii, pp. 614–16; 624; 724; Dyer, Standards of Living, p. 141; J Hatcher, Rural Economy and Society in the Duchy of Cornwall, 1300–1500 (Cambridge, 1970), pp. 226–8.

Humphries and Weisdorf (2017), ‘Unreal Wages? Real Income and Economic Growth in England’, p. 5. A ‘main finding’ of the authors is that ‘the apogee of the fifteenth-century ‘Golden Age’ was much lower and surpassed much earlier than other authors have proposed ... confirming Hatcher’s intuition that day workers’ annual incomes during the long fifteenth century were much smaller than those inferred from multiplying day-rates by 250’ (ibid., p. 13).

Dyer (2015), ‘A Golden Age Rediscovered’.

See, for example, Muldrew, ‘What Is a Money Wage?’, above pp. 165–9, which exposes the illusion that casual farm labourers normally received their pay promptly in full in cash and provides details of the variety of forms of benefits in kind, concessions and promises to pay that their remuneration commonly took.

Dymond, ed., (1996), The Register of Thetford Priory, 2 vols. passim. See also, ‘Seven Centuries of Unreal Wages’, above pp. 236–7.

Dyer (2015), ‘Golden Age’ Rediscovered, p. 193.

Dyer (2015), ‘Golden Age’ Rediscovered, pp. 194–5.

The statements are made by Hatcher on pp. 244–245 (Table 9.2), and 248 of his article printed above.

Dyer (2015), ‘Golden Age Rediscovered’, p. 185.