Some uncertainty is unavoidable in all calculations of the present nature; yet, after making the utmost allowances for errors, we may conclude from such a table of prices that a penny, in terms of the labourer’s necessities, must have been nearly equal in the reign of Henry VIII. to the present shilling.  For a penny, at the time of which I write, the labourer could buy as much bread, beef, beer, and wine—­he could do as much towards finding lodging for himself and his family—­as the labourer of the nineteenth century can for a shilling.  I do not see that this admits of question.  Turning, then, to the table of wages, it will be easy to ascertain his position.  By the 3rd of the 6th of Henry VIII. it was enacted that master carpenters, masons, bricklayers, tylers, plumbers, glaziers, joiners, and other employers of such skilled workmen, should give to each of their journeymen, if no meat or drink was allowed, sixpence a day for the half year, fivepence a day for the other half; 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