ABSTRACT
The sixteenth century has seldom appeared as pleasant or prosperous for wage-earners in Europe. It has often seemed the century of the widening gap between money wages and prices; the century in which owners and employers grew rich at the expense of employees; and the century in which cheap, exploitable and abundant labour opened the way to economic advance. Professor Phelps Brown and Miss Hopkins have made European comparisons possible with their syntheses of evidence based on the wages of builders. They have depicted workers in England, Alsace, Vienna, and Valencia sliding to ruin down a steep slope, and their pay inexorably losing the high power to purchase essential goods which, in the prosperous mid-fifteenth century, it had once contained. The bottom of the pit lay across the five decades ~j 80-1630, and was usually deepest between 1590 and 1620, when a swollen population weighed heaviest on an insufficiently expansive economy. The growing towns, the modestly expanding industries and the reclamation of land suggest that population must generally have increased. A circular argument can buttress this suggestion. From the shrinking power of wages to buy, from a rise in the price of foodstuffs greater than in that of manufactures,
I am much indebted to members of Prof. Postan's seminar for their criticisms of an earlier version of this paper.
