ABSTRACT
Money-wage data and real-wage series based on full-time adult male earnings have serious limitations in the assessment of living standards but can convey much useful information on the wage economy. They allow comparisons between occupations; within occupations over time; between male and female workers, and between regions. Joseph Massie's well-known survey of 1759 emphasised two main differentials: that craftsmen's wages were higher than those of common labourers, while in both categories wages were higher in London than in the provinces. A third should be added: that men's wages were invariably higher than women's, even if for similar or even identical work. 1
Discussion of eighteenth-century wages - money or real - is helped by dividing the period at the beginning of the French wars in 1793, for not only did 1792 represent an earnings peak for many workers, but the wage history of 1793 to 1815 is dramatically different from that of the preceding ninety years. Over the latter generally slowly improving money wages brought a degree of improvement in real wages because cereal prices were generally low over the first half of the century. Thereafter the accelerating rate of population growth coincided with the ending of the bounty of generally good harvests to turn the trend in the cost of living sharply upwards, while in most regions the increase in the labour force changed a labour market in which wages had generally held up for more than half a century. As two leading historical demographers have recently stressed: 'The largest and most obvious effect of the sharp rise in population in the eighteenth century was on the national average wage of labour.' The kinds of productivity change which can in-
crease output sufficiently to offset rapid population growth were becoming significant only in the early nineteenth century. This does not mean that the pace of innovation and of capital formation in the eighteenth-century economy were negligible. Indeed, they were sufficient to allow an increase in the labour force of about 5 per cent at constant wages. Any slower rate, as for example in the first half of the eighteenth century, allowed real wages to rise.2 The demographic acceleration of the second half of the century depressed them quite sharply, except in those areas in the North and Midlands where manufacturing change and expansion were locally creating a different labour market.3 This was a significant exception, but although their higher rate of natural increase and migration into the rising manufacturing districts enlarged the population of earners in the 'better-waged' districts absolutely and proportionately, this was insufficient to prevent a fall in the national average real wage.
