ABSTRACT
In an earlier paper 2 we gave estimates showing that the basketful of consumables which the English building craftsman could buy with a day's pay began about 1510 to contract progressively, and by 1630 had shrunk to perhaps as little as two-fifths of what it had been through much of the fifteenth century. Since the builder's labourer suffered equally, and he may be regarded as representative of unskilled wage-earners at large, there is reason to believe that the decline was not peculiar to building but afflicted other wage-earners too. It was catastrophic. So far as we know, there is nothing like it anywhere else in wage history. Yet one can read a great deal about the sixteenth century without finding any mention of it, and with some reason, for there was no great outburst to set historians looking for a great social constriction as its origin. Did it really happen in anything like the severity that the figures suggest? If it did, what caused it?
