ABSTRACT
In two previous papers 2 we gave estimates indicating that the basketful of consumables which the building craftsman could buy with his day's pay contracted greatly in the course of the sixteenth century in Southern England, France and Alsace, until in all three it was less than half as big as it had been. Our estimates also indicated that this had come about despite the builders' money wage-rate having risen in much the same proportion as the prices of industrial products: the prices of foodstuffs had risen very much more, so that the quantity of foodstuffs which the industrial worker could obtain in exchange for a unit of his own produce was greatly reduced. We suggested that this wide movement of the terms of trade between workshop and farm, itself also common to all three regions, might have a common cause in the increase of population: if the agriculture of the time could not absorb many of the extra hands, most of them must work in industry if they were to work at all, and so the output of industry would be increased relatively to that of agriculture, and industrial products and the labour that made them would alike be cheapened in terms of food. We can now add estimates which will show whether anything of the same kind seems to have happened in Münster, Augsburg, Vienna and Valencia.
