ABSTRACT
The development of the modern system of wage labor requires several specific conditions to come together: these include but are not limited to the possibility of encompassing the whole of the active population; a rigorous delineation of the different kinds of work and the clarification of ambiguous categories such as domestic work or agricultural work; a firm distinction between work and leisure time; and a precise account of the times of work. 1 In actuality all these criteria will not be unambiguously satisfied until the turn of this century—that is, the twentieth. This raise the question of whether we are even justified in speaking of the “wage-earning classes” in earlier epochs, and especially in distant periods like the Middle Ages, when virtually none of these preconditions for defining wage labor were present. The answer is a qualified yes, so long as we realize that we will find here only the embryos, or intimations, of this modern wage-earning relationship.
