ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the following two questions. Firstly, is the gloomy picture of wage decline from the fifteenth to the twentieth century exaggerated? Secondly, is the picture of work and plenty that was given for later fifteenth-century Nuremberg, if extended to the towns of the empire as a whole, perhaps not an overoptimistic view of common standards of living at the end of the medieval era? Using evidence already collected in the 1930s as part of a history of wages and prices in early modern Germany and Austria, statistics have been produced for towns like Nuremberg, Augsburg, Cologne, Frankfurt-am-Main and Vienna. An overall analysis of the price and wage lists in Pribram’s study of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Austrian evidence, covering Vienna and the two provinces of Lower Austria, gives the following trend. Full employment, regular pay and job security meant greatly different things in practice to each early modern employer and to each of his labourers.
