red Halifax collier found the 2d. a day he earned carding wool derisory, although his productivity may have been low because he lacked experience and dexterity -- but even such poorly paid employment boosted a household's income, most significantly, its disposable income.(32) Daniel Defoe claimed from observations in Norfolk and Taunton in the 1720s that a child as young as four or five `could earn its own bread' in the local textile industries, and that a Derbyshire lead miner's wife could earn 3d. a day washing ore, which is about the same amount that a woman might earn spinning wool on a wheel for cloth- or hose-making.(33)Continued from page 7Consequently, when these rising subsidiary incomes are added to the more easily demonstrable increases in the pay of adult males, and combined with the deflation of food prices over much of this period, the emphasis placed by contemporaries upon the relative prosperity of the lower orders and their ability to support themselves by working less than full weeks would appear to be validated.IVThe observed habits of the labouring and artisan masses, and the interpretation put upon them by contemporaries, were not unique either to England or to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.(34) Echoes are, of course, to be found around this time in a number of European countries, but it is perhaps the era of severe labour shortage in the aftermath of the Black Death of 1348-9 which provides the most telling parallels. In fact, the diagnoses proffered and the prescriptions advocated in these two widely separated periods are in many respects remarkably similar, as indeed is the language in which they were expressed. The essence of a substantial part of the edifice of observation, theory and policy on labour and wages which we characterize as `later mercantilist' was in evidence in the later fourteenth century.It is doubtful that Joseph Townsend, writing in 1786, had in mind William Langland's Piers Plowman...
