----- Original Message -----
Sent: Tuesday, August 02, 2005 10:12
PM
Subject: Re: [socialcredit] Thorold
Rogers
It's puzzling. I cannot find a
statement quite like the one cited below by Michael. I already
quoted the one that says there were only five holidays besides
Sundays. That was on p. 181. I have read entire chapters
surrounding the pages cited by Michael without encountering the "forty
days plus Sundays". What I do find, on p. 539 is this:
"The workman of the fifteenth century only
missed eighteen days of the year, of which a fortnight was at Christmas,
three days at Easter, three at Whitsuntide, and six on other days
scattered over the year."
In the following paragraph Rogers says that
he has taken the best prices of artizan labour in the best English market
for such labour [in 1883-4] in order to contrast them,
improved as they are by trade unions, to the prices paid spontaneously for
such labor in England of the 1450s. As of 1884 they were only just
barely catching up. These improved circumstances are compared, on
page 398, with the miseries of English labour after Henry VIII. "I repeat
for the last time, what a husbandman earned with fifteen weeks' work, and
an artizan with ten weeks' work in 1495, a whole years' labor would not
supply artizan or labourer with in the year 1725, throughout
Lancashire." On page 391 he had already said, "The work of a whole
year would not supply the labourer with the quantity which in 1495 the
labourer earned with fifteen weeks labour. The artizan could procure
it with forty weeks labour. [As contrasted to a year.]
The theme of this chapter (surrounding p.
389) is an analysis of what we call today "inflation". That is,
after there was a general rise in prices in the fifteenth century (which
some 20th century economic historians have attributed to the gold stolen
by Spanish conquistadores), Rogers looked for evidence of wages
paid in money and compared them with what he could find of prices for the
things that laborers had to buy. The data he provides are
therefore all about comparing prices versus what they would buy in various
years after 1495 with what they bought in that year and
before.
Jumping back even further into the previous
chapter, Rogers addresses the conditions that he believes account for at
least part of the changes that worsened the conditions of the working
classes. That is, the scandals of the 3-popes era in the church and
parallel corruptions in the courts and aristocracy. On pp. 367-8 he
says:
"I have stated frequently that the fifteenth
century was an epoch of peculiar prosperity, that the means of life were
cheap, that wages were high, that the price of land went rapidly up, that
English commerce increased, that enterprise...was general, that the
yeomanry and small gentry were firmly planted, and that remarkable
opulence was attained by many." A little later he mentions that
"Lollardy...infected all those who prospered and grew rich...[and] was
hardy and vigorous." [The influence of Wycliffe in the 14th
century.] I am far from well read in English history, but I do
recall the observation of economic historians that following the Great
Plague or Black Death, so many workers [died] that those who
survived did enjoy the benefit of a supply-demand imbalance in their
favor. The cognizance of this opportunity combined with repressive
regimes above them is said to have sparked the Peasants' Revolt of the
14th century and its brutal suppression. Rogers seems to affirm that
the underlying circumstances continued to operate in favor of workers
right through to the end of the 15th century.
Keith
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Tuesday, August 02, 2005 7:53
AM
Subject: [socialcredit] Thorold
Rogers
In Triumph of the Past for June 1997 I
made the following statement and citation:
"The English artisan
of 1495 worked an eight-hour day, could pay his family's grocery bill
for a year with ten weeks' work, and enjoyed forty holidays besides
Sundays." (Rogers, Six Centuries of Work and Wages, pp.
389, 542)
I didn't note the edition, but I expect Keith can
locate the quotes.
Michael
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