88 THE PEASANTS YEAR
can be given, for we lack nearly all the information which would
enable us to proceed with any certainty. But several lines of
investigation give us some insight into the peasant's standards of
living, and are worthy of consideration. We may first of all deal
with the corn allowances made to manorial servants. On those
manors where the lord employed a permanent staff of plough-
men, carters, shepherds, etc., they were paid, partly by a small
yearly wage, partly by food provided at the hall, and partly by
periodical gifts of corn. These, naturally, varied to some extent
from manor to manor and from servant to servant; but, con-
fining ourselves to the most highly rewarded servants—the
ploughmen and carters—we find a constantly recurring figure
asserting that they received one quarter of corn in ten weeks, or
more usually in twelve weeks.1 When this was so, it follows that
they had some 36 bushels (or in modern reckoning some
29 bushels) at their disposal in the course of the year. What,
precisely, they did with these 36 bushels we do not know; the
frequency with which some such allowance occurs suggests that
it was a normal living allowance—but whether for a single man
or for a family is more difficult to say. In later times it would
certainly have been considered a family allowance. Writers in the
eighteenth century, and more scientific critics of recent times,
seem to agree that something like one quarter of wheat was con-
sumed annually by each person in eighteenth-century England;2
so that, if we assume for the moment that the consumption of
bread was the same in the thirteenth as in the eighteenth century,
a medieval family of five (two adults and three children) would
want between four and five quarters of grain a year. It may well
be that the thirteenth-century peasant ate considerably more
bread than his descendant, owing to the more limited variety of
foodstuffs at his disposal. But even if so, our 2o-acre holder had
plenty of margin between his 151 bushels and the 36 bushels
which are in question. All that we need to argue here is that
1 The evidence for this figure comes from a large number of manorial
accounts, printed and imprinted: see, for example, Davenport, op. tit. 24;
E.H.R. K, 422; Neilson, Ramsey Econ. Conditions, 83; Rogers, Prices, i, 288;
II, 626; and Ministers' Accounts, 751/18-21 (Berks); 859/23 (Glos); 843/31
(Essex); 998/25 (Suffolk). It also corresponds with what we are told by the
author of Hosebonderie, 75.
* See references and discussion in Elizabeth W. Gilboy, Wages in Eighteenth-
Century England (Harvard Economic Studies, No. 45), 22 and n. 3.