Nearly everywhere his expenditure was much in excess of his earnings, the yearly budgets of fifty-three families in twelve different counties showed generally large annual deficiencies, amounting in one case to L21 18s. 4d.  In one case in Lindsey, where the deficiency was small, the family lived on bread alone.  The factory system, too, had already deprived the labourer of many of his by-industries, and thus helped the pauperism for which landlord and farmer had to pay in rates.

About 1788 Sir William Young proposed to send the unemployed labourers round to the parishioners to get work, their wages being paid by their employers and by the parish.  This method of obtaining work was known as the ’roundsman system’.[523]

Landlords, however, and farmers were profiting greatly by the high prices, which fortunately received a check by the abundant harvest of 1796, which, with large imports,[524] caused the price of wheat to fall to 57s. 3d., and in 1798 to 47s. 10d.  It is difficult to conceive what instability, speculation, and disaster such fluctuations must have led to.  In 1797 the Bank Restriction Act was passed, suspending cash payments, and thereby causing a huge growth in credit transactions, a great factor in the inflated prosperity of this period.  In January, 1799, wool was 2s. a lb., and prices at Smithfield: 

s. d. s. d.

Beef, per stone of 8 lb.    3  0    to   3  4
Mutton      "        "      3  0     "   4  2
Pork        "        "      2  8     "   3  8

The summer of that year was uninterruptedly wet; some corn in the north was uncut in November, so that wheat went up to 94s. 2d., and in June, 1800, was 134s. 5d., the scarcity being aggravated by the Russian Government laying an embargo on British shipping.[525] Yet Pitt denied that the high prices were due to the war.[526] They were due, indeed, to several causes: 

  1.  Frequent years of scarcity.

  2.  Increase of consumption, owing to the great growth of
     the manufacturing population, England during the war having
     almost a monopoly of the trade of Europe.

  3.  Napoleon’s obstructions to importation.

  4.  The unprecedented fall of foreign exchanges.

  5.  The rise in the price of labour, scanty as it was.

  6.  Suspension of cash payments, which produced a medium
     of circulation of an unlimited nature, and led to speculation.[527]

In March, 1801, wheat was 156s.; beef at Smithfield, 5s. to 6s. 6d. a stone; and mutton, 6s. 6d. to 8s.  A rise in wages was allowed on all sides to be imperative, but the labourer even now got on an average little more than 9s. a week,[528] a very inadequate pittance, though generally supplemented by the parish.  Arthur Young[529] tells of a person living near Bury in 1801, who, before the era of high prices, earned 5s. a week, and with that could purchase: 

A bushel of wheat.
" malt.
1 lb. of butter.
1 lb. of cheese. 
A pennyworth of tobacco.