Seven Centuries of Unreal Wages: The Unreliable Data, Sources and Methods that have been used for Measuring Standards of Living in the Past

Chapter 1: Introduction.Chapter 2: Seven Centuries of Unreal Wages.Chapter 3: The Tyranny of Numbers: Are There Acceptable Data for Nominal and Real Wages for Pre-Modern China?.Chapter 4: What is Wrong with the History of Wages? Or the Divide in Economic History.Chapter 5: In Search of the Average Craftsman: Understanding Skilled Work and Wages in the Early Modern Building Trades and Wider Economy.Chapter 6: The Pay of Unskilled Men on London Building Sites, 1650-1770.Chapter 7: What is a Money Wage? Measuring the Earnings of Agricultural Labourers in Early Modern England.Chapter 8: Seasonal Patterns of Agricultural Day-Labour in Eight English Farms, 1836-44.Chapter 9: Unreal Wages: Long-run Living Standards and the 'Golden Age' of the Fifteenth Century.Chapter 10: Cash, Wages and the Economy of Makeshifts in England, 1650-1800.

John Hatcher is Emeritus Professor of Economic and Social History and Fellow of Corpus Christi College, University of Cambridge, UK. He is renowned for his wide ranging work on the economic, social and demographic history of England from the Middle Ages to the eighteenth century. He has also published a book about the experiences of the ordinary individuals who lived and died in the Black Death, which combines history with fiction.

Judy Stephenson is a postdoctoral fellow in Economic History at Wadham College, University of Oxford, UK. She researches and publishes work on early modern employment, work and labour markets. She published her first book Contracts and Pay: Work in London Construction 1660-1785 with Palgrave Macmillan in 2018.