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Notes -
One of my little hobbies is examining historical evidence and trying to make a reasonable guess at the truth of things. I thought an example of such might be fun enough for people here, so here you are.
Bret Devereaux writes of Roman weavers:
First, the reason this passage drew my attention: that an at least partially skilled laborer could draw half the wage of a farmhand does not pass the smell test. Why would such individuals not simply up and leave? The farms await with their great bounties. Such a discrepancy demands explanation. Bret attempts one, but his is that capital ownership was much more important in the labor-rich premodern environment, and that therefore the earnings of weavers could be driven down. This explains nothing of the discrepancy between weavers and presumably equally disenfranchised hired hands. So what could account for this?
First, background on Diocletian’s edict. Normally we think of price controls as a minimum cost or wage for this and that, typically as a socialist dictator’s ploy to stay popular. Diocletian was setting a maximum to try and halt inflation. So in each of these, we should consider: given an environment where labor is in a relative position of strength, Diocletian forbids the worker demanding a wage beyond a certain amount. If labor is not strong, and currency is not too greatly debased, then we should expect actual prices to stay lower than these marks, or else for wages to float beyond them on the gray market.
In the edict itself, however, low-grade weavers were not paid by the day, but rather by the pound. This is likely what is generating Bret’s estimate range here, as it’s hard to know exactly how much a weaver can weave. But there’s another confounder here, which is that the edict does not specify the quality of the weaver, but rather the quality of the wool, which is coarse. Wool’s weight per yard is not fixed, but varies on the thickness of the thread - so a weaver using coarse thread is simply going to be producing more pounds per yard and per unit of labor than one using fine thread. Flax is finer than wool, and presumably is going to be priced higher per pound.
And since our estimates on historical productivity are at best sketchy, we really can’t rely on our figures here. Modern estimates are typically given by historical reenactors. Not to put too fine a point on it, these are amateurs and historians who are bookish and unlikely to be either driven or particularly skilled with their hands. Premoderns, on the other hand, were going to eat or starve based on their productivity, and starvation was not so very far away. They would be working hard (perhaps 12h/d instead of 8 max), and with no end to practice, and likely with more dexterity than book learning. We should expect their productivity to be substantially greater than our contemporaries. And, given that we know Diocletian was trying to set reasonable price caps to halt inflation, we can assume that he was working off of estimates to keep the overall income of these similar workers in line. The farmhand shares wages with a water carrier and a mule driver. The equivalent for the wool weaver would be the day-wage linen weaver, who made 20d. That should actually make us strongly suspect that a weaver of coarse wool fabric was making a pound and a third, or a yard and change, of cloth a day, rather than making much less money. (Also interesting: women make much less a day, down to 12d. Was this because women worked slower, because they were expected to work part-time alongside childcare, or because they were understood to be exceptionally vulnerable without a working man and therefore easy to exploit? The wage gap persists.)
Lastly, a couple considerations on the nature of the work. Farmhands are presumably not sharecroppers, but rather hired help during the backbreaking and urgent plowing and harvest seasons. They would not be needed the rest of the year. In contrast, given that thread does not spoil like food, a weaving workshop can operate year-round and would likely prefer to so distribute the work in order to fully utilize workspace and looms. So our farmhand is hired for a few weeks of brutal but reasonably paid work, while our weaver is steadily employed throughout the year. Even though the farmhand likely picks up additional work to cover the gaps, the needed rest after these periods means he is all but certain to average below his sticker price. How much lower is a hard estimate, but 20% of the time out of work is sufficient to bring his wage down to the linen-weaver. And we have to assume that Diocletian was completely aware of this fact.
So, in summary: looking at the actual numbers and the actual purpose of the edict, alongside some reasonable assumptions about the comparable nature of the work and our own limited ability to produce, yields a plausible interpretation of the evidence where the astonishing anomaly of Bret’s assertion that weavers were paid like women (on its own an anomaly) vanishes. And this is a technique, for what it’s worth, that Bret has used himself for things like military equipment weight, so I think he most likely is just less familiar with this field and took someone else’s uncited estimate as gospel instead of examining the strange details like he would for military matters.
If something doesn’t make sense on the roughest estimates, that’s almost always because one premise or another is false or misunderstood. This mutation of syllogistic reasoning holds quite broadly.
—Having the freedom to change jobs
—In Diocletian’s Rome
Anon, I....
How did this work? What was the gears-level social fabric (heh) that prevented people from changing jobs?
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