In his pioneering study from 1886 on living standards in the past, the economic historian James Thorold Rogers delivered a harsh verdict on the labour laws that governed employer–worker relations in England between 1563 and 1824. Rogers described this body of labour legislation as nothing less than a ‘conspiracy’ aiming ‘to cheat the English workman of his wages, to tie him to the soil, to deprive him of hope, and to degrade him into irremediable poverty’.
1 J. T. Rogers, Six Centuries of Work and Wages: The History of English Labour (London, 1884), p. 398. This characterisation of English labour legislation as a socially selective and oppressive body of law that resulted in low wages, immobility and poverty was informed by Rogers’ liberal ideological stance. In their design, the English labour laws were indeed completely antithetical to the principles of free trade that Rogers advocated as a politician. Of most significance here, however, is that the quotation illustrates that the founders of economic history paid ample attention to the legal framework in which labour was mobilised, supervised and remunerated. The material realities of work and wages that Rogers sought to reconstruct could not be dissociated from the legislative framework of work and wages that characterised English society between the late Middle Ages and the early nineteenth century. Other pioneers of English economic history followed in Rogers’ footsteps. On the eve of the First World War, Richard Tawney published a lengthy article on the periodic assessment of wages by Justices of the Peace – one of the key elements of early modern English labour laws.
2 R. H. Tawney, ‘The Assessment of Wages in England by the Justices of the Peace’, Vierteljahrschrift fur Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte, 11 (1914), 307–37, 533–64. This interest in the history of pre-industrial economic relations would expand beyond England. In his opus magnum on the history of economic development in Europe, the Russian historian Maxim Kowalewsky devoted more than 200 pages to the early history of labour laws in late medieval Europe.
3 M. Kowalewsky, Die ökonomische Entwicklung Europas bis zum Beginn der kapitalistischen Wirtschaftsform, vol. 5 (Berlin, 1911), pp. 208–445; M. Kowalewsky, ‘La législation ouvrière aux XIIIe et XIVe siècles’, Annales Internationales d’Histoire (1900), 173–212. In his view, late medieval labour legislation was an elite response to the breakdown and demise of serfdom in many parts of Europe. Kowalewsky identified labour laws as a characteristic feature of the transition from feudalism to capitalism in late medieval Europe. Nor was this interest in the history of labour legislation restricted to economic historians. In Germany in particular the history of the legal status of servants attracted much attention. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries numerous – and sometimes lengthy – studies were published that retraced and reconstructed the vast regional bodies of labour laws that governed master–servant and employer–worker relations in the past.
4 For example, R. Wuttke, Gesindeordnungen und Gesindezwangsdienst in Sachsen bis zum Jahre 1835 (Leipzig, 1893); H. Platzer, Geschichte der ländlichen Arbeitsverhältnisse in Bayern (Munich, 1904); E. Lennhoff, Das ländliche Gesindewesen in der Kurmak Brandenburg vom 16. bis 19. Jahrhundert (Breslau, 1906); O. Könnecke, Rechtsgeschichte des Gesindes in West- und Suddeutschland (Marburg, 1912). All these historians shared the belief that labour laws were more than a footnote in the economic history of Europe; in their design, operation and enforcement, labour laws exposed the social, economic and legal realities and hierarchies of work in the pre-industrial past.
In the second half of the twentieth century, this perspective was gradually abandoned. Economic historians produced a wealth of new data on wages and earnings in the past, but the potential impact of legal labour regimes on the operation of the labour market was rarely researched or acknowledged. In contrast, it was social historians who from the 1970s onwards stressed the fundamental role of labour, poor and vagrancy laws in creating a disciplinary environment for the different categories of pre-industrial workers.
5 See, for example, C. Lis and H. Soly, Poverty and Capitalism in Pre-Industrial Europe (New Jersey, 1979) and A. Beier, Masterless Men: The Vagrancy Problem in England 1560–1640 (London, 1985). With particular reference to England, economic historians sketched a narrative of labour markets that were seemingly immune to the impact of labour laws. This was due to the focus on the settled male day labourer as the preferred unit of analysis, combined with a relative neglect of different forms of labour organisation, such as service or migrant labour. Yet, work performed by living-in servants still accounted for the majority of waged work in the agricultural sector in England until the 1770s.
6 C. Muldrew, Food, Energy and the Creation of Industriousness. Work and Material Culture in Agrarian England, 1550–1780 (Cambridge, 2011), pp. 223–4. The privileged attention of economic historians on male day labourers produced a skewed and incomplete picture of the lived realities of waged labour in the pre-industrial countryside. Arguably, immobile married adult male labourers were the category of workers that were the least affected by labour, poor and vagrancy laws. The vast body of labour laws predominantly targeted other categories of workers: the young, the unmarried, the mobile and the property-less. Also, recent research on England has shown that young women were disproportionally affected by late medieval and early modern labour laws. Late medieval compulsory service, for example, targeted women in particular.
7 J. M. Bennett, ‘Compulsory Service in Late Medieval England’, Past and Present, 209 (2010), 7–51. The reconstruction of women’s wages in the long run by Humphries and Weisdorf indicates that legal wage ceilings imposed by the labour laws effectively held down the earnings of women employed on annual contracts.
8 J. Humphries and J. Weisdorf, ‘The Wages of Women in England, 1260–1850’, Journal of Economic History, 75 (2015), 423–4. Importantly, the relative lack of information and detailed studies on these categories of workers compared with male day labourers produces an unrealistic picture of the impact of labour laws in pre-industrial England and other parts of Europe. As we show, numerous studies have unearthed a substantial body of late medieval and early modern labour legislation that actively shaped labour markets and had a direct impact on substantial parts of the pre-industrial rural workforce.
From 1349 onwards, in the aftermath of the Black Death, laws to control waged work multiplied across Europe. Some were local by-laws, others national statutes; some sought to regulate wages and contracts, others sought to control mobility and force potential workers into employment. What these laws demonstrate is a shared belief that hired workers could not be left unregulated. Thus, although waged work became a common form of labour across much of the continent during the late medieval and early modern period, this wage labour was not necessarily ‘free’. That is to say, receiving payment in return for work does not necessarily mean that a free labour market existed, where workers and employers met on equal terms and bargained to create a labour contract. Instead, governments and local elites sought to control those social groups that provided wage labour – particularly the young, the relatively poor, and the mobile – and create terms of employment that favoured the employer. In many regions, service was preferred over day labouring as a means of exercising greater control over wage workers. Many laws contained provisions for unemployed or casually employed people to be forced into compulsory service. What we observe, in many parts of Europe, is a selectivity in how labour markets were organised resulting in the restriction of freedom for some categories of workers. The timing, nature and enforcement of such restrictions on the operation of a ‘free’ labour were subject to important variations. However, as the chapters in this book indicate, labour laws cannot be isolated from underlying economic, social, political and cultural structures.
This book is largely concerned with rural workers, the most common form of wage labour in late medieval and early modern Europe. It concentrates on Western Europe, the region where free wage labour is imagined to have developed. While recent histories have rightly characterised the late medieval and early modern economies of many European regions as dynamic and highly commercialised, this does not mean that free labour markets necessarily existed. The book explores the variety of legal and regulatory regimes that existed to control labour and how workers experienced those controls. As such, it views labour not just as a relationship between worker and employer but as one between worker, employer and the state. The rest of this section briefly explores the wider implications of wage labour and its regulation for our understanding of this period. Part two of the introduction provides an overview of the context and motivations of labour regulation in different regions, while part three summarises the laws enforced. The final section explains the structure of the book.
Building on the ground-breaking articles of Samuel Cohn and Catharina Lis and Hugo Soly, this book aims to place the development of Europe’s labour laws in comparative perspective.
9 S. Cohn, ‘After the Black Death: Labour Legislation and Attitudes towards Labour in Late Medieval Western Europe’, Economic History Review, 60 (2007), 457–85; C. Lis and H. Soly, ‘Labor Laws in Western Europe, 13th–16th Centuries: Patterns of Political and Socio-Economic Rationality’, in M. van der Linden and L. Lucassen (eds), Working on Labor: Essays in Honor of Jan Lucassen (Leiden, 2012), pp. 297–321. Viewing labour regulation comparatively across geographical regions demonstrates both the range of ways labour was organised and the variety of means used to control hired workers. While there were many similarities across regions – for instance, the division of the hired workforce into three main groups, servants employed on annual contracts, day labourers and skilled craftsmen – there were also important differences. Robert Brenner’s description of rural economic development in medieval and early modern Europe envisaged workers either as subject to serfdom or as free peasants or wage workers.
10 R. Brenner, ‘The Agrarian Roots of European Capitalism’, Past and Present, 97 (1982), 16–113. Yet wage labour did not necessarily entail freedom of action for workers within labour markets. Instead labour was controlled in a variety of ways: sometimes by types of taxation and forms of tenancy (late medieval Italy),
11 See the chapter of Cristoferi in this volume. sometimes by guild regulations (Germanic regions),
12 S. Ogilvie, State Corporatism and Proto-Industry: the Württemberg Black Forest, 1580–1797 (Cambridge, 1997). sometimes using by-laws created by local elites (southern Low Countries),
13 See Lambrecht in this volume. and sometimes by national and regional laws (England and Scandinavia).
14 See Whittle, Østhus and Uppenberg in this volume. These regulations could be all-encompassing and tightly enforced (as in eighteenth-century Sweden, nineteenth-century Iceland and parts of early modern Germany),
15 See Uppenberg and Vilhemsson in this volume. For Germany: S. Ogilvie, ‘Married Women, Work and the Law: Evidence from Early Modern Germany’, in C. Beattie and M. Stevens (eds), Married Women and the Law in Northern Europe c.1200–1800 (Woodbridge, 2013), pp. 213–39. or unevenly enforced (early modern England).
16 See Mansell in this volume. But, wherever they existed, they demonstrate that the holders of political power conceived of wage workers not as ‘free’ but as subservient and in need of control – economic, social and moral. Workers were seen not as choosing to labour but instead as having a duty to work, and to work in a particular way.
Wage labour is an important aspect of how historians envisage economic change in late medieval and early modern Western Europe. Large farms worked by wage labourers are seen as characterising agrarian capitalism and as more economically advanced than large farms worked by labour services under serfdom, or small farms that relied predominantly on family labour.
17 L. Shaw-Taylor, ‘The Rise of Agrarian Capitalism and the Decline of Family Farming in England’, Economic History Review, 65 (2012), 26–60. Similarly, the proportion of the population who were wage earners is seen as a measure of overall economic development and dynamism.
18 T. de Moor and J. L. van Zanden, ‘Girl Power: the European Marriage Pattern and Labour Markets in the North Sea Region in the Late Medieval and Early Modern Period’, Economic History Review, 63 (2010), 12–13. Yet, typically, these schema leave unexplored the range of types of wage labour and the nature of markets in which labour was offered for wages. This not only overlooks the human experience of work but risks misrepresenting the context of economic change. We imagine labour markets emerging ‘naturally’ and operating smoothly according to supply and demand. Yet both Karl Marx and Adam Smith recognised that worker and employer did not meet as equals in the labour market: the employer benefited not only from ownership of capital but also from the support of legislation.
19 A. Smith, Wealth of Nations, vol. 1 (London, 1776), pp. 97–9; K. Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (London, 1887), chapter 28.Historians of labour regulation have developed a parallel account of the development of wage labour in Western Europe that draws very different conclusions. Historians including Robert Steinfeld, Douglas Hay and Paul Craven, and Alessandro Stanziani argue that wage labour was not ‘free’ until reforms in master–servant laws in the second half of the nineteenth century.
20 R. J. Steinfeld, The Invention of Free Labor: The Employment Relation in English and American Law and Culture, 1350–1870 (Chapel Hill, 1991); D. Hay and P. Craven (eds), Masters, Servants and Magistrates in Britain and the Empire, 1562–1955 (Chapel Hill, 2004); A. Stanziani, Bondage: Labor and Rights in Eurasia from the Sixteenth to the Early Twentieth Centuries (New York, 2014). Before that time laws and litigators conceived of wage workers not as free agents entering into contracts as equals but as servants and as subservient.
21 This issue is explored in Sarti, this volume. Not only were servants (workers employed on longer contracts, often living with their employer) numerically dominant, they were also the normative conception of a wage worker and were assumed to be subservient – that is, of inferior social status and possessing inferior legal rights. In this conception, the late medieval and early modern period was not one of free wage labour markets, but instead was characterised by varied forms of wage labour, typically dominated by live-in service and heavily regulated by laws. Most of these forms of labour were less than free.
Implicit in this ‘less than free’ wage labour approach is another important observation. Wage labour is not a self-evident concept; instead, like slavery and serfdom, it consists of a bundle of rights that might or might not be extended to different workers and types of worker. For instance, Marcel van der Linden argues for an approach to all forms of labour that examines the entry, conduct and exit from employment arrangements separately in order to discern the degree of freedom allowed to the worker.
22 M. van der Linden, ‘Dissecting Coerced Labor’, in M. van der Linden and M. Rodríguez García (eds), On Coerced Labor: Work and Compulsion after Chattel Slavery (Leiden, 2016), pp. 293–322. Lists of possible freedoms or rights, used in comparative histories of slavery, can also be applied to wage workers.
23 For example, R. E. Wright, The Poverty of Slavery: How Unfree Labor Pollutes the Economy (London, 2017), pp. 25–7. The argument here is not that wage labour was equivalent to slavery or serfdom but rather than each form of labour is made up of characteristics that varied and need to be identified and considered in each particular case. As a consequence, it is helpful to think of many varieties of late medieval and early modern wage labour as ‘less than free’ rather than ‘free’ or ‘unfree’.
The integration of the ‘less than free’ wage labour perspective into interpretations of economic and social change in Western Europe (and elsewhere) has a number of important implications. The first is that the development of capitalism (or highly commercial and market-orientated societies) does not depend on the dominance of free wage labour. This point has been made repeatedly by historians of early modern slavery,
24 See, for example, B. L. Solow, ‘Capitalism and Slavery in the Exceedingly Long Run’, in B. L. Solow and S. L. Engerman (eds), British Capitalism and Caribbean Slavery: The Legacy of Eric Williams (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 51–78. and is implicit in the continued existence of slavery and other forms of coercion in the modern world.
25 D. Eltis et al. (eds), The Cambridge World History of Slavery. Vol. 4: 1804–2016 (Cambridge, 2017). But it is also true that the development of capitalism between the fourteenth and eighteenth century, and during the Industrial Revolution, often depended on ‘less than free’ labour within Western Europe. Thus the second important implication is that the presence of markets in labour indicate neither the presence of capitalism nor the absence of unfree labour. Markets and capitalism are not synonymous, and the absence of serfdom or slavery does not imply freedom for all workers.
The third point, following from this, is that wage rates do not necessarily reflect market forces (i.e. supply of and demand for labour or the productivity of the worker), but may reflect the freedom of workers to negotiate contracts and the balance of power within wider society. Workers’ freedoms could be constricted not only by laws that sought to set wages but also regulations that impeded mobility, created harsh punishments for breaking contracts and forced the unemployed into work. Lack of social status and political power reduced the ability to demand higher wages, as studies of women’s work demonstrate.
26 E.g. Humphries and Weisdorf, ‘The Wages of Women’, 419–30. This leads to the fourth point: to understand restrictions to workers’ freedoms we need to look beyond the regulation of wages to not only other aspects of labour legislation but also vagrancy laws and the poor laws, to which the labour laws were closely related. Vagrancy laws constricted mobility and punished unemployment. Poor laws could force the able-bodied into work, but, perhaps more significantly, they also sanctioned moral and social interference by economic and political elites in the lives of the relatively poor, undermining freedom in other ways.
27 S. Hindle, On the Parish? The Micro-Politics of Poor Relief in Rural England c.1550–1750 (Oxford, 2004); see also Johnsson and Vilhelmsson, this volume below. A final, perhaps rather obvious, point is that the labour laws make it very clear that the legal system was not socially or politically neutral. While laws occasionally offered rights to workers, for instance to reclaim unpaid wages or challenge broken contracts, they were predominantly used to empower employers and enforce workers’ subservience. In that sense, labour laws created, reproduced and amplified social and economic inequalities in pre-industrial Europe.