A large number of European studies have exposed the emergence and existence of various legal measures and mechanisms that intervened in the operation of rural labour markets in pre-industrial Europe. In general terms, these legal interventions – commonly referred to as labour laws – were a reaction to the ‘problem of labour’. This problem – real or perceived – manifested itself through anxieties and concerns about the labour supply, wage levels and worker subservience.
1 C. Lis and H. Soly, ‘Policing the Early Modern Proletariat, 1450–1850’, in D. Levine (ed.), Proletarianization and Family History (Orlando, 1984), pp. 163–228. As this section will show, these challenges often prompted different and divergent responses from those who sought to address the problem of labour. Existing research illustrates that European elites resorted to an impressive and varied arsenal of formal legal measures to bring labour under their control. Labour laws were a pan-European phenomenon during most of the medieval and early modern period, but were equally characterised by substantial differences in the nature of the measures that were adopted.
The variety of responses recorded in pre-industrial labour laws defies any logic at first sight. With respect to the timing, institutions, targeted worker populations and disciplinary measures, the European countryside displays significant differences. Following the outbreak of the Black Death, many regions throughout Europe resorted to some kind of labour control.
2 For an overview of post-Black Death interventions in European rural labour markets see R. Schröder, Zur Arbeitsverfassung des Spätmittelalters. Eine Darstellung mittelalterlichen Arbeitsrecht aus der Zeit nach der grossen Pest (Berlin, 1984), pp. 74–104 and R. Braid, ‘Et non ultra: politiques royales du travail en Europe occidentale au XIVe siècle’, Bibliothèque de l’Ecole des Chartes, 161 (2003), 437–91. In some regions these interventions were either short-lived or failed to produce the desired effects. For example, historians have been sceptical about the effects of the labour laws introduced in the region of Paris and the county of Hainaut to combat the mid- fourteenth-century inflation of wages and labour costs.
3 G. Fourquin, Les campagnes de la région parisienne à la fin du Moyen Age (Paris, 1964), p. 258 and G. Sivery, Structures agraires et vie rurale dans le Hainaut à la fin du Moyen Age, vol. 2 (Lille, 1980), pp. 429–30. In other regions the measures introduced during the 1350s proved more resilient and marked the starting point of centuries of labour and wage control. For example, in England, northern Italy and some German regions labour laws following the demographic catastrophe of the late 1340s and 1350s initiated interventions in the labour market in the longer term. In contrast, some regions remained untouched by top-down labour market intervention following the Black Death. In the Low Countries most rural regions did not introduce labour legislation in the fourteenth century. Here, the second half of the sixteenth century witnessed an upsurge in local and regional initiatives to deal with the ‘problem of labour’ following a number of mortality crises.
4 C. Verlinden and J. Craeybeckx, Prijzen- en lonenpolitiek in de Nederlanden in 1561 en 1588–1589. Onuitgegeven adviezen, ontwerpen en ordonnanties (Brussels, 1962). Other regions did not introduce labour laws until the seventeenth century. In large parts of Central and Eastern Europe the demographic downturn triggered by the Thirty Years War (1618–48) marked a new starting point of decades of active labour market intervention.
5 W. Abel, Agrarkrisen und Agrarkonjunktur. Eine Geschichte der Land- und Ernährungswirtschaft Mitteleuropas seit dem hohen Mittelalter (Hamburg–Berlin, 1978), pp. 160–1; S. Simon, Die Tagelöhner und ihr Recht im 18 Jahrhundert (Berlin, 1995), p. 258.There was more uniformity with respect to the demise of efforts to control the rural labour market via legal means. In the course of the nineteenth century rural labour laws were either abolished, simplified or reformed to bring workers and employers onto an equal legal footing. Labour market intervention in England remained in force until the third quarter of the nineteenth century but after the 1720s targeted the industrial sector in particular. In contrast to previous centuries, the impact of labour laws in eighteenth-century rural England was limited.
6 W. E. Minchinton, ‘Wage Regulation in Pre-Industrial England’, in W. E. Minchinton (ed.), Wage Regulation in Pre-Industrial England (Newton Abbot, 1972), pp. 10–36; M. Roberts, ‘Wages and Wage-Earners in England: the Evidence of the Wage Assessments, 1563–1725’, unpublished PhD dissertation (University of Oxford, 1981); J. Innes, ‘Regulating Wages in Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth-Century England: Arguments in Context’, in P. Gauci (ed.), Regulating the British Economy, 1660–1850 (Farnham, 2011), pp. 195–216. In France, the revolutionary period marked the end of Old Regime rural labour laws. Although there were temporary measures to deal with rural labour shortages and wage inflation during the Revolution (see below), legal measures during the nineteenth century were restricted to the prevention of worker coalitions (to obtain higher wages) and breach of contract.
7 Y. Crebouw, ‘Les salariés agricoles face au maximum des salaires’, in La Révolution française et le monde rural (Paris, 1989), pp. 113–22; Y. Crebouw, ‘Droits et obligations des journaliers et des domestiques, droits et obligations des maîtres’, in R. Hubschner and J.-C. Farcy (eds), La moisson des autres. Les salariés agricoles aux XIXe et XXe siècles (Ivry-sur-Seine, 1996), pp. 181–98. Crebouw notes that – at least in theory – French law placed farmers and their workers on an equal legal footing. There is an overall impression of a gradual relaxation of legal means to control the rural workforce during the second half of the nineteenth century. Labour laws were increasingly undermined by the growth of industry and rapid urbanisation in the nineteenth century as large sections of the rural population were offered an alternative to agricultural employment. Liberal governments throughout Europe deliberately deregulated rural labour markets to facilitate internal migration and inter-sectoral mobility.
8 See the case of German territories in T. Keiser, ‘Between Status and Contract? Coercion in Contractual Labour Relationships in Germany from the 16th to the 20th century’, Journal of the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History, 21 (2013), 32–47. However, the disappearance of labour laws did not necessarily imply that rural elites lost their overall grip on the local labour market. In England, for example, the (old and new) poor laws offered ample opportunities for employers to gain formal and informal control over the working lives of the labouring population. Poor laws and labour laws had worked for centuries in tandem to discipline and control England’s rural workforce.
9 See the examples in A. L. Beier, ‘A New Serfdom. Labor Laws, Vagrancy Statutes and Labor Discipline in England, 1350–1800’, in A. L. Beier and P. Ocobock (eds), Cast Out. Vagrancy and Homelessness in Global and Historical Perspective (Athens, 2014), pp. 55–6; T. Wales, ‘Living at Their Own Hands: Policing Poor Households and the Young in Early Modern Rural England’, Agricultural History Review, 61 (2013), 33. The growing poverty of the rural workforce from the middle of the eighteenth century onwards made the poor laws a more effective tool of labour market control for rural elites.
10 K. Snell, Annals of the Labouring Poor. Social Change and Agrarian England, 1660–1900 (Cambridge, 1985), p. 124. For examples from the Low Countries, see Lambrecht in this volume. The impact and use of labour laws might have receded, but rural elites found other ways to gain control over the local labour market.
In addition to differences in timing, European labour laws also tended to target different categories of workers. As noted, there was an important element of selectivity in labour laws. In most Scandinavian countries, for example, labour laws targeted unmarried adolescents who were brought under the control of employers through the institution of service. Swedish, Norwegian and Icelandic labour laws were a response to the low population densities that characterised these countries. Service became the favoured strategy to hire workers because it assured the employers of year-round access to labour.
11 See the overview in A. Imhof, ‘Der Arbeitszwang für das landwirtschaftliche Dienstvolk in den nordischen Ländern im 18 Jahrhundert’, Zeitschrift für Agrargschichte und Agrarsoziologie, 22 (1974), 59–74 and Østhus, Uppenberg, Johnsson and Vilhelmsson in this volume. In late medieval and early modern France labour laws were primarily designed to facilitate the recruitment and supply of day-labourers. These laws were mainly constructed to avoid labour shortages during peak agricultural periods. The grain and grape harvests in particular were at stake and these required the availability of labourers that could be hired for shorter periods. These differences can also be observed within countries. As the examples of England and the Low Countries indicate, labour laws – in either their design or their enforcement – targeted workers selectively. The specific nature of agricultural production and the associated logic of labour deployment (servants, day labourers and/or migrant workers) largely determined the type of labour that was targeted through the labour laws. Labour laws, therefore, clearly built on pre-existing patterns of labour demand and targeted those categories of workers that were essential to agricultural operations. Labour laws largely mirrored the specific demographic and agricultural characteristics of a region and were not designed with the aim of introducing radical changes in either the supply or the recruitment of labour.
Thirdly, there are also substantial differences in the institutions that enacted labour laws, which could range from national parliaments to local lords. National labour laws that were enacted in a uniform manner throughout a large territory flourished in particular in regions characterised by early forms of political and territorial centralisation. Late medieval and early modern England is the best example of this situation. Here, national labour laws were enacted by parliament from 1351 onwards and – in theory – a set of identical labour laws applied to all English regions and villages. The English case, however, is exceptional in late medieval Europe. Although in many other European countries and principalities some form of ‘national’ labour law can be encountered, these national initiatives often operated in tandem with legislation enacted by other political entities.
12 See the case of the Danish state in Østhus, this volume. In early modern France, for example, there was national labour legislation concerning work during the harvest period, but local and regional authorities could supplement these laws with additional measures. For example, the provost of Paris introduced maximum wages in 1601 for the Parisian countryside, including harvest work. Whereas the national labour laws of the sixteenth century stated only that able-bodied rural dwellers should hire themselves for ‘reasonable’ wages during harvest, local and regional magistrates could complement this labour legislation by setting maximum wages for harvest operations. The body of labour laws that controlled harvest work in early modern France was thus the result of a dialogue between the national and local level.
13 J. Jacquart, La crise rurale en Île-de-France, 1550–1670 (Paris, 1974), pp. 266–7; H. Heller, Labour, Science and Technology in France, 1500–1620 (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 50–1, 186. This can also be witnessed in the case of work regulation in the production of wine. During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the French monarchy did not issue any top-down labour regulations for this important rural sector, but endorsed and ratified labour regulations solicited and enacted by local and regional authorities.
14 M. Delafosse, ‘Notes d’histoire sociale. Les vignerons d’Auxerrois, XIVe–XVIe siècles’, Annales de Bourgogne, 20 (1948), 22–34; D. Stella, ‘Un conflit du travail dans les vignes d’Auxerre aux XIVe et XVe siècles’, Histoire et Sociétés Rurales, 5 (1996), 221–51. Such a pattern can also be observed in the German principalities. In the sixteenth century the so-called
Reichspolizeiordnungen of the Holy Roman Empire instructed the different territories to draft labour legislation to halt the inflation of wages and introduce measures to control the mobility of servants, but was silent on how this should be achieved in practice. It was up to the states and regions to design tailor-made labour laws suited to their specific social and economic contexts. As the
Reichspolizeiordnungen explicitly acknowledged, labour market conditions within the Holy Roman Empire were too diverse to be captured by a uniform set of labour laws.
15 M. Weber, Die Reichspolizeiordnungen von 1530, 1548 und 1577. Historische Einführung und Edition (Frankfurt am Main, 2002), pp. 152, 159, 200–1, 255.Finally, labour laws also differed with respect to the economic interests they served. Although many labour laws frequently invoked the ‘common good’ to justify measures, in most preambles of labour laws a rhetorical strategy hides the true beneficiaries of these policies. In the case of northern Italy, numerous studies have shown that the urban interest was the primary driver of labour legislation. Labour laws for rural workers were the logical complement of an economic policy that was aimed at political domination and economic exploitation of the countryside by urban elites. Although some late medieval labour laws in German regions also partly served the urban interest, this was nowhere as explicit and dominant as in northern Italy.
16 For example, in 1423 the nobility and some twenty cities in Westphalia issued labour laws for rural servants and labourers. See E. Kelter, ‘Das deutsche Wirtschaftsleben des 14. und 15. Jahrhunderts im Schatten der Pestepidemien’, Jahurbücher für Nationalökonomie und Statistik, 165 (1953), 168. Here, it was in the interest of urban landowners to have access to large, cheap and docile reservoirs of rural labour to work their estates in the hinterland of large cities.
17 G. Piccinni, ‘La politica agraria delle cita’, in R. Mucciarelli, G. Piccinni and G. Pinto (eds), La costruzione del dominio cittadino sulle campagne. Italia centro-settentrionale, secoli, XII–XIV (Siena, 2009), pp. 601–25. See also Cristoferi in this volume. There is marked contrast with other highly urbanised areas in Europe, where large cities did not seek to expand their control over the surrounding countryside by way of stringent labour laws.
18 See the case of Marseille explored by Michaud in this volume. Urban dwellers in the Low Countries, for example, primarily resorted to commercial leasehold to exploit their rural estates. In contrast to sharecropping or direct management, this did not necessitate direct interference in the rural labour market.
In England, on the other hand, late medieval labour laws were crafted with other stakeholders in mind. Here, labour laws served the interests of both manorial lords and tenants with holdings that depended on wage labour. In the mid-fourteenth century many manorial demesnes still depended partly on the supply of cheap labour provided by unfree tenants through a range of labour services.
19 See the recent overview in M. Bailey, The Decline of Serfdom in Late Medieval England. From Bondage to Freedom (Woodbridge, 2014). The demographic haemorrhage of the Black Death resulted in labour shortages that threatened the supply of both labour services and waged labour on these demesnes. The English labour laws of the fourteenth century contained provisions that directly benefited manorial lords. For example, lords enjoyed a preferential right to hire workers within their manors.
20 B. Putnam, The Enforcement of the Statutes of Labourers During the First Decade After the Black Death, 1349–1359 (New York, 1908), p. 71. The gradual demise of the demesne sector in fifteenth-century England meant that other actors became the main beneficiaries and the labour laws facilitated the recruitment of workers to medium-sized and large farms that depended heavily on wage labour. This benefited the lesser gentlemen, yeomen and tenants farmers who ran large farms.
21 J. Whittle, ‘Land and People’, in K. Wrightson (ed.), A Social History of England 1500–1750 (Cambridge, 2017), pp. 156–65. See also Whittle in this volume. In late medieval and early modern France these groups were the exclusive beneficiaries of royal and local intervention from the onset. In many regions, labour services had been either abolished or severely restricted in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Some lords could claim labour services within their seigneuries until the end of the eighteenth century, but these so-called
corvées were severely restricted by both custom and the intervention of royal courts.
22 For a survey of these restrictions see M. Gransagne, Les corvées sous l’Ancien Régime (Saarbrucken, 2015). In addition, because most lords had resorted to leasing their demesne farms in the later Middle Ages, their direct interests were not the object of labour legislation. Rather, labour laws in late medieval and early modern France met the needs of arable farmers with large holdings in particular.
23 L. Vardi, ‘Construing the Harvest: Gleaners, Farmers and Officials in Early Modern France’, American Historical Review, 98 (1993), 1424–47; T. Lambrecht, ‘Harvest Work and Labor Market Regulation in Old Regime Northern France’, in T. M. Safley (ed.), Labor Before the Industrial Revolution. Work, Technology and Their Ecologies in an Age of Early Capitalism (Abingdon, 2019), pp. 113–31. This focus on the interests of larger farms was also the main characteristic of labour legislation in the Low Countries. Legal interventions in the labour market emerged only where large holdings occupied the majority of the land. In regions dominated by peasant agriculture that relied predominantly on unpaid family labour, local officials saw no need to intervene in the operation of labour markets.
24 T. Lambrecht, ‘The Institution of Service in Rural Flanders in the Sixteenth Century: A Regional Perspective’, in J. Whittle (ed.), Servants in Rural Europe, 1400–1900 (Woodbridge, 2017), pp. 50–4. In addition to the different groups sketched above, the state itself could also benefit directly from labour market intervention. In regions where territorial princes or states exploited substantial demesne farms, it was in their direct interest to control labour through the machinery of law. For example, the labour laws of Hainaut from 1354 benefited the count directly, as he was still employing large numbers of agricultural workers on his rural estates during the fourteenth century.
25 G. Sivery, ‘Le Hainaut et la peste noire’, Mémoires et Publications de la Société des Sciences, des Arts et des Lettres du Hainaut, 79 (1965), 441–3. In a similar way, the sixteenth-century Swedish labour laws would also have benefited the more than one hundred royal demesnes that were largely dependent on wage labour.
26 On labour organisation of the Swedish Crown estates see C. Pihl, ‘Gender, Labour, and State Formation in Sixteenth-Century Sweden’, Historical Journal, 58 (2015), 685–710. On sixteenth-century Swedish labour laws see T. Kotkas, Royal Police Ordinances in Early Modern Sweden. The Emergence of Voluntaristic Understanding of Law (Leiden–Boston, 2014), pp. 43–4, 62.Although the myriad local, regional and national interventions in labour markets defies any pan-European logic, they nevertheless share a common characteristic. Most fundamentally, the overwhelming majority of labour laws in pre-industrial Europe favoured employers. Although labour and contract law undoubtedly offered labourers some protection against abuse and fraud by employers (for example, in the case of premature dismissal or refusal to pay wages), interventions in the labour market during this period cannot be characterised as precursors of worker protection. Indeed, what most labour laws have in common is an implicit or explicit bias towards the interests of those who employed workers, whether these were manorial lords, urban landowners, large farmers or states. Labour laws shaped this inequality in the face of the law by creating a deliberate asymmetrical relationship between employers and various categories of workers. As illustrated below, this asymmetrical relationship was expressed through a wide range of legal norms and rules. These measures share a common feature: they shaped and defined the boundaries of the bargaining arena for labourers and in doing so constrained the choices and freedom of some workers in offering their labour to the market. Labour laws forced large sections of the rural population into an unequal bargaining position. Admittedly, some aspects of labour law targeted employers as well. For example, employers who paid wages to labourers and servants in excess of those provided by statutes risked and faced prosecution. In addition, employers could be fined and punished if they failed to honour their contractual obligations. Although labourers and employers were treated equally by some parts of the law, the complete body of law governing relations between workers and employers gravitated unequivocally towards the interests of the latter. Taken as a whole, legal provisions concerning rural labour were far from balanced between interested parties.
Of course, the existence of such unequal legal provisions does not imply that all workers were subject to the effects of labour laws all the time. As the case of England has shown, there were marked chronological and geographical differences in levels of enforcement throughout the medieval and early modern period. The enforcement of labour laws was contingent upon a number of factors. The English case shows that rural elites enforced the labour laws when a real or perceived need presented itself. The option to enforce labour laws constituted a powerful tool in the hands of these elites to control large sections of the rural population. As long as rural populations were periodically reminded of this option – either through formal prosecution or face to face with an employer – labour laws would have a direct impact on the outcome of the bargaining process. Formal constraints influence individual and group behaviour because they raise the costs and involve risk.
27 S. Ogilvie, ‘Choices and Constraints in the Pre-Industrial Countryside’, in C. Briggs, P. M. Kitson and S. J. Thompson (eds), Population, Welfare and Economic Change in Britain, 1290–1834 (Woodbridge, 2014), p. 298; Humphries and Weisdorf, ‘The Wages of Women’, 422. In the case of labour laws, it can be argued that their very existence raised the cost of some actions (through fines or other forms of punishment) and consequently might have deterred some people from pursuing these actions altogether.