This collection does not aim to comprehensively cover the history of labour regulation in Europe over more than 500 years, which would not be possible in a single volume. As a consequence, topics, time periods and European regions are not evenly covered. Instead the aim is to offer fresh perspectives and intensify discussion about the nature of wage labour across Europe between the late medieval period and the nineteenth century based on new research. The chapters of the book are divided into three sections. Part one examines different strategies of labour regulation created in the aftermath of the Black Death between the late fourteenth and sixteenth centuries. It shows that, depending on the structures of government and varying local circumstances, different parts of Europe chose very different paths. As Jane Whittle demonstrates, in England a centralised government dominated by the interests of the landed gentry and aristocracy led to the early and active use of national legislation to regulate labour. While laws were not always effectively enforced, the government never lost interest in finding more effective ways to regulate and discipline the relatively poor and landless to provide a subservient workforce. In southern France, Marseille adopted a strategy close to a free-market solution to obtain an agricultural workforce, as Francine Michaud shows. On the one hand, it seems that the high status of Marseille’s existing guild of ploughman mitigated against the harsh regulation of agricultural workers, while, on the other, the unregulated in-migration of workers from surrounding regions eventually undermined the Marseille ploughmen’s high wages. Marseille benefited from being a prosperous and relatively peaceful enclave surrounded by regions that offered less favourable employment conditions.
The Italian city states of Tuscany also had to contend with the push and pull between neighbouring polities as well as regulation within them. Davide Cristoferi explores the similarities and differences between the strategies pursued by Florence and Siena. In both states, protecting the interests of wealthy citizens who had invested in landed property let on sharecropping agreements was paramount. Here taxation was the favoured form of regulation. By taxing wage earners and independent peasant farmers more heavily than sharecroppers, they both encouraged and protected sharecroppers, creating a market in which city dwellers could accumulate more land and lease it on favourable terms. By their nature, sharecropping contracts provided an agricultural labour force for tenancies. In the long term, the removal of alternatives allowed urban landowners to squeeze sharecroppers harder and bind them to the land. In late medieval England and Tuscany, the profitability of land for rentier owners was maintained using political power to undermine workers’ economic advantage. Only in Marseilles, where conditions proved generally favourable to landowners, was increased regulation largely avoided.
Part two of the book turns to the development of labour laws and the classification of labour in the early modern period. Labour laws and other legal structures not only regulated workers but also described and classified different forms of labour relations – these classifications in turn shaping future regulations. Raffaella Sarti compares how slavery, service and other forms of dependent labour such as apprenticeship were understood by early modern commentators. She demonstrates how workers were seen as implicitly dependent and subservient, whether or not they were paid wages or coerced into providing labour. While historians draw sharp distinctions between service (as a form of voluntary wage work) and slavery (as a highly coercive removal of personal freedom), early modern jurists and other writers saw them as very similar types of labour: these views were found across Europe in Italy, France and England. Hanne Østhus, focusing on the Danish Empire, looks more specifically at the state as a vehicle for regulation and classification. The early modern Danish state ruled an empire that included Denmark, Norway, Iceland and a range of other territories stretching from northern Germany to the Caribbean and south-east Asia. Everywhere the large numbers of statutes attest to the importance with which labour regulation was regarded by the state. As elsewhere, labour laws were intertwined with the regulation of vagrancy and provision for the poor, and it was taken for granted that the ‘idle’ who were not appropriately employed should be forced into work. Yet, despite an increasingly absolutist state, labour regulations remained local, shaped by local elites and tailored to particular circumstances.
In this sense, the Danish empire stood somewhere between the southern Low Countries and Sweden in its approach. Thijs Lambrecht shows that in Flanders national and regional labour legislation was absent but local by-laws concerned with labour were common. Unlike England, these showed little concern for wage rates and instead concentrated on the servant labour force by regulating service contracts and mobility. Regional differences are evident: areas of large commercial farms sought to force workers into compulsory service, while areas of peasant farming were more concerned with regulating contracts. In Sweden, Carolina Uppenberg demonstrates that successive national statutes built a system that aimed for near-total control of the rural labour force. The laws not only regulated workers, telling people what work to do and ensuring they did that work, but also controlled employers by proscribing how many workers farmers could employ. These regulations stretched into the family: the children of peasant householders could be forced into service as a consequence of parents being allowed to keep only a certain number of working children at home.
The final part of the book explores how labour regulation was experienced by those affected. Lack of evidence makes the experience of law enforcement hard to uncover before the nineteenth century. Charmian Mansell uses an ingenious approach to weigh popular attitudes to labour legislation in England from 1564 to 1641. Young people, seen as prone to idleness and possessing a duty of subservience, were the prime target of the laws. Evidence from ‘exceptions’ to the character of witnesses in the church courts allows attitudes towards young people to be tweezed from the documents. This shows that, while neighbours were concerned about the poverty and vagrancy of young people, they did not necessarily see entering service, as proscribed by the labour laws, as the solution to these problems. Theresa Johnsson examines the administration of vagrancy legislation, an essential element of the Swedish labour laws, in the early nineteenth century. She demonstrates how, despite an excessively controlling state, imprecision in the legislation and variations in enforcement created a state of uncertainty for the labouring poor. Her analysis of how people were caught up in a capricious system of state monitoring of livelihoods offers a critique to those who would place too much emphasis on the agency of those who were deliberately denied power by the legal system and its enforcers. Vilhelm Vilhelmsson offers another perspective, looking carefully at the unruly behaviour of servants as evidence of resistance rather than a rhetorical trope. In mid-nineteenth-century Iceland service was compulsory for young unmarried people and courts sought to control many aspects of their lives, yet also provided arbitration in disputes between servants and employers. Cases in these courts demonstrate both the mistreatment of servants and servants’ misbehaviour. Yet they also indicate that some servants used the courts and ‘weapons of the weak’ to renegotiate unsatisfactory situations.
Too often discussions of preindustrial European labour laws have remained restricted to particular national historiographies. Bringing these studies together illuminates three important propositions. First, legal interventions in the operation of labour markets can be witnessed across many different regions of Europe. Second, the combination of the importance of wage labour and a multitude of regulations that sought to ensure the subservience and control of wage workers were a distinctive characteristic of this period. Finally, the most common forms of wage labour in the countryside in this period cannot be considered fully free. Thus, neither the end of serfdom nor the appearance of large numbers of wage workers necessarily resulted in the rise of labour markets in which workers were free to negotiate contracts that suited them. It was not until the nineteenth century that political authorities across Europe, from the village to the nation state, abandoned the assumption that the interests of wage workers should be subordinated to the owners of property.