1 Attitudes to Wage Labour in English Legislation, 1349–1601

By prioritising wage labour over serfdom at this point of crisis, those in power recognised the advantages of wage labour as a means of providing a labour force, but at the same time did not envisage this labour as ‘free’, in the sense of operating in a free market according to personal choice. Among other things, the laws sought to criminalise unemployment, to undermine the power of workers to negotiate contracts and to force men, women and children into compulsory service.

Over the next 250 years, principles of the Ordinance were repeatedly reinforced. Serfdom was left to wither away,1 Mark Bailey, The Decline of Serfdom in Late Medieval England: From Bondage to Freedom (Woodbridge, 2014). but statutes concerned with regulating labour, vagrancy and the able-bodied poor multiplied and became increasingly complex. This chapter revisits those laws and asks what they reveal about attitudes to wage labour in late medieval and sixteenth-century England. It does so through three lines of inquiry. First, it considers the wider social divisions implied by the laws, by examining who created and enforced them. The laws were created by parliament, so a consideration of who sat in parliament and how they generated legislation is needed, emphasising the dual role of the ruling elite as members of parliament and employers. It is also important to consider who enforced the laws, as enforcement demonstrates support for the labour laws from a much wider social group of less elite employers. Secondly, the chapter examines how workers were classified by the legislation. There was a tripartite division of wage workers into servants, casual labourers and artificers, with those who refused to conform being labelled as vagrants. The categories into which workers and potential workers were placed by the labour laws demonstrates a well-developed understanding of different types of wage labour by 1349. The laws reinforced these categories both through repeated usage and by policing their boundaries. This indicates a conscious ordering of the most mobile and, from an elite perspective, unruly sections of society. Thirdly, the chapter investigates the compulsion to work and the unequal power relations between employer and worker that the laws sought to strengthen. Compulsory work was neither serfdom nor slavery, as it was not inherited or perpetual. However, it did restrict personal freedoms in ways that are often overlooked. The laws were thus contradictory in their approach to wage labour. They implicitly recognised the benefits of wage labour in providing a motivated and well-ordered workforce, while at the same time demonstrating an active hostility to a free labour market.2 Robert J. Steinfeld, The Invention of Free Labor: The Employment Relation in English and American Law and Culture 1350–1870 (Chapel Hill, 1991), especially chapters 2–4.

The chapter crosses a number of traditional boundaries in terms of chronology and subject matter. There are many studies of England’s late medieval labour laws. Pioneering research on the widespread enforcement of the medieval laws was undertaken by Bertha Putnam and Nora Ritchie.3 N. Ritchie née Kenyon, ‘Labour Conditions in Essex in the Reign of Richard II’, in E. M. Carus-Wilson (ed.), Essays in Economic History, vol. 2 (London, 1962), pp. 91–111; Bertha H. Putnam, Proceedings before the Justices of the Peace in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries: Edward III to Richard III (London, 1938); Bertha H. Putnam, The Enforcement of the Statutes of Labourers during the First Decade after the Black Death (New York, 1908). These findings have been reinforced by more recent research by Judith Bennett, Simon Penn and Chris Dyer, L. R. Poos and Elaine Clark.4 Judith M. Bennett, ‘Compulsory Service and Late Medieval England’, Past and Present, 209 (2010), 7–51; Simon A. C. Penn and Christopher Dyer, ‘Wages and Earnings in Late Medieval England: Evidence from the Enforcement of the Labour Laws’, Economic History Review, 43 (1990), 356–76; L. R. Poos, ‘The Social Context of Statute of Labourers Enforcement’, Law and History Review, 1 (1983), 27–52; Elaine Clark, ‘Medieval Labor Law and English Local Courts’, American Journal of Legal History, 27 (1983), 330–53. Chris Given-Wilson has perhaps done most to think about the wider social and political implications of the laws, in terms of both how they were created and how they were intended to be enforced.5 Christopher Given-Wilson, ‘The Problem of Labour in the Context of English Government, c.1350–1450’, in James Bothwell, P. J. P. Goldberg and W. M. Ormrod (eds), The Problem of Labour in Fourteenth-Century England (York, 2000), pp. 85–100; Christopher Given-Wilson, ‘Service, Serfdom and English Labour Legislation: 1350–1500’, in Anne Curry and Elizabeth Matthew (eds), Concepts and Patterns of Service in the Later Middle Ages (Woodbridge, 2000). But see also Alan Harding, ‘The Revolt Against the Justices’, in R. H. Hilton and T. H. Aston (eds), The English Rising of 1381 (Cambridge, 1984), pp. 165–93; Samuel Cohn, ‘After the Black Death: Labour Legislation and Attitudes Towards Labour in Late Medieval Western Europe’, Economic History Review, 60 (2007), 457–85. Yet the medieval laws continue to be studied separately from those of the sixteenth century. S. T. Bindoff and Donald Woodward undertook detailed research into the creation of the 1563 Statute, the most important sixteenth-century law; yet both saw it as new, prefigured only by some stray wage assessments in the early 1560s.6 S. T. Bindoff, ‘The Making of the Statute of Artificers’, in S. T. Bindoff et al. (eds), Elizabethan Government and Society: Essays Presented to Sir John Neale (London, 1961), pp. 56–94; Donald Woodward, ‘The Background to the Statute of Artificers: The Genesis of Labour Policy 1558–63’, Economic History Review, 33 (1980), 32–44. See also Bertha H. Putnam, ‘Northamptonshire Wage Assessments of 1560 and 1667’, Economic History Review, 1 (1927), 124–34. In this chapter it is considered as a continuation of the medieval statutes. Studies of the enforcement of the 1563 Statute are relatively limited in comparison to those of the late medieval period. Classic studies by Keith Kelsall, Margaret Davies and F. G. Emmison have recently been supplemented by the research of Douglas Hay and Tim Wales.7 R. Keith Kelsall, Wage Regulation under the Statute of Artificers (London, 1938); Margaret G. Davies, The Enforcement of English Apprenticeship: A Study in Applied Mercantilism,1563–1642 (Cambridge, MA, 1956); F. G. Emmison, Elizabethan Life: Home, Work and Land (Chelmsford, 1976), pp. 146–74; Douglas Hay, ‘England, 1562–1875: the Law and Its Uses’, in Douglas Hay and Paul Craven (eds), Masters, Servants and Magistrates in Britain and the Empire, 1562–1955 (Chapel Hill, 2004), pp. 59–116; Tim Wales, ‘“Living at their own hands”: policing poor households and the young in early modern rural England’, Agricultural History Review, 61 (2013), 19–39. The sixteenth-century poor laws8 Paul Slack, Poverty in Tudor and Stuart England (London, 1988); Steve Hindle, On the Parish? The Micropolitics of Poor Relief in Rural England c.1550–1750 (Oxford, 2004); Marjorie K. McIntosh, Poor Relief in England 1350–1600 (Cambridge, 2012); Marjorie K. McIntosh, Poor Relief and Community in Hadleigh, Suffolk, 1547–1600 (Hatfield, 2013). and the vagrancy laws9 C. S. L. Davies, ‘Slavery and Protector Somerset: the Vagrancy Act of 1547’, Economic History Review, 19 (1966) 533–49; J. F. Pound, Poverty and Vagrancy in Tudor England (London, 1971); A. L. Beier, ‘Vagrants and the Social Order in Elizabethan England’, Past and Present, 64 (1974), 3–29; A. L. Beier, Masterless Men: The Vagrancy Problem in England 1560–1640 (London, 1985); Patricia Fumerton, Unsettled: The Culture of Mobility and the Working Poor in Early Modern England (Chicago, 2006). have a scholarship largely separate from that of the regulation of labour, despite their close relationship.

Recent research increasingly challenges this fragmented approach. Robert Steinfeld’s sweeping survey The Invention of Free Labor emphasises the long-term development and wider impact of the labour laws between the fourteenth and nineteenth centuries.10 Steinfeld, Invention of Free Labor. A. L. Beier draws important connections between labour, vagrancy and poverty legislation in an essay that nonetheless fails to consider the period before 1500 in any detail.11 A. L. Beier, ‘“A New Serfdom”: Labour Laws, Vagrancy Statutes, and Labor Discipline in England, 1350–1800’, in A. L. Beier and Paul Ocobock (eds), Cast Out: Vagrancy and Homelessness in Global and Historical Perspective (Athens, GA, 2008), pp. 35–63. The gap in knowledge about the period between the active enforcement of new legislation in the late fourteenth century and the creation of the Statute of Artificers in 1563 has now been partly filled. Marjorie McIntosh demonstrates the increasing concern of communities across the country regarding measures of social control from the late fourteenth century onwards – measures that included punishment of vagrants and the unemployed.12 Marjorie K. McIntosh, Controlling Misbehaviour in England, 1370–1600 (Cambridge, 1998). Given-Wilson draws attention to parliament’s concern for regulating labour during the fifteenth century,13 Given-Wilson, ‘Service, Serfdom’; Given-Wilson, ‘Problem of Labour’. while Paul Cavill has shown that parliament’s attempts to reinstitute wage regulation in 1495 caused rebellion in Kent.14 Paul Cavill, ‘The Problem of Labour and the Parliament of 1495’, in Linda Clark (ed.), Of Mice and Men: Image, Belief and Regulation in Late Medieval England (Woodbridge, 2005), pp. 147–50. Jane Whittle has demonstrated that the medieval labour laws, including compulsory service for the unemployed, were being actively enforced in mid-sixteenth-century Norfolk.15 Jane Whittle, The Development of Agrarian Capitalism: Land and Labour in Norfolk 1440–1580 (Oxford, 2000), pp. 275–301. New digital resources make it far easier to track the development of the laws in parliament.16 Parliament Rolls of Medieval England [PR], https://www.british-history.ac.uk/no-series/parliament-rolls-medieval [accessed 17 March 2020]; Journal of the House of Lords: Vol. 1: 1509–1577: https://www.british-history.ac.uk/lords-jrnl/vol1 [accessed 17 March 2020] (the run is not complete for the early sixteenth century); Journal of the House of Commons: Vol. 1: 1547–1629: https://www.british-history.ac.uk/commons-jrnl/vol1 [accessed 17 March 2020]; Statutes of the Realm [SR] Vols 1–4, available on HeinOnline: https://heinonline-org.uoelibrary.idm.oclc.org/HOL/Welcome [accessed 23 June 2020]. As a consequence, the time is ripe for a reassessment of the laws and their full implications for the development of wage labour.