Social divisions and the creation and enforcement of labour legislation

During the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries England’s parliament developed as a significant part of government.3 Maddicott, ‘Parliament and the People’. The medieval parliament was (as it still is) composed of two houses, the Lords and the Commons. The Lords was a forum of the most powerful men: magnates and senior churchmen. It was effectively a wider extension of the king’s council, and its members were each invited to attend parliament by the monarch. In contrast, the Commons were partly representative. Each county selected two knights of the shire, and towns were represented by two burgesses. As a consequence, the parliamentary electorate in the 1430s consisted of an estimated 15,000 people out of a population of around 2 million.4 Or 0.75 per cent of the population. Maddicott, ‘Parliament and the People’, 339–41, 348–9. MPs sitting in the Commons were an elite, but quite a broad elite that included a mixture of gentlemen, lawyers (who tended to come from the gentry) and wealthy townsmen. Over time townsmen were increasingly replaced by gentlemen, so that by the end of the sixteenth century gentry MPs outnumbered non-gentry townsmen by four to one.5 G. R. Elton, “The Body of the Whole Realm”: Parliament and Representation in Medieval and Tudor England (Charlottesville, 1969), pp. 31, 34.

In the fourteenth century most members of both parliamentary houses would have been manorial lords with servile tenants. Bruce Campbell calculates that half of all tenanted land was subject to serfdom in the fourteenth century.6 Bruce M. S. Campbell, ‘The Agrarian Problem in the Early Fourteenth Century’, Past and Present, 188 (2005), 37–8. So some support for the institution of serfdom might have been expected. However, all MPs were employers of wage labour. It was impossible for a wealthy man to live during this period without servants, or without craftsmen to build and fix houses, shoe horses and create clothing and saddlery. Many of those who owned land relied on casual labour to bring in the harvest. Thus, while Maddicott notes that, in the early fourteenth century, the Commons supported wider popular interests against the monarchy by seeking to curtail taxation and purveyancing,7 Maddicott, ‘Parliament and the People’, 343–5. after 1349 they were united as employers against the large section of the population who earned wages.8 Penn and Dyer suggest ‘at least one third of the population’ gained all or part of their livelihood from wages: ‘Wages and Earnings’, p. 356. See also Poos, ‘Social Context’, 28.

New laws or statutes had to be agreed by both houses of parliament and the crown before they could become law, and could originate from any of these bodies.9 Paul Cavill, The English Parliaments of Henry VII 1485–1504 (Oxford, 2009), chapter 5. Proposed legislation took the form of petitions in the medieval period, which were known as bills in the sixteenth century. Many petitions and bills were discussed but failed to become statutes. Bindoff’s study of the creation of the 1563 Statute of Artificers provides an example of how new legislation was formulated. He traces its origins to a committee of senior lawyers appointed by the newly crowned Elizabeth I’s Privy Council in December 1558 ‘for consideration of all things necessary for the Parliament’. This produced a document that listed twenty-three proposals, including a revival of locally set wage rates and restrictions on apprenticeship. These measures were put to parliament in early 1559, but remained at the discussion stage and were not passed. They were reintroduced at the next parliament in 1563, and after five readings and two ‘committals’ (when measures were referred back to a committee for further amendments) by the House of Commons over a period of three months, the Statute of Artificers became law.10 Bindoff, ‘Making of the Statute’, pp. 70–1, 80–91. The 1563 Statute repealed all previous labour laws and included a mixture of new and existing measures. Its diverse origins are demonstrated by its size and by the fact that some of its clauses overlap and partially contradict one another.11 Bindoff, ‘Making of the Statute’, pp. 59–60. Its creation resulted from the combined concerns of royal government, senior legal advisors, and MPs in the Commons, with support from the Lords.

The level of parliamentary concern is indicated by the sheer quantity of legislation relating to labour and the poor discussed and enacted between 1349 and the end of the sixteenth century. Parliaments were not held every year. Sixteenth-century parliaments were less frequent but stayed in session longer and passed more complex laws than those of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Table 1.1 summarises the frequency of parliaments, proposals for new legal measures relating to labour, vagrancy and the able-bodied poor, and the number of relevant statutes actually passed. It demonstrates that labour legislation and related measures was never far from being a topic of concern. The longest period in which no measures were discussed was the twenty-six years from 1446 to 1472; this was broken by a request from the Commons for various existing statutes to be enforced, including ‘statutes of labourers and artisans’.12 PR 1472.

The labour laws were unusual in creating a new system for enforcement as well as a set of regulations. In the 1350s special Justices of Labourers were commissioned to hear infringements. After 1360 their duties were fused with those of keeping the peace to create quarter sessions courts presided over by Justices of the Peace (JPs), held four times a year at county level to hear cases relating to the labour laws and other breaches of law and order.13 These developments were complex, as outlined in Putnam, Enforcement, pp. 10–26; Putnam, Proceedings, pp. xxiii–xxv. See also Poos, ‘Social Context’, 30; Anthony Musson and W. M. Ormrod, The Evolution of English Justice: Law, Politics and Society in the Fourteenth Century (Basingstoke, 1999), pp. 52–3. These courts endured until 1971. Detecting and reporting infringements at a local level, including enforcing the compulsory service clause, was the responsibility of village sub-constables and similar officials in towns.14 Poos, ‘Social Context’, 31. While JPs were drawn from the gentry,15 Musson and Ormrod, Evolution, pp. 56–7. constables were of middling social status and were selected from among the village elite. Like JPs, however, they would typically have been employers of labour and not waged workers themselves.16 Anthony Musson, ‘Sub-Keepers and Constables: the Role of Local Officials in Keeping the Peace in Fourteenth-Century England’, English Historical Review, 117 (2002), 1–23; Poos, ‘Social Context’, 35; Whittle, Development of Agrarian Capitalism, p. 56. The statutes required workers to be hired in public and servants sworn twice a year to uphold the legislation. This took place at petty sessions held within each community and presided over by constables.17 Statute 1351; evidence of enforcement: Poos, ‘Social context’, 31; Musson, ‘Sub-Keepers’, pp. 5, 20. This system of enforcement functioned in the late fourteenth century and was active in mid-sixteenth-century Norfolk and across the country after 1563.18 Poos, ‘Social Context’, 30–4; Whittle, Development of Agrarian Capitalism, pp. 276–87; Kelsall, Wage Regulation, chapter 4.

There was also a gender dimension to the labour laws and their enforcement. The laws themselves were remarkably egalitarian: the first clause, cited above, explicitly stated that women as well as men had a duty to work for wages. Yet those who created and enforced the laws were exclusively men. A number of historians have argued that women were particularly likely to be targeted for infringements, particularly for failing to enter service and ‘living at their own hands’, because patriarchal norms classified such behaviour as immoral.19 Bennett, ‘Compulsory service’; Wales, ‘“Living at their own hands”’; Paul Griffiths, Youth and Authority: Formative Experiences in England 1560–1640 (Oxford, 1996), pp. 378–80. Sandy Bardsley discusses women prosecuted for high wages: ‘Women’s Work Reconsidered: Gender and Wage Differentiation in Late Medieval England’, Past and Present, 165 (1999). Whittle found that men were likely to be placed in compulsory service in rural Norfolk: Development of Agrarian Capitalism, pp. 260–1.

Alan Harding notes that as JPs ‘the country gentry became the moral arbiters of society, enforcing their values in the courts’.20 Harding, ‘Revolt’, pp. 183–4. The same could be said of constables in the regulation of their communities. McIntosh found that, in the fifteenth century, when royal government was weaker, local officials became increasingly engaged in regulating social and moral order.21 McIntosh, Controlling Misbehaviour, pp. 129–34. So, while before the Black Death parliament represented the interests of the populace against the monarchy by curbing taxation, after the Black Death the labour legislation demonstrates that it increasingly represented the interests of employers against those of workers. Mechanisms of enforcing the labour laws drew on the support of wider social group of less wealthy employers and for the first time divided English society into two opposing social groups defined by employment relations.