The classification of wage workers

The common understanding, but also confusion, surrounding the three main types of worker are evident from other fourteenth-century documents, most notably the Poll Tax returns and manorial accounts.2 Both types of document are in Latin. The Poll Tax returns of 1380–1 recorded occupations. Rodney Hilton gives the example of the rural parish of Brewood in Staffordshire. Among the 249 taxpayers in 1380–1 were forty-five peasant heads of household (men described as cultor), forty artificers or retailers (men or women described by specialist occupations), fifteen taxpaying servants who lived in the households of others (serviens, abbreviated as ‘s’) and thirty-five labourers (labor), of whom twelve were married and headed their own households.3 R. H. Hilton, The English Peasantry in the Later Middle Ages (Oxford, 1975), pp. 34–5 and Carolyn Fenwick (ed.), The Poll Taxes of 1377, 1379 and 1381: Part 2, Lincolnshire to Westmoreland (Oxford, 2001), pp. 477–8 (the descriptions are in abbreviated Latin); see also Poos, ‘Social Context’, 24. All people aged over 15 were liable for the tax. He observes that, as well as living in the households of others, servants were usually unmarried, often female and rarely paid the full tax quota; on the other hand, labourers were more likely to pay the full tax and be married and male. However, Larry Poos notes that ‘late medieval England did not possess a completely unambiguous terminology to denote what historians understand by “servant” and “labourer”’: some servants lived away from their employer and the term ‘famulus’ was used for both types of worker.4 L. R. Poos, A Rural Society after the Black Death: Essex 1350–1525 (New York, 1991), pp. 185–6; see also R. H. Hilton, Class Conflict and the Crisis of Feudalism (London, 1985), p. 261. Famuli were manorial employees. They appear in manorial accounts that survive in their thousands for the period 1250–1450, recording the economy of the large demesne farms owned by manorial lords. Manorial famuli were normally paid every quarter or half year and did not necessarily live with their employer. As well as ploughmen, who were typically young unmarried men, they included shepherds and carters, who were more likely to be married with households of their own.5 M. M. Postan, ‘The Famulus: the Estate Labourer in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries’, Economic History Review Supplement 2 (1954); David Farmer, ‘The Famuli in the Later Middle Ages’, in R. H. Britnell and J. Hatcher (eds), Progress and Problems in Medieval England (Cambridge, 1996); Jordan Claridge and John Langdon, ‘The Composition of Famuli Labour on English demesnes, c.1300’, Agricultural History Review, 63 (2015). Manorial accounts also record payments to casual agricultural workers employed by task or day to thresh, mow and reap, but these workers are rarely named or described. They also frequently record payments to craftsmen such as smiths, carpenters and other building workers, sometimes paid by the task or day and sometimes retained on long-term contracts like famuli. Confusion is caused by the fact that both ‘servant’ and ‘labourer’ could be used to mean wage workers in general, as well as to refer to more specific types of worker.6 On the wider use of ‘servant’ see Steinfeld, Invention of Free Labor, p. 18–22. For instance, the 1349 Ordinance did not use the term ‘labourer’ and was glossed in the original French as a ‘proclamation concerning servants’, while the 1351 Statute was entered in the Parliament Roll as ‘Statute of Artificers and Servants’.7 SR, vol. 1, p. 307 and PR 1351. By 1360, however, the 1351 Statute was referred to as ‘the Statute of Labourers of old times made’.8 SR, vol. 1, p. 366.

The remainder of this section looks in turn at the classification of servants, labourers, artificers and vagrants within the laws. With regards to servants, the labour laws made a transition over time from assuming that servants were manorial famuli to using the term ‘servant in husbandry’. For instance, the first clause of the 1351 Statute addressed the typical categories of manorial famuli when it ordered all ‘carters, ploughmen, drivers of the plough, shepherds, swineherds, deies (dairywomen), and all other servants’ to accept wages at pre-plague levels and ‘serve by a whole year, or by other usual terms, and not by the day’.9 SR, vol. 1, p. 311. From 1388 Statutes began to set new wage levels,10 The earlier statutes had tried to enforce pre-plague wage levels. and this involved describing the servants who received different levels of pay, as shown in Table 1.2. Initially, as in 1351, servants were understood as having specialist roles typical of manorial demesne farms, but by the mid-fifteenth century they were divided into groups according to level of skill, gender and age. This transition occurred at the same time that manorial lords largely abandoned direct demesne farming and leased out their demesnes to farmers.11 Bruce M. S. Campbell, English Seigniorial Agriculture 1250–1450 (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 3, 29.

The annual wages listed in Table 1.2 imply annual contracts. However, the statutes remained vague about the length of time servants should be employed for. The Statute of 1351 mentioned working for the ‘whole year’, but qualified this with ‘or other usual terms’.12 SR, vol. 1, p. 311. It was not until 1549–50 that a statute specified the requirement that ‘all servants of husbandry unmarried’ should ‘serve by the whole year, and not go by the day wage’.13 SR, vol. 4, p. 121. The 1563 Statute of Artificers was again unclear, stipulating that compulsory service for the unemployed should be ‘by the year’, but not specifying whether normal contracts should always be of that length.14 SR, vol. 4, p. 415. Wage accounts from the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries show much variation and suggest that a quarter year or six months was the usual understanding of ‘a longer term’, rather than twelve months.15 Jane Whittle, ‘A Different Pattern of Employment: Servants in Rural England c.1500–1660’, in Jane Whittle (ed.), Servants in Rural Europe c.1400–c.1900 (Woodbridge, 2017). It is also notable that the statutes make no explicit mention of servants living in their employer’s household. From 1446 onwards the provision of ‘meat and drink’ with wages is specified, but this was also the case for day labourers, who received meals when they worked. Nor was the assumption that servants were typically unmarried mentioned until 1549.16 SR, vol. 4, p. 121. It seems that neither being married nor having children was seen as a barrier to being placed in service. Instead the key determining factor was whether or not someone had sufficient property to support themselves. The 1446 Statute ruled that ‘no man shall be excused to serve by the year’ unless they had enough land to provide ‘continual occupation’ for one man: this suggests that some householders could be placed in service.17 SR, vol. 2, p. 337.

Despite the preference for placing people in service, as discussed further in the next section, the laws conceded that casual labourers were also part of the economy. In particular, they were needed to meet peaks in labour demand during the agricultural year. The Ordinance of 1349 did not explicitly address casual labourers as a group. But it did rule that ‘any reaper, mower or other workman’ should not depart from ‘any man’s service’ before the end of the agreed term. However, the 1351 Statute mentions wage rates by the task and by the day, while the Statute of 1390, which allowed JPs to set local wage rates, attached the description ‘labourer’ specifically to workers paid by the day. This use of ‘labourer’ was continued in the fifteenth century. National wage levels set in 1446 acknowledged for the first time labourers who worked outside of agriculture and female harvest labourers, as well as male agricultural labourers. It also set wages for winter and summer, reflecting the different hours of work. By 1495 working hours for labourers and artificers were being described in increasing detail, specifying the number and length of meal breaks and what times of the year it was permissible to have a midday nap. These provisions were repeated in the Statutes of 1515 and 1563. Thus day labourers were an accepted part of England’s wage labour force.

Harvest work was consistently noted as an exception to other guidelines, reflecting a desire to ensure that workers were available at this time of peak demand, even if that transgressed normal boundaries. It was acknowledged as a legitimate cause for the large-scale seasonal movement of workers. The 1351 Statute stated that workers should ‘serve the summer … where he dwelleth in the winter’, but made an exception for the people in various upland regions such as ‘the counties of Stafford, Lancaster, Derby, Craven [in Yorkshire], of the Marches of Wales and Scotland, and other Places’ who may ‘come in time of August and labour in other counties, and safely return, as they were wont to do before this Time’.18 SR, vol. 1, p. 312. These exceptions continued in the sixteenth century. The 1572 Statute against Vagabondage noted that it did not ‘extend to any cockers or harvest folks that travel into any country of this realm for harvest work, either corn harvest or hay harvest, if they do work and labour accordingly’.19 SR, vol. 4, p. 592. In 1388 craftsmen were enlisted into the harvest labour force with the order that ‘artificers, servants and apprentices, which be of no great reputation, and of which craft or mystery a man hath no great need, in harvest time, shall be compelled to serve in harvest, to cut, gather, and bring in the corn’.20 SR, vol. 2, p. 56. This was repeated in 1563 and extended to the hay harvest.

Artificers were seen as a threat to the employing and consuming class via their demands for higher wages or higher prices for the goods they produced. Yet the labour laws went beyond the regulation of prices and wages, usurping the role of craft guilds in regulating entrance into the crafts and work practices. In doing so the government displayed two overriding concerns: one was to protect the primacy of agriculture in the economy, and the other was a fear of craftsmen’s independence. The two were connected because structures of landownership allowed the elite to control the agricultural economy via manorial lordship, whereas they had no such control over those employed in crafts and industry. Measures indicate a concern for defining craft workers as separate from the agricultural economy, to which they were nonetheless subjugated, as the requirement for harvest labour indicates. While publicly justified in terms of ensuring the food supply, the primacy of agriculture also served the private interests of the majority of parliamentarians. Nonetheless, craft employment was consistently attractive to workers across the period, providing an escape from servile lord–tenant relations in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and a more profitable alternative to agricultural labour for the land-poor in the sixteenth century.

The fear that craft employment was causing a shortage of agricultural labour was first voiced in 1388. That statute specified that no man or women who ‘use to labour at the plough and cart, or other labour or service of husbandry’ up to the age of twelve was to enter any ‘mystery or handicraft’. This plea was sharpened in 1406 when it was stated that ‘there is so great scarcity of labourers and other servants of husbandry that the gentlemen and other people of the realm be greatly impoverished’. Property qualifications for entry into crafts were introduced, although in 1429 London gained an exemption from these. The Statute of Artificers of 1563 strengthened parliamentary control further, with wealth and property qualifications set for parents wishing to apprentice children into a comprehensive list of crafts.

The labour laws also increasingly micro-managed the work practices of craftsmen. In 1402 a whole statute was devoted to stopping artificers being paid a full day’s pay for holidays or half-days. Hours of work were specified from 1445 onwards, while in 1563 building workers were banned from leaving jobs unfinished. In the sixteenth century journeymen, the most independent and mobile subset of craftsmen, drew particular attention. A statute of 1549 regulating textile workers expressed disapproval of the ‘many young folks and servants of sundry occupations’ who after completing their apprenticeships were able to work ‘at their liberty … to the intent they will live idly and at their pleasure flee and resort from place to place’. The law banned unmarried journeymen from working for less than three months at a time. In 1563 this was extended to one year, and applied to all unmarried workers and all workers under the age of thirty in all crafts.

The power of the labour laws lay not only in regulating work but in criminalising unemployment. This was recognised in the Ordinance of 1349, which noted in its final clause that ‘many valiant beggars as long as they may live of begging do refuse to labour, giving themselves to idleness and vice, and sometime to theft and other abominations’, and ordered that none should give alms to anyone able to work so that ‘they may be compelled to labour for their necessary living’.21 SR, vol. 1, p. 308. ‘Valiant’ in this context means ‘sturdy’ or able-bodied. Yet there remains confusion about the nature of the people targeted as ‘idle’ by this and later statutes. This confusion is partly linguistic and partly a matter of interpretation, because the laws applied to a wide range of people. The statutes use the words ‘vagrant’, ‘vagabond’ and ‘vacabond’ interchangeably. Up until the mid-fifteenth century, when the original statutes were written in French, the term vagrant was used. The earliest vagrancy statute in English, that of 1495, used the obsolete term ‘vacabond’, which derives from the Latin verb vacere, meaning ‘to be unoccupied or idle’, whereas vagabond, like vagrant, derives from the Latin vagari, meaning ‘to wander’.22 Oxford English Dictionary Online, https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/220882#eid16 067803 [accessed 24 April 2020]. Throughout the sixteenth century the terms vacabond and vagabond were both used in statutes.23 In 1495, 1531, 1536, 1549 and 1576 vacabond was used; 1503–4 and 1572 used both vacabond and vagabond; in 1547 and 1598 the term vagabond was preferred. The interchangeability of the two words highlights the laws’ concern both with ‘idleness’ and unemployment and with ‘wandering’ and mobility.

Early statutes aimed at the mobile and unemployed also vacillated in their concerns. A 1360 Statute highlighted those who had broken contracts – ‘labourers or artificers who absent themselves from their services’ – ruling that they should be branded with an ‘F’ as a ‘token of falsity’. In 1383 a statute sought to punish vagrants and ‘faitours’ who wandered ‘from place to place’,24 SR, vol. 2, pp. 32–3. ‘Faitour’ is an obscure medieval term for ‘a vagrant who shams illness or pretends to tell fortunes’: Oxford English Dictionary Online: https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/67773?redirectedFrom=faitour#eid [accessed 24 February 2020]. while in 1388 the focus was on ‘every person that goes begging, and is able to serve or labour’. In 1446 it was emphasised that even people with their own house and land could be ordered to serve by the year ‘upon the pain to be justified as a vagrant’, if their land was insufficient to occupy them fully.25 That is, punished as a vagrant: SR, vol. 2, p. 339. A 1495 Statute urged punishment ‘of every vagabond, hermit or beggar able to labour’.26 SR, vol. 2, p. 569. Concern about vagrancy heightened in the sixteenth century and statutes became increasingly eloquent and detailed in their descriptions of those they sought to punish, but continued to include labourers and unemployed servants in their remit. The 1547 Statute, which notoriously introduced fixed-term slavery as punishment, was aimed at men and women who:

A new statute in 1549 noted that ‘such common labourers … using loitering and refusing to work for such reasonable wage’ would be ‘adjudged vacabond’. The statutes of 1572 and 1597–8 set out long lists of different types of people deemed to be ‘rogues, vacabonds and sturdy beggars’. Among various categories of fraudsters, travellers and entertainers are ‘all common labourers being persons able in body using loitering, and refusing to work for … reasonable wages’.27 Same wording in both statutes: SR, vol. 4, pp. 592, 899.

The vagrancy laws are particularly vivid in their moral judgements of people without property who refused to work under the terms set out in the labour laws, but all the labour laws are imbued with the idea that such people had a duty not just to work but to serve. That is, ‘idleness’ was not a failure to work per se, but a failure to offer yourself as an obedient employee in return for low wages and thus accept a subservient position in society. The exigencies of agricultural production required the tolerance of some casual seasonal day labour, but the laws indicate that preferred modes of wage labour were longer-term service contracts in which the employer had tighter control over the worker’s life as a whole.