Compulsion and subservience as aspects of wage labour

The first clause of the 1349 Ordinance ordered men and women aged under sixty who lacked property or a craft to be ‘bound to serve him which so shall him require’.1 SR, vol. 1, p. 307. Records of the enforcement of compulsory service survive for the late fourteenth century, the mid-sixteenth century and the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.2 Bennett, ‘Compulsory Service’, 17–25; Whittle, Development of Agrarian Capitalism, pp. 280–7; Kelsall, Wage Regulation, pp. 29–33; Kussmaul, Servants in Husbandry, p. 166; K. D. M. Snell, Annals of the Labouring Poor: Social Change and Agrarian England (Cambridge, 1985), p. 100; Griffiths, Youth and Authority, pp. 350–89; Wales, ‘“Living at their own hands”’. It was applied to both women and men, who were placed in year-long service contracts. In some places and periods women seem to have been particularly targeted with this clause.3 See footnote 35, above. Those who refused to enter compulsory service were prosecuted. A case from Norfolk in 1551 carefully rehearsed the stipulations of the 1349 Ordinance, noting that: ‘Robert Gyllam of Hanworth … who was “strong in body and about the age of 20” and had no craft, property, or living by which to support himself, and was not retained in anyone’s service’ was ordered into service of husbandry for one year.4 Whittle, Development of Agrarian Capitalism, p. 280.

Some of those placed in compulsory service were vagrant, in the sense of lacking a permanent home. A short-lived statute of 1572 allowed people to avoid punishment for vagrancy if they entered service, and assize records contain lists of those placed with employers. For instance, in Sussex six people were indicted for vagrancy on 31 May 1573: three (two men and a woman) were ‘bound in service’ with named employers, one (a married man) was prosecuted as a vagrant, and two (both women) were discharged.5 J. S. Cockburn, Calendar of Assize Records: Sussex Indictments, Elizabeth I (London, 1975), p. 96. Many of those placed in compulsory service were not vagrants without a home, however. Some lived with their parents; others accused of running ‘from place to place like a rogue’ nonetheless had a parish of residence.6 Whittle, Development of Agrarian Capitalism, p. 283. Instead they were defined by being relatively poor, often young, and not actively seeking to enter service.

Evidence from mid-sixteenth-century Norfolk demonstrates that all the mechanisms of enforcement were in use, from petty sessions to detect the ‘unemployed’ and warrants forcing people into compulsory service to prosecution and imprisonment of those who resisted or absconded.7 Whittle, Development of Agrarian Capitalism, p. 285. Similar documentation does not exist for other counties. However, a lack of documentation does not necessarily mean a lack of enforcement.8 An argument also made strongly by Bennett, ‘Compulsory Service’, 15–18. We know that quarter sessions continued to be held between the late fourteenth and late sixteenth century, although only fragmentary records survive.9 Putnam, Proceedings. See pp. cxxi–cxxiv for her comments on geographical and chronological variations in enforcement of the labour laws. Some manorial courts in the period 1450–1550 reported people for ‘living suspiciously’ and in the sixteenth century occasionally ordered people into service.10 McIntosh, Controlling Misbehaviour, p. 92. It is important to note that compulsory service was only likely to appear in the courts if it was resisted. The law allowed employers to force unemployed people into compulsory service with the support of local officials.11 Bennett, ‘Compulsory Service’, p. 15; Putnam, Proceedings, p. cxxiv; John Bellamy, Criminal Law and Society in late medieval and Tudor England (Gloucester, 1984), pp. 12–13. Further, the threat of compulsory service was sometimes enough to encourage people to enter service by their own arrangement. So the existence of documentation is not necessarily a good measure of the wider effect of the laws.

The range of compulsory work was expanded in 1563 to include not only compulsory service in husbandry by the year in the countryside for men and women aged between twelve and sixty (clause V) but also compulsory service by the year in craft occupations for those with appropriate training who were unmarried or aged under thirty (clause III); more casual forms of compulsory work ‘by the year by the week or day’ for unmarried women aged twelve to forty in towns (clause XVII); compulsory harvest work by artificers (clause XV); and compulsory apprenticeship in husbandry or crafts for those ‘required by any householder’ (clauses XVIII, XIX, XXVIII).12 SR, vol. 4, pp. 414–22. There were qualifications about the type of householders that could take apprentices; see clauses XVIII and XIX. Unlike compulsory service, which lasted for one year and was paid, compulsory apprenticeship was unpaid and longer term. The 1563 Statute considered compulsory apprenticeship appropriate for those aged eleven to seventeen, lasting until they were twenty-one, or for seven years in crafts.

The idea of compulsory apprenticeship had been developing in law since the Vagrancy Statute of 1536, which ordered that children aged between five and fourteen living by begging or idleness should be placed with masters of husbandry or crafts ‘to be taught’.13 SR, vol. 3, p. 559 (clause VI). This was developed further by a 1549 statute that specified that, if the parents were beggars, children could be taken from them without their permission and placed as a ‘servant without wages, to what labour, occupation or service soever’ until they reached the age of eighteen years.14 SR, vol. 4, p. 116 (clause X). These provisions were consolidated in the English poor laws of 1597–1601, which remained in force until 1834 and which allowed those in charge of poor relief ‘to bind poor children apprentices’ until they were twenty-one (girls) or twenty-four (boys).15 SR, vol. 4, p. 897 (clause IV). This applied to ‘children of all such whose parents shall not … be thought able to keep or maintain their children’.16 SR, vol. 4, pp. 962–3 (clauses I and III), confirming almost identical statements in 1597. Unlike other work-creation schemes for the poor, this provision was commonly and actively pursued until the early nineteenth century.17 Hindle, On the Parish? pp. 191–223; Katrina Honeyman, Child workers in England 1780–1820: Parish Apprentices and the Making of the Early Industrial Labour Force (Aldershot, 2007); Jocelyn and R. D. Dunlop, English Apprenticeship and Child Labour: A History (London, 1912), chapter 16. Compulsion was thus an important underlying principle of the labour laws and associated legislation. People who lacked a certain amount of land or level of wealth were assumed to have a duty to serve in wealthier households.

The second strand of the laws set out to undermine workers’ power to negotiate labour contracts freely with employers. This was done by setting maximum wage rates and specifying hours of work. Contracts had to be made in public, and workers and employers were sworn to obey these laws twice a year. While breaking labour contracts had been illegal before 1349, the labour laws increased the punishment for workers but not employers,18 Steinfeld, Invention of Free Labor, pp. 3–4, 23–4, 113–14. Servants continued to be imprisoned for leaving service without a master’s consent through to the late eighteenth century. and service was preferred over day labouring. Service, in which the worker became a member of the employer’s household, increased the employer’s control over the worker. During a contract, servants had a duty to obey their master and could be asked to do any work task and work unlimited hours.19 In the early twentieth century servants worked sixteen hours a day, 6.5 days a week: Laura Schwartz, Feminism and the Servant Problem (Cambridge, 2019), p. 30. The employer had a duty to police their servants’ behaviour and morals.20 On the legal status of servants see Clark, ‘Medieval Labor Law’, 346–7; Steinfeld, Invention of Free Labor, pp. 27–34. See also Griffiths, Youth and Authority, chapter 6. The laws also controlled mobility, inhibiting people’s ability to search for employment freely.

Legal wage rates were set nationally in 1388, 1446, 1495 and 1515 and locally by county from 1390 to 1446 and from 1560 onwards, as shown in Table 1.2.21 E. A. McArthur, ‘A Fifteenth Century Assessment of Wages’, The English Historical Review, 13 (1898), 299–302; Woodward, ‘Background’. In the late fourteenth century most recorded prosecutions under the labour laws concerned wages, but after 1400 cases concerning broken contracts and compulsory service were more common.22 Poos, ‘Social Context’, 30–31; Penn and Dyer, ‘Wages and Earnings’, 358–9; Bennett, ‘Compulsory Service’, 16–17. Nonetheless, in the late fifteenth century a new wage assessment caused open rebellion in Kent – suggesting that legal wage rates were enforced, at least in certain times and places.23 Cavill, ‘Problem of Labour’. Prosecutions for broken contracts were the most persistent type of court case citing the labour laws. For instance, these are found in the central court of Common Pleas across the fifteenth century. Figure 1.1 shows the incidence of debt cases where the plaintiff claimed money owing as a consequence of a broken contract and cited the labour laws.24 Relevant cases were identified by using the indexes available from the Anglo-American Legal Tradition (AALT) for selected years: http://aalt.law.uh.edu/Indices/CP40Indices/CP40_Indices.html [accessed 18 June 2020]. The cases came from all parts of the country, from Yorkshire to Kent and from Devon to Norfolk. They were common in the early fifteenth century before tailing off after 1460.25 Eastern England (Lincolnshire, Norfolk, Suffolk, Cambridgeshire) and the West Country (Gloucestershire, Wiltshire, Somerset) were particularly over-represented in comparison with their 1377 population estimates. Common Pleas cases from fifteenth-century London record the counter-pleas in which defendants explained why they left their employment, as shown in Table 1.3.26 Analysis data from Jonathan Mackman and Matthew Stevens, Court of Common Pleas: the National Archives, Cp40 1399–1500 (London, 2010), British History Online http://www.british-history.ac.uk/no-series/common-pleas/1399–1500 [accessed 18 June 2020]. These demonstrate the difficulties that could emerge during a period of service and the ways employers could use the law to harass former employees.

Workers needed to move around freely to seek favourable terms of employment, yet doing so made them liable to prosecution. From 1388 those on the move without documentation could be prosecuted as vagrants. This was confirmed in 1563, when servants were ordered not to leave employment and depart from a parish of residence without a testimonial letter sealed by a constable.27 SR, vol. 4, p. 416 (clause VII). As we have seen, the vagrancy laws were explicit in including ‘servants out of service’, and ‘common labourers’ within their remit. Punishments for vagrancy set out in the statutes included being imprisoned (1383), set in stocks for three days (1495), whipped (1531), mutilated by having ‘the upper part of the gristle of his right ear clean cut off’ (1536), branded with a hot iron and placed in slavery for two years (1547, repealed 1549), imprisoned, whipped or compelled to do service (1572) and whipped and detained in a house of correction (1597). Thus servants who left service without permission, or even those who left legally but failed to obtain the necessary documentation, were liable to swift and direct forms of punishment, bolstering the inequality between worker and employer. Employers who failed to pay wages or terminated contracts early could be prosecuted in the courts, but were not subject to such immediate and humiliating punishment. Concern about vagrancy in the sixteenth century thus was not only about groups of beggars and petty thieves moving about the countryside, but about the presence of a large wage-earning class within the population, and the desire to regulate and discipline them in the interests of employers.

To see the labour laws as merely a mechanism to cap wages is to overlook their main intent and impact. The laws were intended to compel people to work for others, and to tip the balance of power between employer and worker heavily towards the employer. They were intended not only to provide a labour force but to enforce subservience and a particular social order. They were enforced not only by bringing cases to court but by immediate action: placing people in compulsory service, putting them in the stocks or whipping them as vagrants. The full power of these laws lay not only in enforcement, which operated more effectively in some counties than others, but in the threat of enforcement, which caused workers to tolerate situations that they might otherwise have rejected.