Age of Invention: The Century-Long Depression

There’s an old proverb about England, current in the sixteenth century, that it was a hell for horses, a paradise for women, and a purgatory or prison for servants. I still don’t quite know what to make of the first and second parts, but a few months ago I finally began to understand how England was a prison for servants. Compared to the world of work today, with all its occasional frustrations and boredoms, having to work for a wage in the four or so centuries c.1350-1750 was a dystopian nightmare, with England pursuing policies sometimes so absurdly and ambitiously oppressive that as I discovered more about them my jaw just kept on dropping.

I believe their impact has been highly underrated, based on the belief that they weren’t regularly enforced. But the evidence, to me, suggests that they were on the whole adhered to, and so they would have hugely distorted the functioning of the English economy. I haven’t seen the full scale of the policies set out before in all their detail, and I think some important details have hitherto been missed or misinterpreted. So what follows is the long, appalling history of how England created its prison for servants, and of how this led to a century of economic depression.

The prison’s walls were first erected in the midst of the Black Death, when an estimated half of the English population was wiped out. As the plague still raged, in 1349 Edward III issued an emergency ordinance to try and contain the economic fallout. Even though half the population died, their gold and silver coins survived, so that there was suddenly twice as much coinage in circulation per head. And so one of the immediate effects was for the price of everything, including both goods and services, to rapidly rise. This rapid inflation, brought on as it was by so many people dying, inevitably led to higher wages being demanded for all kinds of work. “Seeing the necessity of masters and great scarcity of servants”, the ordinance explained, workers now found themselves able to pick and choose who they worked for, and to hold out for much higher wages than before.

But not if the government could help it. The response of Edward’s 1349 ordinance to the inflation was to simply ban it, making it illegal for anyone, whether a merchant or a worker, to charge more than before. But this in turn required the creation of an extraordinary, novel system of oppression for workers.

Waged workers before 1349 did not enjoy great conditions, but much like today they were typically free to work for whomever they pleased, and to bargain for as high a wage as employers were willing to pay.¹ There were still many serfs or villeins who could technically be forced to work for their lords, cultivating the lands that the lords managed directly. But only about 10% of peasant labour was claimed in this way, and otherwise even serfs could move around and work for whomever and at whatever rates they pleased.² It’s often more accurate to think of villeins of the fourteenth century not as a kind of worker, but as a species of rent-paying farmer, locked into a hereditary tenure whose terms were governed by custom, and with only about a third of them owing just a small portion of rent in the form of labour.³ Villeins could even be employers themselves, especially when they managed to acquire larger land-holdings to farm — something that only accelerated as the plague killed off their relatives and neighbours.

On the whole then, workers before 1349 had had great freedom to contract for work, taking it or leaving it on their own terms. It was just that with the sheer number of people in England at the time, few could afford to be picky, resulting in low wages and often poor terms of employment. Yet the Black Death shifted the balance of supply and demand in workers’ favour, so their freedom would have to be brought to an end if the government was to stamp inflation out.

The Statutes of Labourers

In order to prevent workers holding out for the best-possible wages, Edward III’s 1349 ordinance decreed that “every man and woman of our realm of England, of what condition he be, free or bond, able in body” should be forced to work for the first employer who attempted to hire them, and at the old wages too. There were exceptions of course, for workers who were already under contract, for people who were too old or infirm to work, and for those who were otherwise likely to be employers — merchants, craftsmen, farmers, and landlords. But anyone else who tried to withhold their labour, hoping to wait for higher wages by being “idle”, was to be imprisoned (as was anyone who gave alms to beggars, on the grounds that it would allow the able-bodied to stay out of work).

Although the ordinance forbade workers to withhold their labour entirely, however, there were still plenty of jobs to choose from, with each employer still willing to outbid the last. Workers, while taking care to stay out of idleness, could still easily pursue higher wages by travelling longer distances to wherever the pay was best, or by flitting from employer to employer, only ever contracting to work for a day or week at a time, and so able to leave as soon as a better offer came along.

So just a year and a half later, Parliament cracked down. The 1351 Statute of Labourers forbade workers from leaving their home towns or villages in search of better-paid work during harvest-time. It forbade most agricultural workers from serving by the day, pushing them into longer and ideally annual contracts. And it ramped up enforcement. All hiring was to be done openly, in a market town, rather than in private, while all workers were to appear before the local constables every six months to swear, on oath, that they would abide by the statute’s provisions — a serious requirement for a much more religious age. Those who refused to swear, or who failed to keep to their oath, were to be imprisoned for three days in the stocks, with wooden boards fastened around their ankles while they sat with their legs outstretched. Every town, the statute ordered, was to ensure it had stocks, which were a much cheaper and more uncomfortable alternative to gaol. (The stocks are not to be confused with the pillory, which instead trapped the prisoner’s head and hands while they stood.)

This still, however, left the problem of employers outbidding one another. The 1349 ordinance had forbidden anyone from paying or promising to pay higher wages than before, allowing employers who saw their workers being poached by a better-paying neighbour to sue for damages in the manorial courts. But the lords and nobles who presided over those courts were often among the worst offenders themselves, having the means to outbid humbler farmers for employees. As the representatives of the lesser gentry in Parliament, the Commons, complained in 1351, workers were all too able to “withdraw themselves to serve great men”, who were shamelessly abusing their power and influence to pay them wages at twice or even three times the legal rate.

So the statute also centralised enforcement. It set out national maximum wages for the various kinds of work done by the day or the task, to prevent different regions outcompeting one another by pretending that their pre-plague wages had been higher than they actually were. And it enabled the king to appoint officials, the Justices of Labourers (whose powers were in the 1360s to be subsumed into the office of Justices of the Peace), to decide on each particular area’s wages below the national cap. The Justices were to hold court in the region to which they had been assigned four times a year — what came to be known as the Quarter Sessions — where they would judge the cases brought against those taking or giving too much pay.

Typically, there were two ways that people were formally accused of a crime and put on trial: they were either sued directly by the wronged party, or were else indicted by a presenting jury (what would nowadays be called a grand jury), drawn from among their neighbours. Whereas employers might theoretically sue their workers for taking excess wages, however, there was little incentive to do so, not least because they were themselves often just as complicit in the crime for having enticed workers away from other employers with the promise of higher pay. Those who did would probably also find themselves unable to find workers ever again. And as for the presenting juries, it was unlikely that villagers would risk causing strife among so many of their neighbours, especially when they were already struggling to keep their workers from leaving.

So the 1351 statute put in a juicy incentive for presenting juries to indict. By allowing the accumulated fines from the recovery of excess wages to offset the taxes assigned to every village and town to pay for Edward III’s ongoing war against France, anyone who was not a waged labourer themselves — lords, merchants, master craftsmen, farmers, and even villeins — could use the new law to effectively pass their tax bills onto the workers who had taken too much. It seems to have done the trick. In 1352, over 7,500 workers in Essex alone — approximately 15% of its entire adult population — were indicted by their neighbours and forced to hand over their excess wages, offsetting the whole county’s tax bill by over half.⁴

The current consensus among historians is that enforcement of the new labour laws collapsed in the 1360s, especially as the tax incentive was removed and the Black Death returned, raising the pressures of inflation yet again. But I’m not so sure. Hints of drop in the number of people being sued each year doesn’t really tell us much: it might be a sign of dropping enforcement, or just as easily be a sign of growing acquiescence to the law. And as for the complaints of contemporaries about workers’ demands, which are often cited as the clearest evidence that the laws were failing to bite, I think they actually show the exact opposite.

Take the complaints of contemporary employers that the typical worker “wickedly loafs everywhere”, singing and drinking instead of doing their tasks, being generally “sluggish”, and each day working just a third as hard as before.⁵ This was not something that would have occurred had wages been able, either legally or illegally, to rise to meet demand. It instead suggests that workers were being generally and often drastically underpaid, and so — perfectly rationally — didn’t bother to work as hard.

Or take the many complaints of workers’ outrageous taste for luxury, which appears to have been the result of employers competing with one another for workers by exploiting various loopholes in the law. Although the statute stipulated the amount of cash that workers could be paid, both with and without providing them with food and drink,⁶ it didn’t say anything about the quality or even the quantity of that food or drink. So instead of giving them bread made of rye, barley or beans, perhaps with a slice of old salted bacon to sweeten the deal, employers now had to provide their workers with only the best-quality wheaten bread, and with freshly-cooked meat still warm from the pot. Instead of providing them with mere water to quench their thirst, employers now had to give them the freshest of ales. As one contemporary complained, the servants were now demanding “to be better fed than those who hired them”.⁷

Take also the fact that the law said nothing about paying workers in other goods, or about their broader terms of service. Workers who agreed to serve for some time, receiving room and board in their employer’s house, were no longer content with simple straw pallets, but had to be given such luxuries as proper beds and pillows.⁸ And workers were frequently paid in the form of increasingly luxurious cloth or clothes. Whereas the clothing of servants had once been “of grey material”, now they apparently “seized upon ermine and grey furs for trimming”.⁹ Servants were becoming so well-dressed, one chronicler worried, that “one person cannot be discerned from another in splendour of dress or belongings.” It was becoming increasingly difficult to tell apart a serf from a freeman, or even from a gentleman, by sight. And with their better dress, servants were becoming increasingly haughty. Employers “dare not challenge or offend their servants”, the Commons complained in 1376, but “give them whatever they wish to ask”.¹⁰

This was all certainly a sign of growing competition for workers, but it’s hard to imagine it being the subject of so much specific complaint, or of such persistent resentment, if cash wages had simply risen to meet the demand. None of these myriad little appeasements or raises in-kind would have been necessary if employers had generally simply broken the law and competed by paying wages well above the caps — much like how airlines before the 1979 in the United States weren’t allowed to compete for customers by lowering their prices, and so had had to offer increasingly luxurious flying experiences with cocktail bars and piano lounges instead. What we see here are indications that the law was being taken seriously.

Testing the Limits

Even if the law was widely followed, this could never be universal. There’s always someone willing to test the limits.

Within cities, carpenters and stonemasons began to effectively unionise, assembling and swearing oaths to one another that they would all refuse to work unless for higher wages. They appear to have got around the caps by contracting to work by the week, so that they could be paid for days, including holy days, that they did not actually work — a strategy that confused the usual punishment of fining them for excess wages, as it was not always clear by how much they’d actually exceeded the cap. So Parliament responded in 1361 by making all their “congregations, chapters, ordinances and oaths betwixt them … void and wholly annulled”. It forbade contracting by the week, insisting on carpenters and masons being paid by the day. And more broadly it forbade all payment of wages to any kind of worker for festival days. To take some of the sting out of the change, it did very slightly increase the permissible wages for both carpenters and masons too.¹¹

But Parliament also enforced the labour laws more harshly. It replaced the usual fines for taking excess wages with 15 days’ imprisonment — presumably in the stocks, given this was often the only form of prison that most villages could afford — to then be continued indefinitely in a nearby gaol until the guilty worker “justify themselves”.¹² Local officials were also themselves threatened with substantial fines if they let any such prisoner out on bail, with a generous bounty paid to whoever informed on them.

And there was a crackdown on workers breaking their contracts in search of higher wages, fleeing not just into neighbouring villages, but beyond the grasp of their local Justices into other counties and cities. Parliament made is much easier for their employers to have them arrested and returned, after which the runaway worker was to “be burnt in the forehead with an iron made and formed to the letter ‘F’, in token of falsity”. Any city leaders who failed to expedite the worker’s return, once demanded, was to be punished by a steep fine, with a third of the money going to the aggrieved employer.¹³ With it now becoming potentially profitable simply to ask, employers gained both the means and the incentive to track their runaway workers down.

In 1362, as the plague returned to take its toll, the labour laws were even extended to priests. Just like other waged workers, they were not to be paid above certain amounts. Those who took more than the legal maximum were to be suspended from office unless they returned the excess to their church within the month. Churches that paid their priests above the caps were to be fined double the excess, the sums seized by the local bishop and spent on alms. Noblemen who overpaid their chaplains, their offers of better pay having enticed many priests away from public-facing jobs, leaving whole parishes un-shepherded, were to be fined most steeply of all. Parliament even restricted the movement of priests in search of better jobs — they were not to leave a bishop’s jurisdiction to work in another without his explicit approval — and sought to ensure minimum levels of service. Given the risk that priests might respond to the wage caps by neglecting their duties — if paid less, they might simply work less too — they were threatened with suspension if they failed to follow orders within three weeks.¹⁴

Most ambitiously of all, however, in 1363 Parliament moved to cap the various in-kind payments that had been used to supplement cash wages. Decrying “the outrageous and excessive apparel of diverse people against their estate and degree”, it restricted the kinds of meals that servants and other workers could be served, and capped the values of the cloth that they could possess, let alone wear. Mere farm labourers and servants, for example, along with their families, were to “not take nor wear no manner of cloth but blanket and russet wool” worth under a shilling, and not to wear girdles of any better material than linen. Craftsmen and yeomen were allowed cloth worth under 40 shillings, and forbidden from wearing silks, buttons, rings, garters, ribbons, chains, or anything embroidered; and so on and so forth through all the social classes.¹⁵

But this was a step too far. With legal wages being held so far below demand, and with fancy foods and clothes being some of the few legal means to make up the gap, there was only so much extra pressure that the labour market could take. The next time Parliament sat, in 1364, the ban on in-kind payments was repealed.¹⁶

The Flight from the Farms

In the decade 1375 to 1385, the post-plague inflation came to an end, and many prices — particularly of grain —suddenly stagnated or slumped.¹⁷ On the face of it, you would think that the end of inflation would have also spelled an end to the need to enforce the labour laws, as the overall gap between the wages that employers needed to pay, and what they could legally pay, should have shrunk. But the slump mainly only affected farming, while other sectors like tin-mining, fishing, leather-making, and especially cloth-making all surged.

With farmers struggling to sell their produce into a glutted market, they also struggled to afford their workers. The fall in revenues was bad enough, but the knock-on effects made it all the worse. For a start, the slump in prices also meant a slump in rents, making it easier than ever for their labourers and farm servants to get farms of their own, enabling them to quit and go work for themselves. Still worse was that 80% of the wages that farmers paid to their servants had typically been in the form of food and drink — a necessity when they needed to get around the caps on how much they could pay in cash. With the fall in agricultural prices, that payment in kind fell in value too, especially when compared to products of industry like leather or cloth. Farmers tried to adjust. By the 1390s the proportion of annual farm servants’ wages paid in cash had risen from just a fifth to over a third.¹⁸ Yet the lure of industry was far too great, their workers fleeing the fields for the cities and towns.

Villein farmers were among the hardest hit by the sudden shortage of agricultural workers, because they still owed some of their rent in the form of labour on the lands that their lords directly managed — dues that the lords increasingly insisted on, as the cost of that labour compared to their own agricultural revenues also grew. It’s unclear to me whether villeins always did this labour themselves, or whether they often hired others to perform it for them. I suspect the latter, especially as the scale of villein holdings had increased. But in any case the effect was the same: the cost of these labour dues, when compared to their falling income from selling produce, drastically increased. And so there was growing discontent. Over the course of the late 1370s there were more and more complaints and disturbances over the terms of villein tenure, culminating in the huge outburst of violence now known as the 1381 Peasants’ Revolt.¹⁹

Although villeins might be violently angry with their landlords, however, both sides — and indeed, all farmers who ever needed to employ someone — had common cause in wanting their workers’ flight from farming to be suppressed. In 1376 the Commons petitioned for workers to be forced to “return to the trades at which they worked before”, and to be sent back to their villages, as well as to prevent any craftsmen from taking on apprentices who could otherwise be put to work on a farm. But the government seems to have taken the line that the laws already on the books were enough.²⁰ The only minor update, in 1378, was to clear up any doubts about the legality of the 1349 ordinance by having it “affirmed and holden for a statute”.

The 1381 Revolt, however, seems to have prompted the government into action. Seeing that discontent still continued to simmer, in 1383 Parliament cracked down on the ability of workers to travel in search of better wages by making it effectively illegal to be a stranger. In order “to refrain the malice of diverse people … wandering from place to place”, all sorts of local officials and magistrates were given the power to arrest all “feitors and vagabonds” — that is, all idlers and wanderers — and to compel them to find guarantors of their good conduct. Any such person who failed to find anyone to stand surety for them — their guarantors needed to have sufficient goods or property between that was to be liable to seizure if the stranger failed to pay any penalties for breaking the law — would immediately be committed to gaol, there to rot until the Justices eventually figured out what to do with them.²¹

Who exactly counted as an idler or wanderer, however, was fraught with difficulties, and the system inevitably caught out people who had simply been going about the business of their lords or masters, or who were legally going straight from one person’s employment into another’s. So Parliament refined the restrictions, effectively creating a fully-fledged internal passport regime — much like the hukou system in place since the 1950s in China, which had exactly the same intention of preventing the movement of workers out of agriculture.

From 1388, nobody was to be allowed to leave the area they were living and working in — their borough town or city, or if in the countryside their hundred, known in the north as a wapentake — without bearing an official document under the King’s seal that detailed the area they were leaving and contained “the cause of his going, and the time of his return, if he ought to return”. This internal passport, known as a letter testimonial, was to be delivered to the authorities of the hundred or town they went to upon arrival. Any stranger wandering without one, regardless of whether they were there on their master’s business, had actually found work, or were simply passing through while on religious pilgrimage, was to be arrested and placed in the stocks until someone stood surety for their return.²² Travelling friars and hermits needed to carry passports signed by the officers of their religious orders, students needed passports signed by their university’s chancellor, and those unable to work and reduced to begging were not allowed to travel outside their hundred at all.²³ Naturally, the passports were also needed for anyone ostensibly travelling to or from abroad, including prisoners of war returning home.²⁴

It was also made illegal to host any strangers who lacked the letters testimonial, and even to host anyone passing through with such a passport for more than one night, unless they tarried for some reasonable cause like sickness. Otherwise, they would be fined. The royally-appointed Justices of the Peace were also given the power to fine various local leaders for failing to enforce the new system, while anyone found to have a forged passport was to be imprisoned for at least 40 days, and potentially much more, until they somehow found someone to stand surety for them.

But the oppressive new internal passport system would not, on its own, have been enough to stem the flow of workers into industry and so keep agricultural wages low. So a raft of other measures were brought in alongside it. Whereas farm-workers had in 1351 merely been banned from leaving their village during the harvest, now the harvest was to draw upon the workers of the towns. Essentially all town and city craftsmen, be they apprentice, journeyman, or even master, were to “be compelled to serve in harvest, to cut, gather, and bring in the corn”. (The exceptions were for those crafts in “great need in harvest time”, and for masters of especially “great reputation”, but it was presumably up to the Justices to work out what these vague terms meant.)²⁵

Added to this, all those who had practised farming below the age of 12 — or in other words, all those who were the children of farmers — were banned from changing their profession, with any attempt to bind themselves as an apprentice to a craftsman rendered null and void. Farming was effectively made hereditary and inescapable.²⁶

The 1388 statute also set out national maximum wages for the various kinds of agricultural worker who served by the year — the first time that the wages of farm servants, and not just the daily rates paid to labourers, were specifically defined. It’s probably no coincidence that at around this time agricultural employers increasingly recorded the names of farm servants in their accounts, and not just the number of them.²⁷ It would have been essential information, when questioned by the authorities, about how the labour laws were being enforced.

What’s most interesting about the new national maxima for annual wages, however — and I don’t think this clause has ever been properly noticed before — is that the law also commanded that “no servant or artificer nor victualler within city, borough, nor other town, shall take more”. In other words, the 1388 law appears to have pegged all urban wages to the levels of those paid in agriculture, so that the incentive to move to the towns and cities would be extinguished. Those who contracted to pay or be paid more than the caps were to be fined — on the first offence the value of the excess, on the second double, and on the third triple — with the worker to be imprisoned for forty days if they could not pay.²⁸

With these harsh new measures, the final major pillar of England’s prison for servants was in place.²⁹ In the centuries that followed, it was only a matter of ensuring those pillars were propped up — though this often brought radical changes to the way that law, in general, was enforced.

The Birth of Summary Justice

We unfortunately lack detailed evidence of how well the system held up over the course of the next century, and historians long assumed that they simply fell out of use. A lot of the time you’ll see later changes to the law described as Parliament merely re-enacting or re-confirming the older laws from time to time — something that’s often offered as evidence that the laws were not being effectively enforced. And certainly, during the periods when prices were stagnant or even fell, and the pressure to raise wages eased, the need to enforce the system would also have weakened. But whenever inflation returned, or whenever the gap between rural and urban demand widened, the system of suppressing wages came under renewed pressure. The laws that Parliament passed were not mere confirmations, but major updates to the legislation to ensure that the pressure was contained.

Occasionally, a little flexibility was required. In 1390, for example, the plague returned with a vengeance, bringing with it a general inflation again. Given the uncertainty about just how rapidly costs were rising, and where, Parliament delegated the job of controlling prices to the Justices of the Peace, also empowering them to set and proclaim the wages to be taken by the day and the task. Justices were therefore permitted to react to changing local conditions by setting the maximum wages for short-term work, even exceeding the national caps,

Although the national caps imposed two years earlier on all annual wages remained in place, the Justices were permitted to react to changing local conditions by setting the maximum wages for short-term work in their areas, even exceeding the national caps that had been put in place almost four decades before.

Yet there were limits to this newfound flexibility, and more generally Parliament preferred to double down, reinforcing the system and stoppering up all ambiguities and loopholes as and when they emerged. In 1402, the ban on carpenters and stonemasons using weekly contracts had to be extended to include various other building tradesmen as well — labourers, tilers, plasterers, daubers, and roofers — while the ban on them charging for holy days also had to be extended to the days before the holy days, when they often only worked until noon.³⁰

Likewise, in 1406, the measures that had made farm-work hereditary were tightened up by banning anyone with an income below £1 a year from land— a substantial sum — from being able to apprentice their children to a trade other than agriculture, with the Justices to make out certificates of their landed wealth. Craftsmen who took on an apprentice who failed to meet the criteria, rather than their agreement simply being void as before, were now to be punished by a steep fine, half of which was paid out as a bounty to whoever sued them.³¹ The leaders of London described themselves as so “grievously vexed and inquieted” by the policy that they lobbied hard for an exception to made for the city, eventually managing to secure it over two decades later in 1429.³² Even as late as 1495 — almost ninety years on from the act — an exception also had to be made for the clothmakers of Norfolk, who complained that because of the lack of sufficiently wealthy apprentices their entire industry was dying out.³³

Meanwhile, however, general enforcement was also improved. The oaths that all workers had to regularly make to abide by the 1349-51 laws, on pain of being thrown in the stocks, were in 1406 extended to all the later labour laws as well. Fines were also put in place for any villages that failed to maintain their stocks,³⁴ and in 1414 a series of loopholes allowing priests to be paid much higher wages than the maxima set over half a century earlier — by being paid generously in kind, or by simply by getting a special dispensation from their bishop — were eliminated, though the caps were slightly raised.³⁵

Parliament also tried to make enforcement of the labour laws more uniform between counties. Complaining that workers were able to flee to more lenient counties, it threatened each county’s sheriff with the truly astronomical fine of £20 if they failed to see them returned (forty times the legal yearly wage of a master shepherd or carter, or over three times the new legal annual wage of a priest, even with a special dispensation).³⁶ Although this 1414 law seems on the face of it mundane — a typical administrative update, and hardly ever mentioned today — it also contained clauses that were to transform the practice of law in England. Passed the year before Henry V invaded France and won his stunning, much-celebrated victory at Agincourt, the 1414 statute was a far more impactful event, giving Justices of the Peace an unprecedented new power. It authorised them to examine both workers and their employers under oath, and to automatically convict them if they confessed to having broken the law — something they could do without the involvement of a jury.³⁷

This was just the thin end of the wedge. Two years later Parliament was still dissatisfied with the results, noting that employers, having been sworn to tell the truth, were often simply refusing to answer so as to avoid incriminating themselves. It tried suspending the punishment of employers, on a three-year trial basis, to see if this would help.³⁸ But the experiment seems to have been disappointing. So in 1423-4 the Justices’ extraordinary new powers were increased yet again: without a jury, and without now even needing a clear confession, the Justices were enabled to immediately convict based simply on their own opinion of the case, issuing fines for overpaying employers and imprisoning both overpaid workers and overcharging retailers for a whole month without bail. In trying to reinforcing the edifice of wage suppression, Parliament invented the summary trial, which was soon applied to swiftly punishing other crimes as well.³⁹

The new powers did not go unchallenged, or so it at least seems — the sources are scarce, so we often have to read between the lines of the subsequent laws.

A couple of years on, stonemasons reacted to the crackdown by effectively unionising again, organising into “congregations and confederacies” at which “the good course and effect of the Statutes of Labourers be openly violated and broken, in subversion of the law.” The last time this had happened, in 1361, Parliament’s response had been to simply declare the mutual oaths among the masons dissolved. But in 1425 its reaction was brutal. If the masons were to meet again, it declared, those attending would be imprisoned indefinitely, to “make fine and ransom at the King’s will”, while the ringleaders would be punished with death.⁴⁰

The more serious challenge, however, appears to have been that the Justices’ new powers were undermined by a legal decision, probably when one of their summary decisions was appealed in a higher court. The ability of the Justices to suppress annual wages to the national maximum set in 1388 was beyond question, and may even now have become too strong, as farmers now complained of being totally unable to hire servants while also following the law. But as for wages by the day or the task, which had since the 1390 statute been set by the Justices locally, the law was so loosely worded that the courts interpreted it as not actually specifying a punishment for exceeding the caps.

So in 1427-8 Parliament eliminated the ambiguity by more carefully and precisely set out all the Justices’ powers in full. It also added some flexibility when it came to annual wages, empowering the Justices to set all wages according to local conditions, whether by the day, the task, or the year.⁴¹ But, as ever, in making the system more flexible, and in giving greater discretion to each locality, it also made the system less effective at suppressing wages. In the mid-1440s, when a slump in agricultural prices created pressure for workers to flee agriculture for industry again, there was once again too much competition between areas, with agricultural workers in particular flocking to the places where the Justices had set the highest legal wages, and especially to where they were most generally lenient with their punishments.

Thus, in 1445, Parliament was forced to re-impose national wage caps, to re-impose the pegs between rural and urban wages, and to force the Justices to mete out steep minimum fines. It closed a loophole whereby people had been evading the labour laws by pretending to be contracted as farm-servants while actually being contracted to do something else: Justices were now empowered to remove them from their employer and to force them to work for a legitimate farmer instead. It tightened a loophole whereby farm servants were removing themselves from the workforce by acquiring land at rock-bottom rents: Parliament raised the minimum amount of land that they needed in order to no longer be forced to serve.⁴² It even added a whole new restriction. Many farm servants had, it seems, been obeying the law, keeping to their compulsory annual contracts and only leaving for new employers when the year out. So Parliament insisted that they now give at least six months’ notice before leaving for a new employer, or else be forced to remain for a whole other year.⁴³

And finally — perhaps most momentously for what we know about how the law was enforced — in 1445 Parliament empowered each Justice of the Peace to act like a roving one-man court, with the power to question and imprison those who broke the labour laws “at every time”, and not just at the formal Quarter Sessions.

The Hundred Years Depression

The result of this extraordinary new power, unfortunately, is that cases that made it to the sessions — the records of which are themselves patchy — don’t actually give us a full picture of how the laws were enforced. The sessions would have dealt with cases where people had been arrested or reported by other local officials to await the Justices’ judgement, or who were being sued by the wronged party. But we have no idea how many cases the Justices dealt with by themselves. Still fewer labour law cases would have gone to higher courts to be appealed,⁴⁴ or been dealt with by other local officials like sheriffs — their duties only covered some aspects of the laws, such as arresting idlers and wanderers or seeing that runaway workers were arrested and returned.⁴⁵

So although we only have a smattering of labour law cases in the few surviving records — something that many historians have suggested as a sign that enforcement might have weakened, or become more restricted in scope — the fact that they show up in those records at all should really be treated as just the tiny tip of the iceberg. They’re a hint, in my view, that there was a great deal more enforcement going on under the surface, but which we may never get to see⁴⁶ — which I think is corroborated by some other signs.

In 1449, for example, just as England was struggling to defend its last remaining lands in France, the priesthood gave to the war effort and were rewarded by being pardoned for all prior offences of exceeding the wage caps, as well as pardoning all priests accused or convicted of rape. That they valued a pardon for excessive wage-taking so highly, and seemingly on par with such serious felonies — of which they complained they had been “grievously and wrongly vexed” — suggests that the caps were still suppressing their wages three decades on from when they’d last been updated.⁴⁷ In 1450, too, when a major rebellion broke out in Kent, the labour laws were listed among the rebels’ many grievances. And after the upheaval of civil war in 1470-1, when the deposed Henry VI was briefly restored to the throne before being deposed for a second time by Edward IV, one of Parliament’s priorities in restoring basic law and order was to make sure the labour laws were observed.⁴⁸

This is not to say that enforcement was perfect. Various employers’ account books sometimes show workers being paid above the wage caps set in 1445.⁴⁹ But what’s also striking is that for at least half a century, right up until the 1490s, if not later, there was hardly any increase in measured wages at all.

This stagnation in wages might have been the result of wider economic conditions. England’s population for much of the fifteenth century was also remarkably stagnant, and prices slumped particularly badly c.1440-1470. By 1500 they were barely back to the level they’d been at a hundred years before. In the context of this long-term stagnation, punctured by bouts of severe deflation — a kind of century-long depression — weak demand for everything, including labour, would have resulted in under-employment and thus lower wages, leaving little reason for the laws to artificially suppress them too.

But on the other hand, it’s something of a mystery as to why England was quite so remarkably stagnant in the first place. The populations of most other regions, like France, the Low Countries, or Italy, recovered fairly quickly to their pre-Black Death levels. Even neighbouring Scotland’s appears to have bounced back. But England’s, even as late as 1500, still languished at less than half.

One recent explanation for this relative stagnation in population is that England chronically lacked coin, so that there was often too little money in circulation with which to grease the wheels of commerce — the result of keeping the precious metal content of its coinage so unusually high, even while every other country in Europe frequently debased theirs. Because England held to a monetary policy that resulted in persistent under-employment, the argument goes, its population often lacked work and struggled to make ends meet, thereby marrying less and having fewer children. It’s a compelling argument because other factors that might have restrained the population — like plague, famine, and war — were seemingly much worse in France.⁵⁰

Yet even if we buy the monetary explanation for England’s stagnation, why was it so unusually committed to a policy so different to everywhere else?

Well, I’m starting to wonder if we’ve been looking at things the wrong way around. If the labour laws actually did continue to bite throughout the fifteenth century — and I believe they did, though probably with some interruptions when order occasionally broke down when the country was at civil war at various points in the 1450s-90s — then they would have been a major and highly unusual factor in suppressing wages, and thus on restraining population growth. And wage suppression was justified by keeping prices low as well, then the labour laws themselves may have been a major reason for the government to keep the currency so remarkably strong.

Unfortunately, we don’t have much to go off in terms of how England’s unusual monetary policy was rationalised. The sources rarely discuss such matters at all, not least because controlling the currency was very much a royal prerogative, and questioning it akin to questioning the king. But there is a particular, rather rare episode that I think helps to confirm my hypothesis.

In 1445, much of Europe suffered a major deflationary crisis, with prices falling across the board. England actually got off rather lightly, but people did complain of a severe lack of coin, and Parliament went so far as to petition the king to weaken the currency. Yet the government ignored this, instead focusing — as we’ve seen — on reinforcing and extending the labour laws.⁵¹

What I think this response to the 1445 crisis shows is that the government was unwilling to do anything that might causes prices or wages in any sector to rise, and so undermine the labour laws. Even in the midst of widespread deflation, affecting agriculture worst of all and so prompting a flight from the farms, it believed that weakening the currency would do little to solve the problem. With still-buoyant industry paying increasingly attractive wages to craftsmen, and with servants and labourers all the scarcer in agriculture as a result, boosting the money supply would only have caused the prices and wages in the towns and cities to rise even higher still. And even if weakening the currency helped to prop up agricultural prices as well, it would have done little to close the gap. If it buoyed industry more than agriculture, it might even have made the problem worse. So the more targeted solution was to lean back on the tried-and-tested, century-old policy of suppressing the movement and wages of workers instead.

In other words, England had a kind of grand political bargain in place. The labour laws were popular among both urban and rural employers — those who were represented in Parliament — because they stood to lose if wages were not suppressed. And so long as prices could be controlled as well, then the much larger population of servants and labourers could be kept relatively content. But to make this bargain work, it was practically impossible to ever weaken the currency, except when in the direst of deflationary straits, because any extraordinary pressures to increase prices would put the caps on both prices and wages under severe strain.

And so, in turn, every part of England’s political and economic consensus prevented its population growing: the price caps prevented the growth of economic activity, restricting opportunities for employment; the wage caps and other restrictions prevented people from amassing the resources to marry and start families; and even when the wage and price caps weren’t under any especial pressure, the unwillingness to weaken the currency often left the country desperately short of circulating cash, exacerbating bouts of deflation and under-employment.

This was not what happened in most other countries, which frequently allowed either prices or wages to rise, and frequently used debasement either for economic reasons — to prevent deflation — or simply to raise cash to fight wars. Although England was not the only country to impose harsh labour laws after the Black Death — almost identical measures were imposed throughout all the rest of Europe too — few other government took them anywhere near as far. England was one of the only places to extend the labour laws to cover essentially all professions, both urban and rural, and across the whole country, as well as then sticking with them for more than just a few years or decades.⁵²

The only other exception, as far as I can tell, was Norway, which experienced many of the same effects. Despite having once had a fairly monetised economy and debased its currency fairly often, Norway after the Black Death resisted any further inflationary devaluations of its currency, in the century after 1387 even going so far as to not mint any new coin at all, so that its people were forced to use foreign coins (when available), and mostly had to resort to barter.⁵³ Unsurprisingly, its population was also remarkably slow to recover after the Black Death, taking even longer than England’s.⁵⁴

So there was a trade-off at work. Whereas most other countries preferred to be able to debase their currencies at the cost of allowing prices and wages to rise, England upheld the labour laws at the cost of being able to weaken its currency. Indeed, in the sixteenth century, when it denied the trade-off and attempted to have its cake and eat it, it was to suffer devastating results. But more on that another time.

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1. For the relative freedom of contracting by workers before 1349, see: Bailey, Mark, ‘The Regulation of the Rural Market in Waged Labour in Fourteenth-Century England’, Continuity and Change, 38.2 (2023), pp. 137–62. Bailey, Mark, After the Black Death: Economy, Society, and the Law in Fourteenth-Century England (Oxford University Press, 2021), pp.37-8

2. Bailey 2021, p.33

3. Ibid., pp.33-4

4. Poos, L. R., ‘The Social Context of Statute of Labourers Enforcement’, Law and History Review, 1.1 (1983), pp. 27–52

5. Hatcher, John, ‘England in the Aftermath of the Black Death’, Past & Present, 144.1 (1994), pp. 15, 17

6. Technically, the 1351 statute only says what the specified daily rate was when wages were paid “without meat and drink, or other courtesy to be demanded, given, or taken”. But this only refers to daily and task rates during the peak agricultural seasons and doesn’t say how much they were to be paid in cash if they were also paid in kind, probably because it was expected that cash wages would simply be lower in such cases, as was typical. It wasn’t until the 1390 statute that JPs were instructed to enumerate cash wages for daily and task work both with and without food and drink, and at all times of the year.

7. Hatcher p.24; Bailey, Mark, ‘The Peasants and the Great Revolt’, in Historians on John Gower, ed. by Stephen H. Rigby and Sian Echard (D. S. Brewer, 2019), pp. 167–90

8. Ibid., pp.15, 17

9. Bailey 2019, p.176

10. Hatcher, pp.19, 20

11. 34 Edward III c.9. The prohibition on taking wages for festival days is in c.10.

12. Given-Wilson, Chris, ‘Service, Serfdom and English Labour Legislation, 1350-1500’, in Concepts and Patterns of Service in the Later Middle Ages, ed. by Anne Curry and Elizabeth Matthew (Boydell & Brewer, 2000), p.28 suggests that the fines were reinstated the following year. I disagree. 36 Edward III st.1, c.14 the following year mentions fines for infractions of the labour laws in a general sense. When it amends another statute, with the words “notwithstanding the words in another statute, which be contrary to this declaration and ordinance”, it refers to whether fines will be used to offset taxes. It says nothing about repeal and doesn’t specify which statute it is amending. Given the context I think it’s much more likely to be referring to 31 Edward III st.1, c.6, which a few years earlier in 1357 had directed the fines from the labour laws to be given to the lords of franchises that have issues, fines and amerciaments — i.e. to local authorities — rather than to offsetting taxes.

13. 34 Edward III c.10 and c.11

14. 36 Edward III st.1, c.8

15. 37 Edward III, c.8-14

16. 38 Edward III, c.2

17. Bailey 2021, p.238

18. Claridge, Jordan, Vincent Delabastita, and Spike Gibbs, ‘(In-Kind) Wages and Labour Relations in the Middle Ages: It’s Not (All) about the Money’, Explorations in Economic History, 94 (2024), article no. 101626. The authors dismiss the impact of the labour laws on the basis of the qualitative evidence that I think has been misinterpreted. As they note, however, there was a substantial lag after the Black Death before annual wages were allowed to rise. The patterns they find in nominal wages, both in cash and in kind, appear to correspond almost exactly to what you’d expect if the laws continued to be enforced.

19. This is my slightly modified version of Bailey’s compelling arguments as to the underlying factors behind the social disturbances. What I’ve added is to explain the stubbornly high wages in agriculture as being caused by the high rewards on offer in other industries, which Bailey largely discusses separately. See Bailey 2021, pp.255-262.

20. Given-Wilson, Chris, ‘Service, Serfdom and English Labour Legislation, 1350-1500’, in Concepts and Patterns of Service in the Later Middle Ages, ed. by Anne Curry and Elizabeth Matthew (Boydell & Brewer, 2000), p.28

21. 7 Richard II, c.5

22. 12 Richard II, c.3

23. 12 Richard II, c.7. Specifically, beggars unable to work were either to remain where they were, if they could find sufficient alms there, or else had forty days from the date of the proclamation to find somewhere else in the same hundred willing to support them, or to return to the place they were born. After that they were never to leave again.

24. 12 Richard II, c.8

25. 12 Richard II, c.3

26. 12 Richard II, c.5

27. Claridge et al, p.17; see also their online Appendix G.

28. 12 Richard II, c.4

29. Curiously, the current consensus among historians is that these measures represented a revising and narrowing of the scope of the labour laws. But they did nothing to repeal the older laws, which continued to be enforced - as I think the many later amendments to the overall system show. The 1388 changes represented an additional pillar, not a new one. For a recent statement of the consensus, see e.g. Bailey, Mark, ‘The Implementation of National Labour Legislation in England after the Black Death, 1349–1400’, The Economic History Review, 78.2 (2025), p.548

30. It’s sometimes said that the 1402 law lifted punishments for employers, but it did nothing of the sort. Instead, the parliamentary petition for this specific loophole being closed for building tradesmen asked that the punishment apply to both employers and employees, but the final act only punished employees. The act did nothing to repeal or amend the 1349, 1351, and 1388 statutes, and effectively just extended the small amendment made in 1361. The misunderstanding seems to stem from an error in Chris Given-Wilson, ‘The Problem of Labour in the Context of English Government, c. 1350–1450’, in The Problem of Labour in Fourteenth-Century England, ed. by James Bothwell, P. J. P. Goldberg, and W. Mark Ormrod (Boydell & Brewer, 2000), p.87.

31. 7 Henry IV, c.17

32. 8 Henry VI, c.11

33. 12 Henry VII, c.1. This was specifically for worsted clothmaking.

34. 7 Henry IV, c.17

35. 2 Henry V, st.2, c.2. Although this law substantially raised the amounts that priests could receive in cash, it appears less generous than it appears at first glance by insisting that the value was to include all “board, apparel, and other necessaries” when calculating their annual wage - words not present in the 1362 statute. The crucial sentence, however, was the one that limited the amount they could be overpaid by special dispensation: “unless it be by licence of the ordinary, so that the whole sum pass not 9 marks”. This, I think, must have over-ridden the words in the 1362 statute that the old caps could not be exceeded “without the bishop’s dispensation”.

36. 2 Henry V st.1, c.4

37. Bellamy, John G., Criminal Law and Society in Late Medieval and Tudor England (Alan Sutton, 1984), p.12

38. 4 Henry V, c.4

39. Bellamy, pp.12-14

40. 3 Henry VI, c.1

41. 6 Henry VI, c.3

42. The 1349 Ordinance had simply said that in order to be exempt from compuslory service, the person needed to have “of his own whereof he may live”, or “proper land about whose tillage he may occupy himself”. Although the meaning of “proper” is unclear, it seems to imply that the bar was self-sufficiency from the land - i.e. enough land to simply feed themselves, which may not have been much. What the 1445 law did was to raise the requirement to enough “lands than the husbandry of the same shall suffice to the continual occupation of one man” - or, in other words, enough land to employ a man all year round. I think the key word here is continual, because rural workers who graduated from annual service to more casual labouring would typically have worked on their own farms for part of the year, and then taken on a bit of waged labour by the day or the task in order to supplement their incomes.

43. 23 Henry VI, c.12

44. Hettinger, Madonna J., ‘Defining the Servant: Legal and Extra-Legal Terms of Employment in Fifteenth-Century England’, in The Work of Work: Servitude, Slavery, and Labor in Medieval England, ed. by Allen J. Frantzen and Douglas Moffat (Cruithne Press, 1994), pp. 206–28

45. Cavill, P. R., ‘The Problem of Labour and the Parliament of 1495’, in The Fifteenth Century: Of Mice and Men: Image, Belief and Regulation in Late Medieval England, ed. by Linda Clark (The Boydell Press, 2005), v, pp. 145-7 for example notes that in York’s sheriff’s court 1471-1500, a mere 47 of its 2,000 or so cases were to do with the labour laws, using them to suggest that enforcement had become restricted to only a few kinds of cases such as dealing with absconding workers. But it’s unclear if he’s counted imprisonment of vagabonds and idlers in this figure, and in any case sheriffs’ only other legal duties and powers under the labour laws were to apprehend and return fugitive workers.

46. See for example the labour law cases found in Ipswich’s records by Amor, Nicholas R., Late Medieval Ipswich: Trade and Industry (Boydell & Brewer Ltd, 2011), pp.218, 250, 253, 264.

47. 27 Henry VI, c.6

48. Rotuli Parliamentorum, Volum 6, p.8. The Commons petitioned the king in 1472 “to do call before your Highness the Statutes of Westminster, Winchester, Northampton, the Statutes of Labourers and Artificers, the Statute of Apprentices, and all other profitable statutes and ordinances” so as to put the disorder down.

49. Woodward, Donald, Men at Work: Labourers and Building Craftsmen in the Towns of Northern England, 1450-1750 (Cambridge University Press, 1995), p.182

50. Mayhew, Nick, and Katherine Ball, ‘Debasement and Demography in England and France in the Later Middle Ages’, Continuity and Change, 37.2 (2022), pp. 233–56

51. For overviews of the 1440s crisis see Nightingale, P., ‘England and the European Depression of the Mid-Fifteenth Century’, Journal of European Economic History (Rome, Italy), 26.3 (1997), pp. 631–56 and Hatcher, John, ‘The Great Slump of the Mid-Fifteenth Century’, in Progress and Problems in Medieval England: Essays in Honour of Edward Miller, ed. by Richard Britnell and John Hatcher (Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp.237-271, and Ball, Katherine, ‘The Role of Demographic and Monetary Factors in the Late Medieval Economies of England, Scotland and the Southern Low Countries (1351–1530)’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Oxford, 2018).

52. For how other European countries reacted to the Black Death see Lis, Catharina, and Hugo Soly, ‘Labour Laws in Western Europe, 13th-16th Centuries: Patterns of Political and Socio-Economic Rationality’’, in Working on Labor: Essays in Honor of Jan Lucassen, ed. by Marcel van der Linden (Brill, 2012), pp. 299–321

53. Svein, H. Gullbekk, ‘Medieval Law and Money in Norway’, Numismatic Chronicle, 1998, pp. 173–84. For newer evidence of the lack of Norwegian coins see Risvaag, Jon Anders, ‘Keep out the Coins! Colonialist Approaches to Northern Norway by the German Hansa?’, in Money, Coinage and Colonialism: Entangled Exchanges, ed. by Nanouschka Myrberg Burström and Fleur Kemmers (Routledge, 2025).

54. Brothen, James A., ‘Population Decline and Plague in Late Medieval Norway’, Annales de Démographie Historique, 1996, pp. 137–49.