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.
Great article. Do you think this may explain that other European regions, in that period, showed a better behaviour in demographic and economic growth, or it is not the case?
Yes, I think the more frequent adjustment of the currency elsewhere meant they saw much faster demographic (and this economic) recovery from the plague.
I don't think so, mainly because after 1500 the English population did finally begin to recover again. People tend to focus a lot on Malthusian constraints, seeing a greater population as a burden, but there are also major advantages to having a higher population in terms of market size and division of labour, and for much of the sixteenth century this was seen as the more pressing priority.
Thanx very much for this, which I found most informative, tho also rather depressing.
Were many people engaged as sailors, and were many engaged as soldiers? I suppose they had press gangs to enforce their own forms of exploitation. But fighting wars in France does not seem calculated to improve the labour supply in England.
Great question. I would need to double check, but there was no standing army so it would have been a short, sharp shock to the labour force every time.
Anton, thanks for this. There is so much we don't know due to the paucity of information isn't there. When I was reading your article, a couple of points came to mind. Firstly, I wondered if our current productivity problems of underperformance could be laid at the draconian laws of "servant slavery" ? And secondly, following on from that, did these laws encourage Britain to learn how to enslave people globally in the 17th and 18th centuries? And thirdly, did these laws suppress innovation in Britain at a time when the rest of Europe was innovating in knowledge?
I don't think that the laws would have had long-term effects all the way to today, at least not in such a way that they'd show up in productivity.
On the second question, that's an interesting one. I suspect there are aspects of the legal framework that were then applied to it, and as I'll mention next time, in the 1540s Parliament actually did introduce slavery for idle wanderers in England (though it was repealed soon afterwards). But on the other hand some English explorers and travellers in the early seventeenth century expressed surprise and disgust at chattel slavery when they saw it practised by the Portuguese, Spanish, and others. So I suspect that they largely adopted it from elsewhere.
On the third question, I suspect that as a factor restricting population growth and urbanisation likely did have that effect in the fifteenth century. Though for reasons I'll go into next time, the laws don't seem to have suppressed it later on (or if they did, they didn't suppress it entirely).
Thanks Anton. I realise that it is impossible to surmise too much! But it is always interesting to see if there might be some form of neural pathway which guides society in a particular direction when a set of laws has been applied systemically over decades.
Fascinating, one of my favourite of your essays. Does this link into some of the stuff about Tudor monetary policy you were discussing on the WiP podcast - did experience with incredibly strong currency (underpinned by immense labour market restrictions) during the high middle ages feed into the way debasement was thought about in the Tudor era?
They're very much related, yes. Largely because England was just totally unprepared for inflationary debasement when it came. They'd only had a handful of periodic, very cautious ones. The Tudors do update the labour laws, but I had to save that for another post as it was getting too long, and I think it had slightly different effects.
Consistent with our Anglo legal heritage, I found your piece hauntingly familiar, given my background as a retired public defender in N.Y.
Despite authority’s self-serving celebration of our freedoms, their unequal enjoyment remains.
The excessive summary prosecution of “quality of (whose?) life” offenses, justified under “the broken windows” theory of law enforcement, or the targeting of the unemployed, informal economy-employed, and homeless, appears starkly rooted in medieval tradition.
That our punitive approach rose while our cities were deindustrialized - thanks to capital flight to cheap labor markets - syncs with your description of ancient legal remedies.
In both instances, even as it arguably regulated all, it seems the most economically vulnerable were sacrificed to superficial class-biased understanding of the problem.
Like Anatole France remarked, the law in its “magnificent equality” prohibits the rich and poor alike from sleeping under bridges.
Good stuff Anton. Britain once again experimented with wage and price controls in the 60s and 70s and it didn't work so well then either. But at least Edward Heath didnt put you in the stocks I guess.
First question, do we know what the effect of these laws was on living standards vis a vie France or elsewhere in Europe? Presumably if they inhibited population growth, they were keeping people poorer than elsewhere.
Second, you mention that the population began to recover after 1500, but that these laws lasted until 1750, so how was it that the population grew, and england/britain became increasingly productive after 1600 or so, when these laws were still in place? Isn't one of the traditional explanations of the industrial revolution (one I don't like but nevermind that) that 'wages were high'? And what and when were the key acts of repeal?
Great questions. On the first, population growth and density is one of our main proxies for economic development, so for the fifteenth century it's certainly a case of France outpacing England. France had been 3-4x as populous as England before the Black Death (in practice less, given a big chunk had been under English control, and other chunks under the sway of semi-independent dukes), but by the 1500s it was over 6x as large (and all under the rule of its king), largely just because it had recovered to its pre-plague peak while England hadn't. And it was significantly more urbanised - London in the early 16thC was smaller than France's second and third cities, Rouen and Lyon, and about a third the population of Paris.
On the second, most of the labour laws were only repealed in 1813, but by the 1750s had already seemingly largely fallen out of use, or become significantly narrowed in scope (as I'll argue next time, because of how the case law developed). But basically there are some significant changes to the labour laws in the sixteenth century, which I'll get into next time. And some comments to add on some well-known theories!
Thanks Anton. I look forward to your next article. But for now I do have a couple more questions.
First, you mention that quote about servants, ladies and horses. The Swiss visitor Thomas Platter mentions it when he is describing the freedom of women he sees in England in 1599. But that makes me think, is there evidence for the relative oppressed state of ordinary wage labourers you point to in the writings of foreign visitors, or even amongst other English? If, as you mentioned elsewhere in the comments, English explorers and travellers expressed disgust at chattel slavery, there was surely a bed of moral sentiment amongst some English that would have led them to criticise, or at least draw attention to, the relative state of subordination of their own labourers.
Second, and you may have already implicitly answered this in the negative when you said that other countries tried to enforce similar rules but were less successful, but could the difference with England have possibly been due to the greater representation of the interests of middling employers in the political system (House of Commons)? Or alternatively could it have been due to the relatively small scale of serfdom in England in this period? You don't need such rules to control people who are already under the thumb. Again you might have already answered that when you pointed to England's lagging urbanisation rate, but I thought worth asking anyway. Lastly, could the more effective enforcement reflect greater English centralisation and state capacity? England had a common law fairly well developed legal and political systems by the period in question, whereas France, for example, had a lot of de facto regional autonomy.
On the first, sources like travellers’ accounts don’t seem to mention the laws. Perhaps because of the high social status of visitors, or perhaps as it just wouldn’t be as legible to them. There are a few interesting cases of dissent among English people themselves, my favourite being a sort of pamphlet war in the 1560s about the female servants of London. We also just have a great deal more surviving testimony from legal cases, to be able to see how workers complained. Though I think as in many such cases, people often took the laws for granted, complaining more about ill treatment by individuals within the framework of the laws rather than wishing to tear down the laws themselves. But there are some cases, too, of violent dissent, such as in 1496 and especially the 1540s and 50s - more on those next time.
On the second, I’m not entirely sure, but I suspect you’re right that it has to do with the relatively broad representation of the Commons - and it’s pretty much always coming from the Commons - of both borough and county, and so employers of both kinds. Centralisation, and especially the lack of local privileges, is certainly also a big deal. And yes, serfdom was seemingly already on the way out even before the plague, so it’s possible that it was in some ways an alternative means of worker control.
Thanks. I ask the first question because that kind of observation, though obviously anecdotal, might pick things up not in the data. Foreign visitors may well have been ignorant about the laws, but its possible they would have noticed the relative destitution of English workers as compared to workers in other countries - their clothes, the size of their homes, even their physical stature and appearance. I'm looking for comments a bit like Alexis de Tocqueville's from much later that '‘The English poor appear almost rich compared to the French poor’, except presumably in reverse.
You mention that in the early period, when the rules were still being developed, workers were demanding 'to be better fed than those who hired them' and 'seized upon ermine and grey furs for trimming', and I wonder if any of that type of thing might have continued to seep through the cracks. Or is it possible that the absence of comment reflected the fact that the main effect was felt in lower population and not so much in greater poverty? Thanks!
I had no idea medieval labour laws were so oppressive in England. I don't know if I'm appalled of how meddlesome they were or impressed with their state capacity.
I should reiterate - as I mentioned it only briefly - that almost identical labour laws were introduced in other places. You see them directed by Italian city states against their rural hinterlands, by various French and Spanish rulers against urban artisans, and in various other forms in Germany too. But it does seem as though the English worked out some clever (and oppressive) ways to incentivise enforcement so as to ensure that they were longer-lasting.
These brutal laws make me think of the way the muscovite elite turned russian serfdom into basically slavery starting with the rule of Ivan the Terrible. The reason was the same, too much land and too few peasants, in England because of the plague in Russia due to expansion.
There’s a bit of doubling with the end of the paragraph which begins with “Occasionally a little flexibility was required” and the paragraph which follows.
The tyranny of this is pretty impressive and surprisingly long lasting. Never knew about the internal passports either; normally ever hear about that with modern Communist countries.
No particular plans to, as it really just emerged from writing a paragraph in my book (about inflation in the 1540s), reading up on the wage restrictions, and then finding that I disagreed with some of the interpretations. While also having had the fifteenth-century stagnation at the back of my mind for a while as a problem to get back to. So in a sense I was rather hoping that this was the article, in terms of it being my big writeup!
If you look at the world today it is evident that poor people have more children, not less. Given the added incentive that the fear of plague was very real during this period, and people who are poor would hope that a bigger family would earn more in total, and and you need more children to make it more likely some would survive to to help the parents in their latter years doesn’t that undermine one of part of your argument?
I don’t think so, because the mechanism for reduced fertility isn’t that married families plan to have fewer kids. It’s instead that people marry much later, or not at all, because they cannot afford to set up on their own, or “live of their own hands” in the parlance of the time. So even if they planned to have the same number of kids, or even more, their window for doing so is much shorter.
This is interesting. I’ve often wondered why England went from being a relatively backward place in 1500 to the country of Shakespeare, a sophisticated urban economy and nascent empire by 1600. Maybe it was just the shackles coming off.
Planning to explain some of the shift in the next post. Though one interesting element is that the labour laws were very much still in effect in 1600 (though with some flexibility added in 1563)
I should re-read it at some point. I think I last looked at it over ten years ago, so my memory's a bit hazy about the exact arguments. I may do a post on it when I do!
It’s hard to say, at least for this earlier period. We don’t know what was said in Parliament, or by whom, and just the final results. So perhaps there were MPs to defend worker liberties, but their names are lost to us. But I suspect they were very few if they existed at all. Things are a bit less murky in the 16thC - more on that next time!
Thanks for this. I'm working on a critique of contemporary pro-natalism, starting with a history of population growth where I'm just getting to the Black Death and its impact on wages. This will be super-helpful to me.
Great article. Do you think this may explain that other European regions, in that period, showed a better behaviour in demographic and economic growth, or it is not the case?
Yes, I think the more frequent adjustment of the currency elsewhere meant they saw much faster demographic (and this economic) recovery from the plague.
>saw much faster demographic recovery
So maybe the laws counterintuitively kept wages high in the long run?
I don't think so, mainly because after 1500 the English population did finally begin to recover again. People tend to focus a lot on Malthusian constraints, seeing a greater population as a burden, but there are also major advantages to having a higher population in terms of market size and division of labour, and for much of the sixteenth century this was seen as the more pressing priority.
Thanx very much for this, which I found most informative, tho also rather depressing.
Were many people engaged as sailors, and were many engaged as soldiers? I suppose they had press gangs to enforce their own forms of exploitation. But fighting wars in France does not seem calculated to improve the labour supply in England.
Great question. I would need to double check, but there was no standing army so it would have been a short, sharp shock to the labour force every time.
This is superb writing and a metaphor for our modern issues. 👏
Economics is Politics. And Politics is the distribution of Economics
Anton, thanks for this. There is so much we don't know due to the paucity of information isn't there. When I was reading your article, a couple of points came to mind. Firstly, I wondered if our current productivity problems of underperformance could be laid at the draconian laws of "servant slavery" ? And secondly, following on from that, did these laws encourage Britain to learn how to enslave people globally in the 17th and 18th centuries? And thirdly, did these laws suppress innovation in Britain at a time when the rest of Europe was innovating in knowledge?
I don't think that the laws would have had long-term effects all the way to today, at least not in such a way that they'd show up in productivity.
On the second question, that's an interesting one. I suspect there are aspects of the legal framework that were then applied to it, and as I'll mention next time, in the 1540s Parliament actually did introduce slavery for idle wanderers in England (though it was repealed soon afterwards). But on the other hand some English explorers and travellers in the early seventeenth century expressed surprise and disgust at chattel slavery when they saw it practised by the Portuguese, Spanish, and others. So I suspect that they largely adopted it from elsewhere.
On the third question, I suspect that as a factor restricting population growth and urbanisation likely did have that effect in the fifteenth century. Though for reasons I'll go into next time, the laws don't seem to have suppressed it later on (or if they did, they didn't suppress it entirely).
Thanks Anton. I realise that it is impossible to surmise too much! But it is always interesting to see if there might be some form of neural pathway which guides society in a particular direction when a set of laws has been applied systemically over decades.
typo, is->it:
> Parliament made *is* much easier for their employers to have them arrested and returned
Thank you! Updated.
Fascinating, one of my favourite of your essays. Does this link into some of the stuff about Tudor monetary policy you were discussing on the WiP podcast - did experience with incredibly strong currency (underpinned by immense labour market restrictions) during the high middle ages feed into the way debasement was thought about in the Tudor era?
They're very much related, yes. Largely because England was just totally unprepared for inflationary debasement when it came. They'd only had a handful of periodic, very cautious ones. The Tudors do update the labour laws, but I had to save that for another post as it was getting too long, and I think it had slightly different effects.
Thank you for this.
Consistent with our Anglo legal heritage, I found your piece hauntingly familiar, given my background as a retired public defender in N.Y.
Despite authority’s self-serving celebration of our freedoms, their unequal enjoyment remains.
The excessive summary prosecution of “quality of (whose?) life” offenses, justified under “the broken windows” theory of law enforcement, or the targeting of the unemployed, informal economy-employed, and homeless, appears starkly rooted in medieval tradition.
That our punitive approach rose while our cities were deindustrialized - thanks to capital flight to cheap labor markets - syncs with your description of ancient legal remedies.
In both instances, even as it arguably regulated all, it seems the most economically vulnerable were sacrificed to superficial class-biased understanding of the problem.
Like Anatole France remarked, the law in its “magnificent equality” prohibits the rich and poor alike from sleeping under bridges.
> The excessive summary prosecution of “quality of (whose?) life” offenses, justified under “the broken windows” theory of law enforcement,
Um, no. That's prosecuting actual, low level, victimful crimes, not attempting to enforce wage controls.
Ok, there were also some types of wage and price controls, but you strike me as the kind of guy who supported those.
Good stuff Anton. Britain once again experimented with wage and price controls in the 60s and 70s and it didn't work so well then either. But at least Edward Heath didnt put you in the stocks I guess.
First question, do we know what the effect of these laws was on living standards vis a vie France or elsewhere in Europe? Presumably if they inhibited population growth, they were keeping people poorer than elsewhere.
Second, you mention that the population began to recover after 1500, but that these laws lasted until 1750, so how was it that the population grew, and england/britain became increasingly productive after 1600 or so, when these laws were still in place? Isn't one of the traditional explanations of the industrial revolution (one I don't like but nevermind that) that 'wages were high'? And what and when were the key acts of repeal?
Great questions. On the first, population growth and density is one of our main proxies for economic development, so for the fifteenth century it's certainly a case of France outpacing England. France had been 3-4x as populous as England before the Black Death (in practice less, given a big chunk had been under English control, and other chunks under the sway of semi-independent dukes), but by the 1500s it was over 6x as large (and all under the rule of its king), largely just because it had recovered to its pre-plague peak while England hadn't. And it was significantly more urbanised - London in the early 16thC was smaller than France's second and third cities, Rouen and Lyon, and about a third the population of Paris.
On the second, most of the labour laws were only repealed in 1813, but by the 1750s had already seemingly largely fallen out of use, or become significantly narrowed in scope (as I'll argue next time, because of how the case law developed). But basically there are some significant changes to the labour laws in the sixteenth century, which I'll get into next time. And some comments to add on some well-known theories!
Thanks Anton. I look forward to your next article. But for now I do have a couple more questions.
First, you mention that quote about servants, ladies and horses. The Swiss visitor Thomas Platter mentions it when he is describing the freedom of women he sees in England in 1599. But that makes me think, is there evidence for the relative oppressed state of ordinary wage labourers you point to in the writings of foreign visitors, or even amongst other English? If, as you mentioned elsewhere in the comments, English explorers and travellers expressed disgust at chattel slavery, there was surely a bed of moral sentiment amongst some English that would have led them to criticise, or at least draw attention to, the relative state of subordination of their own labourers.
Second, and you may have already implicitly answered this in the negative when you said that other countries tried to enforce similar rules but were less successful, but could the difference with England have possibly been due to the greater representation of the interests of middling employers in the political system (House of Commons)? Or alternatively could it have been due to the relatively small scale of serfdom in England in this period? You don't need such rules to control people who are already under the thumb. Again you might have already answered that when you pointed to England's lagging urbanisation rate, but I thought worth asking anyway. Lastly, could the more effective enforcement reflect greater English centralisation and state capacity? England had a common law fairly well developed legal and political systems by the period in question, whereas France, for example, had a lot of de facto regional autonomy.
Thanks, Chris
On the first, sources like travellers’ accounts don’t seem to mention the laws. Perhaps because of the high social status of visitors, or perhaps as it just wouldn’t be as legible to them. There are a few interesting cases of dissent among English people themselves, my favourite being a sort of pamphlet war in the 1560s about the female servants of London. We also just have a great deal more surviving testimony from legal cases, to be able to see how workers complained. Though I think as in many such cases, people often took the laws for granted, complaining more about ill treatment by individuals within the framework of the laws rather than wishing to tear down the laws themselves. But there are some cases, too, of violent dissent, such as in 1496 and especially the 1540s and 50s - more on those next time.
On the second, I’m not entirely sure, but I suspect you’re right that it has to do with the relatively broad representation of the Commons - and it’s pretty much always coming from the Commons - of both borough and county, and so employers of both kinds. Centralisation, and especially the lack of local privileges, is certainly also a big deal. And yes, serfdom was seemingly already on the way out even before the plague, so it’s possible that it was in some ways an alternative means of worker control.
Thanks. I ask the first question because that kind of observation, though obviously anecdotal, might pick things up not in the data. Foreign visitors may well have been ignorant about the laws, but its possible they would have noticed the relative destitution of English workers as compared to workers in other countries - their clothes, the size of their homes, even their physical stature and appearance. I'm looking for comments a bit like Alexis de Tocqueville's from much later that '‘The English poor appear almost rich compared to the French poor’, except presumably in reverse.
You mention that in the early period, when the rules were still being developed, workers were demanding 'to be better fed than those who hired them' and 'seized upon ermine and grey furs for trimming', and I wonder if any of that type of thing might have continued to seep through the cracks. Or is it possible that the absence of comment reflected the fact that the main effect was felt in lower population and not so much in greater poverty? Thanks!
I had no idea medieval labour laws were so oppressive in England. I don't know if I'm appalled of how meddlesome they were or impressed with their state capacity.
I should reiterate - as I mentioned it only briefly - that almost identical labour laws were introduced in other places. You see them directed by Italian city states against their rural hinterlands, by various French and Spanish rulers against urban artisans, and in various other forms in Germany too. But it does seem as though the English worked out some clever (and oppressive) ways to incentivise enforcement so as to ensure that they were longer-lasting.
These brutal laws make me think of the way the muscovite elite turned russian serfdom into basically slavery starting with the rule of Ivan the Terrible. The reason was the same, too much land and too few peasants, in England because of the plague in Russia due to expansion.
There’s a bit of doubling with the end of the paragraph which begins with “Occasionally a little flexibility was required” and the paragraph which follows.
The tyranny of this is pretty impressive and surprisingly long lasting. Never knew about the internal passports either; normally ever hear about that with modern Communist countries.
Ah thanks. Will get that fixed! Yes it’s quite astonishing. And in some ways in the 16thC it gets worse!
This is fascinating--thank you for your work. I've never read anything about this. Will you be publishing this somewhere as an article?
No particular plans to, as it really just emerged from writing a paragraph in my book (about inflation in the 1540s), reading up on the wage restrictions, and then finding that I disagreed with some of the interpretations. While also having had the fifteenth-century stagnation at the back of my mind for a while as a problem to get back to. So in a sense I was rather hoping that this was the article, in terms of it being my big writeup!
If you look at the world today it is evident that poor people have more children, not less. Given the added incentive that the fear of plague was very real during this period, and people who are poor would hope that a bigger family would earn more in total, and and you need more children to make it more likely some would survive to to help the parents in their latter years doesn’t that undermine one of part of your argument?
I don’t think so, because the mechanism for reduced fertility isn’t that married families plan to have fewer kids. It’s instead that people marry much later, or not at all, because they cannot afford to set up on their own, or “live of their own hands” in the parlance of the time. So even if they planned to have the same number of kids, or even more, their window for doing so is much shorter.
This is interesting. I’ve often wondered why England went from being a relatively backward place in 1500 to the country of Shakespeare, a sophisticated urban economy and nascent empire by 1600. Maybe it was just the shackles coming off.
Planning to explain some of the shift in the next post. Though one interesting element is that the labour laws were very much still in effect in 1600 (though with some flexibility added in 1563)
🤔
I'd be interested in your thoughts on Gregory Clark's A FAREWELL TO ALMS. Thanks for your interesting and thoughtful posts.
I should re-read it at some point. I think I last looked at it over ten years ago, so my memory's a bit hazy about the exact arguments. I may do a post on it when I do!
That really puts Parliament in a much darker light. Were there any prominent opponents to the ever-increasing growth of the labor restrictions laws?
It’s hard to say, at least for this earlier period. We don’t know what was said in Parliament, or by whom, and just the final results. So perhaps there were MPs to defend worker liberties, but their names are lost to us. But I suspect they were very few if they existed at all. Things are a bit less murky in the 16thC - more on that next time!
Thanks for this. I'm working on a critique of contemporary pro-natalism, starting with a history of population growth where I'm just getting to the Black Death and its impact on wages. This will be super-helpful to me.