Statute of Labourers 1351

Governments tried to fight this.

The English Statute of Laborers in 1351 attempted to cap wages and restrict the movement of workers.

But broadly speaking, these measures failed because the new economic landscape had created opportunities for social mobil-

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That's right, and the, uh, the people with the land decide they don't care much for that.

[laughs] So in, uh, 1351, the Statute of Laborers attempte- attempted to restrain wages and compel the able-bodied people to work at pre-plague rates, and so enforcement varied and, uh, rural economy was more complicated than one law.

But the direction was clear.

The social hierarchy wants to contain the bargaining power the catastrophe had given laborers.

Um, so in response to this, almost kind of immediately after the first outbreak of plague in 1348, 1349, um, parliament tries to...

The King and parliament try to kinda stem this tide of a, a rising, you know, almost laborers' rights movement, um, by issuing, issuing, excuse me, something called the Ordinance of Labour and the Statute of Labourers.

And this, uh, this is an attempt to turn back the clock to pre-plague, um, wage caps.

Um, it prevents, um, tenants from leaving the land, um, to go elsewhere.

The period before the renewed outbreak of open war with France was not unimportant in constitutional history.

Besides the unwise Statute of Labourers, to which we have already alluded, and the Statute of Provisors, which resulted from the long quarrel with the Pope which had opened in 1344, several other important pieces of legislation belonged to the years 1350 to 1355.

Among them were the Statute of the Staple, which provided that wool, leather and fleeces, tin and lead, the most important English exports, should only be sold in certain towns, ten within the realm, four in Ireland, and two, Calais and Bruges, without it.

The main object of this statute designating the staple towns was to facilitate the levying of the duties on wool, which could be more easily collected if the king's officers had to keep their eyes on a small number of places only.

The method finally adopted for collecting it was a poll tax on the whole of the inhabitants of the realm above the age of fifteen.

It was graduated upwards from one shilling paid by the poor to three pounds imposed on the richest individuals.

The imposition of this tax, which pressed very heavily on the labouring classes, was the cause of the explosion of a discontent which had been brewing ever since the social troubles that had followed the Black Death and the Statute of Labourers.

The Peasant Revolt, or Wat Tyler's Rebellion, as it is sometimes called, was not the result of the poll tax only.

the time and to the expenses of chivalry and war were continually in want of money it became therefore the custom for the serfs to buy their freedom from their lords edward the third himself used to raise money by selling manumissions

to his serfs in time the labourer became detached from the soil and could pass from one farm to another the scarcity of labour after the black death made the landowners feel how disadvantageous this system was to them formerly they could compel their serfs to work now they had to pay the labourers the wages which they asked or allow their land to remain untilled and the harvests to rot upon the fields government was of course in those days entirely in the interests of the landlords to remedy the evil of high wages the king assembled his council on the fourteenth june thirteen forty nine the country was not yet sufficiently recovered from the plague to allow of parliament being summoned the council issued a royal ordinance which was afterwards embodied in the statute of labourers The preamble of this statute gives us in a few words a vivid picture of the times.

It states that a great part of the people, and especially of workmen and servants, late died of the pestilence.

Many, seeing the necessity of masters and the great scarcity of servants, will not serve unless they may receive excessive wages, and some are rather willing to beg in idleness than by labour to get their living.

Still more galling to the labourer was the attempt made by this statute to bind him once more to the soil, and thus to rob him of his newly acquired freedom.

We cannot wonder

that the statute of labourers produced a growing discontent amongst the labour class, which at last broke out in the peasants' revolt under Richard II.

the horrors of the black death had rudely disturbed the joy and prosperity of the english people no greater contrast can be imagined than that between the condition of

The old regime, however, is far from happy about this new system and wants its power back.

A law is passed in 1351 called the Statute of Labourers, which aims to restore the old way of life, the hierarchy of feudalism.

The statute enforces a national wage freeze.

A haymaker's earnings are capped at one penny a day, a carpenter at thruppence.

You get...

The, the year after the Black Death hits, you get the Ordinance of Labourers, which is later backed up in statute with the Statute of Labourers, that says you can't earn any more than pre-pandemic levels.

If you were getting paid a penny a day before, you get paid a penny a day now, and you can't demand any more than that, and you can't leave your land.

And, you know, by the 1360s, they're bringing in extensions to those laws that you can be branded with an F on your forehead for falsehood if you try and run away from the lands that you're tied to.