The opening snippet of Anton Howes' look at labor and the economy of post-plague England.
From his Age of Invention substack, Jan 11, 2026:
Where we last left off, I argued that England’s labour laws following the Black Death — maximum wage rates, compulsory employment, minimum contract lengths, restrictions on apprenticing outside of agriculture, and strict limits on everyone’s movement — were much better enforced than has commonly been assumed, and even that they prevented the English population recovering as quickly as the rest of Europe’s over the course of the fifteenth century.
(It’s also thanks to demographic change that this post, which follows the labour laws into the sixteenth century, has been so delayed. Life, quite literally, intruded, because I became a father.)
As I hinted last time, the labour laws — having already been downright dystopian — were soon to become especially biting. Some historians have assumed they were resurrected, rather than continued, after England had descended into on-and-off strife — a period usually known as the Wars of the Roses, but better termed the Cousins’ Wars.
For those who don’t know this not-at-all complicated or convoluted history, King Henry VI became mentally incapacitated in the 1450s, just as England lost much of its territory in France, leading to violent clashes between rival court factions until he was deposed by his third cousin, Edward IV, in 1461, before being re-installed as king in 1470, and then re-deposed (and killed) by Edward in 1471.
Then, a few months after Edward IV’s death in 1483, his two sons and heirs were pronounced illegitimate and mysteriously disappeared into the Tower of London, so that he was succeeded instead by his brother, Richard III, who in turn was deposed just a couple of years later by the French king’s second cousin, who killed Richard in battle during a second invasion attempt launched from France. This spurious pretender to the English throne — the grandson of a Welsh knight who had married Henry VI’s French mother, and the great-grandson, on his mother’s side, of Henry VI’s grandfather’s illegitimate half-brother, whose line had been explicitly barred from the succession by Parliament — became Henry VII, the first of the Tudor monarchs....
....MUCH MORE
Courtly politics made simple. Now on to geo-political-economics.
Plus, the earlier piece on The Statute of Labourers has some insights into the nature of power struggles between those who have it and those who want it:
Age of Invention: The Century-Long Depression
