From Anton Howes' Age of Invention, August 26:
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....
....MUCH MORE
