The Problem of Labour in the Context of English Government, c. 1350–1450

The ‘problem of labour’ loomed large in the minds of the English governing classes during the century or so after the Black Death. The root of the trouble lay, of course, in the demographic and occupational crisis brought on by the terrible pestilence of 1348–9, repeated at regular intervals through the later fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. With the early fourteenth-century surplus of labour now transformed into a shortage, and the consequently increased potential for the labouring classes to demand higher wages and greater flexibility in working practices, the ability of landlords and employers to impose the sort of conditions which would maximise their profits and ensure the co-operation of their tenants and employees was under real threat.

The government – which quite unashamedly represented the interests of the landholding class – clearly saw what it repeatedly referred to as ‘the malice of servants’ as a serious challenge to its authority, and its reaction was gradually to assume greater and greater control over the labour market. The principal medium through which this control was formulated was parliamentary legislation. More than a third of the seventy-seven parliaments held between 1351 and 1430 passed legislation relating to labour, and further acts were passed in the mid 1440s and again in the 1490s.

The underlying aims of this legislation were threefold: first, to restrict wages from rising above whatever levels were deemed at the time to be acceptable; secondly, to restrict labourers’ mobility, in order to prevent them scouring the vicinity for higher wages or better conditions; and thirdly, to enforce working contracts on terms favourable to employers rather than employees, which usually meant for longer rather than shorter periods of time (although not in the building trade, where demand for labour was less predictable, and employers tended to favour short-term contracts). All three of these aims had been foreshadowed in the first Ordinance of Labourers, issued by the council in June 1349, at the very moment when the country was in the grip of the first outbreak of plague, and when, therefore, the holding of a parliament was deemed inadvisable. When, in February 1351, parliament did eventually meet, this Ordinance was reissued (with significant modifications) as a statute, and there is no doubt that during the following decade strenuous efforts really were made to enforce it.