The Social Context of Statute of Labourers Enforcement

Abstract

Historians' impressions of the position of agricultural servants and wage labourers within the medieval English rural society and economy remain as imprecise as the picture which most contemporary documents provide. Research to date on medieval agricultural labourers has concentrated upon estate workers within the seigneurial economy, primarily because manorial accounts provide fairly detailed information about famuli or estate labourers employed by particular manors, their terms of employment, and the remuneration they received. But the role of servants and labourers employed on tenant holdings by medieval villagers, and their importance for non-agricultural production within rural communities, are still extremely uncertain. They appeared fleetingly if at all in manorial documentation, which seldom had reason to be concerned with them as such, while another source which historians have used to approach the problem, nominative polltax returns furnishing household or occupational information, poses serious difficulties of interpretation.

After the Black Death: labour legislation and attitudes towards labour in late‐medieval western Europe

“…219–20). For later studies of labour law—not only in 1349 and 1351, but also laws such as the statutes of Cambridge in 1388, see Ritchie (Kenyon), ‘Labour conditions’; Clark, ‘Medieval labor law’; Poos, ‘Social context’; Penn and Dyer, ‘Wages and earnings’; and Braid, ‘Et non ultra’. While these works show the richness and complexities of interpreting the data on labour enforcement, they do not substantially challenge the prejudicial views of Putnam derived from a non‐quantitative analysis of these documents.…”

“…23 23 Poos, ‘Social context’; and Penn and Dyer, ‘Wages and earnings’, refined her research by focusing on cases from Essex, the county where the largest number of sentences survive. Poos (p. 48) finds that enforcement in Essex varied greatly from one district to another.…”

A reappraisal of the freehold property market in late medieval England

“…Parliament's attempts to control wages in the 1351 Statute of Labourers were ultimately unsuccessful; after the second outbreak of plague in the 1360s, wages rose steadily throughout the second half of the fourteenth century and by the 1500s were 50 per cent higher than the statutory rate. 59 As a consequence, the costs associated with running an estate were now much higher than previously, and this may have proved an incentive to sell for many landowners.…”

Help or hindrance? Social policy and the ‘social determinants of health’

“…From this early social policy debate, public health emerged as a peculiarly uncontroversial way to resolve at least some facets of the controversy (Hamlin 1998). For hundreds of years English law had distinguished between people who were unable to work due to age or infirmity -who were regarded as worthy recipients of welfare -and those who were physically able, and thus unworthy recipients (Ault 1930;Poos 1983). Even deliberately punitive laws that banned vagrancy on pain of death allowed for those who were sick to access publicly funded relief (Vagabonds Act 1535;Vagabonds, etc.…”