Statute of Laborers

King Edward III

The Black Death that struck Florence between 1347 and 1350 came to England, causing a loss of lives so severe that there was an almost immediate shortage of laborers. Under these conditions surviving laborers could demand higher wages and apparently did. This hurt the powerful commercial and landed classes, who turned for help to government authorities. One response was the Statute of Laborers (1351), issued by King Edward III and directed against changes in prices and wages. An excerpt of this statute follows.

Consider: The economic and social consequences of the plague in England; the king's response to this economic problem; the standards used to evaluate proper wages.

. . The King to the sheriff of Kent, greeting: Because a great part of the people, and especially of workmen and servants, have lately died in' the pestilence, many seeing the necessity of masters and great scarcity of servants, will not serve unless they may receive excessive wages, and others preferring to beg in idleness rather than by labor to get their living; we, considering the grievous incommodities which of the lack especially of ploughmen and such laborers may hereafter come, have upon deliberation and treaty with the prelates and the nobles and learned men assisting us, with their unanimous counsel ordained: That every man and woman of our realm of England, of what condition he be, free or bond, able in body, and within the age of sixty years, not living in merchandize, nor exercising any craft, nor having of his own whereof he may live, nor land of his own about whose tillage he may occupy himself, and not serving any other; if he be required to serve in suitable service, his estate considered, he shall be bound to serve him which shall so require him; and take only the wages, livery, meed, or salary which were accustomed to be given in the places where he oweth to serve, the twentieth year of our reign of England, or five or six other common years next before.

If any reaper, mower, or other workman or servant, of what estate or condition that he be, retained in any man's service, do depart from the said service without reasonable cause or license, before the term agreed, he shall have pain of imprisonment; and no one, under the same penalty, shall presume to receive or retain such a one in his service.

No one, moreover, shall pay or promise to pay to any one more wages, liveries, meed, or salary than was accustomed, as is before said ....

SOURCES:

Statute: Edward P. Cheyney, ed., "England in the Time of Wycliffe," in Translations and Reprints from the Original Sources of European History, vol. 11, no. 5, Department of History of the University of Pennsylvania, ed. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1898), pp. 3-4.

Selection: D. Sherman, Western Civilization: Images and Interpretations (3rd ed.), McGraw-Hill, 1983, pp. 251-252.