local guild was a birthright. It was, therefore, no such great unfairness, that a person who sought employment in some other town might be dragged back to his native field to labor, when it was thus artificially protected for him. This was the chief artificial regulation. Otherwise the relations of laborer and lord were left much to settle themselves, both sides relying on natural causes for the supply of laborers and of labor to be done. The lord could exact a fine from an absconding serf; on the other hand, the serf could not gain entrance in the guild of a town not his own until he had resided and worked in it for a year and a day. There was no attempt at the regulation of the price of labor; but for some centuries matters went on in this way—a condition of affairs by no means so unlike that now recognized by law as were conditions which afterward happened in the sixteenth, or may now happen in the twentieth, century.

And the law never attempted to fix the price of the raw material; but it did soon attempt to fix that part of the price of a necessary commodity which was determined by human agencies alone. And this would appear to have been the dangerous precedent.

The Statute of Laborers.

So matters went on until the middle of the fourteenth century, when was passed the Statute of

Laborers. Up to that time matters had gone on fairly well, and had adjusted themselves. The agricultural laborer got wages sufficient for his support, the artisan from two to three times as much, the clerk or scribe rather less than the artisan; nor were the hours of labor long. Thorold Rogers proves pretty conclusively that they were probably only eight hours a day, and the workman was paid extra for overtime. What brought this state of affairs to an end, and that in a purely fortuitous way, appears to have been the great plague, known as "the black death," in 1348. The first effect of this, of course, by vastly decreasing the supply of labor, was to double or treble wages. Prices in general went up, though not in the same proportion. The small farmer was little injured; but the large land-owner, the lord, or, as we should say, the capitalist, thought he was ruined. Then, with the bad example of the laws attempting to regulate prices before him, he induced, first, the king to issue a proclamation, that, despite the demand for labor, no higher than customary wages should be paid; and then, as this was necessarily disregarded, the Parliament passed the statute which remained a law until the fifth year of Queen Elizabeth, and contained eight clauses, of which, leaving out those which merely concerned the form of penalty, four concern us to-day. These four are, substantially :

1. No person under sixty, serf or free, shall decline to undertake farm labor at the wages that had been customary in the year 1347, except they were possessed of lands or private means or engaged in some mechanical or mercantile industry; the lord having the first claim to their labor, but those who declined to work either for him or for others could be sent to the common jail.

2. Artificers were made liable to the same conditions, and the artificers enumerated were saddlers, tanners, curriers, shoemakers, tailors, smiths, carpenters, masons, tilers, pargetters (plasterers), carters, and others. Doubtless they would have extended the law to operatives in the textile industries, but that at that time these were necessarily possessed of special skill, and their craft was enough of a mystery to lie outside of the care of the English privileged classes, it being mostly in the hands of Flemings or other foreigners.

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3. That food must be sold at reasonable prices, and,

4. Alms - giving to able-bodied laborers was strictly forbidden.

Labor Compulsory.

It will be noted that there are three important principles in this statute: first, that of compulsory labor; second, the legal limitation of wages; and third, the prohibition of alms-giving, or chari

table support. The first principle may have had some effect during the two or three centuries through which the law lasted; but Thorold Rogers tells us that the second principle-that of the regulation of wages-did not in practice work, but was commonly evaded, even in the case of agricultural laborers, where, from the nature of the case, it had most effect; and the third principle, that of forbidding alms-giving, was radically altered by the statute of Elizabeth, which founded the modern poor-law system of England, and which the nineteenth century has come to believe was the greatest of all agencies in the pauperization of English labor. We will notice in passing that at this time—the fourteenth century -women were employed in field work, being paid at the rate of a penny a day, substantially less than the ordinary payment of male labor. Despite this Statute of Laborers, the ordinary wages of agricultural labor increased, in men's work about fifty per cent., while in women's work it was doubled. The peasants, says Thorold Rogers, met the law by combinations; or, in modern English, the serfs entered into what are now called tradeunions, and supported each other in resistance of

1

1 See the monumental evidence of the effect of such state help, both on economic and moral conditions, contained in the voluminous report to the House of Commons in 1834, reprinted by special order in 1885.

the law and in demands for higher wages.

Pos

sibly as a consequence of this Statute of Laborers came the celebrated insurrection of Wat Tyler, as a result of which all the incidents of villainage were abolished, and all laborers declared free by the sovereign of England. It is noteworthy that Kent took the lead in this movement; "for there never have been serfs in Kent.' To have been born in that county was a bar to the proceedings by which a lord claimed the recovery of his serf. Attempts were constantly made to enforce the Statute of Laborers by subsequent acts of Parliament; but, says Thorold Rogers, the fifteenth century was the golden age of the English laborer, if we are to interpret the wages which he earned by the cost of the necessaries of life. These efforts failed, and the rate kept steadily high, the wages of the artisan being generally sixpence a day, and the agricultural laborer fourpence; and women received from half to two-thirds as much. Wages were reduced a century later, under Henry VIII., by the indirect process of debasing the coinage; and by an attempt, partially successful, to suppress the guilds and confiscate their property, both the laborer's power of resistance and his benefit society were taken away.