THE LABOUR LAWS. INTRODUCTORY CHAPTERS. CHAPTER I. SUMMARY PROVISIONS RESPECTING BREACHES OF LABOUR CONTRACTS PRIOR TO LORD ELCHO'S MASTER AND SERVANT ACT, 1867. By the common law of this country, that is to say, the law irrespective of any act of parliament, breaches of contract or duty on the part of servants towards their masters, as well as on the part of masters towards their servants, are the subject of a civil action by which damages are awarded. But from a very early period a remedy of another kind, so far as relates to breaches of duty by some descriptions of servants and workmen, was created by act of parliament, and extended from time to time: that is to say, a summary remedy by taking the offending person before a justice of the peace-a corresponding remedy being also given to certain classes of servants for recovery of wages. Former legislation, however, went much further in its interposition than providing a tribunal and machinery for enforcing contracts. It sought to enforce work, and to regulate the price paid for it; and these various acts of parliament and their history form a very interesting and D. B instructive subject for historians, political economists and antiquaries (a). The relation of master and servant, arising out of the form of contract known to the law under the name of hiring and service, embraces many varieties of service. We have, in the first place, the broad distinction between domestic servants and every other class of servants. Next to these come servants employed in trade and business, such as clerks, shopmen, and the like. With the foregoing classes of servants the legislature has never thought it necessary to interfere. The respective rights and obligations of master and servant, as arising from the contract between them, have been left to be determined by the common law of the land, and any differences between them to be dealt with by the ordinary tribunals. The contract of hiring and service, so far as relates to servants (a) The Report of the Labour Laws Commissioners, 1875, contains an interesting popular account of the statutes of labourers. I have in another non-legal work called attention to the contrast between the freedom enjoyed by workmen in the reign of Edward III. and in the reign of Victoria. To enlarge the castle of Windsor, contemporaneously, or nearly so, with the institution of the Order of the Garter, in the middle of the fourteenth century, writs were sent to the sheriffs of London and twelve counties to impress stonemasons and others to work at the king's wages, under the control of William of Wykeham, who was the surveyor (himself in receipt of wages of one shilling a day). Many of the workmen so impressed absconded in order to work for other persons at higher wages, and the works at the castle being retarded, writs were directed, in 1362, to the sheriffs of son, London, commanding them to make proclamation prohibiting any per"whether clerk or layman," from employing any of the men, on pain of forfeiting all their goods; and also commanding the sheriffs to arrest the absent workmen and commit them to Newgate. Passing to the nineteenth century we find early in the present reign a strike among the workmen employed in building the Queen's new palace at Westminster (the Houses of Parliament). In the winter of that year they availed themselves of the vacant seats in her Majesty's Court of Queen's Bench as affording a place of shelter and repose. There I saw them day after day enjoying the warm, if not wholesome, atmosphere of the court, and lulled to sleep by the monotonous proceedings in banc, their slumbers undisturbed by any fear of writs or other compulsory process to force them to return to their work. |