Statute of Labourers

The Statute of Labourers was a law created by the English parliament under King Edward III in 1351 in response to a labour shortage, designed to suppress the labour force by prohibiting increases in wages and prohibiting the movement of workers from their home areas in search of improved conditions. It was poorly enforced and did not stop the rise in wages.

The Black Death or Bubonic Plague, which killed more than one-third of the population of Europe, killed 30%−50% of the population in Britain, caused a dramatic decrease in the supply of labour. Lords suddenly faced a sharp increase in competition for workers to work for them. Labourers had increased bargaining power and commanded higher wages. The increase in labour cost also led to inflation throughout the economy. The elite class lamented the sudden shift in economic power. In an attempt to control labour costs and price levels, Edward III issued the Ordinance of Labourers in 1349. Parliament attempted to reinforce the Ordinance with the Statute of Labourers.

The statute set a maximum wage for labourers that was commensurate with wages paid before the Black Death, specifically, in the year 1346. It also mandated that able-bodied men and women should work and imposed harsh penalties for those who remained idle. It required:

That every person, able in body and under the age of 60 years, not having enough to live upon, being required, shall be bound to serve him that doth require him, or else be committed to gaol until he shall find surety to serve, and that the old wages shall be given and no more;

Whereas lately it was ordained by our lord king and by the assent of the prelates, earls, barons and others of his council, against the malice of servants who were idle and not willing to serve after the pestilence without excessive wages, that such manner of servants, men as well as women, should be bound to serve, receiving the customary salary and wages in the places where they are bound to serve in the twentieth year of the reign [1347] of the king that now is, or five or six years before, and that the same servants refusing to serve in such a manner should be punished by imprisonment of their bodies, as is more plainly contained in the said statute. Whereupon commissions were made to diverse people in every county to enquire and punish all those who offend against the same. And now for as much as it is given to the king to understand in the present parliament by the petition of the commons that the servants having no regard to the ordinance but to their ease and singular covetousness, do withdraw themselves from serving great men and others, unless they have livery and wages double or treble of what they were wont to take in the twentieth year and earlier, to the great damage of the great men and impoverishment of all the commonality; whereof the commonality prays remedy. Wherefore in the parliament by the assent of the prelates, earls, barons, and those of the commonality assembled there, in order to refrain the malice of the servants, there are ordained and established the underwritten articles.

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