1349 – 1381
Wages, labour laws and revolts, 1349–1381
The plague leaves fewer hands to plough, reap and weave, and the survivors ask for more pay. Lords and employers turn to their kings. On 18 June 1349, while the plague is still spreading through England, Edward III issues the Ordinance of Labourers at Westminster. Every man and woman under sixty who has no land or trade of their own must work for whoever asks, at the wages paid in 1346 or the years before. Nobody may give alms to beggars who can work. In 1351 Parliament turns the ordinance into the Statute of Labourers and sets the rates: a reaper takes 2 pence a day in the first week of August, a master mason 4 pence. Justices hear thousands of cases in the 1350s, most of them against workers.
Other rulers do the same. John II of France issues an ordinance on the trades of Paris on 30 January 1351, and the Cortes of Castile at Valladolid fix the pay of workers in the same year. Wages rise all the same, because employers short of hands pay more. The economist Gregory Clark finds that English farm wages doubled between 1350 and 1450.
Revolts follow in the next decades. Historians weigh the plague’s part in each against war, taxes and local quarrels. The Jacquerie, a rising of peasants north of Paris, begins at Saint-Leu-d’Esserent on 28 May 1358, while the French king is a prisoner of the English after his defeat at Poitiers in 1356. In 1378 the wool workers of Florence, the Ciompi, rise and hold a share of the city’s government from July to the end of August. In England a poll tax sets off the Peasants’ Revolt at Brentwood in Essex on 30 May 1381. On 13 June the rebels of Essex and Kent enter London, and the next day they kill the archbishop of Canterbury, Simon Sudbury. At Mile End Richard II grants most of their demands, the end of serfdom among them. On 15 June their leader, Wat Tyler, is killed at Smithfield, and the king takes back his grants.
Reapers at work under a reeve in Queen Mary’s Psalter, made in England about 1310Wikimedia Commons, Queen Mary Master, Public domain (Reeve and Serfs.jpg)
The priest John Ball rides before Wat Tyler’s rebels of 1381, in a manuscript of Froissart’s Chronicles made about 1470Wikimedia Commons, unknown painter, Public domain (John Ball encouraging Wat Tyler rebels from ca 1470 MS of Froissart Chronicles in BL.jpg)
Sources
- Ordinance of Labourers (1349) and Statute of Labourers (1351), in Rosemary Horrox, The Black Death (1994).
- Bertha Haven Putnam, The Enforcement of the Statutes of Labourers during the First Decade after the Black Death, 1349–1359 (1908).
- Gregory Clark, “The long march of history: Farm wages, population, and economic growth, England 1209–1869”, Economic History Review 60 (2007).
- Justine Firnhaber-Baker, The Jacquerie of 1358: A French Peasants’ Revolt (2021).
- Alastair Dunn, The Great Rising of 1381 (2002).
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