English Gilds Volume 40, PT. 1; The Original Ordinances of More Than One Hundred Early English Gilds: Together with E Olde Vsages of E Cite of Wynchester; The Ordinances of Worcester; The Office of the Mayor of Bristol; And the Costomary of the Manor

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1870 Excerpt: ...and as merchants and tradesmen took advantage of the small supply of wares to raise their prices, in like manner the workmen endeavoured to use, for a general rise in wages, the distress into which the propertied class had been plunged through the universal dearth of labour. The consequences of this were the notorious Statutes of Labourers (23 and 25 Edward III.), in which it was ordained for workmen in general, but especially for agricultural labourers and those employed in the building trades, that no workman should take more, and no employer should give more, than had been customary before the plague. It has become the fashion in our time to represent these wage-regulations as a policy contrived for the oppression of the labourer, and this especially in explanations to working-men asking for legal regulations of wages, --as they frequently did towards the end of the last century and in the beginning of the present, --of the superior value of modern legislation for the working-class. To give such a character to these statutes is however, in my judgment, a complete misrepresentation of the real state of the case. These regulations of wages were but the expression of the general policy of the Middle Ages, which considered that the first duty of the State was to protect the weak against the strong, which not only knew of rights, but also of duties of the individual towards society, and condemned as usury every attempt to take unseemly advantage of the temporary distress of one's neighbour1. According to Knighton, there existed at the time of the plague such distress and such general loosening of the bonds of society as is only to be found in the descriptions of earthquakes in South America. Whole villages died out; houses fell into ruins; nobody would work exc.