So scarce had laborers become through the ravages of
the Black Death, that wages rose rapidly, to the alarm of the
employers, who prevailed upon King Edward III to issue the
historic proclamation of 1349, directing that no laborer should
demand and no employer should pay greater wages than those
customary before the plague. This early attempt to outmaneuver an
economic law by a legal device was only the prelude to a long
series of labor laws which may be said to have culminated in the
great Statute of Laborers of 1562, regulating the relations of
wage-earner and employer and empowering justices of the peace to
fix the wages in their districts. Wages steadily decreased during
the two hundred years in which this statute remained in force,
and poor laws were passed to bring the succor which artificial
wages made necessary. Thus two rules of arbitrary government were
meant to neutralize each other. It is the usual verdict of
historians that the estate of labor in England declined from a
flourishing condition in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries
to one of great distress by the time of the Industrial
Revolution. This unhappy decline was probably due to several
causes, among which the most important were the arbitrary and
artificial attempts of the Government to keep down wages, the
heavy taxation caused by wars of expansion, and the want of
coercive power on the part of labor.
>From the decline of the guild system, which had placed labor and
its products so completely in the hands of the master craftsman,
the workman had assumed no controlling part in the labor bargain.
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