The Edge of the World: How the North Sea Made Us Who We Are (45 page)

Workers now thought they could choose where
to be, which master to serve, how much would be a fair wage. In his chronicle, Henry
Knighton complained that workers were ‘arrogant and obstinate’ for wanting
higher wages when the cost of food was soaring. A French labour law of 1354 expresses
great crossness at those who worked ‘whenever it pleased them, and spending the
rest of their time in
taverns playing games
and enjoying themselves’. This was not just an irritant; it was a threat. A
petition to the English Parliament in 1377 warned of peasants making
‘confederation and alliance together to resist the lords and their officials by
force’. When the peasants did march on Mile End in 1381 to present their own
petition to the king, they demanded that ‘no man should serve any man except at
his own will’.

Everyone had to be fixed in place because
the poor would never have chosen theirs. It was generally agreed that work was a
punishment for Adam’s fall from grace, and if nature refused to co-operate with
man it was because sin had corrupted the weather, the soil and the natural world. Being
poor brought no spiritual rewards unless you chose to be poor, and no great improvement,
either; peasants seemed to have much the same anger, pride and greed as barons. Being
poor was just wretched; an early-fourteenth-century poem, the
Song of the
Husbandman
, suggests ‘we might as well die now as struggle on like
this’. The poor were not even attractive; Henry Grosmont, Duke of Lancaster, had
to confess he did not like the way they smelled. He prayed for forgiveness for his
reaction, but still he found them distasteful.

When in the thirteenth century peasants made
a brief appearance in the new stained glass of cathedrals like Chartres and Le Mans,
they were shown being busy where the donor of the glass would usually be, but only
because they were shorthand for the gift of a vineyard or some land that had paid for
the window, so their labour was support for the church. By the fourteenth century, even
this sort of dependency was too much to acknowledge; peasants went back to the margins
of lovely manuscripts for the delight of rich individuals. They were shown doing easy,
orderly chores in perfect weather, rarely in groups of more than two and dedicated to
the job.
¹⁵
The English market, having had quite enough of rebellious peasants,
was particularly keen on this vision of order.

The language about workers began to sound
curiously modern. In William Langland’s great poem about Piers Plowman and his
allegorical quest to save the world, there are ‘shirkers’ that Piers
threatens with starvation, but their only response is to fake failing eyesight and
twisted limbs, all the tricks that, he
says, ‘layabouts’ know. The character Waster, the worst of the lot, is
deeply unimpressed by anything that Piers can threaten to get the people to bring in his
harvest; he says he doesn’t give a damn for the law or any knight’s
authority, or Piers and his plough, and what’s more he will beat up the lot if he
ever sees them again. Workless is lawless; some of the poor are undeserving. You
can’t believe a cripple when he says he finds walking difficult. The world is full
of idle people who must be goaded into action. Nobody respects old Romans like Cato any
more, or his instructions to those born poor: ‘Bear your poverty with
patience.’ This new kind of labourer wants hot food at mid-day and a
‘lordly’ wage, or else he feels exploited. In the end it is only the
presence of Hunger, the memory of the terrible famines and the fact that food was always
scarce at the end of summer when last year’s grain was finished and this
year’s crop was not yet reaped which drives the men to the threshing floor.
¹⁶

In the summer of 1349, the harvest was
rotting in the English fields because of ‘the many people, and especially workers
and servants, now dead in this pestilence’. The answer was law: the Ordinance of
Labourers and then the Statute of Labourers. Wages and prices were to be controlled and
labour contracts were to be long, public and unbreakable; those were not new rules, and
they were mostly directed at ploughmen and country workers and those who paid them. The
law mentioned tailors, saddlers, goldsmiths, blacksmiths and shoemakers but they were
not the ones who were prosecuted; it left out the professionals like notaries whose fees
were controlled by law elsewhere, in particular by the laws that King John II proposed
for the Île de France around the same time. But the next provision was quite
extraordinary: anyone with nothing else to do could be ‘bound to serve anyone who
requires his or her services, as long as the service is appropriate to his or her
estate’. Anyone under sixty, woman or man, bonded or free, had to obey, and to
accept the wages being paid before the plague arrived when there was no shortage of
labour. Anyone who failed to accept the work went to jail until they had a change of
mind.
¹⁷

This was something entirely new. There were
still some slaves,
mostly working for
foreigners, but this is not slavery; nobody owns anybody else, but nobody controls his
own labour any more, either. Peasants might hold land in return for doing work, which
was not exactly an arrangement freely negotiated, but it was at least akin to some kind
of payment on a lease. There were serfs, of course, who kept the great estates going
with their unpaid labour and only sometimes held land in return; but this new law was
not directed at serfs. Indeed, serfs had one of the few defences against compulsion;
William Meere in 1352 told a court that he was already the serf of the prior of Boxgrove
and so he could not possibly be required to work for anyone else.

There was a means test: anyone who did not
have enough land or money or goods could be pushed into service. That does not mean paid
work; in service, you got shelter and food and if you were lucky a bit of cash when the
contract was finished. Otherwise, you were tied. People who themselves had servants
could be caught by the rules, like Agnes, wife of a shepherd who had already been in
court because he had the nerve to demand ‘excessive’ wages; she was ordered
to come and hoe the corn of John Maltby, refused, and ‘she also did not permit her
two maidservants to do this work’. Neighbours in nearby houses could suddenly be
labelled vagrants, and a person could be judged idle if she or he was happy to work for
daily wages but did not want a long-term contract. The law was determined to settle a
whole society down: no kindness to ‘unworthy beggars’, no travel for beggars
or workers without letters of authorization.

All this was managed with one more new idea:
summary punishment, no need to prove a case in court or even hold a trial. There had to
be two witnesses to a refusal to serve, but once they had told their story anyone
refusing work could be put in the stocks or taken off to jail, where they stayed until
they agreed to labour. The new justices of labourers who made these laws work were kept
quite furiously busy; those in Essex in 1352 handled thousands of cases, involving
perhaps one in seven of the adults in the county. When the justices were eliminated in
the 1360s, and cases came first to justices of the peace and then to the King’s
Bench, the records are sparse and sometimes missing altogether; but we know enough from
the early
years to see that the machinery of
the law was mostly used against workers who wanted more money than employers wanted to
pay. This is not surprising; if someone’s offence was refusing work there was
nothing to discuss. They were judged on the spot and punished until they agreed to do
what was wanted. There was no need to go to the kind of court that keeps records.

Sometimes a boss wanted to avoid the prickly
business of negotiating altogether, to sidestep the one time a worker could make some
choices and lay down some conditions; the tailor Matthew Ruthin in Oxford demanded the
services of Christine Hinksey, who had no job, and when she refused, she went to jail.
But it wasn’t just the wanderers, the persons without work, who had reason to be
nervous. Roger Gedeney of Stainton in Lincolnshire was accused of refusing to
‘serve in his trade’ of thatcher in the village, and then going off
‘through the countryside to get better and excessive wages’. A community was
determined to hold on to its own, and not to pay him overmuch. John Bingham had a home
and work as a ploughman and was doing fine as a day labourer; but his neighbours wanted
to give him a contract and pay him less, accused him of refusing compulsory service for
them and told the justices he was a vagrant.

The law could be twisted, abused but also
defied, sometimes by the constables and justices. They did force labourers into
contracts, but the contracts could be better than a man could otherwise expect. Not
everyone went quietly: husbands brought back wives who had been assigned to labour for
local grandees, and Richard Cross rescued Joan Busker with a show of force. On
occasions, the constables themselves were hauled into court for letting people go or
simply refusing to apply the law. There were signs of rebellion even from clerics; the
vicar of Preston in Suffolk, in front of his startled congregation, excommunicated the
constables who wanted to tell a day labourer called Digg that he had to serve various
men in the village and he must not go travelling. Digg worked on, for himself. The
constables got off lightly, whatever the harm to their souls; in the 1370s their
colleagues in Wyberton put a vagabond in the stocks and were set upon by a small holy
army, the rector, a chaplain and the rector’s servant.

The greatest resistance came from the people
paying the wages,
who knew how hard it was
to find workers and keep them. They paid the official wage, of course, for the sake of
appearances, often put that amount in their accounts, but that was only the start. They
also found extra payments for threshing, gifts of wheat, food and drink at mid-day, a
bonus for working in the rain: all put down to general expenses but going to the
workers. Employers were very aware that workers thought they had choices, the main one
being to go and work elsewhere, or have a holiday when there was enough money for the
year. At Knightsbridge in Lincolnshire even the carpenter who made the stocks, the
punishment for anyone breaking the Statute, was paid an illegal rate: 5½d a day.

There were also new laws about spending
money, especially on clothes. Preachers thought they had reason to condemn the way
country people dressed: some ‘wretched knave that goes to the plough and the cart,
that has nothing but makes his living year by year … now he must have a fresh
doublet of five shillings or more the price, and above a costly gown with bags hanging
to his knee.’ The law tried to stop the working classes buying their way out of
their proper station. Likewise, in 1390, the law stopped ‘any kind of artificer or
labourer’ from hunting ‘beasts of the forest, hares or rabbits or other
sport of gentlefolk’. The scaffolding of society, having rusted a bit and even
fallen, was being put back; ‘gentlefolk’ were becoming a protected class. By
English law in 1388, servants and labourers who had gone travelling were made to return
to their home villages, ‘to work at whatever occupation they had formerly
undertaken’; an old, familiar world was being restored. A man who persisted in
moving faced prison and, at least in theory, branding on his forehead: the letter
‘F’ for ‘Falsity’.

All across Europe this kind of control
followed the plague. In Sweden, after 1350, every able-bodied adult had to work unless
he could show he had a fortune enough to keep him for a full year; in 1354 the Danes had
the same law. They added a change that looks almost humanitarian at first sight: capital
punishment was limited, as was any punishment that involved maiming. Workers were scarce
and it was unhelpful to harm or kill them.

In Antwerp, the notion of deserving and undeserving poor
took root, and by the sixteenth century virtue was being policed. Anyone pub crawling
lost all right to help, and public sinners – like adulterers – were not eligible in the
first place; to get outdoor relief, which means help without being shut up, you had to
go to confession once a year and to Mass at Easter, and prove it. The nuns at St
Elizabeth’s Hospital refused to help anyone who was pregnant or who had a sexually
transmitted disease, because helping the pregnant would just encourage sin. People with
plague lay dying there alongside other patients and one magistrate reckoned ‘a
patient who has been in the hospital once would rather die than return there’.

In Hamburg the town physician, Johann
Böckel, said plague broke out in poor areas and was spread by beggars in the street; so
the vagabonds, the homeless and workless were bundled off to plague hospitals. In
London, where the workhouse truly began, the poor were set to work in the ‘house
of labour and occupation’ at Bridewell in 1552; within thirty years the house was
‘a lock up for petty offenders’, a ‘nursery of rogues, thieves, idlers
and drunken persons’. The wretched poor made tennis balls and felt and nails, and
they spun wool, which inspired the Amsterdam house for inconvenient women called the
Spinhuis. The poorhouse was meant to cure the poor of being poor, and make them useful;
it was almost a medical idea.
¹⁸

Plague, like the threat of terror nowadays,
was the reason for supervising people’s lives, examining, controlling and
disciplining. The right to do so lay not with a Church that could preach against sin but
with civil authorities who could act. They could adjust a society to their own
tastes.

In this, the pioneer was Edinburgh, in 1498,
with rules that trimmed back tavern hours, insisted that children be kept under
supervision on pain of a forty-shilling fine and put a stop to fairs and markets; the
point was to control movement of people and goods, so nobody could lodge an outsider
without a licence, no English cloth could be imported and anybody visiting Glasgow
without permission went to jail for forty days. Nobody could travel without explaining
themselves, or arrive without being checked. A few years later citizens were told to
report the presence of plague at once; one
man was hanged for concealing a case of plague in his house.
Nobody could deal in old clothes or even remove them for washing. The city was cleaned
and cleaned again, the streets swept and scrubbed, all vagrants expelled on pain of
branding if they ignored the order and death if they came back, because the fear of
death easily justified a social cleansing. ‘
Timor mortis conturbat
me
,’ William Dunbar was writing, with reason: ‘I am troubled by the
fear of death.’ One more gallows was built, like the one that already warned the
lepers what would happen if they strayed, to show that the city was in earnest.
¹⁹