ON THE PRICE OF LABOUR. 299 



villains. Those who declined to work should be sent to the 

 common gaol. ii. Imprisonment is decreed against all who 

 quit service before the time fixed in their agreement, iii. No 

 other than the old wages should be given, the remedy being the 

 lord's court, iv. Lords of manors violating the previous clause 

 to be liable to treble damages, v. Artificers shall be liable to 

 the same conditions ; the artificers enumerated being saddlers, 

 tanners, tawers, shoemakers, tailors, smiths, carpenters, masons, 

 tilers, pargetters, carters, and others, vi. Food should be sold 

 at reasonable prices, vii. Alms are strictly forbidden to able- 

 bodied labourers, viii. Any excess of wages taken can be seized 

 for the king's use towards the payment of a tenth and fif- 

 teenth just granted. The statute provides the price at which 

 labour should be paid summer and winter, and guards against 

 the emigration of inhabitants of towns to country places in 

 summer'. 



We have already seen, from the evidence of facts, that these 

 statutes were inoperative. We might indeed have anticipated 

 that they would be, because it is impossible that legislative 

 enactments should over-ride economical laws. And besides 

 these facts, we read continually of petitions in Parliament 

 complaining that the Statute of Labourers was not kept. In the 

 strictness of the letter it could not possibly be kept, for it 

 .would have been necessary that the price of all commodities, 

 the value of which is determined by the cost of labour expended 

 on them, should have remained stationary, and have conformed 

 to the regulations of the enactment. But though the statute 

 might to some extent have checked the growth of agricultural 

 wages, it could not control the cost of iron, of cloth, and of the 

 numerous materials which the agriculturist of the Middle Ages 

 needed to purchase for the purpose of carrying on his farm. 

 The regulation did not, in spite of its terms, afreet the class 



1 Perhaps it is in connexion with the provisions of this statute that we must interpret 

 25 Edw. III. cap. 1 8, to the effect that villenage may be pleaded and a villain seized though 

 a writ "de nalivitate probanda" may be pending. The chapter is not printed but only alluded 

 to in Ruffhead's Statutes ; but I have found it on this authority in Fitzherbert. 



