Il6 ON THE DISTRIBUTION OF WEALTH IN ENGLAND, 



enacting, but with little success, that the old rate of wages 

 should be retained, and denounced penalties on the giver as 

 well as on the receiver of excess wages. The lords tried to 

 reverse the old bargains which they had made with their serfs 

 for the commutation of labour rents, and as a consequence had 

 to encounter the prodigious social convulsion of Tyler's and 

 Littlestreet's insurrection. Notwithstanding the indignant 

 assertion that the charters of manumission were revoked, and 

 that the concessions made to the rebels were annulled, the 

 serfs virtually obtained that for which they had contended, 

 and the money commutations became a settled and irrevocable 

 agreement 1 . Thenceforward the grievances of employers are 

 embodied in petitions to Parliament, in complaints that the 

 Statute of Labourers is not kept, and in the efforts which the 

 framers of the parliamentary statute made in its various 

 chapters to give effect to the prayer of the petitioners. They 

 constantly complain that the wages of labour are excessive 

 and, to them, ruinous. 



By the 12 Ric. II, masters and servants in husbandry who 

 paid or received more than the statutable rate of wages were 

 rendered liable to be fined in the excess, and after a second 

 conviction to be amerced in double the excess, and if convicted 

 a third time, in three times, payment of the fine being enforced 

 by a penalty of forty days' imprisonment in default. In the next 

 year, 13 Ric. II, in order to bring wages still more under con- 

 trol, the justices of the county were empowered to fix the rate 

 of wages which labourers in husbandry and artisans were to 

 receive with or without board and clothing. This was the 

 machinery adopted and in force at the commencement of the 

 fifteenth century. 



By 4 Henry IV, cap. 14, labourers were to receive no hire 

 for holidays nor on the eves of feasts, when it seems they were 



1 The suggestion which I made first in my first volume, that the real cause of the insur- 

 rection of 1381 was a determination to maintain the commutation of the labour rents, 

 was accepted by the late Mr. Tom Taylor, who told me that he had long me'.litat< <1 

 writing a drama on the subject of Wat Tyler, but did not, till he read what I had stated, 

 see the cause of the outbreak. See Vol. i. p. 81. 



