4 ENFORCEMENT OF THE STATUTES OF LABOURERS 



was unjust and atrocious;' on the other side it is held 

 that the statutes were hostile to villeinage, inasmuch as 

 they interfered with the relations of the lord to his 

 villein and lessened the dependence of the latter on the 

 former,* and that in accordance with the economic theo- 

 ries and practices of the age it was both reasonable and 

 desirable that wages should be regulated, these statutes 

 being peculiarly equitable in that they aimed to restrict 

 prices as well as wages. ^ As to their effectiveness, we 

 ■ find that while the belief is often expressed that the 

 statutes were one factor in the causation of the peasants' 

 revolt,-* the common statement is that they were inopera- 

 tive as to their avowed object and may be regarded as 

 dead letters. ' This view is based either on the fact of the 

 undeniable rise in wages after the plague, put at from 



'Eden, op. cit., i, 39-42; Pashley, loc. ciL; Rogers, Hist, of Prices, 

 V, preface, y.\--x.\i, passim; Seebohm, "The Black Death," in Fort- 

 nightly Review, ii. 270-273. 



^ Petrushevsky, Wat Tyler' s Rebellion (Russian), reviewed by Savine 

 in E. H. R., xvii, 781-782; Savine, " Bondmen under the Tudors," in 

 Trans. Royal Hist. Soc, new series, xvii, 254-256; for an important 

 discussion of this aspect of the statutes, cf. Vinogradoff , Villainage in 

 England, 53-55. 



^Ashley, op. cit., i, ch. 3, ii, 332-337; Brentano, Hist, of Gilds, 

 cxlii-cxliii; Cunningham, op. cit., i, 249-254, 335-336; Tout, Polit. 

 Hist, of England, 372-374. 



* Bergenroth, Sybel's Hist. Zeitschrift, ii, 51-86; Kriehn, "Social 

 Revolt, 1381," in A. H. R., vii, 282-285, 477-479; Oman, The Great 

 Revolt, 7-9, 17; Page, End of Villainage, 71; Petit-Dutaillis, in intro- 

 duction to Reville's Soulhvement des Travailleurs d' Angleterre, xxxii, 

 xlv-xlix; Powell, The East Anglia Rising, i; Seebohm in Fortnightly 

 quoted supra, 272; Stubbs, op. cit., ii, 420; Trevelyan, Wycliffe, 189- 

 190, 217-218. 



^E.g., Powell, loc. cit.; Stubbs, op. cit., ii, 428, 473. Eden is an 

 exception, and with no reference to the revolt holds that the statute was 

 "rigorously enforced;" op. cit., i, 42. Cf. also Denton, Eng. in the 

 ' 15th Century, 239-241. 



