In 1563 the English Parliament passed the ‘Statute of Artificers’ (aka ‘the Statute’), which sought to regulate wage labour and ‘banish idleness, advance husbandry and yield unto the hired person both in time of scarcity and in the time of plenty a convenient proportion of wages’. Such a lofty aim was to be achieved through three main mechanisms, enforced primarily through the county-level criminal courts (quarter sessions):
- Compulsory service for much of the labouring population, with control and oversight of contracts.
- Control of wages through the regular assessment and setting of maximum rates.
- Mandated and regulated apprenticeship amongst craftsmen and merchants.
This sprawling suite of legislation built upon and replaced various labour laws enacted since the Black Death, and it would remain the backbone of the country’s labour code until the early 19th century.
When examined through the lens of ‘freedom or unfreedom’, the Statute appears to underpin an obviously coercive system restricting workers’ agency. Yet, to what extent did this curtailment of freedom extend beyond the law books to reality? This blog post is principally concerned with this question of effective enforcement, a longstanding topic within labour laws historiography. Here I seek to further complicate the debate, by surveying the many levels of labour law enforcement to show just how diffuse mechanisms of enforcement could be, and just how bound the question of ‘effective enforcement’ remains to the survival of certain sources.