I discovered an interesting document yesterday. Titled “The Statute of Labourers, 1351,” it is the text of a law passed by the English Parliament in 1351 A.D.

Let the words of the English political, religious, and economic elites explain the Statute’s purpose: “Whereas it was lately ordained by our lord the king and by the assent of the prelates, earls, barons, and others of his council, against the malice of servants, who were idle, and not willing to serve after the pestilence, without excessive wages, that such manner of servants, as well men as women, should be bound to serve, receiving the customary salary and wages in the places where they ought to serve in the 20^th year of the reign of the king that now is, or five or six years before, and that the same servants refusing to serve in such a manner should be punished by imprisonment of their bodies, as is more plainly contained in the statute.”

Some context: after the plague we remember as the Black Death killed millions upon millions of people, perhaps as many as a third to half of all people in many areas of the world, all peasant-operated agricultural economies faced an extreme labor shortage.

The shortage meant that peasants all over Europe and the world were in a position where they could pit one potential employer against another in pursuit of higher wages and they could pit one lord against another in pursuit of fewer or no service obligations, better working conditions and terms of contract, food and drink allotments, and more political freedom.

The response of secular and religious landowners was to try to legally fix wages at the earlier rates they were willing to pay to ensure that their revenues and wealth remained as high as possible. Of course, the peasants routinely tried to resist the law, but a sustained effort to enforce it unfolded in real time during the following years.

The copy of the statute appears in volume IV (1969) of English Historical Documents, edited by A. R. Myers, a noteworthy professor of medieval history at the University of Liverpool at the time of publication. The volume covers 1327 through 1485 and is a part of a twelve-volume series published by the Oxford University Press.

For writers of medievalist fiction of any subgenre, the Statute is a nice factual marker about the wages for certain work in England shortly before the Black Death. The Statute is proof that whenever favorable conditions, such as an extreme labor shortage, existed, the workers tried and often succeeded, at least for a time, in getting far higher wages than the wealthy landowners wanted to pay them.

The statute listed the legal wages for many trades and types of work. For example, a master carpenter’s allowable wage was 3d per day (3 silver pennies), and other carpenters, 2d per day. A master mason’s wage was 4d per day, while a mason’s assistant or servant’s wage was 1.5d per day. “A mower of meadows” could earn 5d per acre or per day, and “reapers of corn in the first week of August 2d, and the second 3d, and so till the end of August, and less in the country where less was wont to be given” (994).

More broadly, in the ceaseless and endless struggle between capital and labor, the Statute is clear proof that the oligarchy can capture a political system and make the law serve its interests, not necessarily the interests of all people. Without some version of communal capitalism, this type of robber-baron economy occurs over and over again throughout history.

This ongoing power struggle eventually erupted into the English Peasant Revolt of 1381. If you are unfamiliar with the leader Wat Tyler or the preacher John Ball, I recommend Summer of Blood: England’s First Revolution (Penguin, 2016) by Dan Jones as a quick introduction to what common people do if you push them too far and the spiraling savagery both sides typically engage in during such a class conflict. The peasants in England revolted as they always do eventually. And so did their peers in France, Germany, Hungary, Slovenia, Croatia, Finland, and Switzerland, according to Jones’ tally. Similar examples occurred in many other regions of the world, and the evidence rests on the shelves of any number of good libraries, at least for now.

[Trilogy Project update: I finished my polishing revision of Book Three on August 1. After my first reader gives me her feedback, I’ll polish it one more time before pushing the button to publish it. In other words, I am publishing well before my original projected period of December 2025. Note: as of August 17, Book Three is live and published on Amazon.]