Note 175-1 — Chapter III

The plague known as the black death of 1348, which devastated the greater part of Europe, was followed by many complaints on the part of the buyers of labor, of the cupidity and malicious conspiracies of the working classes. (See supra § 160.) Fixed rates of wages under Peter the Cruel of Castile, 1351; contemporaneously in France, Ordonnances, II, 350, and in England, 25 Edw. III, c. 2; 37 Edw. III, c. 3. In France, the wages of a thresher were fixed at the one-twentieth or the one-thirtieth of a scheffel, while in present Saxony it is from one-fourteenth to one-twelfth. In England, under the same ruler, who had seen his castle at Windsor built, not by day laborers for wages, but by vassal masons, vassal carpenters, etc., whom he got together from all parts of the kingdom. That the rates might not be evaded, the succeeding king forbade both the leaving of agriculture for industry and change of domicile[TN 14] without the consent of a justice of the peace. (12 Richard II., c. 3.) All such provisions were little heeded in the 16th century. (Rogers, the Statist. Journal, 1861, 544 ff.)

Fixed rates of wages under Henry VII. and Henry VIII., in the interest of workmen. (Gneist, Verwaltungsrecht, II, Aufl., 461 ff.) The fact that in 5 Elizabeth, c. 4, another attempt was made to fix the rate of wages by governmental provisions, in which the person paying more than the sum fixed was threatened with 10 days' imprisonment, and the person receiving less with 12, was in part akin to the English poor laws. If a poor man had the right to be eventually employed and supported by the community, it was, of course, necessary that the justice of the peace should be able to determine at what wages anybody should be prepared to work before he could say: I can find no work. Extended by 2 James I., c. 6, to all kinds of work for which wages were paid. (Eden, State of the Poor, V, 123 ff., 140.) The buyers of labor in the eighteenth century frequently complained that these fixed wages were more to the advantage of workmen than of their masters. (Brentano, English Guilds., ed. by Toulmin Smith, 1870, Prelim. CXCI.)

In Germany, the depopulation caused by the Thirty Years' War explains why, before and after the peace of Westphalia, so many diets were concerned with fixing the rate of wages of servants. Compare Spittler, Gesch., Hanovers, II, 175. Among the most recent instances of English fixed rates of wages, is 8 George III., for London tailors, and the Spitalfields Act of 1773, for silk weavers who had, a short time before, revolted. Also in New South Wales, about the end of the last century, on account of the high rate of colonial wages. (Collins, Account of the English Colonies of New South Wales, 1798.) Later, Mortimer, Elements of Politics, Commerce and Finance, 1174, 72, maintains fixed rates of wages to be necessary. In Germany the imperial decree of 1830, tit., 24, and again the ordinance of Sept. 4, 1871, provide that each magistrate shall fix the rate of wages in his own district. Chr. Wolf, Vernunftige Gedanken vom gesellsch. Leben der Menschen, 1721, § 487, would have the rates so fixed that the laborers might live decently and work with pleasure.