Note 385 — Chapter V

See Question 864, Master and Servant Law Select Committee, 1866; Unwin v. Clarke, 1 Law Reports, Queen’s Bench, p. 417; and Second Report of Labour Laws Commission, c. 1157 (1875), p. 7.

The enactments rendering the workman liable to imprisonment for simple breach of a contract of service are historically to be traced to the period when the law denied to the labourer the right to withhold his service or to bargain as to his wages. Any neglect or abandonment of his work was, therefore, like a simple refusal to work at all, a breach, not so much of contract, as of a duty arising out of status and enforced by statute. The law on the subject dates, indeed, back to the celebrated Statute of Labourers of 1349 (23 Ed. III.), the primary object of which was to enforce service at the rates of hiring that existed prior to the Black Death. The second section of this law enacts that if a workman or servant depart from service before the time agreed upon he shall be imprisoned. The same principle was asserted in the Statute of Apprentices in 1563 (5 Eliz. c. 4), which consolidated the law relating to all artificers and labourers, and expressly applied it to workers by the piece, who were rendered liable to imprisonment if they left before completing their job. During the eighteenth century, which abounded, as we have seen, in enactments dealing with particular trades, a long series of statutes made the provisions of law more definite and stringent in the industries in question. The principal English Acts were 7 Geo. I. st. 1, c. 13 (tailors); 9 Geo. I. c. 27 (shoemakers); 13 Geo. II. c. 8 (all leather trades); 20 Geo. II. c. 19; 27 Geo. II. c. 6; 31 Geo. II. c. 11 (various trades); 6 Geo. III. c. 25 (agreements for a term); 17 Geo. III. c. 56 (textiles, etc.); 39 & 40 Geo. III. c. 77 (coal and iron); 4 Geo. IV. c. 34 (all trades); 10 Geo. IV. c. 52 (general); 6 & 7 Vic. c. 40 (textiles).

The intolerable oppression which these laws enabled unscrupulous employers to commit was, at the beginning of the century, scarcely inferior to that brought about by the Combination Laws. This was strongly urged by the authors of A few Remarks on the State of the Laws at present in existence for regulating Masters and Workpeople(preserved among the Place MSS. 27804), which George White, the prompter of Peter Moore, M.P., published in 1823. The pieceworker clause of the Statute of Apprentices was particularly oppressive. “This clause,” says White, “has been much abused, as in many businesses they never finish their work, as the nature of the employment is such that they are compelled to begin one before they finish another, as wheelwrights, japanners, and an infinite number of trades; therefore if any dispute ariseth respecting the amount of wages, and a strike or turn-out commences, or men leave their work, having words, the master prosecutes them for leaving their work unfinished. Very few prosecutions have been made to effect under the Combination Acts, but hundreds have been made under this law, and the labourer or workman can never be free, unless this law is modified. The Combination Act is nothing: it is the law which regards the finishing of work which masters employ to harass and keep down the wages of their workpeople; unless this is modified nothing is done, and by repealing the Combination Acts you leave the workman in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred in the same state you found him—at the mercy of his master” (p. 51). But, in spite of this somewhat exaggerated protest, neither Place nor Hume took up the amendment of the law relating to contracts of service. Their paramount concern was to secure for the workman freedom to enter into a contract, and oppressive punishment for its breach attracted, for the moment, little attention.

Besides White’s Manual, the following may be referred to for the history of the law, and of its amendment: Report of Conference on the Law of Master and Workman under the Contract of Service(Glasgow, 1864); the Reports of the Select Committee on the Law of Master and Servant, 1866, and of the Royal Commission on the Labour Laws, 1875; The Labour Laws, by James Edward Davis (1875); and Stephen’s History of the Criminal Law, vol. iii.