Practice question · Multiple choice
The Ordinance of Labourers of 1349 and the Statute of Labourers of 1351 tried to fix wages at pre-plague levels. What does the existence of that legislation tell a historian?
Hints
- Read the statute as evidence of a problem rather than as a description of a policy.
- A law forbidding something is evidence that the something is going on.
Show the answer
A. Wages were rising sharply, since governments do not ban things that do not happen
Why
Legislation is a symptom. Repeated statutes, prosecutions and complaints in the decades after 1349 document exactly the wage pressure they were meant to suppress, and their failure is recorded in the same sources, which is a useful reminder that prescriptive documents describe what worried the authorities, not what was true.
Practise The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries: a Time of Crisis?
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