Constitutional History.
[chap.
Legislation
on labour.
Deficiency
of labour.
First ap-
pearance of
a law of
settlement.
of the statutes, or for the increase of their stringency ; but the
chief result was the spread of disaffection and disorder. From
the paid artificers the dread of servitude and the desire of com-
bination spread to the villeins, against whose conspiracies for
Constrainingtheir masters a statute was passed in 1377, and
who were thus drawn or driven into participation with the
rebellion of 1381, for which at the time they suffered such
heavy retribution. Although the events of that year tended to
bring the employers to a more just sense of their relation to the
employed, petitions every now and then emerge, showing that
the lesson had not been completely learned, and from this time
the cause of the villein and the artisan is one. Besides the
petitions for the enforcement of the statutes, which are pre-
sented as late as the year 1482, statutes were passed in 1388,
1427, and 1430 confirming or amending the acts of Edward III ɪ.
As early as 1378 the commons had petitioned that agricultural
labourers might not be allowed to be received into towns, there
to become artisans, mariners, or clerks; in 1391 occurs the
famous petition that villeins may not be allowed to send their
children to the schools ; in the first parliament of Henry IV the
same feeling is displayed in a request that they may no longer
be enfranchised by being received into a market town 2. All at-
tempts however either to compel the artisans to work at hus-
bandry, or to prevent the villeins from becoming artisans, failed ;
the land went rapidly out of cultivation ; pasturage succeeded to
tillage ; poverty in the labouring class became a growing evil, and
the laws against the beggars grew more and more stringent.
It is to the legislation of 1388 that England owes her first
glimpse apparently of a law of settlement and organised relief.
The act by which the statute of labourers was confirmed and
amended contained a clause which forbad the labourer to leave
his place of service or to move about the country without a
passport. Another clause directed that impotent beggars
should remain in the places where they were at the passing of
the statute, and that, if the people of those places would not
provide for them, they were to seek a maintenance in other
l Statutes, iɪ. 63, 233, 244. 2 Rot. Parl, ijɪ. 46, 294, 296, 448.
XXT.]
Villenage.
623
townships within the hundred or wapentake, or in the places
where they were born, within forty days after the proclamation
of the statute, there to remain during their, lives1. The same
intention appears in the acts of 1495 and 1504, which were no
doubt an expansion of the statute of 1388, and which direct
that beggars not able to work are to be sent to the place where
they were born or have dwelt or are best known, to support them-
selves by begging within the limits of the hundred2. All these Legislation
. . . for vagrant
acts refer to mendicancy as if it were a recognised profession, in poor,
which both pilgrims and poor scholars of the Universities were
included, and such as was practised in Germany by both appren-
tices and students in much later times. It is probable, and indeed
certain, that for the poor who remained at home no such legisla-
tion was needed : in the towns the guilds, and in the country the
lords of the land, the clergy, and the monasteries, discharged
the duty, whether on legal or religious grounds, of providing for
the settled poor without putting them to unnecessary shame.
495. One class of the poor, the villein class, has engrossed The vtiieɪns.
almost the whole of the interest which the sympathy of
historical students can furnish for the medieval poor ; and
in our former chapters we have attempted to gather from
the extremely obscure statements of legal writers, and in Early
. ....... _ . ViIlenage.
spite of the diversities of local customs, some slight notion
of their condition at different periods of our history. We
have seen how in Anglo-Saxon times the relation of the
landless man to his lord placed him under a protection
wrhich was liable to be merged in total dependence, whilst
between him and the bondslave there still existed a dif-
ference so wide as to be really a difference in kind; and
how under the Norman government the differences of rank
in the lower classes of the native population were probably
confused ; the bondman possibly gained, whilst the villein for
the time as certainly lost. Both were ‘ rustici ’ or ‘ nativi,’
both had land on customary conditions, both were so far
‘ adscriptitii glebae,’ that they could not leave their land
without losing their all, or escape from the claims of their
ɪ Statutes, ii. 58. 2 Statutes, ii. 569, 656.