English Wayfaring Life in the Middle Ages (XIVth Century)

by J. J. Jusserand

50. REAPING TIME.

(From the MS. 2 B. vii. Fourteenth Century.)

“We haue the payne and traveyle, rayne and wynd in the feldes.” (John Ball’s speech in Berner’s Froissart.)

The Commons of the Good Parliament of 1376 secured the confirmation of all the previous statutes. Prohibitions were renewed against any going out of their “own district” (pays propre), whether they were villeins proper, or “labourers and artificers and other servants.” The economic changes that had taken place had rendered possible, however, what was not so formerly; labourers were wanted, and it was not rare to find landowners who employed them in spite of the laws, even by the day, and at other wages than those of the tariff. The parliamentary petitions declare that “they are so willingly {269} received in strange places suddenly into service, that this reception gives example and comfort to all servants, as soon as they are displeased with anything, to run from master to master into strange places, as is aforesaid.” And this would not go on, observe the Commons, if when they offered their services in this fashion they were “taken and put in the stocks.” True, indeed, but the landowners who needed help, and whose crops were waiting on the ground, were too happy to meet with “servantz corores” (runaway), whoever they might be; and instead of taking them “to the nearest gaol,” to pay and use them. The labourers knew it, and their traditional masters had to show less severity. For on some unreasonable demand or over-strong reprimand, instead of submitting as formerly, or venturing a protest, the workman said nothing but, “par grande malice,” went away: “As soon as their masters challenge them with bad service or offer to pay them for their service according to the form of the said statutes, they flee and run away suddenly out of their service and out of their own district, from county to county, from hundred to hundred, from town to town, in strange places unknown to their said masters.”[370]

Worse still, and inevitable, many among them, unable or unwilling to work, took up begging or robbing as a profession. These “wandering labourers become mere beggars in order to lead an idle life, and betake themselves out of their district commonly to the cities, boroughs, and other good towns to beg, and they are able-bodied and might wel ease the community if they would serve.” {270}

So much for the beggars;[371] now for the robbers: “And the greater part of the said wandering servants commonly become strong robbers, and their robberies and felonies increase from one day to another on all sides,” acting in small bands of “two, three or four together,” and plundering “simple villages.” Energetic measures must be taken; let it be prohibited to give alms to this sort of people, and “let their bodies be put in the stocks or taken to the next gaol,” to be sent afterwards to where they belong. Edward III had already condemned to prison, by his ordinance of 1349, those who, under colour of charity “sub colore pietatis vel elemosine,” came to the aid of sturdy beggars, those vagabonds who went through the country “giving themselves to idleness and vice, and sometimes to theft and other abominations.” The same complaints recur in the time of Richard II. Hardly is he on the throne than they are repeated from year to year: 1377, 1378, 1379, revealing to us the existence of early unions and federations of villeins and labourers who, advised by men better informed than themselves, “lours counseillours, meyntenours et abettours,” defend their assumed freedom sometimes by force—“menassent les ministres de lours seignurs de vie et de membre”—sometimes by law, invoking written texts and “exemplifications” whose value they have learnt, and swear to remain “confederated” and to help each other at all cost against their masters.[372] {271}

Statutes multiplied to no purpose; the king had to recognize in his ordinance of 1383 that the “feitors (idlers) and vagrants” overran the country “more abundantly than they were formerly accustomed.”[373] In 1388 he renewed all the orders of his predecessors, re-enacting for rustics rules similar to those of the Inscription maritime still applied to-day in France, for what concerns seafaring, to the seaside population: any one who reached the age of twelve without having done anything else than “working at the plough and cart or other labor or service of husbandry,” will have to continue in this state his life long, “without being allowed to learn a trade or handicraft,” and if one is found to be a party to a contract of apprenticeship, the contract shall be void.

The king reminds, at the same time, the mayors, bailiffs, stewards, and constables of their duties, and asks them in particular to repair their stocks and keep them always ready for wanderers to cease in them their wanderings.[374]

No vain threats nor light penalties. The prisons of those days little resembled the well-washed buildings now to be seen in most English towns, at York for instance, where the guilty ones are apt to find more cleanliness and comfort than they ever knew before. They were mostly fetid dungeons, where the damp of the walls and the stationary position compelled by the irons corrupted the blood and engendered hideous maladies.