villeins still existed.  They were only just beginning to consider agricultural laborers as freemen; they were used to the notion of exerting a control over laboring men, who were still often appendant to the land on which they worked, for it was unlawful for an agricultural laborer to change his abode; and in many other ways they were under strict laws.  So that it didn’t seem much of a step to say also, we will regulate the rate of wages—­particularly as the payment of wages in money was rather a new thing.  Probably two or three centuries before most wages were paid in articles of food or in the use of the land.  So they got this first Statute of Laborers through; it required all persons able in body under sixty to do labor to such persons as require labor or else be committed to gaol.  That, of course, is compulsory labor; the law would therefore be unconstitutional with us to-day except in so far as it applied, under a criminal statute, in regard to tramps or vagrants.  In some States we commit tramps and vagrants to gaol if they won’t do a certain amount of work for their lodging, under the theory that they have committed a criminal act in being vagrants.  Otherwise this principle, a law requiring all persons to work, is now obsolete.  Then it went on to say, no workman or servant can depart from service before the time agreed upon; lawful enough, to-day, although laborers do not like to make a definite contract.  The South, however, has adopted this principle as to agricultural labor, just as in the England of the fourteenth century.  Southern States have an elaborate system of legislation for the purpose of enforcing labor upon idle negroes, which, when it creates a system of “peonage,” is forbidden by the Federal laws and Constitution.  They are compelled, as in the old English statute, to serve under contract or for a period of time, and if they break it, are made liable by this statute to some fine or penalty imposed by the nearest justice of the peace; and when they cannot pay this, they may be Imprisoned.  Finally, this Statute of Laborers first states the principle that the old “wage and no more” shall be given, thus establishing the notion that there was a legal wage, which lasted in England for centuries and gave rise to the later law under which strikes were held unlawful.  Here, they meant such wages as prevailed before the Black Death.

(1350) The next year the statute is made more elaborate, and specifies, for common laborers, one penny a day; for mowers, carpenters, masons, tilers, and thatchers, three pence, and so on.  It is curious that the relative scale is much the same as to-day:  masons a little more than tilers, tilers a little more than carpenters; though unskilled labor was paid less in proportion.  The same statute attempts to protect the laborer by providing that victuals shall be sold only at reasonable prices, which were apparently fixed by the mayor.