(1388) The Statute of Richard II restricts laborers to their hundred and makes it compulsory for them to follow the same trade as their father after the age of twelve.  The wages of both industrial and agricultural laborers are again fixed-shepherds, ten shillings a year; ploughmen, seven; women laborers, six shillings, and so on.  Servants are permitted to carry bows and arrows, but not swords, and they may not play tennis or foot-ball.  And here is the historical origin of the important custom of exacting recommendations:  servants leaving employment are required to carry a testimonial, and none are to receive servants without such letter—­the original of the blacklist.  Here, also, we find the beginning of poor-law legislation, those unable to work are to be supported in the town where born.  Villeinage, which began at the Norman Conquest, according to Fitz-Herbert, “because the Conqueror gave lordships with all the inhabitants to do with them at their pleasure to his principal followers, and they, needing servants, pardoned the inhabitants of their lives, and caused them to do all manner of service”—­was now abolished by compensation in a money wage payment.  The institution of villeinage is last mentioned in a commission of Queen Elizabeth, 1574, directing Lord Burleigh and others in certain counties to compound with all such bondmen or bondwomen for their manumission and freedom.

(1389) The next year the practice of fixing wages at a permanent sum is abandoned and they are to be fixed semi-annually at Easter and Michaelmas by a justice of the peace.  In 1402 we find the remarkable provision that laborers are not to work on feast days nor for more than half a day before a holiday.  Such legislation would hardly be necessary in modern England, where, in many trades, no one works for a whole day after the holiday as well.  In 1425 is another statute forbidding masons to confederate themselves in chapters; and in 1427 the attempt to fix wages by law is again abandoned and they are to be fixed by the justices as in 1389, “because Masters could not get Servants without giving higher Wages than allowed by the Statute.”

(1436) Now, perhaps, we find the first use of the expression “restraint of trade,” that most important phrase, in a statute forbidding by-laws of guilds or corporate companies “in restraint of trade,” also forbidding unlawful ordinances by them as to the price of their wares “for their own profit and to the common, hurt of the people,” and such by-laws are made penal and invalid except when approved by the chancellor; and this statute of Henry VI is re-enacted again in 1503 under Henry VII, where by-laws of guilds, etc., restraining suits at law are made unlawful, and so “ordinances against the common weal of the people.”  The meaning and importance of such legislation as this has been, I hope, made clear above.  Note the words “to the common hurt of the people” and “against the common weal of the people.”  From this century, at least, therefore, dates that doctrine of the common law which makes unlawful any contract or combination in restraint of trade, and it was left for the succeeding century to develop the last great principle, that against monopoly, caused either by unlawful combination of individuals or grant by the crown itself.