(1512) Under Henry VIII the penalty for paying higher wages than the law allowed was removed from the employer and applied only to the employee taking the wage; and in 1514 comes perhaps the most elaborate of all the earlier acts fixing the wages and hours of labor.  Their meal times and sleep times are carefully regulated, they are forbidden to take full wages for half-day’s work and forbidden to leave a job until it is finished, and the rates of pay of bailiffs, servants, free masons, master carpenters, rough masons, bricklayers, tilers, plumbers, glaziers, carvers, joiners, shipwrights, ship carpenters, calkers, clinchers, agricultural laborers, both men and women, mowers, reapers, carters, shepherds, herdsmen, and possibly others, are again prescribed; this list of trades in the England of the early sixteenth century is interesting.  Bailiffs who assault their overseers may be imprisoned for a year, and an exception is made from the act of all miners of lead, iron, silver, tin, or coal, “called See Cole, otherwise called Smythes Coole,” or for making of glass, but that part of the act fixing wages was repealed the very next year as to the city of London.

(1514) The abuse of monopolies begins to be shown this year (but see also 1503, above) in a statute complaining of the grant of second patents of a matter already granted; and avoiding in such cases the later patent unless the king express that “he hath determined his pleasure against the first.”

The appearance of the gypsies in England is marked by a statute of 1530, describing them as “outlandish people called Egyptians,” complaining of their robberies, and requiring them to depart the realm.  In the same year first appeared the celebrated Act for the punishment of beggars and vagabonds and forbidding beggary, and requiring them to labor or be whipped.  Herbert Spencer states in his “Descriptive Sociology” that it punishes with loss of an ear the third conviction for joining a trades-union, which, if true, would justify much of the bitterness of modern labor unions against the common law.  The provision evidently referred to (22 Henry VIII, chapter 12, section 4) applies, however, not to guilds, but to “Scolers of the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge that go about begging not being authorized under the seal of the said Universities” as well as to other beggars or vagabonds playing “subtile, crafty and unlawful games such as physnomye or palmestrye.”  The same year is an Interesting statute against foreign artificers exercising handicrafts in England, not without example in the labor legislation of our modern States; but exempting beggars, brewers, surgeons, and scriveners as not handicraftsmen, possibly the origin of the vulgar notion that those trades are more genteel than skilled labor.