It was the failure of this ordinance to effect its ends which brought about at the close of 1349 the passing of the Statute of Labourers.  “Every man or woman,” runs this famous provision, “of whatsoever condition, free or bond, able in body, and within the age of threescore years, ... and not having of his own whereof he may live, nor land of his own about the tillage of which he may occupy himself, and not serving any other, shall be bound to serve the employer who shall require him to do so, and shall take only the wages which were accustomed to be taken in the neighbourhood where he is bound to serve” two years before the plague began.  A refusal to obey was punished by imprisonment.  But sterner measures were soon found to be necessary.  Not only was the price of labour fixed by the Parliament of 1351 but the labour class was once more tied to the soil.  The labourer was forbidden to quit the parish where he lived in search of better paid employment; if he disobeyed he became a “fugitive,” and subject to imprisonment at the hands of justices of the peace.  To enforce such a law literally must have been impossible, for corn rose to so high a price that a day’s labour at the old wages would not have purchased wheat enough for a man’s support.  But the landowners did not flinch from the attempt.  The repeated re-enactment of the law shows the difficulty of applying it and the stubbornness of the struggle which it brought about.  The fines and forfeitures which were levied for infractions of its provisions formed a large source of royal revenue, but so ineffectual were the original penalties that the runaway labourer was at last ordered to be branded with a hot iron on the forehead, while the harbouring of serfs in towns was rigorously put down.  Nor was it merely the existing class of free labourers which was attacked by this reactionary movement.  The increase of their numbers by a commutation of labour services for money payments was suddenly checked, and the ingenuity of the lawyers who were employed as stewards of each manor was exercised in striving to restore to the landowners that customary labour whose loss was now severely felt.  Manumissions and exemptions which had passed without question were cancelled on grounds of informality, and labour services from which they held themselves freed by redemption were again demanded from the villeins.  The attempt was the more galling that the cause had to be pleaded in the manor-court itself, and to be decided by the very officer whose interest it was to give judgement in favour of his lord.  We can see the growth of a fierce spirit of resistance through the statutes which strove in vain to repress it.  In the towns, where the system of forced labour was applied with even more rigour than in the country, strikes and combinations became frequent among the lower craftsmen.  In the country the free labourers found allies in the villeins whose freedom from manorial service was questioned.  These were often men of position and substance, and throughout the eastern counties the gatherings of “fugitive serfs” were supported by an organized resistance and by large contributions of money on the part of the wealthier tenantry.