1. CPR, 1348–1350, vol. 8, p. 594. It is clear that villein services in this area were under significant strain from plague mortality as villeins renegotiated more favorable labor services with Eynsham Abbey in 1349; see Eynsham Cartulary, ed. H.E. Salter, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford Historical Society, 1907–8), vol. 2, pp. 19–20.
2. RP, vol. 2, pp. 225–27. Bertha Putnam, The Place in Legal History of Sir William Shareshull, Chief Justice of the King’s Bench, 1350–1361 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1950), speculates that the Oxford incident was “a factor in leading to the enactment of the more rigid statute of 1351” (p. 147).
3. Putnam, The Enforcement of the Statutes of Labourers during the First Decade after the Black Plague (New York: Columbia University Press, 1908), p. 10, 12. On the need for the 1351 parliament, see RP, vol. 2, p. 225.
4. Knighton’s Chronicle, 1337–1396, ed. and trans. G.H. Martin (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), pp. 102–103. All subsequent references refer to this edition.
5. Knighton, pp. 120–21. Contemporary historians have been kinder to the statute. W.M. Ormrod, “The English Government and the Black Death of 1348–49,” in England in the Fourteenth Century, ed. W.M. Ormrod (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell & Brewer, 1986), pp. 178–79, asserts that “the labour laws were a good deal more effective in the decade after the first outbreak of the Black Death than they came to be thereafter.”