The Social Context of Statute of Labourers Enforcement

Abstract

Historians' impressions of the position of agricultural servants and wage labourers within the medieval English rural society and economy remain as imprecise as the picture which most contemporary documents provide. Research to date on medieval agricultural labourers has concentrated upon estate workers within the seigneurial economy, primarily because manorial accounts provide fairly detailed information about famuli or estate labourers employed by particular manors, their terms of employment, and the remuneration they received. But the role of servants and labourers employed on tenant holdings by medieval villagers, and their importance for non-agricultural production within rural communities, are still extremely uncertain. They appeared fleetingly if at all in manorial documentation, which seldom had reason to be concerned with them as such, while another source which historians have used to approach the problem, nominative polltax returns furnishing household or occupational information, poses serious difficulties of interpretation.