parliament petitioned for a remedy against the labourers who refused to
work and migrated to the towns to become artisans, mariners, or clerks,
so that the very cultivation of the land was threatened.^180 Beaumanoir
had warned in the previous century about the peril of communal
alliances like those of the Lombard cities against the Hohenstaufen
emperors, but also of ‘another sort of people’ who swore, and coerced
reluctant companions to swear, not to work for such low wages as
before: agreements that must be severely punished as soon as they came
to the knowledge of the sovereign or a lesser lord, for they made essen-
tial goods dearer, and were ‘against the common profit’.^181 But the
stream of labour legislation which governments began to produce in the
fourteenth century had a wider scope than the restraint of the wage-
inflation among the peasantry let loose by the Black Death. The Ordi-
nance of Labourers promulgated in England in 1349 and the Statute of
1351 attempted to fix the wages of carpenters, masons, tilers, and other
‘workmen of houses’ along with those of ‘servants in husbandry’, and
to regulate the prices charged by ‘those who carry by land or water’ and
by all sellers of victuals. And they virtually created a new servant class
by requiring ‘every man and woman in our realm of England, or what-
ever condition, free or servile, who are strong in body and under sixty
years of age, if they are not living by trade or exercising a craft, do not
have property to live from or land to cultivate, and are not already in
the service of others... to serve anyone who requires them in work suit-
able to their status (in servicio congruo considerato statu suo)’.^182 In the
same spirit and in the very same month King John of France issued an
ordinance regulating the economic life of Paris and its environs—the
region where the Jacquerie was soon to erupt. Its first title ordered
mendicants ‘of whatever estate or condition, having a trade or none,
both men and women’, if they were ‘sound in body and members’, to
stop their dice-playing in the streets and look for useful work, or else
leave the city within three days. The ordinance went on to require
tradesmen such as carters, glovers, purse-makers, stonemasons,
doublet-makers, and watermen to have no more for their pains than a
third above what they had taken avant la mortalité.^183
In fact, well before the Black Death, Philip VI had cited his royal duty
to provide for le bon estatof his people and keep them in prosperity as
Estates of people 227(^180) RPiii. 46b (no. 69).
(^181) Coutumes de Beauvaisis, i. 446–9 (§883–6).
(^182) SRi. 307–9, 311–13, tr. in EHDiv.1327–1485,ed. A. R. Myers (London, 1969),
993–4; The Cambridge Economic History of Europe, iii.Economic Organization and Policies
in the Middle Ages, ed. M. M. Postan, E. E. Rich, and Edward Miller (Cambridge UP, 1963),
321 ff., 404 ff.; A. Harding, ‘The Revolt against the Justices’, in The English Rising of 1381,
185–7.
(^183) Ordonnances des Roys de France, ii. 350–80, 563–6.