From Newsgroup: alt.buddha.short.fat.guy


ThererCOs an old proverb about England, current in the sixteenth century,
that it was a hell for horses, a paradise for women, and a purgatory or
prison for servants. I still donrCOt quite know what to make of the first
and second parts, but a few months ago I finally began to understand how England was a prison for servants. Compared to the world of work today,
with all its occasional frustrations and boredoms, having to work for a
wage in the four or so centuries c.1350-1750 was a dystopian nightmare,
with England pursuing policies sometimes so absurdly and ambitiously oppressive that as I discovered more about them my jaw just kept on
dropping.

I believe their impact has been highly underrated, based on the belief
that they werenrCOt regularly enforced. But the evidence, to me, suggests
that they were on the whole adhered to, and so they would have hugely distorted the functioning of the English economy. I havenrCOt seen the
full scale of the policies set out before in all their detail, and I
think some important details have hitherto been missed or
misinterpreted. So what follows is the long, appalling history of how
England created its prison for servants, and of how this led to a
century of economic depression.

The prisonrCOs walls were first erected in the midst of the Black Death,
when an estimated half of the English population was wiped out. As the
plague still raged, in 1349 Edward III issued an emergency ordinance to
try and contain the economic fallout. Even though half the population
died, their gold and silver coins survived, so that there was suddenly
twice as much coinage in circulation per head. And so one of the
immediate effects was for the price of everything, including both goods
and services, to rapidly rise. This rapid inflation, brought on as it
was by so many people dying, inevitably led to higher wages being
demanded for all kinds of work. rCLSeeing the necessity of masters and
great scarcity of servantsrCY, the ordinance explained, workers now found themselves able to pick and choose who they worked for, and to hold out
for much higher wages than before.

But not if the government could help it....

cont..
https://www.ageofinvention.xyz/p/age-of-invention-the-century-long?
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