ing the labour markets in the two eras had much in common, so too did the favoured remedies. Since those who would employ labour were, in the words of the Hertfordshire justices in 1687, faced with the `Licentious humours of some servants ... [who] will not work but at such times and in such manner as they please',(40) it was natural that means should be sought to compel the idle to work. Accordingly, in addition to the enforcement of the Statute of Artificers, a prominent place was accorded in the writings of the second half of the seventeenth century and the first half of the eighteenth to schemes designed to promote the duty to labour, backed up with a variety of coercive measures, including the denial of outdoor relief to the able-bodied and incarceration for inveterate idlers.(41) The Ordinance and Statutes of Labourers enacted during and after the Black Death had likewise made it an offence punishable by imprisonment for any man or woman, `of whatsoever condition, free or servile, able-bodied and under the age of sixty years, not living by trade nor exercising a certain craft, nor having of his own whereof he shall be able to live, or land of his own, in the tilling whereof he shall be able to occupy himself, nor serving another man', to refuse employment.(42) Moreover, this legislation sought to restore not only the wages but the prices ruling prior to the Great Pestilence, just as the main thrust of `mercantilist writings' was to argue `that the cost of subsistence must form the norm to which the rate of wages ought to be adjusted'.(43)The close similarities between the thought of these two periods, despite the three centuries and more which separated them, also extend far into the consequences which were believed to flow from excessively high real wages. When the grand jury of Worcestershire made a presentment in 1661 in which they found `the unreasonableness of servants' wages a great grievance, so that the servants are grown ...
