ssary to search for means to negate or circumvent them. People had been few and land abundant in early medieval Europe, but the binding of men and women to their lords and their lands endowed estates with far greater value than they would otherwise have possessed. In the aftermath of the Black Death of 1348-9, seigneurial authority was bolstered by the government and the common law in an attempt to increase the supply of labour, restrain the rise of wages, maintain rent levels and enforce the occupation of lands.(6) In the late seventeenth century when the pool of surplus labour began to shrink and real wages began to rise after more than a century of decline and stagnation, it once again became a priority to find means of blocking and reversing harmful tendencies in the labour market. But in the later eighteenth century, when recurrent food scarcity and trade depressions threatened to impoverish the working masses, voluntary idleness ceased to be viewed as the major problem and concern duly shifted from wages which were deemed to be too high to wages which were in danger of plunging too low.During the half-millennium and more between the Middle Ages and the onset of industrialization the structure of economy and society underwent profound change, but the priorities of those who laboured and those who did not changed far less. The portfolio of ideas, attitudes and policies regarding wages, work, workers, subsistence, consumption, leisure and charity proved exceptionally durable, as did the behaviour of the labouring poor. The issues with which the respective parties had to grapple were recurrent, as were the contrasting and frequently conflicting perspectives from which they were viewed. The broad swings which occurred over the centuries in the level of real wages and the relative scarcity of labour necessitated major adjustments in the responses of employers and employees, governors and governed, rich and poor, but such adjustments occ...
