The history of labour law in the United Kingdom concerns the development of UK labour law, from its roots in Roman and medieval times in the British Isles up to the present. Before the Industrial Revolution and the introduction of mechanised manufacture, regulation of workplace relations was based on status, rather than contract or mediation through a system of trade unions. Serfdom was the prevailing status of the mass of people, except where artisans in towns could gain a measure of self-regulation through guilds. The law of the land was, under the Act of Apprentices 1563, that wages in each district should be assessed by justices of the peace. From the middle of the 19th century, through acts such as the Master and Servant Act 1867 (30 & 31 Vict. c. 141) and the Employers and Workmen Act 1875 (38 & 39 Vict. c. 90), there became growing recognition that greater protection was needed to promote the health and safety of workers, as well as preventing unfair practices in wage contracts.
Roman law
Anglo-Saxon England Of the main conditions of industrial labour in early Anglo-Saxon England details are scanty. Monastic industrial communities were added in Christian times to village industrial communities. While generally husbandry was the first object of toil, and developed under elaborate regulation in the manorial system, still a considerable variety of industries grew up, the aim being expressly to make each social group self-sufficing, and to protect and regulate village artisans in the interest of village resources. This protective system, resting on a communal or co-operative view of labour and social life, has been compared as analogous to the much later and wider system under which the main purpose was to keep England as a whole self-sufficing.
Medieval England
It has also been shown how greatly a fresh spirit of enterprise in industry and trade was stimulated first by the Danish and next by the Norman invasion; the former brought in a vigour shown in growth of villages, increase in number of freemen, and formation of trading towns; the latter especially opened up new communications with the most civilised continental people, and was followed by a considerable immigration of artisans, particularly of Flemings. In Saxon England slavery in the strictest sense existed, as is shown in the earliest English laws, but it seems that the true slave class as distinct from the serf class was comparatively small, and it may well be that the labour of an ordinary serf was not practically more severe, and the remuneration in maintenance and kind not much less than that of agricultural labourers in recent times. In spite of the steady protest of the Church, slavery (as the exception, not the general rule) did not die out for many centuries, and was apt to be revived as a punishment for criminals, e.g. in the fierce provisions of the statute of Edward VI against beggars, not repealed until the passing of the Vagabonds Act 1597 (39 Eliz. 1. c. 4). At no time, however, was it general, and as the larger village and city populations grew the ratio of serfs and slaves to the freemen in the whole population rapidly diminished, for the city populations "had not the habit and use of slavery," and while serfs might sometimes find a refuge in the cities from exceptionally severe taskmasters, "there is no doubt that freemen gradually united with them under the lord's protection, that strangers engaged in trade sojourned among them, and that a race of artisans gradually grew up in which original class feelings were greatly modified."
Boroughs, guilds and agricultural labour
From these conditions grew two parallel tendencies in regulation of labour. On the one hand there was, under royal charters, the burgh or municipal organisation and control of artisan and craft labour, passing later into the more specialised organisation in craft guilds; on the other hand, there was a necessity, sometimes acute, to prevent undue diminution in the numbers available for husbandry or agricultural labour. To the latter cause must be traced a provision appearing in a succession of statutes, especially the Statute of Cambridge 1388 (12 Ric. 2. c. 5), that a child under twelve years once employed in agriculture might never be transferred to apprenticeship in a craft. The steady development of England, first as a woolgrowing, later as a cloth-producing country, would accentuate this difficulty. During the 13th century, side by side with development of trading companies for the export of wool from England, may be noted many agreements on the part of monasteries to sell their wool to Florentines, and during the same century absorption of alien artisans into the municipal system was practically completed. Charters of Henry I. provided forCunningham, W. Growth of English Commerce and Industry naturalisation of these aliens.
Trend towards statute law
From the time of Edward I to Edward III a gradual transference of burgh customs, so far as recognised for the common good, to statute law was in progress, together with an assertion of the rights of the Crown against ecclesiastical orders. The statutes of Edward I, says Dr. Cunningham, "mark the first attempt to deal with Industry and Trade as a public matter which concerns the whole state, not as the particular affair of leading men in each separate locality." The first direct legislation for labour by statute, however, is not earlier than the twenty-third year of the reign of Edward III, and it arose in an attempt to control the decay and ruin, both in rural and urban districts, which followed the Hundred Years' War, and the pestilence known as the Black Death. This first Statute of Labourers was designed for the benefit of the community, not for the protection of labour or prevention of oppression, and the policy of enforcing customary wages and compelling the able-bodied labourer, whether free or bond, not living in merchandise or exercising any craft, to work for hire at recognised rates of pay, must be reviewed in the circumstances and ideals of the time.
Regulation generally in the Middle Ages aimed at preventing any individual or section of the community from making what was considered an exceptional profit through the necessity of others. The scarcity of labour by the reduction of the population through pestilence was not admitted as a justification for the demands for increased pay, and while the unemployed labourer was liable to be committed to jail if he refused service at current rates, the lords of the towns or manors who promised or paid more to their servants were liable to be sued treble the sum in question. Similar restrictions were made applicable to artificers and workmen. By another statute, two years later, labourers or artificers who left their work and went into another county were liable to be arrested by the sheriff and brought back. These and similar provisions with similar aims were confirmed by the Labourers (No. 2) Act 1361 (34 Edw. 3. c. 10), Labourers Act 1368 (42 Edw. 3. c. 6) and the Statute of Cambridge 1388 (12 Ric. 2. c. 7), but the act of 1360, while prohibiting "all alliances and covins of masons, carpenters, congregations, chapters, ordinances and oaths betwixt them made," allowed "every lord to bargain or covenant for their works in gross with such labourers and artificers when it pleaseth them, so that they perform such works well and lawfully according to the bargain and covenant with them thereof made."
Powers were given by the acts of 1368 and 1388 to justices to determine matters under these statutes and to fix wages. Records show that workmen of various descriptions were pressed by writs addressed to sheriffs to work for their king at wages regardless of their will as to terms and place of work. These proceedings were founded on notions of royal prerogative, of which impressment of seamen survived as an example to a far later date. By the Statute of Cambridge 1388 no servant or labourer, man or woman, however, could depart out of the hundred to serve elsewhere unless bearing a letters patent under the king's seal stating the cause of going and time of return. Such provisions would appear to have widely failed in their purpose, for the Quarter Sessions Act 1414 (2 Hen. 5. Stat. 1 c. 4) declares that the servants and labourers fled from county to county, and justices were empowered to send writs to the sheriffs for fugitive labourers as for felons, and to examine labourers, servants and their masters, as well as artificers, and to punish them on confession.
Fifteenth century The Labourers Act 1405 (7 Hen. 4. c. 17), while putting a property qualification on apprenticeship and requiring parents under heavy penalties to put their children to such labour as their estates required, made an exception, giving freedom to any person "to send their children to school to learn literature." Up to the end of the fifteenth century a monotonous succession of statutes strengthening, modifying, amending the various attempts (since the first Statute of Labourers) to limit free movement of labour, or demands by labourers for increased wages, may be seen in the acts of 1411, 1427 (6 Hen. 6. c. 3), 1444 (23 Hen. 6. c. 12), and the Wages of Labourers, etc. Act 1495 (11 Hen. 7. c. 22). It was clearly found extremely difficult, if not impracticable, to carry out the minute control of wages considered desirable, and exceptions in favour of certain occupations were in some of the statutes themselves. The penalties for giving wages contrary to law were repealed by the Wages of Labourers, etc. Act 1512 (4 Hen. 8. c. 5) so far as related to masters, but it also appears that London workmen would not endure the prevalent restrictions as to wages, and that they secured in practice a greater freedom to arrange rates when working within the city. Several of these statutes, and especially the Artificers and Labourers Act 1514 (6 Hen. 8. c. 3), fixed the hours of labour when limiting wages. During March to September the limits were 5 a.m. to 7 or 8 p.m., with half an hour off for breakfast and an hour and a half off for midday dinner. In winter the outside limits were fixed by the length of daylight.
Cloth manufacture