A Bedfordshire Wage Assessment of 1684

Summary

INTRODUCTION

The many duties of the seventeenth century justices of the peace included the assessment of wages. This duty had been imposed upon the justices primarily by the great Statute of Artificers of 1563. That statute provided for the assessment of wages by the justices of the peace in the counties and by the mayors, bailiffs or other head officers in cities-and corporate towns. The wages so assessed were maximum wages and penalties were imposed upon those who gave or received wages higher than the assessed rates. Those penalties were ten days’ imprisonment and a fine of ￡5 for giving higher wages and twenty-one days’ imprisonment for receiving higher wages. Later in Elizabeth’s reign some doubt seems to have arisen over the scope of these assessments and an Act of 1597 clearly laid down that the justices of the peace and the town authorities had power to assess the “wages of any labourers, weavers, spinsters and workmen or workwomen whatsoever, either working by day, week, month, year or taking any work at any person or persons’ hand whatsoever to be done.” This was confirmed in 1604 by a further Act which also provided for the assessment of minimum wages for workers in the cloth industry.

A considerable number of wage assessments made under the Act of 1563 has survived, but hitherto none has been found for Bedfordshire. The recently discovered Bedfordshire assessment for 1684 is indeed the first evidence for the practice of wage assessment in that county. The assessment itself exists only in an eighteenth century copy found among the Francklin MSS. It is not possible to say whether this is an isolated example or one of a series .of such assessments made by the Bedfordshire justices of the peace. Evidence of continuous wage regulation, either in the form of new assess ments or of re-issues of old assessments, is often to be found among Quarter Sessions’ records, but unfortunately the Bedfordshire Quarter Sessions’ records are missing for the period 1660 to 1711. It is possible that these missing records were extant in the eighteenth century and that the assessment of 1684 was copied from them.