Age of Invention: Tudor Trade War

Where we last left off, I argued that England’s labour laws following the Black Death — maximum wage rates, compulsory employment, minimum contract lengths, restrictions on apprenticing outside of agriculture, and strict limits on everyone’s movement — were much better enforced than has commonly been assumed, and even that they prevented the English population recovering as quickly as the rest of Europe’s over the course of the fifteenth century.(It’s also thanks to demographic change that this ...