Definition
Justices of Laborers were judicial officers in medieval English law appointed to enforce the Statute of Laborers (23 Edw. III, 1349–1351) and related legislation governing the wages and conduct of working people. Their primary function was to hear and determine complaints arising from laborers who refused to work, abandoned their employers, demanded wages above the statutory maximum, or otherwise violated the conditions Parliament had imposed on the laboring classes in the aftermath of the Black Death. These justices operated as a specialized tribunal distinct from ordinary justices of the peace, though the two offices were eventually consolidated as labor regulation became absorbed into the general commission of the peace.
Why It Matters in Research
This is a historical term with no modern operational equivalent. Researchers will encounter it almost exclusively in primary sources, legal histories, and treatises covering medieval and early modern English law — particularly in materials treating the development of labor regulation, wage controls, and the transformation of villeinage and serfdom into nominally free labor markets.
Several research traps apply. First, the office predates the modern justice of the peace as a general institution; do not read backward from the familiar magistracy. The Justices of Laborers were a purpose-specific creation, and their jurisdiction was defined by statute rather than common law commission. Second, the term "frowardness" used in both Black's and Burrill's entries (drawn from Blount's Glossographia) is archaic and carries a moral-disciplinary charge — it means willful contrariness or disobedience — that is essential to understanding how contemporaries framed labor regulation as a problem of individual moral failure rather than market economics. Researchers reading period sources should note that this framing shaped the penalties and the discretion granted to justices. Third, jurisdiction and authority under these statutes overlapped considerably with manorial courts, royal commissioners, and later quarter sessions; tracing a specific dispute or enforcement action requires attention to which forum was actually used.
For researchers working in legal history of employment and labor law, this office represents a foundational data point: state-enforced wage suppression as a legal institution. The Statute of Laborers is sometimes cited as one of the earliest examples of legislative interference in the labor market in common law jurisdictions, and the Justices of Laborers were the enforcement mechanism. The office illuminates the origins of doctrines later associated with master and servant law, including the legal compulsion to work and the criminalization of contract breach by servants and laborers.
Corpus connections: Sources citing this term will frequently also reference Justices of the Peace (as the absorbing institution), the Statute of Laborers, and the broader apparatus of master and servant law. Blount's Glossographia (1656) and Blount's Nomo-Lexicon (1670) are the shared upstream source for Black's and Burrill's definitions — a useful reminder that multiple historical dictionaries sometimes share a single secondary source rather than reflecting independent verification.
Historical Dictionary Support
The three source dictionaries are largely in agreement, though they illuminate the office from slightly different angles. Black's and Burrill's entries are nearly identical, both drawing verbatim from Blount and emphasizing the disciplinary rationale — correcting laborers who "would either be idle or have unreasonable wages." The shared Blount provenance means these two entries should not be treated as independent corroboration.
Rapalje & Lawrence adds genuine value by anchoring the office to its specific statutory foundation (23 Edw. III) and framing the problem more neutrally in terms of "questions relating to the wages of laboring men" who demanded wages "beyond the amount prescribed" by statute. This formulation is somewhat more accurate from a legal-historical standpoint: the Statute of Laborers created a regulatory regime, and the Justices of Laborers were its adjudicators, not merely moral enforcers.
What the historical dictionaries collectively miss: they do not note that the office was relatively short-lived as a distinct institution. By the late fourteenth and into the fifteenth century, labor jurisdiction was substantially transferred to or merged with the expanding commission of the peace, making justices of the peace the primary enforcers of labor regulation. This evolutionary detail matters for researchers trying to locate records — enforcement documents after roughly the 1360s–1380s are more likely found in quarter sessions records than in any separate commission.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
The Law Mind Employment & Labor Law Encyclopedia does not contain a directly corresponding entry on medieval English labor regulation or the Statute of Laborers. The listed encyclopedia entries (Railway Labor Act, Public Sector Labor Relations, Juvenile Justice) are not relevant to this historical term. No encyclopedia cross-reference applies.