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 statutes of 1360, 1368 and 1388, 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