The Problem of Labour in Fourteenth-Century England

Attitudes towards `labour', in the wake of the Black Death, shown to range from early protest literature to repressive authoritarianism. At the very moment that the image of the honest labourer seemed to reach its apogee in the Luttrell Psalter or, a few decades later, in Piers Plowman , the dominant culture of the landed interests was increasingly suspiciousof what it described as the idleness, greed and arrogance of the lower orders. Labour was one of the central issues during the fourteenth c