This volume of essays represents a selection of papers first delivered at the York Interdisciplinary Conference on the Fourteenth Century, held at the Centre for Medieval Studies, University of York, in July 1998, and organised around the theme of ‘The Problem of Labour’. This was the first in what is intended to be a series of such conferences, each organised around a coherent theme and each aiming to bring together both established and younger scholars from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds to share their knowledge and enthusiasm for that most eventful and enigmatic of medieval centuries, the fourteenth. The conference series consequently mirrors the academic mission of the Centre for Medieval Studies, which for some thirty years has actively promoted interdisciplinary approaches to the study of the Middle Ages. The conferences in this series are deliberately intended to challenge the contributors by providing themes that almost unavoidably demand an appreciation of and engagement with the subject matters, perspectives, and methodologies of disciplines other than their own.

The ‘Problem of Labour’ thus emerges as a truly interdisciplinary project whose ramifications are evident in a whole range of documentary, literary, artistic and architectural evidence. The natural disasters and profound social changes of the fourteenth century created not merely a ‘problem’ of labour, but also new ways of discussing and (supposedly) solving that problem; a series of contrasting and often competing discourses emerged. These range from the critical social awareness of some of the early fourteenth-century protest literature to the repressive authoritarianism of the new national employment laws that emerged and were enforced in the wake of the Black Death, but which may in part have been rooted in earlier traditions of legislation in London and elsewhere. At the very moment that the image of the honest labourer seemed to reach its apogée in the Luttrell Psalter or, a few decades later, in Piers Plowman, the dominant culture of the proprietary interest was increasingly suspicious of what it described as the idleness, greed and arrogance of the lower orders. Indeed the traditional ruling order consciously appropriated a discourse of sin when faced with what was understood to be a challenge to a divinely sanctioned social hierarchy. This challenge was elsewhere found in the blurring of gender roles consequent upon the advent of a larger proportion of women into the workforce.