§ 2. #Workers in the Middle Ages#. Serfdom for rural labor and many limitations on the workman's freedom in the towns were the prevailing conditions in medieval Europe. Serfdom was both a political and an economic relation. The self was bound to the soil; the lord could command and control him; but the serf's obligations were pretty well defined. He had to give services, but in return for them he got something definite in the form of protection and the use of land. Between the lord and the serf there continued an implied contract, which passed by inheritance from father to son, in the case both of the master and of the serf. In the towns conditions were better for the free master class of the artisans who owned their tools and often a little shop where they both made and sold their products. But the mass of the workers, shut out from special privileges, bore a heavy burden. There were strict rules of apprenticeship; gild regulations forbidding the free choice of a trade or a residence; laws against migration into the town; settlement laws making it impossible for poor men to remove from one place to another; arbitrary regulation of wages, either by the gilds in the towns or by national councils and parliaments, forbidding the workmen to take the competitive wages that economic conditions would have forced the employers to pay; combination laws forbidding laborers to combine in their own interest. These conditions prevailed even in the periods and in the countries often referred to as particularly favorable for the working classes (such as England in the fifteenth century). § 3. #Growth of the wage system#. Throughout the Middle Ages these conditions were gradually changing, and the changes were hastened by the discovery of America, by the social unrest accompanying the Reformation, and by other forces. Servile dues in the rural districts were, by the sixteenth century, commuted for cash payments in England and had begun to disappear in the other Western countries of Europe. The agricultural work was done partly by the peasant landowners, partly by yeomen farmers on their own land, and partly by laborers hired by landowners or by tenant farmers (enterprisers with some capital for equipment). The growth of commerce and of the mechanical trades in the towns required larger ships, factories, and shops, and increasing investments. This required in the towns an increasing proportion of hired laborers having little or no capital invested in industry, and living on wages. This change went on more and more rapidly with the introduction of machinery in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and "the wage system" grew steadily to be a more and more important part of the whole economic structure.[1]