labor has scarcely had any thing similar to an "exchange."[175-4] [Footnote 175-1: The plague known as the black death of 1348, which devastated the greater part of Europe, was followed by many complaints on the part of the buyers of labor, of the cupidity and malicious conspiracies of the working classes. (See _supra_ § 160.) Fixed rates of wages under Peter the Cruel of Castile, 1351; contemporaneously in France, Ordonnances, II, 350, and in England, 25 Edw. III, c. 2; 37 Edw. III, c. 3. In France, the wages of a thresher were fixed at the one-twentieth or the one-thirtieth of a _scheffel_, while in present Saxony it is from one-fourteenth to one-twelfth. In England, under the same ruler, who had seen his castle at Windsor built, not by day laborers for wages, but by vassal masons, vassal carpenters, etc., whom he got together from all parts of the kingdom. That the rates might not be evaded, the succeeding king forbade both the leaving of agriculture for industry and change of domicile without the consent of a justice of the peace. (12 Richard II., c. 3.) All such provisions were little heeded in the 16th century. (_Rogers_, the Statist. Journal, 1861, 544 ff.) Fixed rates of wages under Henry VII. and Henry VIII., in the interest of workmen. (_Gneist_, Verwaltungsrecht, II, Aufl., 461 ff.) The fact that in 5 Elizabeth, c. 4, another attempt was made to fix the rate of wages by governmental provisions, in which the person paying more than the sum fixed was threatened with 10 days' imprisonment, and the person receiving less with 12, was in part akin to the English poor laws. If a poor man had the right to be eventually employed and supported by the community, it was, of course, necessary that the justice of the peace should be able to determine at what wages anybody should be prepared to work before he could say: I can find no work. Extended by 2 James I., c. 6, to all kinds of work for which wages were paid. (_Eden_, State of the Poor, V, 123 ff., 140.) The buyers of labor in the eighteenth century frequently complained that these fixed wages were more to the advantage of workmen than of their masters. (_Brentano_, English Guilds., ed. by _Toulmin Smith_, 1870, Prelim. CXCI.)