The Statute of Labourers (1350–1) compelled all men and women, sound of body, free or bond, and younger than sixty, without craft, merchandise, living, land, or service, to serve in husbandry. No changes were made to the legislation until the Statute of Artificers in 1562–3, which added only a lower age limit, twelve. The legislation was repealed, along with the rest of the statute, in the second decade of the nineteenth century.

Compulsory service had two objectives. It attempted, in the first place, to force cottagers to become reliable, year-round workers when they were protected from this position by their rights to the use of common pasture, forest, and marsh. Of probable equal importance, the statute was the necessary sanction behind wage assessments. Not only were wages to be controlled, but men and women were to be compelled to accept employment at the controlled wages.

Many examples of the enforcement of this legislation from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries exist. In October of 1661, single persons out of work in Cambridgeshire were ordered to place themselves in service within a week. Single men and women out of service were frequently ordered by Essex Petty Sessions in the later sixteenth century to find masters. Similar presentments and orders were made in Buckinghamshire, Hertfordshire, and the North and West Ridings of Yorkshire. In Wiltshire in 1656 young men and women were ordered to go abroad into service, not to remain at home holding out for excessive wages.