The first labour law in England was the "Ordinance of Labourers" (1349), which compelled all people below 60 to work, it set a maximum wage of £2/y and a net work day of around 10 hours. This was then strengthened by "The Statute of Labourers" (1351) which had its means to regulate wages from the increasing real wages seen in the market, due to the demand for labour, incurred by the plague. Thus, the state saw to arrest the labour market by setting the price of labour directly, as well as increasing the supply of labour by compulsion. Despite this, wages tended to increase throughout the 14th century, and had doubled by the beginning of the 15th.
By this time, the guilds had largely managed urban affairs, where trades and craft where based, with members having mutual protections, as opposed to the population of the country, whose agricultural labour was based in serfdom or slavery. We can read guild law codes, such as the Carta Di Bologna (1264) or Les Règlements de Londres pour les Maçons (1356), which set up systems of apprenticeship, fair pay and the like.
We see the overhaul of local guild powers in the "Statute of Artificers" (1562) which sought to regulate wages and movement for the workers in cities, by placing powers over guilds in their admission of apprentices, effectively de-skilling labour, while at once limiting wages, even imprisoning those employers who agreed to pay workers more than what was permitted. Some base this shift in the idea that by this time, labour had greater imperative in the country than the towns, by a focus on agricultural exports than local crafts, as per the mercantilist swoon of early capitalism, eventually culminating in the East India Company (1600 CE).
If we track this from the tendency of primitive accumulation to dispossess peasant farmers by landed gentry, then we see how a focus on the country brings the original momentum for capital, while the town or city becomes central with later industrialisation in the 18th and 19th century, by which time, the bourgeoisie (burghers; city-dwellers) ascend in political prominance, while the country and village declines. At once however, the country becomes depopulated of labourers as they centralise into cities, while the aristocracy dwells in the greenery. Marx discusses this in the union Britain makes with Ireland (1801), that the British lords expel the Irish country into English cities, as they appropriate the land for themselves. We can see
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