The Wool Journeymen's Wage Petition, 1381
In June 1381, the council of a Tuscan wool town debates a journeymen's petition. Before the plague, 42 workshops employed about 1,200 workers; now 27 workshops employ 780. The journeymen ask for a fixed daily wage of 8 soldi and a ban on unpaid overtime. The masters' guild offers 5 soldi, citing a 20% fall in cloth exports and a new tax of 600 florins. A chronicler sympathetic to the masters writes that the petition was 'stirred by foreign vagabonds' and that 'no honest worker' joined it. The town's grain price has risen 30% in two years, and a hospital register lists 64 indigent wool workers. The council must decide whether to impose the journeymen's wage or the masters' offer, or to refer the dispute to arbitration.
1. How reliable is the chronicler's claim about 'foreign vagabonds'? Use the other evidence in the setup to test it.
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The chronicler's claim is weak as stated. It is a hostile summary written by a master-sympathetic author, and it gives no names, dates, or places. The demographic evidence cuts against a simple outsider explanation: the workforce fell from about 1,200 to 780, a loss of 420, so local labor scarcity is a plausible cause of wage demands. The hospital register lists 64 indigent wool workers, and grain prices rose 30%, which suggests insiders had material grievances. The petition itself asks for a fixed wage and unpaid overtime, demands that fit employed journeymen rather than vagabonds. Still, the chronicler could be reporting a real faction of migrant workers; to test it, compare guild admission lists and tax rolls for 1378 to 1381. Without those, treat the claim as an unsupported assertion, not a fact.
2. Recommend a decision and explain how you weighed economic capacity against social stability.
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Use arbitration with a wage board, not a simple imposition of either offer. The masters' 5 soldi is hard to sustain when grain has risen 30% and 64 workers are indigent; the journeymen's 8 soldi may exceed what 27 workshops can pay after a 20% export fall and a 600-florin tax. A board should set a base of 6 to 7 soldi plus a cloth-export bonus, with unpaid overtime banned and enforcement by the guild. This addresses the immediate subsistence crisis while tying future increases to export recovery. The risk is that the masters will lock out workers or move workshops; the council can counter by requiring arbitration awards to bind both sides. If the hospital register is inflated by including non-workers, or if export orders recover sharply, a higher wage is safer. If tax receipts show the 600-florin levy is uncollectible, the masters' capacity argument weakens.