Agricultural wages boards have been abolished in England and Wales, but retained by Northern Ireland and Scotland. Many now argue that the introduction of the National Living Wage makes the Scottish Agricultural Wages Board (SAWB) unnecessary. A three-part series on consecutive Mondays examines the history of agricultural workers' conditions of employment and the continued case for the SAWB.

The Scottish Agricultural Wages Board has helped alter the terms and conditions of employment for Scottish agricultural workers out of all recognition compared to those endured in the seventeenth and eighteenth century.

An article by George Houston on Labour Relations in Scottish Agriculture before 1870 makes very interesting reading. Then, as now, the level of wages and conditions of work were regulated by law, although the workmen's freedom of movement, even at the conclusion of a contracted period of service, was severely limited.

In the seventeenth century wages and terms of hire of farm servants, were fixed by justices of the peace under the acts of 1617 and 1661.

For instance, the Lanarkshire justices issued wage regulations in 1687, 1708 and 1716, fixing the rate for a ploughman at £2 per annum. In Wigtownshire in 1749 farm servants' wages were fixed at £1 and 5 shillings for the summer half year and £1 for the winter half year. In Dumfriesshire in 1751 wages were fixed at £2 and 10 shillings a year.

In 1621 an act was passed preventing farm servants from working for daily or weekly wages and compelling them to engage for at least six months. Apparently many farm servants were in the habit of hiring themselves only for the six winter months, preferring to work for daily or weekly wages in the summer when the demand for labour (for working with peats, building dykes and harvest) was greater and wages higher.

On August 7th, 1716, the Lanarkshire justices laid down the minimum period of service for farm servants at six months, extending it to twelve months on May 6th, 1718. In Dumfriesshire in 1751 it was declared that farm servants should work at least six months with one master and twelve months if the latter wished it.

The Act of 1621 also laid down that farm servants engaged for the winter had to continue to work for their masters during the summer months unless they could prove to the justices that they were hired by another master for the whole period from Whitsunday to Martinmas. A regulation to this effect was passed by the Lanarkshire justices in 1716, and in the same year the justices in Stirling gave farmers the power to detain any of their farm servants "who design to leave their service after Martinmas next and have not feed themselves with any other master."

Even where specific powers of detention were not granted, regulations were often laid down which must have made it very difficult for a farm servant to leave a master who wanted to keep him in service.

In 1716 the Lanarkshire justices declared that servants could only leave if they gave 40 days' notice and obtained a certificate from their employer or the justices before applying for another place. Farm servants who left without permission were to be treated as vagabonds and faced imprisonment. In 1751 the Dumfriesshire justices declared that farm servants must give three months' notice in the presence of two witnesses before leaving at the end of a term.

It is clear that, at least until the second half of the eighteenth century, the Scottish justices (many of whom were landowners) made periodic attempts to control the wages and conditions of farm workers and to limit their freedom to become day labourers or leave the land altogether.

Regulations were passed concerning other workers as well, but in many of the counties the main energies of the JPs appear to have been "directed against the farm-workers".

Strengthened by their powers to imprison offenders, the justices must have wielded an important influence on working conditions in agriculture.

The rise in farm wages from 1650 to 1750 was not more than one-third - an astonishing degree of stability compared with the next hundred years, when there was an eight-fold increase in cash wages in Scottish farming.

After 1750 the countryside saw rapid changes and many direct controls and regulations disappeared before the onslaught of economic progress. It was not until 1813 that the act enabling justices of the peace to fix wage rates was repealed, but long before then a change had begun to take place in the kind of control over labour conditions which the justices were able to exercise.

Direct jurisdiction over wages and other conditions gave way to an indirect influence wielded mainly through the power to settle disputes between masters and workmen.

Next week: Labour relations in farming in the 19th century.