This and other similar ordinances appear to have had a limited effect and they were followed by an edict which stated that some employees had regard for no other than their own ease and exceptional greed and specified that carters, ploughmen, plough-drivers, shepherds, swineherds, dairymaids and other employees shall take the wages accustomed in the said twentieth year. In places where wheat was accustomed to be given they shall take ten pence for the bushel of wheat at the will of the giver until it shall be otherwise be ordained. And that they shall be hired to serve for a whole year and not by the day. No one shall take more than one penny a day for weeding the fields or hay making and mowers five pence per acre or five pence per day and reapers of corn two pence in the first week of August and three pence in the second week and so on until the end of the month and less in places where less used to be given without food or other bonus being asked, given or taken. And that such workers bring the tools of their trade openly to market and there shall be hired in full view and not secretly. Cordwainers [shoemakers] shall not sell boots or shoes or anything else touching their craft in any other manner than in the said twentieth year.
These ordinances again appear to have had little effect because the chronic shortage of workers had given employees far greater bargaining power than they had previously enjoyed and as some chose to be hired by the day and demanded far higher wages
landowners began to overcome reductions to their incomes caused by the shortages of labour by seeking to increase income by renting land to tenant farmers, a situation that gradually led the more ambitious tenants to work hard and steadily increase the size of their holdings and reach the stage where they themselves could become employers of labourers and servants.
No records have survived to show when the Byland abbots began to depend on farm tenants for some of their income though the Poll Tax of 1377 recorded 33 people with sufficient income to be taxed and by the first quarter of the 16th century abbey farm rents from Old Byland amounted to £14 15s 7d which compared with the assessed value of £17 13s 4d placed on the abbey woolhouse at Thorpe Grange. If the income from farm rents is equated with the assessed rental value of 4d per acre placed on Rievaulx abbey lands in 1538 it means that over 880 acres were being farmed by tenants. At the beginning of the 16th century.
Though these early farm tenants would have enjoyed a far greater degree of independence than their peasant predecessors the lives of all the people in Old Byland were still under monastic control monastic during the first quarter of the 16th century but dramatic changes were to take place after Byland Abbey surrendered at the end of 1538.
