c o n t i n u i t y a n d c o n t r ac t 145 the peace elaborated a method which meant that workers who struck or refused to perform work tasks were arrested for breach of contract and then confronted with the alternatives of returning to work on the employer’s terms or remaining in jail for three months.The act was applied diligently, with about 10,000 prosecutions per year during the period 1858-1875. Still in the latter half of the 19th centuryWilliam Blackstone’s (1723-1780) analysis and definitions of labour relationships from 1765-69, which gave the contract merely an accidental, not an essential position, represented the predominant theoretical foundation for this state of legal order.Thus, the greatest importance was attached to the parties’ status.290 Around1870the British Parliament abolished most of the legislation which contained criminal and administrative sanctions for maintaining the workers’ duty to work.The abolition promoted the development of freedom of contract between worker and employer and the use of private law sanctions only. However, common law’s legal analysis of the relationship between “master and servant” as well as of new types of labour contract showed an intellectual tardiness, and a repugnance against elaborating general concepts, which would influence the making of modern English labour law. Moreover, Blackstone’s status-based ideas on the relationship between master and servant have shown considerable vitality.291 The individual contract has never been the main source for regulating the terms of separate relationships of employment. In Great Britain there is no equivalent to the continental systems’ construction of and debate about the contract of employment. Instead, the essential component has been the pre-industrial concept of “service”. Common law’s distinction between contract for service and contract of service emanates from casuistic 290 Blackstone (1765) 1795; Kahn-Freund 1977, pp. 508-528. 291 Kahn-Freund “The personal scope of English Labour Law”, 1966, p. 515;Veneziani 1986, p. 55.
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