The first time they kept ??? en masse (as brought down in the ??????) was in ????? , when ??? asked ???? for a day off each week for the Yidden so that they would be more productive and be able to work better, and when ???? agreed they got ??? off.
That may have been the first time they stopped working for a day en masse, but they certainly didn’t keep the halachos of Shabbos en masse. Shabbos, as you are well aware, is not merely the ceasing of labor. There’s no reason to expect that absent a specific command to do so (which did not exist) that no one wrote a single word, or engaged in borer or even cooked a meal.
The Wolf