English wayfaring life in the middle ages : (xivth century) / by J.J. Jusserand ... tr. from the French by Lucy Toulmin Smith.

  • Jean Jules Jusserand
Date:
1889
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: English wayfaring life in the middle ages : (xivth century) / by J.J. Jusserand ... tr. from the French by Lucy Toulmin Smith. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    98/462 (page 92)
    Jiament their statutes, and the purveyors their exac- tions. Beside the carts they demanded corn, hay, oats, beer, méat ; it was quite a little army that had to be fed, and the réquisitions cast the villages into terror. People did what they could to be exempted ; the simplest way was to bribe the purveyor, but the poor could noü. Yet numberless régulations had successively promised that there should never be any further abuse. The king was powerless ; under an imperfect govern- ment the laws created to last for ever rapidly lose their vitality, and those made at that time died in a day. Purveyors swarmed ; many gave themselves out as king’s officers who were not so, and these were not the least greedy. Ail bought at absurd prices and limited themselves to promising payment. The statute of 1330 shows how these payments never arrived ; how also when twenty-five quarters of corn were taken only twenty were reckoned because they were mea- sured by “the heaped bushel.” ^ In the same way, for hay, straw, &c., the purveyors found means to reckon at a halfpenny for their own account what was worth two or three pence ; they ordered that provision of wine should be brought, kept the best in order to sell it again on their own behalf, and got paid for returning a portion of it to those from whom they had taken it, which singularly reversed matters. The king perceived ail this and reformed accordingly. A little time after ’ “Statutes of the Realm,” 4 Edward III. ch. 3. Eight bushels raakc a quarter. [The Act 25 Edward III. stat. 5, ch. 10 (a.d. 1351) providcd that every mcasurc of corn should bc striken with- out heap, and that the royal purveyors should use this mcasurc. (Hcncc the namc strike for a bushel.) L. T. S.]