specified, as also were the fines to be exacted from lords and their
‘subjects... in whatever estate they are in’, for offending against the
ordinance.^192
A further clause in Philip the Fair’s ordinance ‘for the tranquil state
of the realm’ prescribed what people might eat and drink (down to the
sorts of cheese).^193 Especially in national emergencies, kings were begin-
ning to use their law-making powers to impose a religious and economic
discipline on their subjects. In 1336 a statute of Edward III complained
of ‘the excessive and overmany sorts of costly meats’ consumed in
England in comparison with other countries, to the grievous cost of
great men and the impoverishment of the lesser people who imitated
them, so that ‘they were not able to aid themselves nor their liege lord
in time of need as they ought’. For ‘the honour of God and amendment
of the state of the community of the realm’, it was therefore ordained
and established that no one ‘of whatever estate or condition he may be’
(the now commonplace expression) should ‘cause himself to be served
in his house or elsewhere, at dinner, meal or supper, or at any other
time, with more than two courses and each mess of two sorts of victuals
at the utmost’.^194 The Hundred Years War with France was about to
begin, and Edward’s statute fits into a series of economic measures pre-
venting trade with the enemy and at the same time protecting English
money and the English cloth industry: in the following year the export
of wool was prohibited along with the use of foreign cloth and the wear-
ing of fur by any ‘man or woman of whatever estate or condition’—
except for the royal family, nobles and knights and their ladies, and
churchmen who spent more than £100 of their benefices in a year.^195
The point of the poll-taxes which provoked the English rising of 1381
was that all the servant class, ‘both male and female’, should contribute
to the salvation of the realm according to their state of affluence.^196
A new style of governance which had been developed in an urban
context, first of all to exploit the Jewish minority, was being extended
to everyone in the community, but legislation in England responded to
the petitions of the gentry and rich merchants forming the Commons in
Parliament and naturally reinforced social hierarchy. The major English
sumptuary statute of 1363 answered a petition of the Commons against
‘the excesses of apparel of people beyond their estate... by which cause
230 Legal Ordering of ‘the State of the Realm’
(^192) Ordonnances des Roys de France, i. 324–5, 541–3; P. S. Lewis, Later Medieval France,
The Polity(London, 1968), 172–3, 187, 243.
(^193) Ordonnances des Roys de France,i. 324, 541–3.
(^194) SRi. 278–80; F. E. Baldwin, Sumptuary Legislation and Personal Regulation in England
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1926); Alan Hunt, Governance of the Consuming Passions:
A History of Sumptuary Law(London, 1996).
(^195) SRi. 280–1.
(^196) RPiii. 90 (15).