all the wealth of the realm is consumed and brought to nothing’, and
marked off a wider range of estates than had Philip the Fair’s ordinance.
Servants should wear vesture not exceeding two marks (26s. 8d.) for the
whole cloth in price, their wives and daughters ‘no veils passing 12d. a
veil’; ‘people of handicrafts and those called yeomen by office’, no cloth
more than 40s. and no silk or jewellery, their wives veils ‘only of yarn
made within the realm’ and fur only of ‘coney, cat and fox’. ‘Esquires
and all manner of gentlemen under the estate of knight’ having land to
the value of £100 a year, and clergy of the same wealth, were permitted
cloth within the price of four and a half marks (60s.); esquires with land
to the value of 200 marks (£133 6s. 8d.) cloth priced at 5 marks and
apparel of silk and ‘reasonably garnished with silver’, their womenfolk
miniver. ‘Merchants, citizens, and burgesses, artificers, and people of
handicraft, as well within the city of London as elsewhere’ were ranked
with the hundred-pound landed gentlemen if they possessed goods and
chattels worth £500, with the wealthier esquires if they had £1000.
Knights and clergy with the same landed wealth as the greater esquires
were allowed cloth priced at six marks, and to wear lawn in summer as
they wore fur in winter. Richer knights and ladies with land or rent up
to £1000 might wear what they liked, ermine still excepted: by implica-
tion, nobles wealthier still were subject to no restriction.^197
In the following year the Commons changed their mind and asked
that all people in the realm might trade freely and, ‘of whatever estate
or condition’, freely ‘order provision in living and apparel’ as seemed
best for themselves, their wives, children, and servants. The ordinance
of 1363 was duly repealed, but its social categories were still maintained
a hundred year’s later, when the Commons petitioned Edward IV for
the re-enactment of his progenitors’ ordinances and statutes against
‘immoderate array’. Only the details of the resulting statute, and of
another in 1482 replacing all previous sumptuary laws, were new: for
example, ‘no knight under the estate of a lord, [no] squire or gentleman,
nor other person’ was to wear any ‘gown, jacket or cloak but it be of
such length, as it, he being upright, shall cover his privy members and
buttocks’.^198
Most fundamental for the building of the state, was royal legislation
which corralled the lords into an estate. The lords of England and
France took their places in the new political assemblies created by
Edward I and Philip the Fair. The English aristocracy did so in the
persons of the 150–200 barons the king might summon by means of
individual writs to an early fourteenth-century parliament along with
50–100 bishops and abbots, and of the two representative knights from
Estates of people 231(^197) Ibid. ii. 278–82; SRi. 378–83: tr. in EHDiv. 1153–5.
(^198) RPii. 286, v. 504–5, vi. 220–1; SRi. 383, ii, 392–402, 468.