itself a translation made in 1340 by a certain Dan Michel, a monk of Kent, from a French treatise written in the previous century: "The eighth bough of Avarice is chaffering, wherein men sin in many ways, for worldly gain, and especially in seven ways. The first is to sell things as dear as one can, and buy things as cheap as one can. The next is lying, swearing, and foreswearing, the higher to sell their wares. The third is by weights and measures, and that may be in three ways: the first when a man has divers weights or divers measures, and buys by the greater weights or measures and sells by the lesser; the second when a man has right weights and measures but makes an untrue use of them, as when taverners fill a measure with scum; the third when in weighing a thing it is made to appear heavier than it is. The fourth manner of sin in chaffering is to sell to time [referring doubtless to such sales on credit as have just been explained]. The fifth manner is to sell otherwise than one hath showed before, as the scriveners do who begin with words fairly written. The sixth is to hide the truth about the thing one sells, as to horsedealers. And the seventh is to contrive that the thing sold should appear better than it is; as when cloth-dealers sell their cloth in a dim light." Usury is also divided into seven kinds. "The first when a loan is made in money, and the lender receives profits in money, or in horses, or corn, or wine, or fruits of the land which he takes in pledge, over and above the capital sum, and without reckoning them as part payment. What is worse, a creditor will sometimes demand payment several times in a year, to raise the rate of usury, even when at each term he receives a gift; and he will often turn the interest into the principal debt. These are usuries evil and foul. The courteous lender is he that lendeth without making bargains for profit. . . . . The next manner of usury is that of those who do not lend themselves, but retain what their fathers, or those whose wealth they have inherited, have received through usury. The third way is that of those who are ashamed to lend with their own hand, but lend through their servants or somebody else. They are thus master money-lenders; and of such sin those great ones are not free who support Jews and other usurers, that destroy the country, receiving from them the ransom money of the goods of the poor. The next way is that of those who borrow at a low rate of interest themselves and lend at a greater-the little usurers. The fifth manner is when a man sells a thing for more than it is worth at the time; or, what is worse, when he sells at a time when his wares are greatly needed for twice or thrice as much as they are worth.

Such trade is ruinous to the knights who follow tournaments; they get from them their estates in pledge and never release them. Others buy articles, such as corn or wine, for half as much as they are worth, and sell them for more than twice as much as they are worth; or buy them in harvest time, or when they are especially cheap, with intent to sell them again when they are dear, wishing for a time of scarcity; while others, again, buy corn in the blade, and vines in the flower. The sixth manner of usury is to lend money to merchants on condition that they shall share in gains but not in losses. . . . And finally the seventh manner is that of those who lend a little to their poor neighbours when they are in need, on condition that they shall work for them, and get out of them three pennyworth of work for every penny they have lent."

59. FAIR DEALING AND FAIR PRICE1

So far as the affairs of individual workers or dealers came before the courts they, of course, tried to do what was fair between man and man; and in their customs we find the record of their practical wisdom and experience. They had not necessarily a very high ideal of Christian duty, and their gild merchants do not appear to have had the religious side of life very markedly developed; but they felt that "honourable thing was convenable" for the men of the town, and they tried to enforce what was fair as to a day's work and a day's pay and to secure that transactions should be conducted on reasonable terms that the buyer should pay a reasonable sum for an article on which the seller made a reasonable profit. But we must again remember that, though the courts and their customs embodied this view, it was not necessarily the line taken by each individual tradesman. The mediaeval craftsman would scamp his work, and the mediaeval merchant try to pass off inferior articles at high prices, but we only hear of him when he was found out. The ordinances of gilds and regulations of towns set a standard to which the honest citizen would wish to conform, so that he might hold an honourable place in the town; the rules would thus affect personal morality favourably. But if all men had lived up to a high ideal and done their work in the best way from mere love of it, there would have been no need of either craft gilds or ordinances to keep them up to the mark.

I

Adapted by permission from W. Cunningham, The Growth of English Industry and Commerce: Early and Middle Ages, pp. 228-35. (The Cambridge University Press, 1890.)

In the attempt to do the fair thing between man and man many regulations were framed on matters which we now allow to take their own course. At the same time there is an obvious advantage in thinking out the fair price and settling it where this can be done. There is a distinct advantage in having an authoritative tariff as to the reasonable cab fare, and the maintenance of regulations in regard to those vehicles does not, in all probability, interfere with the prosperity of the trade; so long as the regulations are wise, they subserve the comfort of the public and the good of the trade. In the circumstances of mediaeval commerce, when there were comparatively slight fluctuations in the conditions for the supply of manufactured goods, and labour was such a very important element in the cost of production, it was almost as easy to frame similar regulations for reasonable transaction in trades of all sorts as it is to fix rates for cab hire in the present day.

There were of course varieties of season, and the food supply was necessarily drawn from a comparatively limited area, so that a local scarcity would affect prices more than it does in the present day. The price of corn was necessarily left to be settled by competition, and all that could be done was to try and ensure that this competition should be public, and that there should be no attempts to make a profit by speculative transactions or by creating an artificial scarcity; prohibitions of engrossing and retailing had this object in view. Common folk had a strong suspicion that the man who was able to secure a monopoly by engrossing or by buying up the available supply of any article would retail on terms that were to his own profit, but not to the advantage of the community. But when the price of corn had adjusted itself by "the higgling of the market," a sliding scale could be used to adjust the price of bread, so that the baker might recoup his expenses and get a fair profit, while the public would be supplied at rates which were not excessive. This sliding scale was known as the Assize of Bread; it was certainly framed in the time of Henry II, but this need not have been the first attempt at formulating it.

When the price of food was thus known it was possible and "reasonable" to assign rates of wages; in the time of Henry II wages were apparently intended to vary along with the price of bread, and in and after the time of Elizabeth this scheme was carried out with more or less success by the justices of the peace; at other times the authorities were content with fixing a maximum rate.

Some attempt was also made at enforcing a standard of quality in the goods exposed for sale; we read of an assize of cloth in the time of Richard I. This might have been devised with a view to the protection of the purchasers of imported cloth, but it would also serve as a standard for the weavers, as the manufacture was gradually developed in England and Wales.

The municipal courts enforced what was fair as a matter of policy, but there was another authority which dealt with what was right and wrong as a matter of Christian duty. The discipline of penance, and the canons which were enforced in the ecclesiastical courts were framed, not with reference to burghal prosperity, but in the hope of detecting and suppressing the greed of gain. In earlier times there had been very sweeping condemnations which would have included almost every kind of trading, but it was obviously impossible to enforce such prohibitions. Even though it might be admitted that the merchant's life was one of many temptations, since there were so many opportunities of fraud, it by no means followed that he always yielded to them. The difficulty became more pressing in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries when trade was generally extending; and if the evils were really to be met, it could only be done by finding the inner grounds of the prohibition and applying it equitably according to the different circumstances of different cases.

Modern theory assumes that in buying and selling each man will do what is most to his own private advantage, and thus explains how the prices of different classes of goods tend to be determined on this assumption: it merely attempts to give an explanation of actual practice. But the mediaeval doctrine of price was not a theory intended to explain the phenomena of society, but it was laid down as the basis of rules which should control the conduct of society and of individuals. At the same time current opinion seems to have been so fully formed in accordance with it that a brief examination of the doctrine of a just price will serve to set the practice of the day in clearer light.

In regard to other matters it is difficult to determine how far public opinion was swayed by practical experience and how far it was really moulded by Christian teaching. This is the case in regard to usury. But there can be little doubt about the doctrine of price; the whole conception of a just price appears to be purely Christian; it is unknown to the Civil Law and had as little place in Jewish habits as it has in modern society; but it really underlies a great deal of

commercial and gild regulation and it is constantly implied in early legislation on mercantile affairs.

S. Thomas Aquinas, whose treatment of the subject is classical, assumed that everything has a just price, that there is some amount of money for which it is right that the owner of the ware should exchange it. He does not discuss the conditions on which this depends, as it is of more practical importance that we should understand how the just price of anything is to be known. The just price is not an arbitrary demand, as an extortionate dealer may obtain an absurd price when he sees that he can drive a hard bargain, or a man in need may be willing to part with some heirloom for a mere trifle, for in the one case there is unfair gain, in the other a real sacrifice. The just price is known by the common estimation of what the thing is worth; it is known by public opinion as to what is right to give for that article under ordinary circumstances.

So far we have a parallel with modern doctrine; the mediaeval "just price" was an abstract conception of what is right under ordinary circumstances; it was admittedly vague, but it was interpreted by common estimation. Modern doctrine starts with a "normal" value which is "natural" in a régime of free competition; this too is a purely abstract conception, and in order to apply it we must look at common estimation as it is shown in the prices actually paid over a period when there was no disturbing cause.

Common estimation is thus the exponent of the natural or normal or just price, according to either the mediaeval or the modern view; but whereas we rely on the "higgling of the market" as the means of bringing out what is the common estimate of any object, mediaeval economists believed that it was possible to bring common estimation into operation beforehand, and by the consultation of experts to calculate out what was the right price. If "common estimation" was thus organised, either by the town authorities or gilds or parliament, it was possible to determine beforehand what the price should be and to lay down a rule to this effect; in modern times we can only look back on the competitive prices and say by reflection what the common estimation had been.

It was of course felt that this mode of detecting the just price was not very precise, and, indeed, that it was not possible to determine the just price of any article absolutely. The obvious fact that the seasons varied made it clear that the price of food could not be fixed once for all. They did think it was desirable, then, to settle them as