In the spring of 1327, officers of the City of London pulled up the floorboards in a row of bakehouses near Bread Street. Underneath, they found a hole. Someone had cut a small trapdoor into the bottom of the moulding board, the table where a baker shaped his dough. Customers brought their own dough to be baked, because most homes had no oven. And while that dough sat on the table, a child crouched in the dark below, reaching up through the hole, pinching away handful after handful.
The bakers were caught. They were tied to wooden hurdles, dragged through the streets with the stolen dough strung around their necks, and their names were written into the city's permanent record. That was the punishment for cheating people out of bread in medieval England. Public, fast, and certain.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Comments are subject to deletion if they are not germane. I have no problem with a bit of colourful language, but blasphemy or depraved profanity will not be allowed. Attacks on the Catholic Faith will not be tolerated. Comments will be deleted that are republican (Yanks! Note the lower case 'r'!), attacks on the legitimacy of Pope Leo XIV as the Vicar of Christ, the legitimacy of the House of Windsor or of the claims of the Elder Line of the House of France, or attacks on the legitimacy of any of the currently ruling Houses of Europe.