rage legislature.

The first general example of an English law fixing the price of a
commodity is in 1266, the Assize of Bread and Beer. That fixed the
price of bread according to the cost of wheat, a sliding scale, in
other words; when a bushel of wheat cost so much, a loaf weighing a
certain amount must cost so much, etc. But you must not confound that
with the modern law that still exists in England, and in some States
and cities here, merely regulating the _size_ of a loaf. That is
perfectly proper, reasonable legislation, done merely for the purpose
of protecting the public and preventing fraud. In England, for
instance, there is a certain standard loaf known as a quartern loaf,
and in order to prevent poor people being cheated it is prescribed
by city ordinance that the quartern loaf shall weigh so much, shall
contain so many ounces of flour. We do have similar laws saying how
much a bushel of potatoes shall weigh, how much a barrel of flour
shall weigh. That isn't fixing the price; it is only fixing a uniform
size so that the public may not be cheated in its dealings, and one
must not take such a law as justifying the fixing of prices.

In the year 1266 I find the first statute in the French language,
Norman French; before that they were all in Latin; and they lasted in
French for some four or five hundred years, and then they were put in
English. The Statute of Marlborough, 1267, is a very important one
historically, but it does not concern us, because it mainly had to
do with the ownership of land, the tenure of land in England, an
extremely important subject, but one that is obsolete here. Then we
have something about the trial of clerks for murder. Of course the
word clerk there means not what we mean by a clerk, but a person who
could read and write; and nothing more than that. It originally meant
persons in holy orders, who were called clerks (clerics), but there
got to be clerks who were not in holy orders. Originally only priests
could read and write. No one else knew how, except possibly great
personages like kings, and consequently it was the same thing whether,
when you said a clerk, you meant a person who could read and write or
a priest. But when there got to be people who could read and write and
who were not priests, it became an important distinction. There was
a privilege in England known as the "benefit of the clergy"; if any
clerk was tried for a criminal offence, no matter what, all he had to