tailors charge proportionately. This most
interesting effort to interfere with private life stops short of
regulating the use of wine or beer; and tobacco had not yet been
discovered. It is all the more interesting to note that it was found
so intolerable that it was repealed the following year; and little
effort since then has been made to regulate the diet or dress or
expenditure of Englishmen; it was declared in memorable language that
"which was ordained at the last Parliament, of Living and of Apparel,
and that no English Merchant should use but one Merchandise" be
repealed, and "It is ordained, That all People shall be as free as
they were before the said Ordinance," and "all Merchants, as well
Aliens as Denizens, may sell and buy all Manner of Merchandises, and
freely carry them out of the Realm ... saving the Victuallers of Fish
that fish for Herring and other Fish, and they that bring Fish within
the Realm." Thus, after trying the opposite, we find triumphantly
established in the middle of the fourteenth century the great English
principle of freedom of life and trade. The legislation of this great
reign ends with the prohibition of practising lawyers from sitting in
Parliament and an ordinance that women might not practise law or "sue
in court by way of Maintenance or Reward, especially Alice Perrens,"
Alice Perrers or Pierce having become unpopular as the mistress of the
elderly king. Our courts have usually held that there is no common-law
principle forbidding women to practise law, but from this ancient
statute it would appear that such decisions are erroneous.

(1381) In 5 Richard II is a law absolutely forbidding the sale of
sweet wines at retail. This law, with the testimony of Shakespeare,
goes to show that England liked their wines dry (sack), but the act is
repealed the following year, only that sweet wines must be sold at
the same price as the wines of the Rhine and Gascony; and in the same
year, more intelligent than we, is a statute permitting merchants to
ship goods in foreign ships when no English ships are to be had. In
1383, according to Spence, the barons protested that they would never
suffer the kingdom to be governed by the Roman law, and the judges
prohibited it from being any longer cited in the common-law tribunals.
The rest of the statutes of Richard II are taken up with the important
statutes concerning riots and forcible entries, and regulating labor,
as set forth in the last chapter.