g oak branches. Archaeology has chosen to recognise in this sculpture a
Druidical allegory, which has descended to us in the shape of the
triumphal car of the Prize Ox (Fig. 88). The butchers who, for centuries
at least in France, only killed sheep and pigs, proved themselves most
jealous of their privileges, and admitted no strangers into their
corporation. The proprietorship of stalls at the markets, and the right of
being admitted as a master butcher at the age of seven years and a day,
belonged exclusively to the male descendants of a few rich and powerful
families. The Kings of France alone, on their accession, could create a
new master butcher. Since the middle of the fourteenth century the "Grande
Boucherie" was the seat of an important jurisdiction, composed of a mayor,
a master, a proctor, and an attorney; it also had a judicial council
before which the butchers could bring up all their cases, and an appeal
from which could only be considered by Parliament. Besides this court,
which had to decide cases of misbehaviour on the part of the apprentices,
and all their appeals against their masters, the corporation had a counsel
in Parliament, as also one at the Chatelet, who were specially attached to
the interests of the butchers, and were in their pay.

[Illustration: Fig. 88.--The Holy Ox.--Celtic Monument found in Paris
under the Choir of Notre-Dame in 1711, and preserved in the Musee de Cluny
et des Thermes.]

Although bound, at all events with their money, to follow the calling of
their fathers, we find many descendants of ancient butchers' families of
Paris, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, abandoning their stalls
to fill high places in the state, and even at court. It must not be
concluded that the rich butchers in those days occupied themselves with
the minor details of their trade; the greater number employed servants who
cut up and retailed the meat, and they themselves simply kept the
accounts, and were engaged in dealing through factors or foremen for the
purchase of beasts for their stalls (Fig. 89). One can form an opinion of
the wealth of some of these tradesmen by reading the enumeration made by
an old chronicler of the property and income of Guillaume de Saint-Yon,
one of the principal master butchers in 1370. "He was proprietor of three
stalls, in which meat was weekly sold to the amount of 200 _livres
parisis_ (the livre being equivalent to 24 francs at least), with an
average profit of