ment from time to time) of the prices of bread and ale. The earliest notice of an assize in England is found in the rolls of parliament for 1203, the 5th of John; but the first introduction of the practice is probably of older date. The most ancient law upon the subject that has been preserved is that entitled the Assisa Panis et Cerevisiæ, commonly assigned to the 51st Hen. III. (A.D. 1266). The assize of bread and ale, it is to be remembered, determined the prices of these commodities, not arbitrarily, but by a scale regulated according to the market-prices of wheat, barley, and oats, so that the prices that were really fixed were those of baking and of brewing. The assize of bread was re-enacted so lately as the beginning of the last century, and was only abolished in London and its neighbourhood about thirty years ago: in regard to other places, although it has fallen into disuse, the old law still remains unrepealed. But various other articles, such as wine, fish, tiles, cloths, wood, coal, billets, &c., have at different times been made subject to assize; and in the case of most of these the assize was a perfectly arbitrary determination of the price. The present period furnishes us with a curious example of the manner in which some of these attempts operated. By an ordinance issued in 1357 (commonly called the 31 Edw. III. st. 2), it was directed that no herrings should be sold for a higher price than forty shillings the last. But, in 1361, we find the king and his council, in a second ordinance (commonly called the statute 35 Edw. III.), frankly confessing that the effect of the attempt to fix prices in this case had been, "that the sale of herring is much decayed, and the people greatly endamaged, that is to say, that many merchants coming to the fair, as well labourers and servants as other, do bargain for herring, and every of them, by malice and envy, increase upon other, and, if one proffer forty shillings, another will proffer ten shillings more, and the third sixty shillings, and so every one surmounteth other in the bargain, and such proffers extend to more than the price of the herring upon which the fishers proffered it to sell at the beginning." The
