legal obligations of assize as regards bread; and in the following reign the statute (51 Hen. III. Stat. 6) entitled “the pillory and tumbrel” was framed for the express purpose of protecting the public from the dishonest dealings of bakers, vintners, brewers, butchers and others. This statute is the first in which the adulteration of human food is specially noticed and prohibited; it seems to have been enforced with more or less rigour until the time of Anne, when it was repealed (1709). According to the Liber Albus it was strictly observed in the days of Edward I., for it states that: “If any default shall be found in the bread of a baker in the city, the first time, let him be drawn upon a hurdle from the Guildhall to his own house through the great street where there be most people assembled, and through the great streets which are most dirty, with the faulty loaf hanging from his neck; if a second time he shall be found committing the same offence, let him be drawn from the Guildhall through the great street of Cheepe in the manner aforesaid to the pillory, and let him be put upon the pillory, and remain there at least one hour in the day; and the third time that such default shall be found, he shall be drawn, and the oven shall be pulled down, and the baker made to foreswear the trade in the city for ever.” The assize of 1634 provides that “if there be any manner of person or persons, which shall by any false wayes or meanes, sell any meale under the kinge’s subjects, either by mixing it deceitfully or sell any musty or corrupted meal, which may be to the hurte and infection of man’s body, or use any false weight, or any deceitful wayes or meanes, and so deceive the subject, for the first offence he shall be grievously punished, the second he shall loose his meale, for the third offence he shall suffer the judgment of the pillory and the fourth time he shall foreswere the town wherein he dwelleth.” Vintners, spicers, grocers, butchers, regrators and others were subject to the like punishment for dishonesty in their commercial dealings—it being thought that the pillory, by appealing to the sense of shame, was far more deterrent of such crimes than fine or imprisonment. In the reign of Edward the Confessor a knavish brewer of the city of Chester was taken round the town in the cart in which the refuse of the privies had been collected. Ale-tasters had to look after the ale and test it by spilling some on to a wooden seat, sitting on the wet place in their leathern breeches, the stickiness of the “residue obtained by evaporation” affording the evidence of purity or otherwise. If sugar had been added the taster adhered to the bench; pure malt beer was not considered to yield an adhesive extract. In 1553, the lord mayor of London ordered a jury of five or six vintners to rack and draw off the suspected wine of another vintner, and to ascertain what drugs or ingredients they found in the said wine or cask to sophisticate the same. At another time eight pipes of wine were ordered to be destroyed because, on racking off, bundles of weeds, pieces of sulphur match, and “a kind of gravel mixture sticking to the casks” had been found.
Similar records have come down from the continental European countries. In 1390 an Augsburg wine-seller was sentenced to be led out of the city with his hands bound and a rope round his neck; in 1400 two others were branded and otherwise severely punished; in 1435 “were the taverner Christian Corper and his wife put in a cask in which he sold false wine, and then exposed in the pillory. The punishment was adjudged because they had roasted pears and put them into new sour wine, in order to sweeten the wine. Some pears were hung round their necks like unto a Paternoster.” In Biebrich on the Rhine, in 1482, a wine-falsifier was condemned to drink six quarts of his own wine; from this he died. In Frankfurt, casks in which false wine had been found were placed with a red flag on the knacker’s cart, “the jailer marched before, the rabble after; and when they came to the river they broke the casks and tumbled the stuff into the stream.” In France successive ordonnances from 1330 to 1672 forbade the mixing of two wines together under the penalty of a fine and the confiscation of the wine.
Modern British Legislation.—In modern times the English parliament has dealt frequently with the subject of food adulteration. In 1725 it was provided that “no dealer in tea or manufacturer or dyer thereof, or pretending so to be, shall counterfeit or adulterate tea, or cause or procure the same to be counterfeited or adulterated, or shall alter, fabricate or manufacture tea with terra-japonica, or with any drug or drugs whatsoever; nor shall mix or cause or procure to be mixed with tea any leaves other than the leaves of tea or other ingredients whatsoever, on pain of forfeiting and losing the tea so counterfeited, adulterated, altered, fabricated, manufactured or mixed, and any other thing or things whatsoever added thereto, or mixed or used therewith, and also the sum of £100.” Six years afterwards, in 1730–1731, a further act was passed prescribing a penalty for “sophisticating” tea; it recites that several ill-disposed persons do frequently dye, fabricate or manufacture very great quantities of sloe leaves, liquorice leaves, and the leaves of tea that have been before used, or the leaves of other trees, shrubs or plants in imitation of tea, and do likewise mix, colour, stain and dye such leaves and likewise tea with terra-japonica, sugar, molasses, clay, logwood, and with other ingredients, and do sell and vend the same as true and real tea, to the prejudice of the health of his majesty’s subjects, the diminution of the revenue and to the ruin of the fair trader. This act provides that for every pound of adulterated tea found in possession of any person, a sum of £10 shall be forfeited. It was followed by one passed in 1766–1767, which increased the penalty to imprisonment for not less than six nor more than twelve months. As regards coffee, an act of 1718 recited that “divers evil-disposed persons have at the time or soon after the roasting of coffee made use of water, grease, butter or such-like materials, whereby the same is rendered unwholesome and greatly increased in weight,” and a penalty of £20 is enacted. In 1803 an act refers to the addition of burnt, scorched or roasted peas, beans or other grains or vegetable substances prepared in imitation of coffee or cocoa, to coffee or cocoa, and fixes the penalty for the offence at £100, but subsequently permission was given to coffee or cocoa dealers also to deal in scorched or roasted corn, peas, beans or parsnips whole and not ground, crushed or powdered, under certain excise restrictions. An act passed in 1816 relating to beer and porter provides that no brewer of or dealer in or retailer of beer “shall receive or have in his possession, or make or mix with any worts or beer, any liquor, extract or other preparation for the purpose of darkening the colour of worts or beer, other than brown malt, ground or unground, or shall have in his possession or use, or mix with any worts or beer any molasses, honey, liquorice, vitriol, quassia, coculus-indiae, grains of paradise, guinea-pepper or opium, or any extracts of these, or any articles or preparation whatsoever for or as a substitute for malt or hops.” Any person contravening was liable to a penalty of £200, and any druggist selling to any brewer or retail dealer any colouring or malt substitute was to be fined £500. It was only in 1847 that brewers were allowed to make for their own use, from sugar, a liquor for darkening the colour of worts or beer and to use it in brewing.
All the laws hitherto referred to were mainly passed in the interest of the inland revenue, and their execution was left entirely in the hands of the revenue officers. It was but natural that they should look primarily after the dutiable articles and not after those that brought no revenue to the state. About the middle of the 19th century many articles, however, paid import duty; butter, for instance, paid 5s. per hundredweight; cheese from 1s. 6d. to 2s. 6d.; flour or meal of all kinds, 412d.; ginger, 10s.; isinglass, 5s.; and so on. Sensational and doubtless largely exaggerated statements were from time to time published concerning the food supply of the nation. F. C. Accum (1769–1838) by his Treatise on Adulterations of Food and Culinary Poisons (1820), and particularly an anonymous writer of a book entitled Deadly Adulteration and Slow Poisoning unmasked, or Disease and Death in the Pot and the Bottle, in which the blood-empoisoning and life-destroying adulterations of wines, spirits, beer, bread, flour, tea, sugar, spices, cheesemongery, pastry, confectionery, medicines, &c., &c., are laid open to the public (1830), roused the public attention. In 1850 a physician, Dr. Arthur H. Hassall, had the happy idea of looking at ground coffee
