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The moral control exercised by the magistrate and the sumptuary or criminal ordinances expressed in acts of Parliament might serve as temporary palliatives to certain pronounced evils of the moment; but they were powerless to check the extravagance of an expenditure which was sanctioned by custom and in some respects actually enforced by law.
For at the doorway, at the head of the stairs, there stood the still trim and active figure of an old woman, with something of the mouse likeness seen in her grand-daughter, in the close cap, high hat, and cloth dress, that sumptuary opinion, if not law, prescribed for the burgher matron, a white apron, silver chain and bunch of keys at her girdle.
Townsend Harris, in his journal, remarks on the way in which the Japanese government has interfered with the originality of the people. "The genius of their government seems to forbid any exercise of ingenuity in producing articles for the gratification of wealth and luxury. Sumptuary laws rigidly enforce the forms, colors, material, and time of changing the dress of all.
The question hinges on what are called "sumptuary laws"; that is, statutes regulating the food and drink, the habits and apparel of the individual citizen. This in turn harks back to the issue of paternal government. That, once admitted and established, becomes in time all-embracing. Bigotry is a disease. The bigot pursuing his narrow round is like the bedridden possessed by his disordered fancy.
For the last three nights they had scarcely closed an eye. A good old sumptuary ordinance provided that the lesser burgesses should be first provided for in roomy tents erected in the courtyard, while the notables, among whom the commandant and his lovely wife took precedence, were regaled in the family mansion itself.
The honest burgher's vrow of Middelburg or Enkhuyzen claimed the right to make herself as grotesque as Queen Elizabeth in all her glory. Sumptuary laws were an unwholesome part of feudal tyranny, and, as such, were naturally dropping into oblivion on the free soil of the Netherlands. It was the complaint therefore of moralists that unproductive consumption was alarmingly increasing.
Sulla Resigns the Regency Ordinarily he had himself observed those regulations, which he prescribed for the future. That the people were consulted, we read in the law as to the quaestors which is still in part extant; and the same is attested of other laws, e. g. the sumptuary law and those regarding the confiscation of domains.
The honest burgher's vrow of Middelburg or Enkhuyzen claimed the right to make herself as grotesque as Queen Elizabeth in all her glory. Sumptuary laws were an unwholesome part of feudal tyranny, and, as such, were naturally dropping into oblivion on the free soil of the Netherlands. It was the complaint therefore of moralists that unproductive consumption was alarmingly increasing.
A chronicler relates of the Austrian peasants, under the date of 1478, that "they wore better garments and drank better wine than their lords"; and a sumptuary law passed at the Reichstag held at Lindau, in 1497, provides that the common peasant man and the labourer in the towns or in the field "shall neither make nor wear cloth that costs more than half a gulden the ell, neither shall they wear gold, pearls, velvet, silk, nor embroidered clothes, nor shall they permit their wives or their children to wear such."
It is probable that they did not quite know what they were aiming at, and certain that they did not foresee the effects of their measure. In a confused way the law may have been meant to comprise sumptuary, political, and agrarian objects.
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