On 26 March, 1269, was issued one of those ordinances against forestalling, of which many more followed for several centuries: no citizen to go outside the city of London, either by road or river, to meet victuals coming to market. In the 7th year of Edward I., clipping or debasing the coinage was carried on so systematically that nearly three hundred persons, mostly of the Hebrew race, were drawn and hanged for it. In the 11th year of Edward I. (1283) a statute had been directed against cheating by bakers and millers. Meanwhile the nobility retaliated by plundering the traders and merchants at Boston fair, and the king settled the account with these marauding nobles by hanging them. A statute of 1316, the second year of the famine, to fix the price of ale, has an interest on account of its motive--“ne frumentum ulterius per potum consumeretur.” The proportion of the corn of the country turned into malt, or the amount diverted from bread to beer, may be guessed from the fact that in London, for which the beer ordinance was first made, there were in 1309, brewhouses to the number of 1334, and taverns to the number of 354[102]. In the very year of great famine, 1316, an ordinance was issued (in French, dated from King’s Langley) against extravagant housekeeping[103]. In the year of great scarcity and mortality, 1322, there was such a crowd for a funeral dole at Blackfriars (for the soul of Henry Fingret) that fifty-five persons, children and adults, were crushed to death in the scramble[104]. At the same time the prior of Christ Church, Canterbury, was sitting down to dinners of seventeen dishes, the cellarer had thirty-eight servants under him, the chamberlain and sacrist had large numbers of people employed as tailors, furriers, launderers and the like, and the servants and equipages of the one hundred and forty brethren were numerous and splendid[105]. The monasteries, on which the relief of the poor mostly depended, have been thus characterized: “From the end of the twelfth century until the Reformation,” says Bishop Stubbs, “from the days of Hubert Walter to those of Wolsey, the monasteries remained magnificent hostelries: their churches were splendid chapels for noble patrons; their inhabitants were bachelor country gentlemen, more polished and charitable, but little more learned or more pure in life than their lay neighbours; their estates were well managed, and enjoyed great advantages and exemptions; they were, in fact, an element of peace in a nation that delighted in war. But, with a few noble exceptions, there was nothing in the system that did spiritual service[106].”