Purveyors swarmed; impostors gave themselves out as king’s officers who were not, and did not prove the least greedy. All bought at inadequate prices and limited themselves to fair promises of payment. The statute of 1330 shows how these payments never came; how also when twenty-five quarters of corn were taken only twenty were reckoned because they were measured by “the heaped bushel.”[85] In the same way, for hay, straw, etc., the purveyors found means to reckon at a halfpenny what was worth two or three pence; they ordered that supplies of wine should be held in readiness for them, kept the best for themselves in order to sell it again to their own profit, and exacted payment for returning a part to the original owners, which was a strange reversal of things. The king acknowledged all these evils and decreed reforms accordingly. A little later he did so again, with no more result. In 1362 he declared that henceforth the purveyors should pay ready money at the current market price; and he gravely added, as an important guarantee, that the purveyors should lose their detested name and should be called buyers: “that the heinous name of purveyor be changed, and named achatour.”[86] A word reform, if any.[87] [Illustration 17. A REAPER’S CART GOING UP-HILL. (_From the Louterell Psalter; Fourteenth Century; “Vetusta Monumenta,” vol._ vi.)] The same abuses existed in France, and numerous ordinances may be read in the pages of Isambert, conceived in exactly the same spirit and corresponding to {95} the same complaints; ordinances of Philip the Fair in 1308, of Louis X in 1342, of Philip VI, who willed that the “preneurs pour nous” (takers for us), should not take unless they had “new letters from us,” which shows the existence of false purveyors as in England. John of France renews all the restrictions of his predecessors, December 25, 1355, and so on. The king and his lords journeyed on horseback for the most part, but they had carriages too. Nothing gives a better idea of the awkward, cumbersome luxury which gave its splendour to civil life during this century, than the structure of these heavy machines. The best had four wheels, and were drawn by three or four horses, one behind the other, one of them mounted by a postilion provided with a short-handled whip of many thongs; solid beams rested on the axles, and above this framework rose an archway rounded like a tunnel;[88] an ungainly whole. But the details were extremely elegant, the wheels were carved and their spokes expanded near the hoop into ribs forming pointed arches; the beams were painted and gilded, the inside was hung with those dazzling tapestries, the glory of the age; the seats were furnished with embroidered cushions; a lady might stretch out there, half sitting, half lying; pillows were placed in the corners as if to invite sleep or meditation, square windows opened on the sides and were hung with silk curtains.[89] {96}