Witness the wooing of Matilda of Flanders by William the Conqueror. Having had the audacity to refuse him, the noble suitor entered her home, seized her long tresses, dragged her about the floor, struck her; then flinging her from him, he spurned her with his foot. Matilda at once accepted him, saying: "He must be a man of courage who dare beat me in my father's palace." Pedro el Cruel, king of Castile and Leon, about the middle of the fourteenth century held good, and commanded, under heavy penalties, that no one of the laboring classes, man or woman, who was able to work, should be found begging. He fixed the day's wage of every class with the most punctilious exactitude. Shoemakers, tailors, armorers, and others who worked by the job, had a definite price attached to the making of every article. A shoe of such and such leather, made after such a fashion, with a double or single sole; a cloak, lined or unlined; a weapon of an ordinary, or of a superior temper and finish—each article in its fabrication was to cost just so much and no more. It was an age of interference in the affairs of men, the strong against the weak. It was in these trade regulations, and in sumptuary laws, the superstition of political economy and social statics, that the science of ignorance culminated. It was then that learned men threw dust into the air, cast a cloud about their own intellect, and labored hard to inculcate the principles of nescience into the minds of men. In England the number of servants a nobleman might have was fixed by law, as was also costume, and the number of courses at dinner. Soup and two dishes legally constituted a Frenchman's dinner in 1340. Ferdinand and Isabella were, perhaps, the most parentally inclined of all. No affair, religious, moral, political, judicial, economical, literary, industrial, mechanical, or mercantile could escape their attention. From the regulation and organization of the high councils, and of the civil and ecclesiastical tribunals, to the ordinances for the leather-dressers and cloth-shearers; from the decrees concerning the universities and the literary and scientific bodies, to the orders that prescribed the weight of horseshoes; from the general laws on commerce and navigation, to those which fixed the expenditure at weddings and baptisms, and the amount of wax to be burned at funerals; from the highest interests and rights of religion and of the throne, down to the most humble and mechanical industries—all were considered, legislated upon, and seen to by their Catholic Majesties, with infinite pains and vigilance. In 1510, thinking the colonists of Española too fond of ostentation and extravagance, Ferdinand issued a proclamation, forbidding them to wear rich silks, brocades, or gold or silver lace. Owners of vessels, in times of peace, were forced to engage at fixed prices in perilous voyages of discovery or commerce. [Sidenote: SUMPTUARY LAWS.]