The Edwardian romance, entitled ‘Richard Cœur de Lion,’ contains abundant allusions to conviviality. In the following quotation, the occurrence of the term _costrel_, by which is intended an earthen or wooden flask, is the occasion of a paragraph in Chaffer’s valuable work on pottery.[63] Now, steward, I warn thee, Buy us vessel great plente, Dishes, cuppes and saucers, Bowls, trays and platters, Vats, tuns, and costrel. The same romance tells that it was a female minstrel, an Englishwoman, who betrayed the knight-errant king on his return from the Holy Land. It is worth quoting as illustrative of minstrel life which in these times formed so prominent a feature:-- When they had drunken well a fin, A minstralle com therein, And said, ‘Gentlemen, wittily, Will ye have any minstrelsey?’ Richard bade that she should go. The minstralle took in mind, And saith, ‘Ye are men unkind; And if I may, ye shall for-think Ye gave neither meat nor drink, For gentlemen should bede To minstrels that abandon yede, Of their meat, wine, and ale.’[64] In the reign of King John occurs _The Earliest Statute on the Foreign Wine Trade_. It was enacted (1200) that the wines of Anjou should not be sold for more than 24_s._ a tun, and that the wines of Poitou should not be higher than 20_s._ The other wines of France were limited to 25_s._ a tun, ‘unless they were so good as to induce any one to give for them two marks or more.’ Twelve honest men in every town were to superintend this assize. This ordinance, Holinshed says, could not last long, for the merchants could not bear it; and so they fell to, and sold white wine for eightpence the gallon, and red, or claret, for sixpence. The king claimed, out of every imported cargo, one tun before the mast, and another behind it, under the name of _prisa_ or _prisa recta_, and officers were appointed to collect and account for the same. From the entries of this reign we discover that the principal wines then consumed in England were--those of Anjou, chiefly white and sweet; Gascon wine, wine of Saxony, and wine of Auxerre, which came from the territory of the Duke of Burgundy.[65] The introduction of these wines soon began to manifest its effects. Roger de Hoveden, whose annals date as far as the third year of John, says: ‘By this means the land was filled with drink and drinkers.’ That the English had a wide-spread fame for heavy drinking we incidentally learn from an _on-dit_ of Pope Innocent III. When the case of the exemption of the Abbey of Evesham from the Bishop of Worcester was being argued before the pope, the bishop’s counsel said, ‘Holy father, we have learnt in the schools, and this is the opinion of our masters, that there is no prescription against the rights of bishops.’ The pope replied, ‘Certainly, both you and your masters had drunk too much English beer when you learnt this.’