decree sets forth that some women are wearing trains, "which are both costly and useless," but in future they are to be confined to those ladies who are travelling in a litter--a privilege limited to nobles. All other women are to wear pelisses without trains, just reaching the ground, "or at least not to drag more than two inches upon it." Ladies who broke this rule were to be fined 500 maravedis. Great stress is again laid upon the limitation {217} of extravagance in wedding feasts, and burials, but the cost still allowed shows to what an excess luxury had been carried. The bride's wedding clothes might cost 4,000 maravedis and the groom's outfit 2,000; and thirty-two people were now allowed at the wedding feast. Much more latitude was permitted in the use of seed-pearls, gold, and silver, to people above the rank of knights, but the principal point to be noted in these decrees of Alonso XI. is the incidence of the penalty. In the decrees of Alonso the Wise, as has been shown, the most savage penalties were imposed upon the poorer classes, whilst the punishment of the nobles was left to the King's discretion. But much more even justice is dealt out by Alonso XI. The nobles who break the law are to lose one-quarter of their land, the knights one-third, the citizens 500 maravedis, whilst the poorer classes for slight offences against the sumptuary rules are condemned to lose the offending garment and its cost in money. But whatever the penalty might be, extravagance, checked in one direction, broke out in another, and Peter the Cruel, the son of Alfonso XI., only a few years after the date of the decree just mentioned, issued a complete sumptuary code in which the punishments were positively ferocious. Fines, scourging, mutilation, and banishment for first and second offences, and death for the third, were imposed for the smallest infraction. Peter was particularly hard on priests, who were said to be swaggering about with women, tricked out in gay finery, and they were ordered in future to be sober and frugal, wearing no ornaments of any kind, and only sad-coloured garb. Workmen, too, were to {218} labour from sunrise to sunset for a fixed wage on pain of punishment as severe as those imposed by our own labour laws. The King, moreover, fixed stringently the cost which was to be incurred by cities and towns in entertaining him when he visited them. The dietary scale appears a pretty generous one from the point of view of to-day, consisting as it does of 45 sheep at 8 maravedis each, 22 dozen of dry fish at 12 maravedis a dozen, 90 maravedis worth of fresh fish, with pork, grain, wine, &c.; the total value of the feast being limited to 1,850 maravedis. Villages and nobles were not to spend more than 800 maravedis on a similar occasion.