Beginning in the fourteenth century and continuing even till the eighteenth century, the British government enforced certain laws restricting what people could wear and eat. These laws were concerned not with rationing a scarce product (as was the case with sugar during the Second World War), as with trying to prevent the nation from degenerating into a moral maelstrom, a social chaos in which commoners dressed like lords, and lords squandered their family jewels on exquisite dainties, and dainties became so sumptuous that the very sight of them reduced the nation’s citizens to blubbering idolatry. One of the first monarchs to address this pernicious threat was Edward III, who declared that no person could arrange a dinner of more than two courses, each course comprising no more than two dishes; sauces, also, were to be used modestly, and fish and fowl were not to be mixed. Later, in 1433, another Act of Parliament determined that anyone in Scotland below the rank of baron was forbidden to eat a pie or a baked meat, these dishes still being considered exotic novelties in that realm. By the seventeenth century, such laws had come to be known as sumptuary laws, a term that derives from the Latin sumere, meaning to use up or to spend, which is also the source of the word consume.<\/p>\n
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Beginning in the fourteenth century and continuing even till the eighteenth century, the British government enforced certain laws restricting what people could wear and eat. These laws were concerned not with rationing a scarce product (as was the case with sugar during the Second World War), as with trying to prevent the nation from degenerating […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-41187","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-s"],"yoast_head":"\n