Sumptuary Law, Regulation and Governance

This book starts Ollt as a revisionist history. It is directed against the widely expressed view that sumptuary laws were an unconscionable constraint on the liberty of the individual expressing itself in the private decisions made in the market-place of consumer choice. Such views came in many forms but persistently evinced a flavour of the unquestioned sense of the superiority of the modern over the pre-modern which was so widespread in the p~riod of high modernity exemplified by the nineteenth century view that ‘the Law becomes tyrannous when it prescribes what shall be eaten and what shall be drunk; all such interference is a relapse towards the barbarism of the Middle Ages’ (Pike 1968: II: 585). This rejection of the very idea of sumptuary regulation with its strong, but usually unexamined, assertion of the autonomy of a field of private consumption is buttressed by the historical generalization that sumptuary laws were in any case ‘doomed to .failure’. Since from this standpoint such laws played no part in the emergence of modern law and government they are simply dropped from the record or, at best, relegated to a footnote. The result has been a lack of scholarly attention to sumptuary law and to its treatment as a quaint reminder of a time now sufficiently distant to be looked back on with amusement rather than rancour.