paying a "furnage" toll to the lord.[1] Thomas, Earl of Lancaster, who was beheaded in 1322, was the owner of six common ovens at Leicester, which were rented at £10 a year ; and John of Gaunt, in his Charter of 1375, thought best to reserve to himself all his bakehouse rights. But the common ovens were sometimes let out at rents which do not seem to have been extortionate. Thus, in the year 1422, a Leicester baker, named Thomas Harding, took from the Duchy of Lancaster a thirty years lease of the common oven outside the North Gate of Leicester at a yearly rental of 20s., the lord undertaking to maintain it in good repair — a very favourable bargain, one would think, for the tenant.
A case which arose at the end of the sixteenth century touching the furnage rights of the Crown, as representing the House of Lancaster, will be referred to later. In the middle of the 14th century, the Earl complained that some burgesses, "who had nothing by which they could be distrained, except their flour in the mill or their bread," claimed that they ought not to be distrained at the mill or the oven, and therefore "caused their flour to be carried away at night from the mill to the oven." It was agreed, however, in 1352, that distress might be levied "as well within houses as without, as well at the mill and at the oven as elsewhere."
Besides the restrictions upon promiscuous baking which were imposed by the lord's monopoly of ovens, the Bakers of Leicester were subject to strict regulations regarding the price and quality of their bread. The Statute for regulating the price of bread throughout the Kingdom by a public assize was passed in 1266, and the Leicester Guild Merchant saw to it that the town bakers obeyed this law. The assize is not mentioned in the published Records until the year 1335, when it was ordained "that the Assize of Bread be kept, that is to say that all bakers shall bake four loaves for a penny of whatever kind of bread, well cooked and well baked, so long as the quarter of wheat is within the price of 4s."
- ↑ In the reign of Henry VII burgesses were ceasing to use the Crown ovens and erecting their own. (Records of the Borough of Leicester Vol. II. Introduction xxi., note.)
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