[Illustration:  Fig. 195.—­Measurers of Corn in Paris.

Fig. 196.—­Hay Carriers.

Fac-simile of Woodcuts from the “Royal Orders concerning the Jurisdiction of the Company of Merchants and Shrievalty in the City of Paris,” in small folio goth.:  Jacques Nyverd, 1528.]

It may be asserted as an established fact that the gradual extension of the power of the king, produced by the fall of feudalism, was favourable to the extension of commerce.  As early as the reign of Louis IX. many laws and regulations prove that the kings were alive to the importance of trade.  Among the chief enactments was one which led to the formation of the harbour of Aigues-Mortes on the Mediterranean; another to the publication of the book of “Weights and Measures,” by Etienne Boileau, a work in which the ancient statutes of the various trades were arranged and codified; and a third to the enactment made in the very year of this king’s death, to guarantee the security of vendors, and, at the same time, to ensure purchasers against fraud.  All these bear undoubted witness that an enlightened policy in favour of commerce had already sprung up.

Philippe le Bel issued several prohibitory enactments also in the interest of home commerce and local industry, which Louis X. confirmed.  Philippe le Long attempted even to outdo the judicious efforts of Louis XI., and tried, though unsuccessfully, to establish a uniformity in the weights and measures throughout the kingdom; a reform, however, which was never accomplished until the revolution of 1789.  It is difficult to credit how many different weights and measures were in use at that time, each one varying according to local custom or the choice of the lord of the soil, who probably in some way profited by the confusion which this uncertain state of things must have produced.  The fraud and errors to which this led may easily be imagined, particularly in the intercourse between one part of the country and another.  The feudal stamp is here thoroughly exhibited; as M. Charles de Grandmaison remarks, “Nothing is fixed, nothing is uniform, everything is special and arbitrary, settled by the lord of the soil by virtue of his right of justesse, by which he undertook the regulation and superintendence of the weights and measures in use in his lordship.”

Measures of length and contents often differed much from one another, although they might be similarly named, and it would require very complicated comparative tables approximately to fix their value.  The pied de roi was from ten to twelve inches, and was the least varying measure.  The fathom differed much in different parts, and in the attempt to determine the relations between the innumerable measures of contents which we find recorded—­a knowledge of which must have been necessary for the commerce of the period—­we are stopped by a labyrinth of incomprehensible calculations, which it is impossible to determine with any degree of certainty.