To guarantee liberty, self-administration, and peace was the chief aim of the medieval city. and labour, as we shall presently see when speaking of the craft guilds, was its chief foundation.  But “production” did not absorb the whole attention of the medieval economist.  With his practical mind, he understood that “consumption” must be guaranteed in order to obtain production; and therefore, to provide for “the common first food and lodging of poor and rich alike” (gemeine notdurft und gemach armer und richer(46)) was the fundamental principle in each city.  The purchase of food supplies and other first necessaries (coal, wood, etc.) before they had reached the market, or altogether in especially favourable conditions from which others would be excluded—­the preempcio, in a word—­was entirely prohibited.  Everything had to go to the market and be offered there for every one’s purchase, till the ringing of the bell had closed the market.  Then only could the retailer buy the remainder, and even then his profit should be an “honest profit” only.(47) Moreover, when corn was bought by a baker wholesale after the close of the market, every citizen had the right to claim part of the corn (about half-a-quarter) for his own use, at wholesale price, if he did so before the final conclusion of the bargain; and reciprocally, every baker could claim the same if the citizen purchased corn for re-selling it.  In the first case, the corn had only to be brought to the town mill to be ground in its proper turn for a settled price, and the bread could be baked in the four banal, or communal oven.(48) In short, if a scarcity visited the city, all had to suffer from it more or less; but apart from the calamities, so long as the free cities existed no one could die in their midst from starvation, as is unhappily too often the case in our own times.

However, all such regulations belong to later periods of the cities’ life, while at an earlier period it was the city itself which used to buy all food supplies for the use of the citizens.  The documents recently published by Mr. Gross are quite positive on this point and fully support his conclusion to the effect that the cargoes of subsistences “were purchased by certain civic officials in the name of the town, and then distributed in shares among the merchant burgesses, no one being allowed to buy wares landed in the port unless the municipal authorities refused to purchase them.  This seem—­she adds—­to have been quite a common practice in England, Ireland, Wales and Scotland."(49) Even in the sixteenth century we find that common purchases of corn were made for the “comoditie and profitt in all things of this....  Citie and Chamber of London, and of all the Citizens and Inhabitants of the same as moche as in us lieth”—­as the Mayor wrote in 1565.(50) In Venice, the whole of the trade in corn is well known to have been in the hands of the city; the “quarters,” on receiving the cereals from the board which administrated the imports, being bound to send to every citizen’s house the quantity allotted to him.(51) In France, the city of Amiens used to purchase salt and to distribute it to all citizens at cost price;(52) and even now one sees in many French towns the halles which formerly were municipal depots for corn and salt.(53) In Russia it was a regular custom in Novgorod and Pskov.