BEQUESTS OF SALT 81 



complain of " profiteering " in relation to other 

 commodities. The small shopkeeper and per- 

 sons paid a fixed salary, such as clerks, however, 

 now complain that the " war bonus " of miners 

 and others providing necessities of life is 

 profiteering just as much as the manipulations 

 of food prices and the like. 



We note that in 1379 Newcastle coal was 

 favoured by the Government and taxed at a 

 very low rate, while herrings, and the herring 

 fishery were taxed at the highest rate ; also, that 

 in the same year Thomas Cobald bequeathed 

 to the High Altar of St. Nicholas at Great 

 Yarmouth, among other things, a wey of salt, 

 while three years later, in 1382, William Rook- 

 haghe bequeathed to the same church no less 

 than three weys of salt gross. A wey of salt ^ 

 consisted of 40 water bushels or 200 pecks, 

 5 pecks being the amount of salt required to 

 cure one barrel containing 800 herrings. 



In the same year, 1382, Philippe de Mazieres 

 states that there were many thousands of 

 vessels, each having at least six persons on 

 board, engaged in the fishing for herring in the 

 seas between Denmark and Norway, that there 

 were, in addition, 500 vessels for packing and 

 gutting the herring, and that there were more 

 than 300,000 persons engaged in the herring 

 fishery. 



In the " Annals of Dieppe " there is a record 



• In the seventeenth century a wey of salt was worth about 

 40«. 



