[3] See the Comptes des Frères Bonis, merchants at Montauban during the second half of the fourteenth century, published (1890) by M. Ed. Forestier. Bonis himself possessed in the vicinity of Montauban lands and houses to the value of sixty or seventy thousand pounds sterling, modern value;—which did not prevent his selling his goods with his own hands, down to the smallest detail.
[4] See Bonis, ccviii. Among Bonis’ servants the swineherd, Jean Chaussenoire, bought a vineyard; the neatherd, Salona, two houses in town; another neatherd, a house on the banks of the Aveyron. In 1366, under the English, a shepherdess comes to Bonis and entrusts him with her savings: three and thirty pounds! Bonis’s valet, a man at wages of five pounds a year, possessed enough land to take 430 litres (two septiers) of wheat at the sowing: from six to eight acres of land.
[5] Léopold Delisle, L’Agriculture Normande au Moyen Age. See pp. 8-17, an account of the position of the hospites, who, often burghers in the town, were little better than serfs in the country.
[6] For example, the Marmosets of Charles V.; but this king also knighted numerous burghers of Paris.
[7] For the full description of the origin and class of vavassours, we refer our reader to L. Delisle, L’Agriculture Normande au Moyen Age.
[8] Bonis.
[9] Thorold Rogers, i. 16.
[10] History of Prices, loc. cit., and p. 66.
[11] See especially the treatise on gardening in the Menagier de Paris. There is also a valuable chapter on the kitchen-garden in M. L. Delisle’s L’Agriculture Normande au Moyen Age. Most of the plants quoted were already grown in the gardens of Charlemagne.
[12] Delisle, p. 221.