[405a] Parkin 123.
[405b] See Parkin, as before; who further observes, that Lynn was famous at that time for importing wine: and it seems that foreign wine was then very cheap here, compared with what it is at present. Hence Parkin mentions a pipe of wine as selling here then at 1l. 15s. and a tun of wine at 50s. These were probably red wine, for he afterwards mentions a tun of white wine as having been sold for three marks and a half, i.e. 2l. 6s. 3d.—The mark being 13s. 4d.—Wine sells here now at a price above 50 times higher than what it did at that period. Salmon was an article that appears to have always fetched a high price in those days; and Parkin, in the place from which these articles have been extracted, mentions 20s. as paid for 5 Salmons sent to the bishop of Norwich at South Elmham, on Monday before the feast of the purification. Ten such Salmons were then, it seems, as valuable as a pipe of wine.
[411] The word Gild, (says Chambers,) is formed from the Saxon Gildan, to pay, became every man was gildare, i.e. to pay something towards the charge and support of the company.
[412] Annual Review, for 1807, 490.
[413a] See Jacob’s Law Dictionary, under the word Guild.
[413b] Religious persons, clerks, knights and their eldest sons, excepted.
[413c] Chamber’s Cyclopædia, under Gild and Frank pledge.
[415] See Turner’s Hist. of the Anglo-Saxon, 2nd Ed. vol. 2. p. 109, &c.
[420] Parkin, 134, 5.
[421a] The Gilds of the common people, or those which had no large possessions attached to them, were then probably not meddled with, but suffered to go on as before. Some of them, as we have before seen, existed in Camden’s time, and perhaps a good while afterwards.