ent quality in various parts of his
kingdom.

The culture of the vine having thus developed, the wine trade acquired an
enormous importance in France. Gascony, Aunis, and Saintonge sent their
wines to Flanders; Guyenne sent hers to England. Froissart writes that, in
1372, a merchant fleet of quite two hundred sail came from London to
Bordeaux for wine. This flourishing trade received a severe blow in the
sixteenth century; for an awful famine having invaded France in 1566,
Charles IX. did not hesitate to repeat the acts of Domitian, and to order
all the vines to be uprooted and their place to be sown with corn;
fortunately Henry III. soon after modified this edict by simply
recommending the governors of the provinces to see that "the ploughs were
not being neglected in their districts on account of the excessive
cultivation of the vine."

[Illustration: Fig. 107.--Interior of an Hostelry.--Fac-simile of a
Woodcut in a folio edition of Virgil, published at Lyons in 1517.]

Although the trade of a wine-merchant is one of the oldest established in
Paris, it does not follow that the retail sale of wine was exclusively
carried on by special tradesmen. On the contrary, for a long time the
owner of the vineyard retailed the wine which he had not been able to sell
in the cask. A broom, a laurel-wreath, or some other sign of the sort hung
over a door, denoted that any one passing could purchase or drink wine
within. When the wine-growers did not have the quality and price of their
wine announced in the village or town by the public crier, they placed a
man before the door of their cellar, who enticed the public to enter and
taste the new wines. Other proprietors, instead of selling for people to
take away in their own vessels, established a tavern in some room of their
house, where they retailed drink (Fig. 107). The monks, who made wine
extensively, also opened these taverns in the monasteries, as they only
consumed part of their wine themselves; and this system was universally
adopted by wine-growers, and even by the king and the nobles. The latter,
however, had this advantage, that, whilst they were retailing their wines,
no one in the district was allowed to enter into competition with them.
This prescriptive right, which was called _droit de ban-vin_, was still in
force in the seventeenth century.

Saint Louis granted special statutes to the wine-merchants in 1264; but it
was only three centuries later that they formed a