feathers, or clean down only,
without mixing of scalded feathers, fen-down, thistle-down; sand,
lime, gravel, unlawful or corrupt stuff, hair, or any other, upon pain
of forfeiture,' &c. One would like to know what 'unlawful or corrupt
stuff' is, and whether the corruptness be physical through putridity,
or merely metaphysical and created, like the unlawfulness by statute.
The act provides further, that after a certain day no person 'shall
make (to the intent to sell, or offer, or put to sale) any quilt,
mattress, or cushions, which shall be stuffed with any other stuff
than feathers, wool, or flocks alone,' on pain of forfeiture.

But the most stringent enactments for the protection of the public
against such wholesale deceptions appear to have been in the article
of fustian; and perhaps the hidden adulterations that suggested the
enactments, may be the reason why unsound reasonings and hollow
speeches are called fustian. There is something mysteriously awful in
the act of the eleventh year of Henry VII., called 'A remedy to avoid
deceitful slights used upon fustians.' It begins thus:

'That whereas fustians brought from the parts beyond the sea unshorn
into this realm, have been and should be the most profitable cloth for
doublets and other wearing clothes greatly used among the common
people of this realm, and longest have endured of anything that have
come into the same realm from the said parts to that intent--for that
the cause hath been that such fustians afore this time hath been truly
wrought and shorn with the broad sheare, and with no other instruments
or deceitful mean used upon the same. Now so it is, that divers
persons, by subtlety and undue slights and means, have deceivably
imagined and contrived instruments of iron, with which irons, in the
most highest and secret places of their houses, they strike and draw
the said irons on the said fustians unshorn--by means whereof they
pluck off both the nap and cotton of the said fustians, and break
commonly both the ground and threads in sunder; and after, by crafty
sleeking, they make the same fustians to appear to the common people
fine, whole, and sound; and also they raise up the cotton of such
fustians, and then take a light candle, and set it on the fustian
burning, which singeth and burneth away the cotton of the same fustian
from the one end to the other down to the hard threads, instead of
shearing; and after that put them in colour, and so subtlely dr