The 1363 English Sumptuary law was put in place to control the consumption of fabrics and related goods based on social class. The social implications of such laws have been discussed previously as reviewed in the literature. But there is a need to better understand the context, purpose, and function of these laws through examination of the prices of fabrics compared with the limits on cloth expenditure set out by the sumptuary laws.
This thesis provides a comparison of the 1363 English sumptuary law, the most comprehensive of the fourteenth-century English sumptuary laws, with available fabric prices from the fourteenth century. The fabric prices come from transcriptions of fourteenth-century documents that record fabric purchases for making clothing. Through a comparison of these documents it is possible to gain some understanding of the fabrics available to people based on the restrictions in the 1363 sumptuary law.