(6) “The most disclaunderous article” of all, according to the bishop, was the question of the assize of wine, ale, and bread. While the mayor claimed the assize over the bishop’s demesne, the bishop asserted that such assize “of time that no mind is” belonged wholly to the bishop himself, and in no wise to the mayor.[673] This matter was partly a question of finance, and partly a question of order. So long as wine was first smuggled in by the bishop’s tenants, and then sold in the houses of the canons and in the precincts, against “the ordinances and cry” made by the mayor, the town lost the customs which ought to be paid at the port of Exmouth on every pipe of wine; and as the ferm was paid out of these customs, the bishop’s tenants escaped their share of the rent,[674] and left the whole burden to be borne by the citizens. The corporation further lost the “wine gavell” paid on all wine sold by retail in the town. Moreover fraudulent sellers went unpunished; for instead of allowing the town officers to cast into the canal wine which was condemned by the municipality as “corrupt and not whole for man’s body, damnable and which should be damned,” the bishop’s tenants actually found means to gather from it profits of iniquity; “the which corrupt wine hath been carried to Topsham and there shipped, and so led to Bordeaux, there to be put and melled among new wine, as it shall be well proved if need be.” In the same way the weighing of bread was resisted, and the due testing of beer, and the authority of the city set at nought.
(7) There was also a quarrel about who was to get the profits from increased rents of stalls and shops and houses which opened on the market-place,[675] and whose value altogether depended on the growth of the market and the town trade. Both the municipality and the church would willingly have seized the “unearned increment.” The convent had set up stalls and booths “on the ground of the said mayor and citizens without licence of them asked”—great stalls sixty feet long and over three feet broad, where of old time there had only been shop windows, “the leaves thereof going inward, and none other never were.” The bishop answered that any one in the town might put stalls outside his own house if he chose; and in any case, he added, with consistent denial of the authority of the corporation, it was a matter to be punished by the King, if at all, and not by the commonalty. When the townsmen further urged that they had always “of time that no mind is” held their fish-market in Fish Street, a sort of debateable land, which lay outside the cemetery but within the precincts of the close, but that now the dean and chapter had refused to let the market be held there, and had themselves made stairs and gardens encroaching on the street, which moreover cut off the mayor’s way to the town walls and towers, the bishop answered in quibbling wise that as there never was such a street as Fish Street, no market could well be held in it, nor could it be encroached upon: what the town chose to call Fish Street, the prelate explained, was in his nomenclature S. Martin’s or the Canon’s Street.[676]