Travel obligations and internet issues are going to be interfering with daily posts for at least some of the next 10 days to two weeks. So nobody will go into withdrawal, however, The Legal Genealogist offers…
The term of the day:
JOURNEY-HOPPERS.
Now you have to admit… that’s a fun term. Doesn’t it just conjure up all kinds of mental images? Like the kangaroo pictured here? I mean, really…
It turns out to mean, in English law, “regrators of yarn.”1
Yeah.
Right.
What’s a regrator, you ask? So glad you did. Because I had to look it up too.
Regrating is a term from the criminal law. It means “every practice or device, by act, conspiracy, words, or news, to enhance the price of victuals or other merchandise.”2 In other words, it’s price-fixing.
The journey-hopping part came about because middlemen would buy up yarn in England at low prices, take it to the continent (hopping across the English channel, one can only presume) and then sell it back at much higher prices.
Journey-hoppers.
Who’da thunk it?
SOURCES
- Henry Campbell Black, A Dictionary of Law (St. Paul, Minn. : West, 1891), 652, “journey-hoppers.” ↩
- John Bouvier, A Law Dictionary Adapted to the Constitution and Laws of the United States of America and of the Several States of the American Union, rev. 6th ed. (1856); HTML reprint, The Constitution Society (http://www.constitution.org/bouv/bouvier.htm : accessed 17 Oct 2013), “regrating.” ↩
