ANST - Period Scams?
Crescentia _
crescentia3 at hotmail.com
Tue Mar 30 15:21:00 PST 1999
>Herr Manfred von Wolf asked about period scams.
>>
I do know that that's where the expression "let the cat out of the bag"
came from-- a person might think they were buying a piglet in a sack,
but an unscrupulous dealer might put a cat in there instead. Sometimes
(I think this still might go on nowadays), people would retouch their
horses' manes to make them appear younger and get a better price when
selling them. And of course, you'd always have the people who would
take metal shavings off silver and gold coins and melt them down-- which
is why we have milled edges on our coinage nowadays. Or merchants who
would "fix" their scales so their customer would pay for more than they
bought. Since a lot of the population would have been either illiterate
and/or agrarian, I think that most scams would have been more along the
lines of misreprenting livestock rather than printed misinformation.
-Crescentia
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