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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