Sumptuary Laws (Lat. sumtus, 'expense'), laws passed to prevent extravagance in banquets, dress, and private expenditure. They abound in ancient legislation. The Locrian legislator, Zaleucus, 450 B.C., ordained that nobody should drink undiluted wine; and in Solon's code there were many sumptuary enactments. At an early period in Roman history the Censors, to whom was entrusted the superintendence of public and private morality, punished with the notatio censoria all persons guilty of luxurious living; but as the love of luxury grew with the increase of wealth and foreign conquest various legislative enactments were passed with the object of restraining it. The Lex Orchia, 187 B.C., limited the number of guests to be present at a feast; the Lex Fannia, 161 B.C., regulated the cost of entertainments. There were also the Lex Didia, Lucretia, Cornelia, Æmilia, and others, most of them passed in consequence of the practical disregard of the similar laws that had preceded them; but they all seem to have been habitually transgressed in the later times of the Republic. Julius Cæsar, Augustus, and other rulers also made laws against luxury.
Sumptuary laws were in great favour in the legislation of England from the time of Edward II. down to the Reformation. Statute 10 Edward III. chap. 3 narrates that 'through the excessive and over-many costly meats which the people of this realm have used more than elsewhere many mischiefs have happened; for the great men by these excesses have been sore grieved, and the lesser people, who only endeavour to imitate the great ones in such sorts of meat, are much impoverished, whereby they are not able to aid themselves, nor their liege lord, in time of need as they ought, and many other evils have happened as well to their souls as their bodies;' and enacts that no man, of whatever condition or estate, shall be allowed more than two courses at dinner or supper, or more than two kinds of food in each course, except on the principal festivals of the year, when three courses at the utmost are to be allowed. All who did not enjoy a free estate of £100 per annum were prohibited from wearing furs, skins, or silk, and the use of foreign cloth was allowed to the royal family alone. Act 37 Edward III. declares that the outrageous and excessive apparel of divers people against their estate and degree is the destruction and impoverishment of the land, and prescribes the apparel of the various classes into which it distributes the people; it goes no higher than knights, but there are minute regulations for the clothing of women and children. This statute, however, was repealed the next year. In France there were sumptuary laws as old as Charlemagne, prohibiting or taxing the use of furs; but the first extensive attempt to restrict extravagance in dress was under Philip IV. By an edict of Charles VI. no one was allowed to exceed a soup and two dishes at dinner. Frederick the Great and other German princes endeavoured to suppress the use of coffee as a harmful luxury. Sumptuary laws continued to be introduced in England in the 16th, in France as late as the 17th century; and burial in woollen, prescribed by English law from 1678 till 1815, was akin to them, though its primary object was to lessen the importation of linen. The Scottish parliament attempted to regulate the dress of the ladies, to save the purses of the 'paur gentlemen their husbands and fathers;' and statutes were passed against superfluous banqueting, and the inordinate use of foreign spices 'brocht from the parts beyond sea, and sauld at dear prices to monie folk that are very unabil to sustain that coaste.' Neither in England, Scotland, nor France do these laws appear to have been practically observed to any great extent: in fact, the kings of France and England contributed far more, by their love of pageantry, to excite a taste for luxury among their subjects than by their ordinances to repress it. Froude has suggested that such statutes may have been regarded, at the time when they were issued, rather as authoritative declarations of what wise and good men considered right than as laws to which obedience could be enforced. Enactments of this kind have long been considered to be opposed to the principles of political economy. Most of the English sumptuary laws were repealed by 1 James I. chap. 25; but regulations of a similar kind survive in the university statutes of Oxford and Cambridge. There is a trace of the same principle in the present-day taxation of luxuries—wine and spirits, tobacco, tea, and coffee (though mainly with a view to regulating the incidence of the tax), and in the duties on male servants, armorial bearings, &c. And one reason sometimes urged for the suppression of the liquor traffic is the diminution thereby to be effected in wanton waste and pernicious luxury. In Montenegro strong laws were passed in 1883 against gloves, umbrellas, and non-national costumes.