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Unlike the more charitably inclined members of the laity, moreover, the clergy never issues acts of grace that relieved their debtors of their burdens.

— Legal Plunder by Daniel Lord Smail (Page 269)

In cases where the consul was the victim of predation, responsibility for warehousing the items seized from his place of residence, bizarrely, was often assigned to the consul himself.

— Legal Plunder by Daniel Lord Smail (Page 203)

Even seemingly innocuous objects were worth something. Otherwise, it is impossible to understand why, in Marseille in the year 1331, a man named Peire de Sepeda should have chosen to make good on a debt by invading the home of his debtor and removing, of all things, a tablecloth and two napkins. There is always the possibility, of course, that the debtor, Antoni de Serra, was eating off them at the time of the home invasion: the record carefully specifies that the tablecloth was on the table when Peire seized it. In this case, the value of the linens may have been incidental to the insult delivered by their seizure.

— Legal Plunder by Daniel Lord Smail (Page 144 - 145)

The weight of justice and the omnipresent risk of indebtedness and seizure may have shaped the very profile of consumption in later medieval society, pushing consumption toward small, portable objects of high value. ... It may help us understand why there was a fashion revolution, rather than a furniture revolution, in fourteenth-century Europe.

— Legal Plunder by Daniel Lord Smail (Page 28)

The preacher Bernadarino of Siena, who was particularly attentive to the changes afoot, went so far as to link male ornament and finery to the growing practice of sodomy, since pretty young men would attract unwanted attention from their elders. Women's insatiable desire for fine things, he claimed, also promoted homosexuality because it led to rapid escalation in the cost of dowries, and that, in turn, delayed weddings. In their sexual frustration, young unmarried men had begun to turn to each other to satisfy their lusts.

— Legal Plunder by Daniel Lord Smail (Page 18 - 19)

This is a practical book. It sticks to the facts. It is based, not on other books, but on tapestries I have seen and know. It wastes little space on unimportant tapestries, or on tapestries that have ceased to exist.

I dedicate the book "to France, the mother of tapestries" in recognition of the fact that Perfected Tapestries are a French art based on French literature and painting, and developed at Arras and Paris in the fourteenth century. All great Gothic tapestries are French Gothic, whether woven in Northern France or in the French Netherlands.

— The Practical Book of Tapestries by George Leland Hunter (Page 1)