Salt-weigher

Officials whose duty it was to make sure people were not shortchanged when buying salt.

“Even the infractions of solemn forms tended to become forms themselves. It seems that it was more or less a custom for the funeral of a king of France to be interrupted by a quarrel, of which the object was the possession of the utensils of the ceremony. In 1422 the corporation of the ‘henouars,’ or salt-weighers, of Paris, whose privilege it was to carry the king’s corpse to Saint-Denis, came to blows with the monks of the abbey, as both parties claimed the pall covering the bier of Charles VI.”

J. Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages (1924).