Antitrust Law in the Middle Ages

When most people in America think about anti-trust law, they probably think about Standard Oil. This was the company that brought the concept of monopoly, and its potential to disrupt markets, into the American frame of mind. Damming media from the time wrote about Rockefeller controlling prices of consumer products and the extent of the “scheme” that he used to pull it all off.
Yet Standard Oil and its practices are just one in a long list of potential anti-trust cases that stretch as far back as the Middle Ages, and even before.
Even back then, acts existed that helped to regulate trade in certain regions. The idea was that legislation could control, or at least impact inflation. In fact, Henry III passed an act in 1266 that fixed the prices of grain, which affected bread and ale production. People who violated the law could face anything from a financial penalty to a day in the stocks. Violators were publicly shamed as “oppressors of the poor.”
English law also shared an unconscious similarity with its American counterpart several hundred years later. Under English law, violators of anti-trust laws could be levied with fines that were as much as double the amount of a transaction.
The English were not the only ones dabbling in the practice of controlling markets.
The Italians tried it with their 1283 constitutiones juris metallic, which limited the ability for ore mining companies to team up and fix prices on the minerals they sold. This was also around the time when guilds began forming, as businesses began to fight for their own interests.