THE WEALTH OK NATIONS.

175

Digression concerning the Variations in the Value of Silver during the course of the four last Centuries.

KIR ST pe ui on.

In 1350, and for some time before, the average price of thequarter of wheat in England seems not to have been esti-mated lower than four ounces of silver, Tower-weight, equalto about twenty shillings of our present money. Frotp thisprice it seems to have fallen gradually to two ounces of silver,equal to about ten shillings of our present money, the priceat which we find it estimated in the beginning of the sixteenthcentury, and at which it seems to have continued to be esti-mated till about 1570.

In 1350, being the 25th of Edward III . was enacted whatis called the Statute of Labourers. In the preamble it com-plains much of the insolence of servants, who endeavoured toraise their wages upon their masters. It therefore ordains,that all servants and labourers should for the future be con-tented with the same wages and liveries (liveries in thosetimes signified, not only clothes, but provisions) which theyhad been accustomed to receive in the 20th year of the king,and the four preceding years; that upon this account theirlivery-wheat should nowhere be estimated higher than ten-pence a bushel, and that it should always be in the option ofthe master to deliver them either the wheat or the money.Ten-pence a bushel, therefore,had, in the25thof Edward III .been reckoned a very moderate price of wheat, since it re-quired a particular statute to oblige servants to accept of itin exchange for their usual livery of provisions; and it hadbeen reckoned a reasonable price ten years before that, or inthe 1 Gth year of the king, the term to which the statute refers.But in the 1 Gth year of Edward III . ten-pence containedabout half an ounce of silver, Tower-weight, and was nearlyequal to half a crown of our present money. Four ounces ofsilver, Tower-weight, therefore, equal to six shillings andeight-penco of the money of those times, and to near twentyshillings of that of the present, must have been reckoned amoderate price for the quarter of eight bushels.

This statute is surely a better evidence of what was reck-oned in those times a moderate price of grain, than theprices of some particular years which have generally been re-corded by historians and other writers on account of theirextraordinary dearness or cheapness, and from which, there*