176

THE NATURE ANJJ CAUSES OF

fore, it is difficult to form any judgment concerning whatmay have been the ordinary price. There are, besides, otherreasons for believing that in the beginning of the fourteenthcentury, and for some time before, the common price of wheatwas not less than four ounces of silver the quarter, and thatof other grain in proportion.

In 1309 Ralph de Born, prior of St. Augustine’s, Canter-bury, gave a feast upon his installation-day, of which WilliamThorn has preserved, not only the bill of fare, but the pricesof many particulars. In that feast were consumed, 1st, fifty-three quarters of wheat, which cost nineteen pounds, or sevenshillings and two-pence a quarter, equal to about one andtwenty shillings and] sixpence of our present money: 2dly,fifty-eight quarters of mult, which cost seventeen pounds tenshillings, or six shillings a quarter, equal to about eighteenshillings of our present money: 3dly, twenty quarters oljoats,which cost four pounds, or four shillings a quarter, equal toabout twelve shillings of our present money. The prices ofmalt and oats seem here to be higher than their ordinary pro-portion to the price of wheat.

These prices are not recorded on account of their extraor-dinary dearness or cheapness, but are mentioned accidentally,as the prices actually paid for large quantities of grain con-sumed at a feast which was famous for its marniificence.

O

In 12C2, being the 51st of Henry III . was revived an an-cient statute, called The Assize of Bread and Ale, which theking says, in the preamble, had been made in the times ofhis progenitors, sometime kings of England. It is proba-bly, therefore, as old at least as the time of his grandfatherHenry II. and may have been as old as the Conquest. Itregulates the price of bread according as the prices of wheatmay happen to be, from one shilling to twenty shillings thequarter of the money of those times. But statutes of this kindare generally presumed to provide with equal care for all de-viations from the middle price, for those below it, as well asfor those above it. Ten shillings, therefore, containing sixounces of silver, Tower-weight, and equal to about thirty shil-lings of our present money, must, upon this supposition, havebeen reckoned the middle price ol the quarter of wheat whenthis statute was first enacted, and must have continued to beso in the 51st of Henry III . We cannot therefore be verywrong in supposing that the middle price was not less thanone-third ol the highest price at which this statute regulates