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THE NATURE AND CAUSES OF

then much lower than in later times, its ordinary price mustlikewise have been mucli lower. They might have found,however, that in those ancient times, its highest price was fullyas much above, as its lowest price was below any thing thathad ever been known in later times. Thus in 1270, Fleet-wood gives us two prices of the quarter of wheat. The one isfour pounds sixteen shillings of the money of those times,equal to fourteen pounds eight shillings of that of the pre-sent; the other is six pounds eight shillings, equal to nineteenpounds four shillings of our present money. No price can befound in the end of the fifteenth, or beginning of the sixteenthcentury, which approaches to the extravagance of these. Theprice of corn, though at all times liable to variation, variesmost in those turbulent and disorderly societies, in which theinterruption of all commerce and communication hinders theplenty of one part of the country from relieving the scarcityof another. In the disorderly state of England under the Plan-tagenets, who governed it from about the middle of thetwelfth, till towards the end of the fifteenth century, one dis-trict might be in plenty, while another at no great distance,by having its crop destroyed either by some accident of theseasons, or by the incursion of some neighbouring baron,might be suffering all the horrors of a famine; and yet ifthe lands of some hostile lord were interposed between them,the one might not be able to give the least assistance to theother. Under the vigorous administration of the Tudors, whogoverned England during the latter part of the fifteenth, andthrough the whole of the sixteenth century, no baron waspowerful enough to dare to disturb the public security.

The reader will find at the end of this chapter all the pricesof wheat which have been collected by Fleetwood from 1202to 1597, both inclusive, reduced to the money of the presenttimes, and digested according to the order of time, into sevendivisions of twelve years each. At the end of each divisiontoo,he will find the average price of the twelve years of whichit consists. In that long period of time, Fleetwood has beenable to collect the prices of no more than eighty years, sothat four years are wanting to make out the last twelve years.I have added, therefore, from the accounts of Eton College ,the prices of 1598, 1599, 1600, and 1601. It is the only ad-dition which I have made. The reader will see that from thebeginning of the thirteenth, till after the middle of the six-teenth century, the average price of each twelve years grows