CHAP. XII.

HIGH VALUE OF MONEY.

31 ?

marcs, or about the weight of seventy-two thou-sand ounces of silver, little more than equivalentin money of this day to £18,000 1 .

It appears hy ancient documents in Alsace and in Saxony , if the price of corn be taken asthe criterion of the scarcity of money, that thesame deficiency was felt in those countries. InAlsace , at the end of the tenth century, thecommon money for current purposes was thepfennig. It was of copper, and sixty of themweighed exactly one marc or half a pound avoir-dupois, or 120 of them were a pound weight.The price of a sheffel or bushel of wheat, weigh-ing sixty pounds, or the same nearly as ourEnglish bushel, was seven of these pfennigs.Copper, probably, bore a higher value in propor-tion to silver than it does in the present day;or the bushel of wheat was sold for less than apenny farthing 2 . About two hundred and fiftyyears later, in the same country, the same mea-sure of wheat was sold at twenty-four pfennigs,or about threepence farthing 3 . It appears bythe accounts preserved in the cathedral of Stras-burg,'that the wages paid to the masons em-ployed in the erection of that edifice was fromone and a half to two of these pfennigs. At the

1 Boulainvilliers, p. 114.

2 Florencourt uber die Bergwerke der Alten, p. 57-

3 Annales Colmarienses, 1289, fol. 24.