CHAP. XIV.

IN THE DARK AGES.

361

in three hundred and sixty of the gold and silveris annually consumed by wear, and that in the year800 the stock of those metals had been reduced,from what it was in the time of Augustus , toabout thirty-five or thirty-six millions, it willfollow that a yearly addition of so small anamount as one hundred thousand pounds fromthe mines would be a supply fully adequate to re-place such consumption.

As far as a judgment can be formed from thefew facts that are discoverable, we should bedisposed to conclude the whole quantity yieldedby the mines during the period would, on ayearly average, amount to one hundred thousandpounds, but that the later years were some-what more productive than the earlier. We arerather inclined to this opinion by the rise of afew common articles as noticed by Ruding,(vol. i. p. 193 and 194), which appear to haveincreased in money price between 1150 and 1450,at the rate of nearly one hundred per cent.

There seems thus no reason to suppose thatthe additional quantity of gold and silver broughtinto circulation between the years 800 and1500 was much, if any, more than was re-quired to keep the stock of the last of thoseyears to as high a standard as it had reached inthe first of them; and we judge that thequantity must have remained nearly the samefrom the prices of commodities, when valued by