to what is above written, having respect to the
price of corn."
Thirdly, they seem to have been misled too,
by the very low price at which wheat was
sometimes sold in very ancient times; and to
have imagined, that as its lowest price was
then much lower than in later times its ordinary
price must likewise have been much lower.
They might have found, however, that in
those ancient times its highest price was fully
as much above, as its lowest price was below
any thing that had ever been known in later
times. Thus, in 1270, Fleetwood gives us
two prices of the quarter of wheat. The one
is four pounds sixteen shillings of the money
of those times, equal to fourteen pounds eight
shillings of that of the present; the other is
six pounds eight shillings, equal to nineteen
pounds four shillings of our present money.
No price can be found in the end of the fifteenth,
or beginning of the sixteenth century,
which approaches to the extravagance of these.
The price of corn, though at all times liable
to variation, varies most in those turbulent
and disorderly societies, in which the interruption
of all commerce and communication hinders
the plenty of one part of the country from
relieving the scarcity of another. In the disorderly
state of England under the Plantagenets,
who governed it from about the middle
of the twelfth till towards the end of the fifteenth
century, one district might be in plenty,
while another, at no great distance, by
having its crop destroyed, either by some accident
of the seasons, or by the incursion of
some neighbouring baron, might be suffering
all the horrors of a famine; and yet if the
lands of some hostile lord were interposed between
them, the one might not be able to give
the least assistance to the other. Under the
vigorous administration of the Tudors, who
governed England during the latter part of
the fifteenth, and through the whole of the
sixteenth century, no baron was powerful enough
to dare to disturb the public security.
The reader will find at the end of this chapter
all the prices of wheat which have been
collected by Fleetwood, from 1202 to 1597,
both inclusive, reduced to the money of the
present times, and digested, according to the
order of time, into seven divisions of twelve
years each. At the end of each division, too,
he will find the average price of the twelve
years of which it consists. In that long period
of time, Fleetwood has been able to collect
the prices of no more than eighty years;
so that 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 addition which I have made. The
reader will see, that from the beginning of
the thirteenth till after the middle of the sixteenth
century, the average price of each twelve
years grows gradually lower and lower; and
that towards the and of the sixteenth century
it begins to rise again. The prices, indeed,
which Fleetwood has been able to collect,
seem to have been those chiefly which were
remarkable for extraordinary dearness or cheapness;
and I do not pretend that any very certain
conclusion can be drawn from them. So
far, however, as they prove any thing at all,
they confirm the account which I have been
endeavouring to give. Fleetwood himself,
however, seems, with most other writers, to
have believed, that, during all this period, the
value of silver, in consequence of its increasing
abundance, was continually diminishing.
The prices of corn, which he himself has collected,
certainly do not agree with this opinion.
They agree perfectly with that of Mr
Dupré de St Maur, and with that which I
have been endeavouring to explain. Bishop
Fleetwood and Mr Dupré de St Maur are the
two authors who seem to have collected, with
the greatest diligence and fidelity, the prices
of things in ancient times. It is somewhat
curious that, though their opinions are so very
different, their facts, so far as they relate to
the price of corn at least, should coincide so
very exactly.
It is not, however, so much from the low
price of corn, as from that of some other parts
of the rude produce of land, that the most judicious
writers have inferred the great value
of silver in those very ancient times. Corn,
it has been said, being a sort of manufacture,
was, in those rude ages, much dearer in proportion
than the greater part of other commodities;
it is meant, I suppose, than the greater
part of unmanufactured commodities, such
as cattle, poultry, game of all kinds, &c. That
in those times of poverty and barbarism these
were proportionably much cheaper than corn,
is undoubtedly true. But this cheapness was
not the effect of the high value of silver, but
of the low value of those commodities. It
was not because silver would in such time
purchase or represent a greater quantity of labour,
but because such commodities would
purchase or represent a much smaller quantity
than in times of more opulence and improvement.
Silver must certainly be cheaper in
Spanish America than in Europe; in the country
where it is produced, than in the country
to which it is brought, at the expense of a
long carriage both by land and by sea, of a
freight, and an insurance. One-and-twenty
pence halfpenny sterling, however, we are told
by Ulloa, was, not many years ago, at Buenos
Ayres, the price of an ox chosen from a herd
of three or four hundred. Sixteen shillings
sterling, we are told by Mr Byron, was the
price of a good horse in the capital of Chili.
In a country naturally fertile, but of which
the far greater part is altogether uncultivated,
cattle, poultry, game of all kinds, &c. as they
can be acquired with a very small quantity of
labour, so they will purchase or command but