2 INTRODUCTORY. 



give information as to the record of prices in England are 

 exceedingly imperfect, interrupted, and, judged by the com- 

 monest rules of evidence, untrustworthy. The account in 

 Bishop Fleetwood is very meagre, and many statements are 

 repeated from doubtful authorities. Nor has much addition 

 been made to Fleetwood's evidence since the date of his work, 

 in the works of Macpherson and Eden. 



The student of medieval records is continually struck by 

 the uniformity with which changes in the habits and customs 

 of the community are effected. Experience enables an expert 

 to determine with tolerable precision the date of a manuscript 

 record, whether the document is an account of transactions 

 in Northumberland or Hants, in Cornwall or Kent. The 

 delicate and rather cramped handwriting of the conclusion of 

 Henry the Third's reign gives way to the vigorous and elegant 

 character of Edward the First's time, this again to the bold 

 coarse letters of Edward the Second; while the style of the 

 early part of Edward the Third, similar in some respects to 

 that which prevailed thirty years before, gradually degene- 

 rates into the clumsy scrawl which belongs to the reign of 

 Richard the Second; and this last gives way to the neat and 

 angular letters which are found in English manuscripts of the 

 end of the fourteenth and commencement of the fifteenth 

 centuries. In all cases the change is sudden and almost simul- 

 taneous. We shall see how similar changes take place in the 

 economy of agriculture. 



Except the Pipe rolls, very few documents, other than 

 charters and records of legal procedure, exist before the last 

 twenty years of the reign of Henry the Third. It would 

 seem that landowners began about that time to keep regular 

 accounts. It cannot be by accident that so few accounts 

 of the estates held by the Bigods are anterior to the last 

 years of the monarch just mentioned. If these records ex- 

 tended far back into the long reign of Henry the Third we 

 should be able, no doubt, to trace the circumstances by which 

 so great a change was effected in the material condition of 



