AVERAGES OF PRICES. 183 



some judgment in selection, if the product, the interpretation 

 of which is not sustained by any collateral evidence, is to 

 possess any considerable value as an inference from facts, or 

 as illustrating production and exchange. 



But though I have been unable to use all my facts, or to 

 separate for inferential purposes one region from another, and 

 the several prices of the same article in different localities, 

 I have been able to adopt this plan in the estimate of one 

 kind of labour. Here, indeed, I have taken five divisions, the 

 eastern, the midland, the southern, the western, and the 

 northern counties, and have constructed my table of the prices 

 of threshing the three principal kinds of grain, wheat, barley, or 

 oats, according to these localities. The price is not however 

 an average, but the highest rate paid in each year for the 

 service in question in each of the divisions. Without sepa- 

 rating labourers by their counties, I have adopted the same 

 rule of the highest price paid for mechanical labour, but have 

 also taken an average of the commonest mechanical labour, 

 that of the carpenter. 



III. I have not been able to distinguish the locality of 

 manufactures with such clearness as would suffice for the esti- 

 mate of the charge involved in carriage from the place of 

 production to the market. This of course, when commodities 

 were bulky, forms a ground of great difference in the price of 

 articles of equal value, at unequal distances from their source. 

 Thus, for instance, the price of salt at Lymington, where it 

 was manufactured, is much lower than that at Oxford, whither 

 it had to be carried either by long passage up the Thames, or 

 by an expensive land route, for it could not, except on rare 

 occasions, be conveyed all the way by water. The reader will 

 therefore find great variations in the price of salt, the differ- 

 ences being due, I presume, entirely to the cost of carriage. ' 

 But as the information is very copious, we may, as a rule, be 

 tolerably certain that the average calculated from all the 

 entries represents the charge at which the mass of the com- 

 munity procured this necessary of life. Salt was very cheap, 



