THE PRICE OF LIVE STOCK. 339 



purchased. This of course arises from the fact that they were 

 fattened in coops. 



Green geese were bought in summer, sometimes expressly 

 called goslings, sometimes plainly of such a character, and 

 then either turned into stubble or fattened in coops on oats. 

 The rise in price consequent on such management is fairly 

 denoted in the general average, though evidence as to the 

 price of goslings is very broken and imperfect. The Elham 

 bailiff" seems to have regularly purchased goslings in order 

 to fatten them for the market. Ducks do not vary to any 

 notable extent from the price which we should expect as 

 proportionate to that of other poultry. 



Barn-door fowls, pullets, cocks, and hens, are on the whole 

 very cheap. Hens were slightly dearer than cocks, though 

 the difference is so inconsiderable as hardly to be capable of 

 representation in a general average. Nor is the price of 

 pigeons at all high h . 



It will be seen on inspecting these tables of the price of 

 poultry, that the same rise and fall characterize these kinds 

 of stock, or produce, as have been seen to affect cattle, horses, 

 sheep, and pigs. They are markedly dearer in the twenty 

 years 1311-1330, and dearest of all in the ten years between 

 1361 and 1370. It cannot be but that the great mortality 

 which affected mankind in the famine and the Plague was 

 accompanied by simultaneous murrains in cattle, sheep, pigs, 

 and domestic poultry, and that though the loss was not felt 

 so severely at the time of the first Plague, because the waste 

 of human life seriously checked the demand for farm produce, 

 the devastation must have been considerable during the later 

 visitations of that great pestilence, the ravages of which must 



h It may be mentioned that poultry-rents were all but universal. In fact, the habit of 

 the poorer classes in medieval England was very much the same as that which prevails in 

 France at present ; from which country, as is known, the greater part of the eggs come 

 which are consumed in England. We lament over the destruction of small birds, and 

 predict the ravages of insects, forgetting that one barn-door fowl destroys more insects 

 in a year than forty sparrows could ; is worth something besides, which a sparrow is not ; 

 and that the maintenance of insect-eating birds on a farm is as important a part of agri- 

 cultural economy as any other. 



z. a 



