EMPLOYED IN AGRICULTURAL ECONOMY. 465 



one of lower prices. Were the twenty years 1331-1350 

 omitted from our calculation, each decade would exhibit very 

 slight variations from the general average. 



Tar was, as I have said, sold by the barrel. It is once 

 (1387) sold by the cade. These barrels are supposed to con- 

 tain fourteen or sixteen gallons. During the whole period 

 there are fifty-six sales of barrels of tar, more than one 

 being sometimes bought at the same place. Hence they 

 may be made to supply decennial averages for eighty years, 

 the price not varying considerably during the last fifty years. 

 The general average derived from these sales will be found 

 to be 4*. 9!^., and taking fifteen gallons to the barrel as 

 the medium between the two quantities quoted in the 

 accounts, it would seem that when tar was sold by the 

 barrel it cost little more than 3!^. a gallon, that is to say, 

 about half the price of the same article when retailed in 

 smaller quantity. 



The price of tar was no doubt seriously affected by carriage. 

 Thus it is much dearer at Wolrichston than it is at Sharpness 

 or Hundon, or Brancaster or Apuldrum, in the year 1369. 

 Hundon is in Suffolk, Brancaster in Norfolk, Sharpness is 

 probably Sheerness, and Apuldrum is in Sussex. But Wol- 

 richston is in Warwickshire, and in order that any foreign 

 produce imported from North-eastern Europe should reach it, it 

 must either have been carried as far up the Thames as the 

 navigation of the river allowed, or be transferred by land- 

 carriage from the nearest Norfolk port, or perhaps for some 

 way up the Ouse. So cumbrous and awkward a thing as a 

 barrel of tar would doubtless be conveyed at greater cost than 

 articles which are more easily packed, and though, as has been 

 stated above, land-carriage was far from expensive, it might 

 add, in the course of so long a journey, as much as zs. to the 

 barrel. So in a similar but less degree we can explain the 

 price at which this article stood at Apuldrum. In short, it 

 would seem, on a careful survey of the price of tar, that the 

 cheapest market for this produce was the sea-coast towns of 



Hh 



