47 6 ON THE PRICE OF MATERIALS 



1368. The wrought iron at Langley is omitted. It consisted of 

 bars and stanchions for the memorial windows set up in that church 

 to some of Edward the Third's children and relations. The reader 

 will find the names of the persons commemorated in vol. ii. p. 535. 



1377. The entry from Oxford has been taken at half the quoted 

 value. 



1378. A 'barrel' of steel is given from London, it having formed 

 part of the Cherbourg munitions. I have no means for tracing the 

 quantity implied in this amount. It seems, however, if the term used 

 have any intelligible significance, to point to an excessive price. 



1388, 1390, 1396, 1398. These entries are all derived from 

 manufactured articles. 



The inferences to be gathered from the evidence for the last 

 twenty years as to the market value of raw iron are, I confess, 

 somewhat vague and unsatisfactory. To judge, however, (as we 

 shall see below,) from the price at which lath-nails were sold, 

 the estimate given is not, on the whole, in excess of a rational 

 interpretation from the value of manufactured articles. A 

 similar increase will be found in the price of other articles 

 made of iron, as, for instance, horseshoes and nails, clouts and 

 nails, in all which the same remarkable rise is effected, a rise 

 which can be accounted for only by the fact that the workman 

 was able to make such terms with his employer, or rather with 

 his customer, as involved a prodigious increase in the rate at 

 which his labour was remunerated, and secured those material 

 advantages which gave him so considerable a social position 

 in the century following on that with which these volumes 

 conclude. 



The reader will be now enabled to recognize still more fully 

 how the change, to which I have so frequently adverted, came 

 about, the substitution, namely, of farmers' leases for that 

 bailiff cultivation with the capital and for the benefit of the 

 landowner, which prevailed all but universally up to the time 

 of the Plague. 



We have seen that a great rise was effected in the customary 

 wages of the agricultural labourer, and have followed the 

 gradual extinction of labour rents. We have seen how vainly, 



