1 92 CURRENCY. 



people who live by any kind of wages, and not by rents of 

 lands or trade of merchandize. But, as has been stated 

 frequently before, the rents paid by contract for the use of land 

 could not be raised directly without great difficulty, but only 

 indirectly by taking fines on the renewal of leases, or, as 

 happened frequently in the Eastern counties, by insisting on 

 the payment of corn rents at a fixed price. But in the great 

 majority of cases the payments made to the lords were fee 

 farm rents, were fixed and invariable, frequently purchased 

 at the time, and made the basis of permanent endowments. 

 That the labourers, and those who lived on small fixed incomes 

 paid in base money, were worse off than employers and traders 

 is certain, but it does not seem clear that the landowners who 

 were in the receipt of fee farm rents were not ill off as well, 

 or how one can distinguish this part of their income from that 

 of a pensioner, that is, such persons as were still receiving 

 their commutation for the surrender of their interests in the 

 monasteries, or those who in the new foundations were in the 

 receipt of fixed stipends as academical officers or as eccle- 

 siastical dignitaries. 



4. That the new money was speedily adopted as a currency 

 by tale is quite certain, whatever may be said of the old. That 

 the issue of the reformed currency was followed by an immediate 

 and permanent exaltation in prices, amounting generally to one 

 and a half times more than the amount at which money values 

 ordinarily stood before, will I believe be made overwhelmingly 

 evident in the particular facts which will be laid before my 

 _ readers. But there is a remarkable document 1 which I have 

 printed at length, in the third vol. p. 742. It is, it will be seen, 

 a project of fixing the current value of the new and good 

 money at fifty per cent, above its declared value, i.e., as it is 

 expressly stated, at the amount at which the several prices 

 stood from the 6th year of Edward the Fourth to the 



1 This proclamation is in MS. and does not appear ever to have been issued. 

 Ruding saw a copy, also in MS., in the papers of the Antiquarian Society. My refer- 

 ence is to the Cecil collection in Bodley. 



