312 AVERAGES OF PRICES. 



other provisions in the proximity of London, where prices were 

 always higher than in those rural districts. It is important 

 also to observe that, as the prices of corn are high near London, 

 so they are low in the Eastern counties. This is especially 

 the case with barley and malt, the production and export of 

 which was carried out on a very large scale in Norfolk and 

 Suffolk. Cambridge, from which much information of the 

 most valuable kind has been derived, has the advantage of 

 nearness to these counties, and shares in the cheapness which 

 such a proximity afforded. 



I. The aggregate amount of information as to corn prices is 

 far less than that which I was able to procure for the earlier 

 period comprised in my first two volumes, though I am dealing 

 here with forty years more than I handled before. Less how- 

 ever as the amount is, it has been collected with infinitely 

 more labour. To gather the facts of the first two volumes, 

 I estimated that some eight thousand documents were con- 

 sulted. The contents of the present volumes have necessitated 

 a search into ten times that number,'the vast majority of which 

 have been almost barren of information, or have supplied very 

 scanty results. I despaired of discovering a series of corn 

 prices till I found out the Cambridge documents in King's 

 Hall, King's College, Peterhouse and Pembroke Colleges. Even 

 here however there are breaks, and sometimes there was no 

 little difficulty in identifying the year in which the account 

 was compiled. Patience and a careful examination and esti- 

 mate of internal evidence have at last enabled me to fix the 

 dates of all which have been employed in the third volume, 

 though I have had, to my vexation, to reject not a few accounts, 

 whose exact chronological position, essential in an estimate 

 of corn prices, I was finally unable to determine. 



Though there are years in which my information is vague, 

 yet such information as I have is genuine, and is not in- 

 frequently assisted by the circumstance that, with one excep- 

 tion, all the accounts which have contributed corn prices date 

 from Michaelmas to Michaelmas, i.e. from a little after the 



