AVERAGES OF PRICES. 



completion of one harvest to a similar event in the next year. 

 In consequence, every set of facts for each year, especially when 

 the entries are dated, throws some light on the facts of the 

 year following, and would allow one to infer with some exact- 

 ness, even if no information were forthcoming. Thus, for 

 example, the facts collected for 1546-7 are very scanty, being 

 nothing for wheat beyond the wardrobe account, and one entry 

 afterwards discovered in a Memoranda roll of the Record 

 Office, from St. Ives in Cornwall. But the Cambridge account 

 of 1545-6 is dated, and gives evidence of a declining market 

 in September. 



The corn accounts have moreover, scanty as they sometimes 

 are, this advantage over the farmer's accounts of the earlier 

 period. The farmer sold his corn in the immediate vicinity, 

 the market town, or by private contract at home. The 

 opulent corporations, whose records, at least for the later period 

 of my enquiry, have supplied nearly all my information, went 

 to considerable distances for their purchases. The monasteries 

 of Finchale, Wearmouth, and Durham bought their wheat and 

 malt at remote markets, and had their purchases conveyed by 

 water-carriage along the coast. The Cambridge Colleges go 

 as far as Hampshire to buy one kind of produce, to London to 

 procure other provisions. Economy in expenditure, even for 

 the necessaries of life, was a matter of profound, even of vital 

 interest to those who lived numerously on an academical or 

 monastic foundation, and soon learnt that any notable increase 

 in the price of necessaries involved a serious curtailment of 

 familiar comforts. The fact is curiously illustrated by the 

 common practice adopted by the Cambridge Colleges of re- 

 serving part of their rents in corn at nominal prices, a practice 

 which was very prudent on their part, though it has seriously 

 perplexed, sometimes wholly baffled the enquirer who is trying 

 to discover what was the market price of the year. But where 

 the facts are found, they are not only immediately instructive, 

 but to a greater extent than in the farmer's accounts, exhaustive 

 of prices over a fairly large area, as well as in the proximate 



