AVERAGES OF PRICES. 215 



found not only to illustrate with sufficient fulness the history of 

 prices in these directions, but to show the extent to which the 

 exaltation of prices during the latter half of the sixteenth 

 century affected these commodities. Nor shall I be able to 

 give as much information as before on the price of such articles 

 as constituted the economy of the farm. I have been, from the 

 scantiness of my facts, compelled to omit several tables in these 

 volumes, which were prominent in the other volumes, and 

 group all which I have collected under the miscellaneous head 

 of sundry articles. 



I regret nothing so much as the poverty of my information 

 about wool. My facts were very copious for the first volumes, 

 are meagre and broken now. But as I have elsewhere ob- 

 served, wool was the principal and most important produce of 

 medieval England; was for more than two centuries an un- 

 failing financial expedient, taxes on which were levied on 

 exporters, but paid by foreigners ; and was even a diplomatic 

 implement of the most potent kind. But I have found little 

 information as to wool sales after the middle of the fifteenth 

 century, though enough to follow the great rise in its value. 

 Even when I have been able to investigate the accounts of a 

 great sheep farm, as for example that of Coleshull, it is very 

 rarely that the account gives a price of wool. The owner sells 

 it himself in person to the wool-stapler. We find him often to 

 be a Lombard or Flemish merchant, and the transaction does 

 not appear on the bailiff's roll. My reader will, however, find 

 in vol. iii, p. 704, a singular account of the various qualities of 

 English wool, and a confirmation of the surmise which I ex- 

 pressed in vol. i, p. 182, that the evidence of prices, when that 

 evidence was fuller, implied that there must have been different 

 breeds of sheep and different qualities of produce in different 

 districts of England. It will be found by the extract from the 

 Rolls of Parliament that the best English wool was five times 

 dearer than the worst or cheapest produce. It is something 

 to know that even the most copious information conceivable 

 would still, unless one were informed as to the locality, and 



