

CHAPTER VIII. 



ON THE PRICE OF GRAIN. 



DURING the period comprised in these volumes, the price of 

 wheat is continuous and unbroken. There are slight breaks 

 in the price of barley, malt, and oats. Drageum, which appears 



o be the same as bigg or bere, occurs pretty regularly for the 

 first forty years and then almost disappears. The record of 

 the price of rye is very interrupted, and its use appears to be 



ecreasingly frequent in England. During the greater part of 

 e fifteenth, and for nearly the whole of the first half of the 

 sixteenth century, the price of wheat in England was so 

 continuously low, that its acquisition was within the reach of 

 the ordinary unskilled labourer, whose wages were about four- 

 pence a day, or two shillings a week. Three weeks' labour 

 could obtain him a quarter of wheat, on an average of the 

 price of wheat between 1401 and 1541. There was no neces- 

 sity for him to have recourse to a quarter of that grain, the 

 acquisition of which would have cost him about a fortnight's 

 labour. We must, I believe, ascribe to the same cause the 

 fact that the cultivation of bigg or drage is abandoned. Barley 

 was even cheaper proportionately than wheat, and there was 

 no need that the peasant should drink an inferior beer. The 

 occasional use of wheat and oat malt must be, I suspect, re- 

 ferred to the fact that curious malt liquors were in use even to 

 so late a period as to come into the excise acts. Mum is said 

 to contain malted beans, and I have found malted beans in the 

 accounts. 



