ARTICLES EMPLOYED IN AGRICULTURE. 



The fact that the price of lime was maintained at the rates 

 of the last half of the fourteenth century is an indication of 

 the permanently bettered condition of the labouring classes. 

 We shall indeed see, when we deal with the price of labour, 

 that labourers, notwithstanding the cheapness of food, were in 

 a singularly advantageous position, though the reverse which 

 came upon them in the sixteenth century lowered their con- 

 dition to one of which their forefathers for a long period had 

 no experience. 



IRON AND STEEL. Iron is purchased in two forms, raw and 

 wrought. The information is so considerable that only sixteen 

 years out of the 182 are without entries of one kind or the 

 other. Wrought iron is found under many forms, the product 

 being purchased of the smith or dealer. The old custom of the 

 fourteenth century has not indeed entirely passed away, for 

 purchases of raw material are still made to be fashioned into 

 shape by the craft of the workman, but an increasing number 

 of articles are bought ready made. 



By the beginning of the fifteenth century the hundredweight 

 of 112 lb., originally it seems a tare weight of the London 

 market, has become customary if not universal, though the 

 * piece ' of the older accounts still lingers and is occasionally 

 represented. But the hundredweight or quintal is so general 

 that it may be taken as the basis of both entries and averages. 

 I have therefore reduced all the entries both of raw and 

 wrought iron to this unit, and have thus been able to exhibit 

 the prices of the article in a uniform quantity in all the years 

 in which entries occur. 



Iron is not only of English origin. Much of it comes from 

 Spain ; the first entry in the third volume being a purchase at 

 Stourbridge fair in 1424. Spanish iron is not unknown in the 

 thirteenth century, as I have noted in my first volume, under 

 the year 1294, at Ospring in Kent. But in the fifteenth and six- 

 teenth centuries it is very common. In the fifteenth century it is 

 ordinarily bought by the petra of 14 lb., and for some years into 

 the sixteenth. Finally it is always bought by the cwt. or ton. 



