AGRICULTURAL IMPLEMENTS AND TOOLS. 437 



again multiply by three, it would add 1 i6s. $d. to the 

 ordinary charge of carriage in the third quarter of the six- 

 teenth century. But even this will bring the cost of con- 

 veying and preparing the five Oxford stones of 1567-81 

 up to ^8 os. 9f< It is plain that the increase in the charge 

 does not depend on any increase in the cost of the stones 

 themselves. 



The table of the price of millstones given at the end of this 

 chapter, in which the highest price only is taken, and some 

 which are plainly only of English or of local origin are omitted 

 from the years in which they occur, though very deficient as 

 compared with that in my first volume, again illustrates the 

 rise which is so significant in the present period. I am pain- 

 fully alive to the fact, that in the task which I have imposed 

 for so many years on myself, of searching into and interpreting 

 prices, the ground, in many details, becomes more unsteady 

 as I near modern times. Every transaction in the earlier 

 times was a bargain, keenly debated, and cautiously settled. 

 Buyers discussed the price, refused it or gave it. There was no 

 fashion in buying, no speculation in selling. The prices of 

 corn, if I have collected them sufficiently, are a register of the 

 seasons more precise in the information which they convey, in 

 a concrete form, than, it is to be feared, the mass of recorded 

 observations as to direct solar heat, rainfall and temperature 

 are now, even when the sharpest wits set themselves to the 

 interpretation of meteorological statistics. There is no set of 

 facts which teaches one so much as the register of prices which 

 it has been my business to collect and order. Dry as they 

 seem, they yield, when put to the test, that life of the ages which 

 is most of all forgotten, as they are examined with the view of 

 discovering what the mass of English people were, and how 

 they laboured and lived. Time does not change the great men 

 of our race ; perhaps they keep us in all the better parts of our 

 being from needless or mischievous change ; but as the whole 

 people has inherited the doing and the being of its ancestry, 

 it is of infinite interest to those who know what our people 



