CHAPTER XV. 



ON THE PRICE OF BUILDING MATERIALS, ETC. 



Information as to the price of building materials is exceed- 

 ingly copious during the period comprised in these volumes. 

 The records of colleges and monasteries, and even those of 

 private persons, though they may give scanty and interrupted 

 records of provisions, and but little evidence as to agricultural 

 operations, are full of notes as to the price of all building mate- 

 rials, and of the labour engaged in building operations. Besides 

 these private accounts, there still exist copious and exact 

 accounts of the building and repair of the numerous palaces, 

 in the maintenance of which Henry the Eighth's extravagance 

 was splendid and ruinous. The custom of the time put every 

 repair on the landowner, even when his property consisted of 

 houses in towns, and in many cases the bills tendered by arti- 

 sans, and drawn up by them, are carefully checked and docketed 

 in the collected account of each year. 



The great wealth and unbroken national prosperity of the 

 fifteenth century, disfigured as it was by the ferocious quar- 

 rels of the aristocracy, and the revolutions which changed the 

 succession, was exhibited in a few luxuries, among which a 

 new kind of domestic architecture was most general. The 

 nobility and wealthy gentry began to build houses in which 

 greater attention was paid to comfort and convenience than 

 was supplied in those edifices whose principal purpose was 

 defence. When trade prospered, or manufactures were general, 

 the solid and substantial church of the fifteenth century, with 

 its horizontal lines, lofty elevations, and elaborate tracery, was 

 raised in the place of the lighter, more elegant, but less 



VOL. IV. F f 



