636 ON THE PRICE OF FOREIGN PRODUCE. 



from Normandy, but much was of home manufacture. Nails 

 were manufactured against a probable demand for them by 

 every smith in every village, but they were also introduced 

 from the Low Countries. 



Wine was not exclusively the produce of foreign countries. 

 There is reason to believe that the Otterton entries are of 

 a vintage in the locality. It will be seen, Vol. Ill, p. 509, ii, 

 that red wine grown at Windsor was produced in quantity 

 sufficient for a sale, though the price, zos. the tun, does not 

 say much for its quality. The reader may find evidence of 

 the growth of vines, of course in the open air, at Windsor, 

 Cambridge, and Oxford. In a rental of the curtilage of 

 Barking Nunnery, 1546, Vol. Ill, p. 683, i, a five-acre piece, 

 empaled with elms, and well stored with conies, called the 

 vineyard, is let at 4^. the acre. These instances are casual, 

 arising from notes made in my search after prices, and might 

 have been multiplied. It appears, too, that the vines were 

 trained on spars in the French fashion, these spars being called 

 broches, literally spits, and paxills, except at Barking. 



The wine most commonly consumed, and the cheapest 

 perhaps in some degree because most regularly in demand is 

 that of Western France and, as the herald referred to in the note 

 states, that which was exported from Rochelle and Bordeaux. 

 It was of two sorts, white and red. It is commonly called, 

 when specially named, Gascony, less frequently claret, the 

 latter name apparently implying a quality, though it does not 

 seem that it fetches a higher price under this name than it does 

 when not specially designated. It is bought by the tun of 

 252 gallons, the pipe of 126, and the hogshead 1 of 63 gallons. 

 The price of wine in bulk is, however, so much lower than that 

 of the same article purchased retail of the local vintner, that it 

 would have been misleading to have reduced the quantity of 

 the tun to the hypothetical measure of a dozen gallons which 



1 I have sometimes seen in fifteenth-century accounts, which have been engrossed 

 with peculiar care, an elaborate drawing of a boar's head at the commencement of the 

 account of wine purchases. 



