WINE. 639 



is Spanish, for, in 1462, Gascony wine is bought for the manor 

 of Stoke at $ the tun, Spanish at 5 6s. 8^., a difference 

 too slight to imply any material and permanent variation in 

 value. 



Besides the ordinary measures of claret, the tun, its half and 

 quarter, and sometimes the tierce, which appears to be the 

 third of a pipe, as in the year 1498, red wine is measured by 

 the sextary, especially in the royal accounts. The sextary is 

 a portion of from five to six gallons, as I have discovered by 

 making a careful examination of all those Wardrobe entries, 

 which, for reasons given above, I have excluded during the 

 later part of the period from my register of prices. It was not 

 a measure, but an allowance, served to a mess at dinner, or for 

 the daily meal. My reader may find an instance under the 

 charges incurred in 1495, and again in 1432-3, where twenty- 

 one sextaries of Rhenish are valued at 4^. each. But the sex- 

 tary of Oxford, 1556, must have been a much smaller quantity. 

 At Cambridge again, in 1557 and 1576, the doleum cannot 

 possibly be a tun, and is most probably, as I have treated it, 

 a hogshead. About this time, as I have shown in my chapter 

 on Sundry Articles, King's College used doleum indifferently 

 for all sorts of liquid measures in bulk. 



The sweeter and more expensive wines are first found in 

 bulk at Winterton in 1433. This estate belonged to Fastolfe. 

 But the barrels of Muscadel, Romaney, and Malmsey, must have 

 been small, being only i6s. 8d. each, and on no interpretation 

 of prices can they have been butts of this wine. They may have 

 been such small vessels as the rundlet or the tierce of 1566, 

 the price of an analogous article in the latter years correspond- 

 ing pretty fairly, the change in money values being taken into 

 account, with that of the entry 133 years before. It may be 

 observed that wine is always dearer in the eastern counties 

 than it is elsewhere. The reason is probably to be found in 

 the long sea voyage from the French or Spanish coasts to the 

 Norfolk ports. Wine, on the other hand, is cheap in the south 

 of England. 



