

WINE. 645 



the Emperor Paul, for political reasons of his own, to destroy 

 their export trade to England. Nor is there any doubt that 

 Charles VII or Louis XI would have had recourse to the 

 stringent navigation law which the French herald suggests, 

 had they thought that the restraint on the export trade would 

 have been endured till such times as, if at all, the mercantile 

 marine of France had grown under the protection which the 

 proposal would have accorded to it. It is therefore probable, 

 as the author allows, that the carrying trade of the narrow 

 seas was in English hands, that it was so permanent as to 

 make the risks of effectual rivalry remote, and so beneficial 

 to French producers and foreign consumers as to make the 

 charges of monopoly and piracy unreal and calumnious. 



I do not, therefore, on the whole, discern that political events 

 caused any material change in the value of wine during the 

 whole of the fifteenth century, and the first twenty years of the 

 sixteenth ; but I conclude that such variations in value as can 

 be detected, from the evidence supplied by the accounts, are 

 to be assigned to the merely local causes of copious or scanty 

 vintages. In the next twenty years there does occur a general 

 and simultaneous exaltation in the price of nearly all foreign 

 products, though, as I shall have hereafter to point out, with 

 a few remarkable exceptions, or with exceptions which at least 

 require some explanation. Then follows a decade of com- 

 paratively low prices, to be followed by a full and permanent 

 rise in money values. Bordeaux wine, which was worth on an 

 average Sd. per gallon up to 1520, rises to is. a gallon in the 

 last twelve years of the enquiry. 



It will be seen that the average price in the first and dearest 

 of these ten decades is us. qld., seven years of the ten only 

 being represented in the tables. Of these, 1522 and 1525 are 

 plainly dear years ; the average for the dozen in the former 

 being 14^-. 2d., in the latter 14^-. They are not dear corn 

 years, for wheat is at 6s. o\d, and 5.9. $d. in these years ; the 

 only dear year immediately near them being 1527, when wheat 

 was i2s. yd. But this year is not represented by retail pur- 



