256 ON THE PRICE OF GRAIN. 



them, for certainly the prices of corn in Farnham, Kingston-on- 

 Thames, and Reading are generally high. The last at King's 

 Lynn, from which a considerable foreign trade was carried on, 

 was ioi quarters. But none of these local measures appear 

 in my own accounts, for I have no returns from the district in 

 which they prevailed. 



I see no reason to depart from the conclusion I arrived at 

 when I first began to comment on these researches, that single 

 and small entries are equally valuable with large ones. It 

 is true that the evidence supplied in these volumes, derived 

 mainly from four regularly recurrent sources, differs from the 

 more copious, diversified, and more irregular contributions 

 to the first two periods. But the occasional aid which 

 other entries have supplied me with has been of great value 

 in supplying me at once with additional knowledge, and 

 with corrections. This is particularly the case with those 

 local entries which give the price paid by consumers, in 

 contrast with that furnished by the return of the highest 

 market rate. 



I have drawn the decennial averages of eight kinds of grain 

 and grain products, viz. wheat, barley, malt, oats, oatmeal, 

 beans, peas, and wheat-flour. Though the register is some- 

 what broken, and in one or two places rather seriously in the 

 case of certain decades, I do not doubt that with the ex- 

 ception of barley, for which very scanty evidence is procurable 

 for the last forty years, the decennial average is in the rest of 

 these cases fairly accurate. But it will strike every one who 

 glances at the annual averages, that the hundred years from 

 1603 to 1702 represent a more settled range of prices, than the 

 twenty years which precede them. Two of the earlier years, 

 1596 and 1597, were years of famine, two were years of remark- 

 able plenty, 1587 and 1588, and to these latter there is no 

 subsequent parallel. I therefore infer that the new silver did 

 not induce a final and permanent influence on prices till after 

 the commencement of the third decade, that it had a rapid effect 

 at the beginning of the century, and a slow effect afterwards. 



