ON THE PRICE OF HOPS. 29 1 



sixteenth century, ale, the old name for malt liquor, came to 

 mean a brewing without hops ; beer, that which was flavoured 

 with the plant. 



The Winchester entries, which, owing to the unhappy 

 loss of this corporation's accounts, do not commence till 1644, 

 call hops lupi salicti. I was a good deal puzzled with this 

 name, but soon found out what it must mean, and I discovered 

 that it was the word used for this plant, or supposed to be 

 used for it, by Pliny, who describes the young shoots of the 

 plant as a pot-herb (Nat. Hist. xxi. 50). 



The price of Flemish hops is sometimes so much lower than 

 that of English, that in order to avoid giving a false impression 

 as to the market value of the produce, I have been constrained 

 to omit them from my yearly averages, when they have been 

 named. But it is very possible that some of the Cambridge 

 entries are of Flemish hops not designated. It is clear from 

 the Gawthorp purchases that Stourbridge fair was a great 

 mart for this produce. The only hint one can get as to the 

 place where the hops were bought, when the origin is not 

 designated, is from the time at which the purchase was effected, 

 for Stourbridge fair was held in the early part of September, 

 and therefore comes into the agricultural year, which bears 

 the date of the year before that of the actual crop. 



There is no relation whatever between the price of grain 

 and the price of hops, beyond this, that when hops as a rule 

 are dearest, wheat as a rule is cheapest. But one can draw 

 no inference from this, for in some few years hops and wheat 

 are both dear, and so one is debarred from concluding that in 

 straitened times there was parsimony in the consumption. The 

 only relation which one can detect is a monetary one ; that, 

 on an average, half a hundred-weight of hops cost for the 

 period contained in these volumes rather more than a quarter 

 of wheat 



The highest prices of hops are in the ten years at the con- 

 clusion of the period. They are higher in my accounts than 

 in those of Houghton, but not markedly so, for the average of 



U a 



