ON CANDLES, TALLOW, AND FUEL. 393 



accounts of the several corporations, that most of them, when 

 they could do so, kept in their own hands and cut down for 

 their own consumption, brushwood, coppices, and even larger 

 timber for their own needs. Thus Oriel College in Oxford 

 regularly supplied itself from Stow-wood, between two and 

 three miles distant from the city. The sale of wood is a very 

 important item in the profits of an estate ; and the writers on 

 husbandry in the seventeenth century dwell on the importance 

 of planting and preserving coppice wood, and urge that it 

 should be cut only once in twenty years at soonest, pointing 

 out how much an additional two or three years increases its 

 market value. 



Wood is generally bought by the load. It greatly varies in 

 price, but manifestly rises through the seventeenth century. In 

 some corporations, as at All Souls College, it is the principal 

 fuel consumed, though here I cannot but infer that it is bought 

 to supplement home stores. But even with all allowance made 

 the annual entries exhibit great fluctuations, and some of these 

 are all but inexplicable. Thus, for example, I cannot explain 

 a load of wood which is inserted in the focalia account of 

 King's College in 1628 at 33^., a price beyond parallel. This 

 society does not often buy firewood. Towards the end of the 

 period the price of firewood at Oxford is steady at 2os. the 

 load, the purchaser being generally Magdalen College. 



If the price of firewood is of difficult interpretation, that of 

 ^ggots is more SCK In some places and in the same years the 

 price by the hundred is as high as that of others by the 

 thousand. Faggots were no doubt of very different quality 

 and size, as indeed is sometimes hinted, when one reads of 

 faggots of the double band. I have however ventured on 

 giving a list, though I do not think it would be to the purpose 

 to draw a general or decennial average from them. There are 

 also a few entries of billets by the thousand. For the table, 

 the prices marked with the double asterisk are those of 

 Winchester by the thousand. 



This corporation also buys tall wood by the thousand, the 



