WOOL, HIDES, AND BARK. 407 



and after shearing time, supplied the fells which under the 

 names given above were disposed of to the dealers. 



Eton College continued the custom till the beginning of 

 the seventeenth century, when it begins to buy mutton di- 

 rect from the dealers, and the record is lost. It continues 

 to buy oxen till the commencement of the civil war, and 

 when its accounts after a short interval recommence, it 

 abandons the buying of oxen by the head, and purchases 

 beef. But the purchases of sheep by Magdalen College, Ox- 

 ford, on the same system, were continued to a much later period 

 than those of Eton, and I had hoped, especially as the bursar's 

 account of expenditure constantly notes the charge for clip- 

 ping and winding (involvcre) the wool supplied with their pur- 

 chases, that the Great Indenture, in which the receipts of this 

 corporation are given, would supply me with this much wanted 

 evidence. But this series of indentures is missing, or has not yet 

 been discovered. Had it come to light, I should have been, I 

 doubt not, supplied with evidence for forty years longer, and 

 with evidence of such qualities, the sheep being supplied from 

 very various districts, as would have given as fair an average 

 of the prices generally obtained as the Eton entries do. 



Nor is any trustworthy information supplied by Smith's 

 Memoirs of Wool, a work which is often referred to as an 

 authority on this article. All it says of the seventeenth cen- 

 tury is that there were fluctuations in the price of the article, 

 but it does not suggest that there was any increase in the 

 price, such as at all indicates that wool was affected by those 

 causes which raised prices generally through the seventeenth 

 century, or the facts which I shall have to comment on 

 hereafter. I am indeed disposed to infer that on the whole 

 the price of wool was almost stationary in England during the 

 seventeenth century, and indeed for some time afterwards; 

 that it was at from yd. to is. the pound according to quality 

 and demand, and that there was a tendency rather towards 

 lessening prices. The register of the wool prices which 

 Houghton gives for the last twelve years of the period before 



