602 ON THE PRICE OF PAPER, ETC. 



purchased. It is possible that some was employed for ad- 

 dresses. The use of it in early times was for service books, 

 the toughness of the material suggesting the convenience. 

 But there is no reason to believe that it was at all employed 

 for religious or choir purposes after the use of printing became 

 general. 



ROPE, CORDAGE, AND LINE. Rope is constantly purchased 

 during the period before me for church and chapel belfries, 

 and the rise in the cost of the article is a clear indication of 

 the general course which prices took during the seventeenth 

 century. It is ordinarily bought by the pound, but occasion- 

 ally by the stone or hundredweight. I have no doubt, had the 

 Oxford accounts been better preserved, or had been illustrated 

 by fuller details, that the consumption of New and Magdalen 

 Colleges, Oxford, both of which have insulated bell-towers, 

 would have supplied me with annual entries of this article. 

 King's College, Cambridge, was also to have had an insulated 

 bell-tower near the west door of the great chapel, but this part of 

 the design was never carried out, and its purchases are therefore 

 of the rope for the single bell which serves as the summons to 

 the chapel service. Numerous entries of the price of rope also 

 come from Eton and Winchester. On one occasion rope is 

 bought by the yard, and forms part of the carriage harness 1 . 



The price of this, the commonest kind of rope, does not vary 

 much for the first thirty years, and would scarcely have varied 

 at all but for an unusually cheap purchase made by New 

 College in 1586. Still all the change is upwards. But after 

 the first decade of the seventeenth century the price goes up 

 rapidly, though, unlike general experience, the price of the 

 decade 1643-1652 is less than that of the divisions preceding 

 and following it, the price of this article not partaking in the 

 temporary rise which has been so frequently noted. Rope 

 reaches its maximum price in the ninth decade, 1673-1682, 

 though the cost is not much less during the next twenty 



1 If one can infer from this entry, about i\ Ibs. went to the yard. 



