-.-8 ON THE COST OF CARRIAGE. 



price. If so, the accident which disabled Eton from using 

 its customary mode of conveyance quadrupled the price. 



Sometimes the cost of carriage was the expression of a 

 permanent contract. Thus in 1650, and onwards to 1684, 

 New College bargained with two of its Buckinghamshire 

 tenants that they should deliver at the New College stables 

 annually, each of them, four quarters of beans, at the market 

 price, the College allowing the tenant of each estate 4^. a 

 quarter for carriage, and deducting the sum from the fixed 

 rent payable to the corporation. 



Sometimes the conveyance was partly by land and partly 

 by water. In 1681, S. John's College, Cambridge, bought 

 five loads of slate at Collyweston quarries, in Northampton- 

 shire. This place is not far from Ketton, from which stone 

 was brought to London for building purposes. Now the 

 S. John's account states that the slates came to them by 

 land and water. The slate must have been of exceptional 

 quality, for it cost the College, including the carriage, 285-. 

 a load. 



The navigation of the Thames had been improved, or barges 

 could be built which could get over the shallows as time went 

 on. In the fourteenth century Henley appears to have been 

 the furthest point to which it was ordinarily navigable, and 

 apparently from an entry in vol. iii. p. 672, this was the limit 

 as late as 1541. But in course of time the bargemen got as 

 far as Burcot, a hamlet on the Thames about a mile and a- 

 half from Dorchester. The owner of Burcot constructed a pier, 

 from the bank over the stream, and probably to an eyot in the 

 middle of the river, which is here deep. Thence freight was 

 hauled through the grounds near the house to the Abingdon 

 road, from which a short cut was constructed to the main 

 Oxford road through Henley to London, this main road being 

 a very ancient one, as it is visible in Cough's fourteenth- 

 century map of English roads. 



I visited Burcot some weeks ago (1887), and could easily dis- 

 cover where the pier must have been placed, from the ruts, four 



