780 ON PRICES GENERALLY BETWEEN 1583 AND 1703. 



prices between countries which have commercial relations, is 

 effected almost automatically and imperceptibly. I am of course 

 referring here wholly to the metallic currency which circulates 

 among the inhabitants of a country, not to those metallic re- 

 serves which are made subject to currency movements, and 

 have occasionally been called international money, or, as 

 Adam Smith calls it, ' the money of the great mercantile re- 

 public 1 .' This money, which in modern times has become, 

 if I may use the expression, so fluid and mobile that it is 

 affected by impulses, which are often sudden and entirely 

 unforeseen, is distributed by different causes from those which 

 affect the money which is in circulation in any one country. 



Now I have stated in volumes which have been already pub- 

 lished, that as far as the evidence goes which has come before 

 me, there was no change in real prices, that is the proportion 

 which prices of commodities bore to given weights of coin 

 during the greater part, perhaps during the whole, of the six- 

 teenth century. It is true that, from 1541 onwards, we are 

 met with a marked exaltation in prices ; but, as I pointed out 

 before, this rise is almost in exact correspondence with the ag- 

 gregate debasement of the coin (the crime which Henry VIII 

 and the guardians of his son Edward VI perpetrated) as com- 

 pared with sterling, and again is in equally close relation with 

 the payment of silver before Elizabeth's reformation by weight, 

 and the payment after that reformation by tale. I am more 

 than ever convinced by fresh evidence, collected after I pub- 

 lished my fourth volume, that payments were made by weight 

 up to and during the debasement, and that this is the true 

 explanation of that singular uniformity of prices which 

 characterises the economical history of England between 1259 

 and 1540. The fact that 5^. iof< was the average price of 

 wheat for the first 140 years, and $s. ill*/, for the next 140 

 years (1261-1400; 1401-1540), is to my mind entirely inex- 

 plicable on any other hypothesis. 



It is difficult, perhaps impossible, to determine whether the 

 1 Wealth of Nations, book iv. chap. i. 



