786 ON PRICES GENERALLY BETWEEN 1583 AND 1702. 



landlord, is corrected by its desire for low prices as a con- 

 sumer. Nor will these prices be found, on an examination of 

 the payments made by S. John's and Eton Colleges which I 

 have printed in this volume, to differ very markedly from those 

 on which part of the money rent depended. 



For the rest, I am as before convinced that my averages 

 could not be appreciably altered if a quantity of evidence, 

 equal in amount to that which I have put before my reader 

 in the sixth volume, were discovered. I have had proof of 

 this. Since I had collected and drawn out the averages of 

 several articles, as iron, lead, solder and glass, I found an 

 unsuspected set of facts in certain Bodleian manuscripts. 

 Some of these results have been incorporated with the labour 

 prices in the sixth volume. The rest are in the Addenda. 

 I have been generally able to incorporate most of these new 

 facts with the average tables, annual, decennial, and general, 

 of this fifth volume ; and in any case, the additions, chiefly 

 from London, where materials were cheap, have hardly made 

 my averages vary by more than a slight and unimportant 

 fraction. In point of fact, prices in the seventeenth century, 

 even those submitted to by the consumer, were as competitive 

 as wholesale prices are said to be now. I need hardly say, 

 too, that the price at which an article reached the consumer is 

 far more interesting to the student of social and political 

 economy than the speculative price of a purchaser is, who 

 intends to traffic in the article which he has bought, but 

 whose expectations may not be verified by the consumer's 

 payments. 



I shall now proceed to exhibit, by way of comparison, the 

 averages which I have drawn at first in two portions, the first 

 sixty and the last sixty years, in order to enable the reader 

 to contrast most conveniently the price of the necessaries of 

 life, the price of those products which owe most of their value 

 to labour and were not appreciably affected by rent, and the 

 price at which the labour which produced and depended on 

 the first and was immediately connected with the second was 



