The Disposal, of Farm Produce. 229 



1248, it was as low as 2.s\ per quarter, but in 1270 it reached 

 the prohibitive price of £4 16s., and from 1315 for several years 

 it rose again up to famine prices.^ Beef and mutton were 

 absurdly cheap, averaging about one farthing per pound. ^ 

 Such high prices for cereals and such low ones for butcher's 

 meat would seem to betray the small progress even then made 

 from a pastoral to a more advanced stage of land cultivation. 

 But if we look closer we shall see that, unless the year's yield 

 was exceptionally bountiful, there would be very little occasion 

 to go from home to get rid of every bushel of corn grown. 

 Wheat formed the bread of the upper classes, but corn in some 

 shape was the staple food of the lower orders. They ate it as 

 maslin (a mixture of rye and wheat), and they drank it as beer 

 (made sometimes of an inferior barley called drageum, some- 

 times of sprig). Oats were the food both of the stables and 

 the dwelling, and pulse crops were principally grown for 

 swine feed. 



Professor Rogers has, in guarded terms, made a rough esti- 

 mate of the population, wheat-growing area, and wheat con- 

 sumption of the fourteenth century. He considers that the 

 total average of soil under the plough was not less than it is 

 now ; that the yield per acre was about four times the seed 

 sown ; and that the grain required for each unit of the popu- 

 lation was one quarter per annum. Taking into consideration 

 that the total arable area in Angevin days included bare fallows 

 and other corn crops, he deducts one-fifth from the wheat- 

 yielding area of the present day, and leaves his readers to work 

 out the sum.^ To set about the task, we must examine the 

 figures of modern statisticians, and shall find that the wheat- 

 yielding area of England and Wales, when Rogers wrote his 

 History, was about 3 J million acres. This area, under a system 

 of wheat cultivation in Angevin days, would yield, according 

 to Rogers, four times its seed ; and since Walter of Henley 

 recommends two bushels at least to the acre, we might conclude 

 that the Professor estimates the thirteenth-century crop at 



' Adam Smitli, Wealth of Nations, Prices of Wheat. 



2 Eogers, Prices and Agr^iculture, vol. i., page 57. 



3 Id., Ibid., Bk. I., page 56. 



