The Disposal of Farm Produce. 233 



worked up into cloth of gold for kingly robes/ that of Berks, 

 Oxford, Kent, Salop, Hereford, "Worcester, Somerset, Dorset, 

 Essex, Cambridge, Norfolk, Suffolk, Surrey, and Sussex was 

 also prized. All sorts of scbemes were invented to get hold of 

 the wool at low prices, and, as is usual regarding information 

 pertaining to this age, our sole source is the laws which put 

 an end to such attempts. It was bought at so much per sheep 

 before shearing, and it was shipped abroad sheep and all. No 

 wonder that the farmer was already acquainted with the 

 efficacy of arsenical washes, mercurial ointments, sulphate of 

 iron, and the like, whenever scab or rot threatened to ravage 

 his valued flocks. Coarse and hairy though the wool was, it 

 was worth a vast deal more in proportion during the fourteenth 

 century than the silkiest Leicester fleece is to-day. 



We must now devote a short space to those centres of 

 internal trade, the mediaeval towns. At the time of the 

 Conquest some eighty overgrown villages were all that can 

 be dignified with this appellation. Out of a total population 

 of a million and a half, there were perhaps 150,000 townsmen. 

 By the middle of the tliirteenth century, the population of the 

 whole country had increased by about a million; and Professor 

 Rogers,^ estimating the population of each town from the poll- 

 tax statistics in 1377, has proportioned the urban to the rural 

 inhabitants of England as 1 to 12-31. By the same process, 

 London would then have contained 35,000 souls, York 11,000, 

 Bristol 9,500, Coventry 7,000, Norwich 6,000, and Lincoln 

 5,000. 



Any close description of mediaeval town life would be out of 

 place in a history which professes to confine itself to the dis- 

 cussion of a rural economy only; but the urban market at any 

 rate comes within our scope, since it was generally subject to 

 seignorial jurisdiction. Those townsmen who individually or 

 corporately held lands of lords, came, as we have already 



^ In 1438 a licence was granted to a Portuguese agent in England to 

 export 60 sacks of Cotswold wool for cloths of silver and gold for the 

 use of the Portuguese king. Craig and McFarlane, Rist. of Enyl., Bk. 

 v., ch. iv. 



^ Six Centuries of Work and Wages^ pp. 117, 120. 



