CHAP. XII. HIGH VALUE OF MONEY. 317 



marcs, or about the weight of seventy-two thou- 

 sand ounces of silver, little more than equivalent 

 in money of this day to 18,000 a . 



It appears by ancient documents in Alsace 

 and in Saxony, if the price of corn be taken as 

 the criterion of the scarcity of money, that the 

 same deficiency was felt in those countries. In 

 Alsace, at the end of the tenth century, the 

 common money for current purposes was the 

 pfennig. It was of copper, and sixty of them 

 weighed exactly one marc or half a pound avoir- 

 dupois, or 120 of them were a pound weight. 

 The price of a sheffel or bushel of wheat, weigh- 

 ing sixty pounds, or the same nearly as our 

 English bushel, was seven of these pfennigs. 

 Copper, probably, bore a higher value in propor- 

 tion to silver than it does in the present day; 

 or the bushel of wheat was sold for less than, a 

 penny farthing 2 . About two hundred and fifty 

 years later, in the same country, the same mea- 

 sure of wheat was sold at twenty-four pfennigs, 

 or about threepence farthing 3 . It appears by 

 the accounts preserved in the cathedral ofStras- 

 burg, that the wages paid to the masons em- 

 ployed in the erection of that edifice was from 

 one and a half to two of these pfennigs. At the 



1 Boulainvilliers, p. 114. 



2 Florencourt uber die Bergwerke der Alten, p. 57- 



3 Annales Colmarienses, 1289, fol. 24. 



