3(5 HISTORY OF AGRICULTURE 



Average price was 19^. 4^. A good saddle-horse fetched as 

 much as £^. Sheep were from is. 2d. to is. ^d. each. In 

 Hampshire in 1348 shoeing ten farm horses for the plough 

 for a year cost 5^. ; making a gate cost 1 2d. As Walter of 

 Henley said, it cost a penny a week to shoe a horse on all 

 four feet ; these horses must have been very roughly shod.^ 

 It is evident, from what Walter of Henley says, that horses 

 were not always shod on all four feet, and their shoes were 

 generally very light. The roads were mere tracks without any 

 metalling, so that there was little necessity for heavy shoes ; 

 and as Professor Thorold Rogers suggests, it is quite possible 

 that the hoofs of our horses have become weaker by reason of 

 the continual paring and protection which modern shoeing 

 involves ^. They weighed usually less than half a pound, and 

 cost about 4s. a hundred. 



The most striking fact about agricultural prices at this date 

 is the low price of land compared with that of its products. 

 The annual rent of land was from 4^. to 6d.^ an acre, and it 

 was worth about ten years' purchase. Consequently, a quarter 

 of wheat was often worth more than an acre of land, a good 

 ox three times as much, a good cart-horse four times, while 

 a good war-horse was worth the fee-simple of a small farm. 

 A greater breadth of wheat was sown than of any other crop ; 

 but it seems that none was ever stored except in the castles 

 and monasteries, for in spite of successive abundant harvests 

 a bad season would send the price up at once. Barley was, 

 as now, chiefly used for making beer, which was also made 

 from oats and wheat, of course without hops, which were not 

 used till the fifteenth century ; and sometimes it was made of 

 oats, barley, and wheat, a concoction worth |<f. a gallon in 



1 Crondall, Records, Hampshire Record Society, i, 64. 



^ History of Agriculture and Prices, i. 528. 



^ Seebohm, Transactions of Royal Historical Society, New Series, xvii. 

 288, says that rent in the fourteenth century was commonly A,d. ; the usual 

 average is stated at dd, an acre. 



