[] These will chiefly be found in Sir F. Eden's table of prices; the following may be added from the account-book of a convent between 1415 and 1425. Wheat varied from 4s. to 6s.—barley from 3s. 2d. to 4s. 10d.—oats from 1s. 8d. to 2s. 4d.—oxen from 12s. to 16s.—sheep from 1s. 2d. to 1s. 4d.—butter 3/4d. per lb.—eggs twenty-five for 1d.—cheese 1/2d. per lb. Lansdowne MSS., vol. i. No. 28 and 29. These prices do not always agree with those given in other documents of equal authority in the same period; but the value of provisions varied in different counties, and still more so in different seasons of the year.

[x] I insert the following comparative table of English money from Sir Frederick Eden. The unit, or present value, refers of course to that of the shilling before the last coinage, which reduced it.

Value of pound sterling,
present money.		Proportion.
£. s. d.
Conquest,10662 18 1½2·906
28 E. I.13002 17 52·871
18 E. III.13442 12 5¼2·622
20 E. III.13462 11 82·583
27 E. III.13532 6 62·325
13 H. IV.14121 18 91·937
4 E. IV.14641 11 00 1·55
18 H. VIII.15271 7 6¾1·378
34 H. VIII.15431 3 3¼1·163
36 H. VIII.15450 13 11½0·698
37 H. VIII.15460 9 3¾0·466
5 E. VI.15510 4 7¾0·232
6 E. VI.15521 0 6¾1·028
1 Mary15531 0 5¾1·024
2 Eliz.15601 0 81·033
43 Eliz.16011 0 01·000

[y] Macpherson's Annals, p. 424, from Matt. Paris.

[z] Difference of Limited and Absolute Monarchy, p. 133.

[a] Hist. of Hawsted, p. 141.

[] Nicholls's Illustrations, p. 2. One fact of this class did, I own, stagger me. The great earl of Warwick writes to a private gentleman, Sir Thomas Tudenham, begging the loan of ten or twenty pounds to make up a sum he had to pay. Paston Letters, vol. i. p. 84. What way shall we make this commensurate to the present value of money? But an ingenious friend suggested, what I do not question is the case, that this was one of many letters addressed to the adherents of Warwick, in order to raise by their contributions a considerable sum. It is curious, in this light, as an illustration of manners.

[c] Paston Letters, vol. i. p. 224; Cullum's Hawsted, p. 182.

[d] Hist. of Hawsted, p. 228.

[e] Mr Malthus observes on this that I "have overlooked the distinction between the reigns of Edw. III. and Henry VIII. (perhaps a misprint for VI.), with regard to the state of the labouring classes. The two periods appear to have been essentially different in this respect." Principles of Political Economy, p. 293, 1st edit. He conceives that the earnings of the labourer in corn were unusually low in the latter years of Edward III., which appears to have been effected by the statute of labourers (25 E. III.), immediately after the great pestilence of 1350, though that mortality ought, in the natural course of things, to have considerably raised the real wages of labour. The result of his researches is that, in the reign of Edward III., the labourer could not purchase half a peck of wheat with a day's labour; from that of Richard II. to the middle of that of Henry VI., he could purchase nearly a peck; and from thence to the end of the century, nearly two pecks. At the time when the passage in the text was written [1816], the labourer could rarely have purchased more than a peck with a day's labour, and frequently a good deal less. In some parts of England this is the case at present [1846]; but in many counties the real wages of agricultural labourers are considerably higher than at that time, though not by any means so high as, according to Malthus himself, they were in the latter half of the fifteenth century. The excessive fluctuations in the price of corn, even taking averages of a long term of years, which we find through the middle ages, and indeed much later, account more than any other assignable cause for those in real wages of labour, which do not regulate themselves very promptly by that standard, especially when coercive measures are adopted to restrain them.