Page:Craik History of British Commerce Vol 1.djvu/88

86 greater abundance of other places or other seasons being admitted to relieve it. Comparative, though not absolute steadiness of prices, or at any rate a steady and calculable, in lieu of an irregular and jolting movement of prices, especially of those of the great necessaries of subsistence, is, on the whole, the accompaniment of an advanced civilization, the general character and result of which, indeed, may be said to be to repress irregularities of all kinds, and to bring all social processes nearer and nearer to the equability of those of mechanics. Several of the articles enumerated in the above list we find mentioned elsewhere as bearing a variety of other prices. In one case, for instance, we find a slave purchased for half a pound; in another, for an yre of gold (the amount of which is not known); in another, for three mancuses, or about a guinea; in another, for five shillings and some pence. In these purchases it is generally mentioned that, besides the price, the toll was paid. "The tolls mentioned in some of the contracts for slaves," observes Mr. Turner, "may be illustrated out of Domesday Book. In the burgh of Lewes it says that at every purchase and sale money was paid to the gerefa: for an ox, a farthing was collected; for a man, four pennies." Slaves, of course, differed very considerably from one another in real value. On the other hand, the same sum at which a sheep is here rated at the end of the tenth century appears to have been also its legal price three hundred years before. At least, in the laws of Ina, king of the West Saxons, who reigned at the close of the seventh century, a sheep with its lamb is valued at a shilling. In another of Ina's laws, the fleece alone is valued at two pennies, that is, at two-fifths of the price of the entire sheep and lamb. This high price of wool, as has been mentioned above, is accounted for on the supposition that there was some foreign trade in that commodity in the Anglo-Saxon times. By a law of Edgar, in the latter half of the tenth century, the highest price which could be taken for a weigh of wool was fixed at half a pound of silver ; "