Page:The Ancestor Number 1.djvu/22

 6 THE ANCESTOR March ye 29 pd Mr. Ormong to ye poor ending Lady Day 1680 066 Lad out & spent in ye year 1685 as by ye house book apereth to be. . . 104 14 10 pd. as by ye house book apereth. . .0 86 04 05 wood & cole o 1012 8 Malt 00 5 i 8 7 J in all 207 io 6|- The prices quoted against the articles therein mentioned, especially the amounts relating to the servants' wages, are somewhat interesting ; and while it will doubtless be noticed that the figures entered against many of the various common- place items of every-day expenditure are not in the least excessive according to our own modern standard, those which stand for wages will strike us as being ridiculously low and hardly to be credited when compared with the former. This discrepancy however requires but little explanation, when it is remembered that money was in those days worth many times its present value, and therefore not only do the wage figures, upon the basis of this simple calculation, represent a much higher sum than that which they actually appear to do, but further it is these very items of ordinary and every day necessity which, in reality, when estimated upon the same scale, cost our ancestors much more than they would have paid for them nowadays. The married life of Joan Harris (born Wyndham) however was destined to be a short one, for the untimely death of her husband, Mr. Thomas Harris, at the early age of thirty-five — very shortly before that of his father — left her a lonely widow and the mother of two fatherless boys after but five years of connubial bliss. Death, too, soon robbed her of the younger of these children. Stricken with the weight of her great sorrows and in the full measure of her affliction, this good lady has duly recorded the same in the Harris family Bible, an old volume which has been carefully treasured and religiously kept up to date since 1561 (the book itself was printed in 1583). She died in 1734 at the advanced age of eighty-four, having survived her husband, both her sons and one daughter-in-law. James, the elder son and only surviving child of the said Thomas Harris by the said Joan, his wife, although he suc- ceeded at a tender age to the family fortunes, showed no