Page:The wealth of nations, volume 1.djvu/289

 three or four first and lowest prices; saving in this manner their own labor, and judging, I suppose, that this was enough to show what proportion ought to be observed in all higher prices.

Thus in the Assize of Bread and Ale—51st of Henry III.—the price of bread was regulated according to the different prices of wheat, from one shilling to twenty shillings the quarter, of the money of those times. But in the manuscripts from which all the different editions of the statutes, preceding that of Mr. Ruffhead, were printed, the copyers had never transcribed this regulation beyond the price of twelve shillings. Several writers, therefore, being misled by this faulty transcription, very naturally concluded that the middle price, or six shillings the quarter, equal to about eighteen shillings of our present money, was the ordinary or average price of wheat at that time.

In the statute of Tumbrel and Pillory, enacted nearly about the same time, the price of ale is regulated according to every sixpence rise in the price of barley, from two shillings to four shillings the quarter. That four shillings, however, was not considered as the highest price to which barley might frequently rise in those times, and that these prices were only given as an example of the proportion which ought to be observed in all other prices, whether higher or lower, we may infer from the last words of the statute: "Et sic deinceps crescetur vel diminuetur per sex denarios." The expression is very slovenly, but the meaning is plain enough: "That the price of ale is in this manner to be increased or diminished according to every sixpence rise or fall in the price of barley." In the composition of this statute the legislature itself seems to have been as negligent as the copyers were in the transcription of the other.