r the Conquest the corn law of England simply was that
export of corn was prohibited, save in years of extreme plenty under
forms of state licence, and that producers carried their surplus grain
into the nearest market town, and sold it there for what it would bring
among those who wanted it to consume; and the same rule prevailed in the
principal countries of the continent of Europe. This policy, though, as
one may argue from its long continuance, probably not felt to be acutely
oppressive, was of no avail in removing the evils against which it was
directed. On the contrary it prolonged and aggravated them. The
prohibition of export discouraged agricultural improvement, and in so
much diminished the security and liberality even of domestic supply;
while the intolerance of any home dealing or merchandise in corn
prevented the growth of a commercial and financial interest strong
enough to improve the means of transport by which the plenty of one part
of the same country could have come to the aid of the scarcity in
another.

English corn laws, 1436-1603.

Apart from this general feudal germ of legislation on corn, the history
of the British corn laws may be said to have begun with the statute in
the reign of Henry VI. (1436), by which exportation was permitted
without state licence, when the price of wheat or other corn fell below
certain prices. The reason given in the preamble of the statute was that
the previous state of the law had compelled farmers to sell their corn
at low prices, which was no doubt true, but which also showed the
important turn of the tide that had set in. J. R. M'Culloch, in an
elaborate article in the _Commercial Dictionary_, says that the
fluctuation of the prices of corn in that age was so great, and beyond
all present conception, that "it is not easy to determine whether the
exportation price of 6s. 8d. for wheat" [12s. 10d. in present money per
quarter] "was above or below the medium price." But while the medium
price of the kingdom must be held to be unascertainable in a remote
time, when the medium price in any principal market town of England did
not agree with that of another for any year or series of years, one may
readily perceive that the cultivators of the wheat lands in the
south-eastern counties of England, for example, who could frequently
have sold their produce in that age to Dutch merchants to better
advantage than in their own market towns, or even in London, but were
pr