ance and
the Low Countries, was sure of a foreign as well as a domestic market.
Here was one description of rural produce on which there was the least
embargo, and on which some reliance could be placed that it would in all
circumstances bring a fair value; while corn, the prime rural produce,
was subject as a commodity of merchandise to every difficulty,
internally and externally, which meddling legislation and popular
prejudice could impose. The numerous statutes enjoining tillage and
discouraging pastoral farms--or in other words requiring that
agriculturists should turn from what was profitable to what was
unprofitable--had consequently no substantial effect, save in the many
individual instances in which the effect may have been injurious. (2)
The value of the standard money of the kingdom had been undergoing great
depreciation from two opposite quarters at once. The pound sterling of
England was reduced in weight of pure metal from L1: 18: 9 in 1436, the
date of the first of the corn statutes, to 4s. 7-3/4d. in 1551, as far as
can be estimated in present money, and to L1: 0: 6-3/4 under the
restoration of the coinage in the following year. At the same time the
greater abundance of silver, which now began to be experienced in Europe
from the discovery of the South American mines, was steadily reducing
the intrinsic value of the metal. Hence a general rise of prices
remarked by Hume and other historians; and hence also it followed that a
price of corn fixed for export or import at one period became always at
another period more or less restrictive of export than had been
designed. (3) The wages of labour would have followed the advance in the
prices of commodities had wages been left free, but they were kept down
by statute to the three or four pence per day at which they stood when
the pound sterling contained one-fourth more silver, and silver itself
was much more valuable. This was a refinement of cruelty. The feudal
system was breaking up; a wage-earning population was rapidly increasing
both in the farms and in the towns; but the spirit of feudalism
remained, and the iron collar of serfdom was riveted round the necks of
the labourers by these statutes many generations after they had become
nominally freemen.[1] The result was chronic privation and discontent
among the common people, by which all the conditions of agriculture and
trade in corn were further straitened and barbarized; and an age, in
some high respe