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 prohibited to export abroad,
and yet had no means of distributing their supplies at home so
as to realize the highest medium price in England, must have
felt aggrieved, and that their barons and knights of the shire
would have a common interest in making a strong effort to
rectify the injustice in parliament. This object appears to have
been in some measure accomplished by this statute, and twenty-seven
years afterwards (1463) a decided step was taken towards
securing to agriculturists a monopoly of the home market by a
statute prohibitory of importation from abroad. Foreign import
was to be permitted only at and above the point of prices where
the export of domestic produce was prohibited. The landed
interest had now adopted the idea of sustaining and equalizing
the value of corn, and promoting their own industry and gains,
which for four centuries, under various modifications of plan,
and great changes of social and political condition, were to
maintain a firm place in the legislation and policy of England.
But there were many reasons why this idea, when carried into
practice, should not have the results anticipated from it.
The import of grain from abroad, even in times of dearth and high prices at home, could not be considerable as long as the policy of neighbouring countries was to prohibit export; nor could the export of native corn, even with the Dutch and other European ports open to such supplies, be effective save in limited maritime districts, as long as the internal corn trade was suppressed, not only by want of roads, but by legal interdict. The regulation of liberty of export and import by rates of price, moreover, had the same practical objection as the various sliding-scales, bounties, and other legislative expedients down to 1846, viz. that they failed, probably more in that age than in later times, to create a permanent market, and aimed only at a casual trade. When foreign supplies were needed, they were often not to be found; and when there was an excess of corn in the country a profitable outlet was both difficult and uncertain. It would appear, indeed, that during the Wars of the Roses the statutes of Henry VI. and Edward IV. had become obsolete; for a law regulating export prices in identical terms of the law of 1436 was re-enacted in the reign of Philip and Mary (1554). In the preceding reign of Edward VI., as well as in the succeeding long reign of Elizabeth, there were unceasing complaints of the decay of tillage, the dearth of corn, and the privations of the labouring classes; and these complaints were met by the same kind of measures—by statutes encouraging tillage, forbidding the enlargement of farms, imposing severer restrictions on storing and buying and selling of grain, and by renewed attempts to regulate export and import according to prices. In 1562 the price at which export might take place was raised to 10s. per quarter for wheat, and 6s. 8d. for barley and malt. This only lasted a few years, and in 1570 the export of wheat and barley was permitted from particular districts on payment of a duty of 1s. 8d. per quarter, although still liable to prohibition by the government or local authority, while it was entirely prohibited under the old regulations from other districts. Only at the close of Elizabeth’s reign (1603) did a spark of new light appear in a further statute, which removed the futile provisions in favour of tillage and against enlargement of pastoral farms, and rested the whole policy for promoting an equable supply of corn, while encouraging agriculture, on an allowed export of wheat and other grain at a duty of 2s. and 1s. 4d. when the price of wheat was not more than 20s., and of barley and malt 12s. per quarter. The import of corn appears to have been much lost sight of from the period of the statute of 1463. The internal state of England, as well as the policy of other countries of Europe, was unfavourable to any regular import of grain, though many parts of the kingdom were often suffering from dearth of corn. It is obvious that this legislation, carried over more than a century and a half, failed of its purpose, and that it neither promoted agriculture nor increased the supply of bread. So great a variance and conflict between the intention of statutes and the actual course of affairs might be deemed inexplicable, but for an explanation which a close economic study of the circumstances of the times affords.
Besides the general reasons of the failure already indicated, there were three special causes in active operation, which, though not seen at the period, have become distinct enough since. (1) A comparatively free export of wool had been permitted in England from time immemorial. It was subject neither to conditions of price nor to duties in the times under consideration, was easier of transport and much less liable to damage than corn, and, under the extending manufactures of France 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 £1 : 18 : 9 in 1436, the date of the first of the corn statutes, to 4s. 7¾d. in 1551, as far as can be estimated in present money, and to £1 : 0 : 6¾ 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 respects among the most brilliant in the annals of England, was marked by an enormous increase of pauperism, and by the introduction of the merciful but wasteful remedy of the Poor Laws.
The corn legislation of Elizabeth remained without change during the reign of James, the civil wars and the Commonwealth. But on the restoration of Charles II. in 1660, the question was resumed, and an act was passed of a more prohibitory character. Export and import of corn, while nominally permitted,
- ↑ M‘Culloch found from a comparison of the prices of corn and wages of labour in the reign of Henry VII. and the latter part of the reign of Elizabeth, that in the former period a labourer could earn a quarter of wheat in 20, a quarter of rye in 12, and a quarter of barley in 9 days; whereas, in the latter period, to earn a quarter of wheat required 48, a quarter of rye 32, and a quarter of barley 29 days’ labour.
