were about 13s. apiece[92]; cows, 9s. 5d.  Farm horses were of two varieties:  the ‘affer’ or ‘stott’, a rough small animal, generally worth about 13s. 5d., and the cart-horse, probably the ancestor of our shire horses, whose average price was 19s. 4d.  A good saddle-horse fetched as much as L5.  Sheep were from 1s. 2d. to 1s. 5d. each.  In Hampshire in 1248 shoeing ten farm horses for the plough for a year cost 5s.; making a gate cost 12d.  As Walter of Henley said, it cost a penny a week to shoe a horse on all four feet; these horses must have been very roughly shod.[93] It is evident, from what Walter of Henley says, that horses were not always shod on all four feet, and their shoes were generally very light.  The roads were mere tracks without any metalling, so that there was little necessity for heavy shoes; and as Professor Thorold Rogers suggests, it is quite possible that the hoofs of our horses have become weaker by reason of the continual paring and protection which modern shoeing involves.[94] They weighed usually less than half a pound, and cost about 4s. a hundred.

The most striking fact about agricultural prices at this date is the low price of land compared with that of its products.  The annual rent of land was from 4d. to 6d.[95] an acre, and it was worth about ten years’ purchase.  Consequently, a quarter of wheat was often worth more than an acre of land, a good ox three times as much, a good cart-horse four times, while a good war-horse was worth the fee-simple of a small farm.  A greater breadth of wheat was sown than of any other crop; but it seems that none was ever stored except in the castles and monasteries, for in spite of successive abundant harvests a bad season would send the price up at once.  Barley was, as now, chiefly used for making beer, which was also made from oats and wheat, of course without hops, which were not used till the fifteenth century; and sometimes it was made of oats, barley, and wheat, a concoction worth 3/4d. a gallon in 1283.[96] Cider was also drunk, and was sold at Exminster in Devonshire in 1286 at 1/2d. a gallon, and apples fetched 2d. a bushel.  Thorold Rogers[97] says that wheat was the chief food of the English labourer from the earliest times until perhaps the seventeenth century, when the enormous prices were prohibitive; but this statement must be taken with reserve, as must that of Mr. Prothero[98] that rye was the bread-stuff of the peasantry.  Where the labourer’s food is mentioned as part of his wages, wheat, barley, and rye all occur, wheat and rye being often mixed together as ‘mixtil’; and it is most probable that in one district wheat, in another one of the other cereals, formed his chief bread-stuff, according to the crop best adapted to the soil of the locality.

Walter of Henley mentions wheat as if it was the chief crop, for he selects it as best illustrating the cost of corn-growing[99]; and from the enormous number of entries enumerated by Thorold Rogers in his mediaeval statistics it was apparently more grown than other cereals.  The chief meat of the lower classes then, as to-day, was bacon from the innumerable herds of swine who roamed in the woods and wastes, but in bad years, when food was scarce, the poor ate nuts, acorns, fern roots, bark, and vetches.[100]