Note 189 — THE ABBEY OF TEWKESBURY, Gloucestershire.

In his observations on the value of silver at the time of the Survey, 1086, Sir Robert Atkyns gives the following statement:—The rate of necessaries which subsist human life is the true estimate of money. Since, therefore, wheat-corn seems to be the most necessary of anything, we may best value coin by the price of wheat in the several ages. A bushel of wheat, soon after the Norman Conquest, was sold for a penny, which was equal in weight to our threepence. At this day (1729) a bushel of wheat, one year with another, may be valued at four shillings, which is sixteen times the value of it six or seven hundred years ago. The conclusion will be, that a man might live in that time as well on twenty shillings a year of our money, as on sixteen pounds a year at present. And, to carry it further, two pounds money would buy as much wheat as ninety-six pounds of the present.—Dyde on Atkyns’ Hist. Gloucest. 142. Hist. of the Abbey.