It will be of interest to compare the prices of the spirits imported into the Colony with the prices of the same spirits as sold in England in the same age. In Virginia, the Spanish and Portuguese wines; madeira, canary, malaga, and fayal were, in 1666, as has been seen, set down at ten shillings a gallon as the very highest figure at which it was legal to sell them. In 1671, this regulation was readopted. It is not probable that the innkeepers disposed of these wines at rates as advanced as were allowed by law except in unusual instances, six or seven shillings a gallon being perhaps the average amount under ordinary circumstances. That this supposition is substantially correct appears from the prices fixed by the justices of the Henrico county court in 1688, when madeira was assessed at fifty pounds of tobacco and the other island wines at forty pounds. If we apply the ratio of values prescribed by Act of Assembly in 1682, a pound of tobacco being accepted in that statute as worth one and a fifth pence, which is a high rather than a low figure for a year of large crops, like 1688, it will be seen that the cost of madeira was about five shillings a gallon, and of other Spanish and Portuguese island wines about four shillings. In England, madeira sold in 1697 at six shillings eight pence a gallon, a difference in its favor in Virginia of one shilling and eight pence. The average rate of canary in the mother country throughout the seventeenth century was five shillings eight and a quarter pence,[1] which was higher than the price of the same wine in the Colony in 1688, and probably than its average price from the time when it was first imported. Sherry rose in value in England from three shillings eight pence in 1617 to eight shillings in 1698 a gallon. In 1688, the same quantity of sherry was sold in Virginia at the rate of four shillings;
- ↑ Rogers’ History of Agriculture and Prices in England, vol. V, p. 445.
