Farmers' wives were accustomed, up to the beginning of the present century, to attend the market to sell their cheese and butter, as in Derbyshire they do now, and the work connected with the accidental discovery of the Royston Cave, it will be remembered, was for the accommodation of these good dames. Farmers at this time had few new notions or agricultural shows to set them thinking, but farmed according to "the good old ways," leaving to here and there a gentleman farmer, farming his own land, such hair-brained schemes as went contrary to them, their plea being that "farmers did not rear the worse turnips nor were longer fatting their oxen without book knowledge than they would be with it." {106} But it is when we come to market prices for the farmer's produce that we get, I suspect, at the root and origin of the smooth-sounding phrase of the "Good old times when George the III. was King." Of the enormous influence of peace or war upon prices then, and the excitement which news of the one or the other stirred in the breasts of farmers and landlords as they gathered in groups in the yards of the Hull, or the Red Lion, on Royston market days, let the following picture testify-- [Illustration: READING THE NEWS.] Below are given a few years of average prices of farmers' produce in grain:-- AVERAGE PRICES. Wheat. Barley. Oats. Year. s. d. s. d. s. d. 1785 43 1 24 9 17 8 1790 54 9 26 3 19 5 1795 75 2 37 5 24 5 1799 69 0 36 2 27 6 1800 113 10 59 10 39 4 1801 119 6 68 6 37 0 1802 69 10 33 4 20 4 1805 89 9 44 6 28 4 1809 97 4 47 0 31 5 1810 106 5 48 1 28 7 1812 126 6 66 9 44 6 {107} The year 1812 was a famine year, but, after this time, prices never rose so high, ranging for wheat from 75s. in 1814, and 96s. in 1817 to 44s. in 1822. Though the landlords took their share and nearly doubled rents between 1790 and 1804, the farmer had reason to remember the good old times if the following story of a Hertfordshire farmer in 1807 be true:--