If we go back to the time of the great plague, about the middle of the reign of Edward III., which gave occasion to the first attempt to regulate wages by law, corn rose from 5s. 4d., the average the first twenty-five years to 11s. 9d., the average of the twenty-five years following. In this reign the pound of silver was coined into 25s., and at the end of the reign of Henry IV., into 30s. In 1444, other statutes regulating wages were passed probably owing to the high price of corn, which had risen on an average of the ten preceding years to 10s. 8d., without any further alterations in the coin; and for this reason there seems no adequate cause but a succession of scanty crops; as a continuance of low prices afterwards prevailed for sixty years. The average price of wheat from 1444 to the end of the reign of Henry VII. (1509) returned to 6s., while the pound of silver was coined into £1 17s. 6d. instead of £1 2s. 6d., as at the passing of the first statute of labourers in 1350, thus indicating a continuance of favourable seasons, and probably, an improved system of agriculture. The rise in the price of corn during the next century was owing probably to other causes. From 1646 to 1665 the price of the quarter of wheat was £2 10s. 0d. During the wars of the Roses, and subsequently it was cheap; but during the civil wars under Charles I., and for some time subsequently it was dear. The harvests of 1794 and 1795 were deficient, but the rise in the price of grain, occasioned by the deficiency of these two years, which is supposed to have been about one eighth, threw into the hands of the agricultural interest, in 1795 and 1796, when prices were at the highest, from 24 to 28 millions for the two years, the farmers with a deficiency of one eighth, having sold their crops for nearly a third more than the usual price before labour had risen. Mr. Reynolds saw the evils we have been describing, and when he purchased the manor of Madeley from Mr. Smitheman he made it a point to encourage small allotments and leases of copyholds. THE CHURCH, AND THE MORAL AND RELIGIOUS ASPECTS OF THE PEOPLE OF MADELEY. We have previously given the names of some of the early rectors of the church, when the whole mind of the people here, as elsewhere, by education, if not conviction, was Roman Catholic. There was undoubtedly a pleasant kind of poetry about the older system of religion, which no man, from the peasant to the peer, thought of questioning, but which, from the cradle to the grave, governed and regulated, as far as its influences went, the thoughts and actions of all men. They were the high days of ecclesiastical power, when the Church could smite with excommunication and civil disability obnoxious families or individuals, and when monarchs could be cut off from the allegiance of their subjects, and made to appear as lepers among their brethren.