The Hundred Years’ War, with its train of ruin and depopulation, introduced the disastrous fashion of mortgaging the cattle on a farm. The unhappy tenant, at his wits’ end for ready money to pay the taxes and to defray the expenses of his farm, sold his herds to some farmer a little less wretched than himself, with the proviso that, for a stipulated number of years, he was to keep on using the cattle with a right to half their produce. Thus one Colin Bois du Mesnil-Patri, near Caen, sells to Guillaume le Paumier, of St. Pierre, nine and twenty sheep, two red cows, two calves, a two-year-old steer, and a mare for the trifling sum of eight livres fifteen sols (say £35), reserving the use of them and half their produce during the three years next ensuing,[12] after which time the entire stock was to become the property of the buyer. In three years, therefore, such unwary farmers would find themselves deprived of the only manner in which they could work their land; it was certain ruin unless, in the breathing-space assured them by the mortgage, some unusual harvest or happy turn of their affairs should enable them to lay aside a sum sufficient to stock the farm afresh. Sheep in those days cost, as a rule, ten sols per head (say £2), alive and unshorn,[13] though when dead and skinned a sheep could be had for a tenth the price.[14] (At the present time in Gascony the normal price for a live sheep is two and thirty francs.) A fourteenth-century ox cost from two to six livres, a cow about three livres (£12). Pigs were dear, valued each between two and three livres, a price apparently in excess of modern values. The horse was less esteemed than the ox for agricultural purposes; he cost as much, or more, to buy, and a great deal more to keep; you could not eat him, he has no horns, and his skin was far less valuable as hide. Still, the horse was indispensable to travel. We give a list of the prices that he fetched in the Comté d’Eu between 1382 and 1388:-- Livres. Sols. Deniers. 1 horse. 2 10 0 1 hackney. 2 10 0 1 tall grey horse 1 10 0 The horse called Rage-en-tête 2 10 0 The roan hackney. 2 10 0[15] And in Picardy, in 1389-- Livres. Sols. Deniers A bay hackney 1 10 0 A black horse 7 0 0 A grey nag 5 0 0 A pair of greys 10 0 0[16]