We have now a fair idea of the expenses of farming. The profits then as now were mainly the sale of wool and hides, of beasts, of corn, of wine or cider. The price of these articles, due proportion being guarded, has not varied in any surprising fashion. The average price of corn (which in the terrible years that followed Poitiers rose to thirty sols) was fifteen sols the septier, let us say thirty shillings the hectolitre; owing to the quantity of foreign corn imported, it does not fetch more than half as much to-day, but on the other hand, owing to our improvement in agriculture, an acre nowadays yields twice as large a harvest, so that the profit to the farmer is about the same. The commonest _vin ordinaire_ appears to have been worth thirty-two deniers the septier--a little more than a halfpenny the litre; but the wine usually served in country taverns cost four deniers the pint[19] (about 1_s._ 3_d._ the bottle, shall we say)--which is more than a “Gladstone claret” commands in France to-day. (That used in our kitchen, the common household wine of France in 1903, costs, if bought by the barrel, a little more than fourpence a litre; but were it not for the extravagant tax paid to the State, it should cost no more than two-pence, at most.) To return to our fourteenth century: In 1371 a butcher at Evreux values two small oxen at four livres five sols; while a large ox of Tallevaude, in 1383, is worth six livres--about four and twenty pounds--which is just five pounds less than the average price given by French country butchers for a fine full-grown beast to-day. The houses of the farmers and the country people differed (then as now) according to their rank and prosperity, and also according to the district they inhabited. The yeoman farmer, and even the well-to-do husbandman, dwelt in a solid house of brick or stone, tiled or slated, with a paved yard separating it from the barns, the outhouses, the dairy, and cattle-pens. The farm-house--which, in England, was always constructed with a southern aspect--as invariably faced the east in Aquitaine, while to the rear, well open to the west, was a long tiled verandah, where, in winter afternoons, the hemp-picking, the wool-carding, the threshing, &c., was done.[20] Within, the vast kitchen glowed in the light of the fire--almost as unextinguishable as the vestal virgin’s; peat, coal, and wood were each abundantly employed; and for a trifling rent, generally paid in kind or labour, the lord of the manor would permit the farmers on his land to cut their turfs from his bog, or their boughs from his forest. Fuel was not only actually, but relatively cheaper in the Middle Ages than to-day; for the bogs were not drained in those days, the forests covered great expanses, and the cost of carriage made it almost impossible to transport their produce. In nearly every part of France and England the supply of fuel was in excess of the demand.