before this, the highest figure allowed by law had been ten, which, however, was specified merely as a limit without being necessarily the amount fixed for the ordinary charge.[1] In 1688, sack was sold in the Colony at four shillings a gallon, the highest rate prescribed for it at any previous time being half a pound sterling. This limit also was probably never reached, except occasionally by exorbitant keepers of ordinaries. In England, the average price of a gallon of sack in the seventeenth century was five shillings and three pence.
The wines of France appear to have been dearer in Virginia than in England. The only French liquor much used in the Colony was claret, which, in 1666 and 1671, was rated at eight shillings a gallon, as the highest figure at which it was to be sold. Modifying this charge in order to reach the probable general average, and the price of claret still remains greater in Virginia than in the mother country, where the general average for the whole of the seventeenth century was only three shillings a gallon. The explanation of the costliness of French wines in the Colony as compared with those of the Spanish and Portuguese islands, is to be found in the fact that in conformity with the Navigation laws, which did not apply to the island wines, they were imported first into England and from thence into Virginia. English spirits were of course dearer in the Colony, to which they had to be transported, than on the spot where they had been manufactured. In 1671, English brandy commanded in Virginia ten shillings a gallon; in England in 1674, four shillings.[2] The prices of liquor in the Colony were probably affected somewhat by the imposition of a duty of three
