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Responds to the comment made by economist Paul A. David on the author's paper on agricultural labor productivity in rural England from 1850 to 1914. Attempt of the author to demonstrate the existence of regional variations in farm labour productivity; Factors influencing the pattern of regional differences in productivity; Comment of the author on the analytical style of David.

The article examines upward social mobility in England in the eighteenth century with reference to the Whitbread family of Bedfordshire, England. Among those families often cited as notably successful in using wealth from trade to found a landed family are the Whitbreads of Bedfordshire, who in the eighteenth century took the circuitous route from Bedfordshire lesser gentry, to London brewers, and finally back to Bedfordshire as great landowners. The Whitbreads provide a good opportunity for studying upward social mobility in the eighteenth century from the viewpoint of one family's experience over several generations. Their rise is analyzed by applying to eighteenth-century England the five scales of the social hierarchy: the ideological, economic, social status, legal, and political. The article examines both the particular combination of these scales that was important to the rise of the Whitbreads and the height to which they climbed each of them. By the seventeenth century the social status of the Whitbreads was already well advanced.

This article discusses several papers on the economic history of England. In the journal "Sussex Archaeological Collections," P.F. Brandon discusses the fortunes of agriculture at Barnholme, Sussex, which was a home farm of Battle Abbey and included heavy uplands and exposed marshlands both much affected by weather conditions. His documentation is largely for the period after the Black Death and his verdict on the farming techniques practiced there is generally favorable. Two more articles are concerned with problems on a larger scale. In a fascinating attempt to explain the background to the astonishing parliament of 1386 and its attack on the king, J.J.N. Palmer reconstructs the business of the previous parliament, the official records of which are lamentably unrevealing. C.S. Cattel's paper "An Evaluation of the Loseley List of Ironworks Within the Weald in the Year 1588," suggests that iron making was fairly stagnant ill the first part of Elizabeth's reign. In an interesting paper on the "Genesis and Structure of the Foley "Ironworks in Partnership" of 1692," R.G. Schafer describes how the Foley brothers settled their personal rivalry by establishing a protean board of directors, creating a form of corporate entity which was not only unusual for its time but allowed the Foleys to control the charcoal iron industry well into the eighteenth century.

This article presents information on several papers and studies, which deal with the economic history of Great Britain. Two studies of general interest concern secular trends in the late medieval economy. The concept of the thirteenth century as a period of boom forms the target for a lively onslaught by E. Miller, "The English Economy in the Thirteenth Century: Implications of Recent Research" in the periodical "Past and Present." For all the signs of expansion, he argues, thirteenth-century England did not enjoy a growth economy in the technical sense. People increased more rapidly than the capacity to produce, and society faced a progressive crisis, in which average production per head was falling. Yet this does not permit us to go to the opposite extreme and make the period after 1350 an epoch of economic growth. Another paper discussed is "Monetary Movements and Market Structure: Forces for contraction in Fourteenth-and Fifteenth-Century England" by H.A. Miskimin that was published in a previous issue of the periodical "Journal of Economic History." In a discussion in fact confined to the fourteenth century, Miskimin attempts to reconcile the demographic and monetary theories of recession. Population changes caused a secular shift in demand, altering market structure and prices.

The article presents a discussion on the periodical literatures of 1969. Some of the literatures include: "The Explanation of English Regional Differences," by G.C. Homans, "Economic Growth in England Before the Industrial Revolution: Some Methodological Issues," by R.M. Hartwell and "Size and Structure of the Household in England Over Three Centuries," by Peter Laslett. Homan contends, a narrowly economic explanation to see regional social differences in terms of technical and geographical differences and leads to generalizations for which the evidence is inadequate, though it maybe less so in the Middle Ages than in the sixteenth century. The vexed question of the extent of aggregate economic growth in pre-industrial England is brought into the open again in a challenging paper by Hartwell. Surveying the current position, he reminds that despite the accumulating knowledge, ambiguity and uncertainty still reign. He concludes with a plea for greater definition of the problems to be investigated, and for more concern with ways of making the results of inquiries comparable.

The article comments on a paper by economist E.H. Hunt related to the agricultural labor productivity in rural England from 1850 to 1914. Hunt has advanced the intriguing idea that well into the present century large areas of rural England continued to manifest many of the features typical of economically underdeveloped agrarian societies. In the paper, Hunt begins by suggesting that the appearance during the nineteenth century of a persisting pattern of inter-regional agricultural wage-rate differences within England did not lead to corresponding regional variations in unit farm labour costs. While wage rates in the south-eastern and East Anglian counties remained below those prevailing in the northerly districts, this is held to have conveyed no advantage to the conduct of agriculture in the cheap labour areas, because lower wages were merely the counterpart of lower output per worker there. Lacking comprehensive statistical measures of regional average labour productivity in agriculture to support this contention, Hunt found it necessary to fall back upon such qualitative indications as are supplied in the reports of various Royal Commissions dealing with nineteenth-century agrarian problems.

The article presents a discussion related to social distribution of landed property and landowners in England between from 1436 to 1700, in reference to the paper of F.M.L Thompson on the topic. Thompson has provided a fruitful and fascinating conspectus of the distribution of landed property. His main purpose was to consider how and why England became overwhelmingly a land of tenant farmers by the end of the eighteenth century and the consequences of this for the subsequent development of the economy. Nevertheless it may be worth seeing whether there is more material available about the situation at the beginning of his inquiry which may at least provide a basis for slightly better-informed guessing. It may also be possible to provide more information about the numbers in the various categories of landowners, or at least show why more accurate information about this would be desirable. The only general criticism of Thompson, which the author ventures to make, is that it is not always clear what data are being used in his calculations.

The article examines the geographical distribution of wealth in England from 1334-1649. In a paper by author E.J. Buckatzsch, attempt was made to measure statistically changes in the distribution of wealth between the counties over an extended period of eight centuries. By employing two statistical measures, Buckatzsch was able to show that statistically significant redistribution of wealth occurred only in the periods 1086-1150, 1150-1283, 1503-1641, and 1693-1803, while at all other times between 1086 and 1843, the distribution of wealth between the counties remained relatively stable. Buckatzsch argued that the tax assessments of 1453 and 1504 showed that practically no redistribution of wealth had taken place between the counties since 1334, while the tax assessment of 1641 showed that a marked, and statistically significant, redistribution of wealth had occurred after 1504. In practice Buckatzsch used a combination of tax assessments on movable property, and tax assessments on annual incomes derived mainly from real property.

This article presents response of the author on comments made by writer J.D. Gould on the paper "Inflation of Prices in Early Sixteenth-Century England" that was published in a 1961 issue of the periodical "Economic History Review." In his comment on the paper related to prices in Tudor and Stuart England, Gould, while in agreement with the general contention, rejects the section dealing with grain-price fluctuations. His objections are mainly based upon the following three points, that the theoretical model of Brenner I is irrelevant and inappropriate, that the author's statistical evidence is presented in an inconsistent form and does not cover the whole period in a uniform manner and that the author contradicts himself with regard to an upward trend and a downward trend in the coefficient of variation of grain prices. He quite agrees with Gould's improved model in his paper, and in the absence of any satisfactory historical evidence to support either his or mine, the author finds his by far the most convincing. Were it not for the fact that the author had spent two years in West Africa examining price behavior in regions where rapid economic transition is taking place, he should has accepted Gould's model without hesitation.

This article examines two points in the history of trade unionism on the railways in Great Britain in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. It details the changing power structure of the union and the distribution of the membership from region to region and one grade to another. Also, it discusses the nature of the response of the old Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants to the new unionism associated with the London Dock strike of 1889 led by John Burns and Tom Mann. Finally, the article discusses the conflicts between policies advocating local bargaining with individual companies and those shaping national movements for one or all grades of railwaymen that characterized the history of the union between 1880 and 1900.

This article details the investment in English overseas enterprises from 1575 to 1630. It focuses on the activities of the two most popular enterprises, the East India Co. and the Virginia Co. The following phenomena show the movement of overseas investment: the magnitude of the interest aroused by overseas ventures and the high level of interest among non-merchants. It also describes the participation of the gentry in the overseas activity by showing the proportion of their contribution not only to personnel but also to investment. Finally, the article discusses the differences between merchant and gentry investors.

The article provides information on several papers on England featured in the number 32 issue of the periodical "Sredniye Veka." The papers focuses especially on medieval agrarian history of the country.

The article presents a study that investigates the social change on the Leveson-Gower estates in England during the period 1714-1832. It discusses the economic and social conditions of small farmers and agricultural laborers during the period. The sizes of tenant farms and the methodology used in the study are presented. It provides an explanation on the source of the data used for the study. The article also discusses the fate of the English "yeoman" in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and of the small owner-occupier, who has been generally equated with the English yeoman.

The article examines the mechanism of the land market in Lincolnshire, England in the eighteenth century. It describes the usual purchasers of land during the eighteenth century and discusses the social composition of the Lincolnshire land market. The factors which contributed to the demand for land in rural areas are identified. The article reports on the work of H.J. Habakkuk, which has illuminated the mechanism of the land market in eighteenth-century England and inspired the revival of interest in the structure of landed society.

The article focuses on agriculture in England during the sixteenth century. It discusses the factors which quickened the pace of economic life in medieval England and the agrarian problems during the sixteenth century. A comparison of the labor plight in England during the thirteenth and sixteenth century is presented. In the sixteenth century, as in the thirteenth, there were tenant-farmers who were in a strong enough position to resist all efforts by their landlords to raise rents. The article suggests that in the sixteenth century those who acceded to the passage of the enclosure legislation did not use it. and those who needed protection did not need protection from the threat of enclosure.

The article explores the concept of freedom and marriage in medieval England. It discusses the privileges of a free man and the social implication of marriage fines for unfree peasants. The significance of a lawful marriage to the bride during the medieval times is examined. The article suggests that freedom in the Middle Ages was not an abstract concept but consisted of concrete privileges for those who were entitled to them, in the manner of the eighteenth-century parliamentary franchise. Freedom and marriage during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries are highlighted.

This article analyzes the reduction of the money supply in England before the Black Death. Since scholars first detected a fall in the level of prices in the later Middle Ages a number of different arguments have been put forward to explain it. Initially, it was believed that prices fell because of a shortage of money and money metals. Then in the 1950's it was argued that changes in population were the cause of falling prices and, although advocates of the monetary theory have continued to question it, it is the population thesis, which still largely holds the field. No one has done more to scatter the ranks of the monetary theorists than professor M.M. Postan, and his explanation of the economic fluctuations of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries makes a good starting point. His argument is that increasing population in the thirteenth century first stimulated the economy of Europe but later began to exert undue pressure on the food supply. Disaster was postponed by the colonization of marginal lands, but survival based on the cultivation of poorer soils became more and more precarious. In these conditions a fortuitous combination of adverse events, such as the succession of bad seasons in the second decade of the fourteenth century, was sufficient to reverse the entire trend of agricultural production and to send the population figures tumbling down.

The article examines some of the economic and social problems faced by the family of the marquis of Stafford in the exploitation of their mineral wealth in England from 1780-1860. Inheritors of an empire of land in the west midlands and in the Scottish Highlands, heirs also to the great Bridgewater fortune, this family was deeply involved in many aspects of the emergent industrial economy. Its investments included road, canal, and railway construction; agricultural improvement was another outlet; it exploited its mineral wealth whenever it was found; it constructed furnaces and directly managed operations in every section of the iron industry. Its social prestige may have derived from its acres and its mansions, but a great deal of the family income had its source in the new sectors of the economy. For three decades in the nineteenth century it was probably the richest family in Great Britain. The relationship between the Staffords and the development of industry was at its most intimate on their estates in the west midlands.

The article discusses the trends in real wages in England from 1750 to 1850. It is simply an attempt to consider as much as possible of the whole body of wage and price material currently available in print, and to examine the extent to which generalization from it is possible. The problem remains to determine whether and to what extent workers benefited or suffered materially from the economic changes of the first stages of the Industrial Revolution. To do this it seems imperative to take an initial terminal point immediately before the first significant changes occurred. Somewhere in the middle of the eighteenth century seems suitable for this, particularly since the third quarter of the century witnessed the beginning of the long price rise of the later eighteenth century that in itself is one of the causes of the historians' difficulties. There is, however, some agreement between historians that real wages were rising all round from the late 1840's onwards; and since the object of this survey is to attempt to resolve controversy, there is a strong case for carrying on to the point at which controversy ceases, namely the late 1840's.

The article assesses the social status of vagrants and vagabonds in England from 1598-1664. Vagabonds became the scapegoats for all social problems. They were carriers of rumor, sedition, and disease, and they infected others with their "licentious liberty." The threat posed by their needless idleness and reckless mobility seemed immediate and overwhelming. In spite of the continuing interest in poverty and the growing amount of work on migration in this period, however, historians have seldom been able to penetrate the haze of rhetorical abuse to see the vagabond as he was, to define his status, or assess the significance of his mobility. A recent survey of migrants in one English county has suggested that mobility among the lower strata of society was both long-distance and frequent, and the literary reactions to vagrancy would support this hypothesis. Information would be most valuable for large urban communities where vagrants were common. Here vagrants' passports were sometimes entered haphazardly in order books or council minutes along with other business.

This article presents information on practice of the migration in Kent, England. The complex phenomenon of migration possesses demographic, economic, and social significance. Long- or short-range movements of people influence the size and stability of populations, are the product of economic balances within a society, and are conditions and determinants of its social structure. Romney possessed innumerable local connections with rural and urban communities. Its busy market attracted buyers and sellers from the countryside and Romney men supplied credit facilities for farmers and tradesmen. Laborers traveled to the town, to carry and load, from as far away as 21 miles and the corporation employed skilled and unskilled labor of the region on their behalf beyond the town. Trade and commerce provided links with the nearby towns of Hythe and Lydd, with Romney butchers active in Hythe markets and its merchants and tradesmen engaged in both ports. For Hythe corporation, supplies for shipping and repairs were often brought from Romney. Shared interests in real property linked men from these towns and villages with Romney men in property transactions, and beneficiaries and executors of Romney wills were drawn from these environs and from the region beyond. Local worthies counted these towns within their sphere of influence and were accorded due courtesies by the various corporations.

This article attempts to set out a data that tends to support professor T.S. Willan's view of the integrity of the merchant class in England as suggested in his book "The Muscovy Merchants of 1555." Willan suggested in his book that few of the Londoners who were charter members of Muscovy Co. were sons of gentry, rather it was lesser provincial families who sent their sons to London, England. He also suggested that few of the Muscovy merchants retired altogether from London, and that those who did were exceptional. The evidence from which these data are drawn is based on a survey of the lives of 140 men; that is, those citizens of London who were aldermen in January 1600 and those who were elected to the Court of Aldermen between the beginning of 1600 and the end of 1624. These men comprise a sample of London's richest citizens in the early seventeenth century. By drawing mainly on three sources: the inventories of estates summarized in the Common Serjeant's Books in London, wills and assessments for the subsidy, it is possible to estimate that 55 of the 140 citizens in the sample were worth over 20,000 pounds in goods at the times of their deaths.

This article presents a comment on an article by G.J. Barnsby, which examined the standard of living of working people in Black Country, England in the nineteenth century. It is, nevertheless, surprising to find the author claiming that in 1842 the miners worked only one day a week on average throughout the year. This year was certainly one of the worst trading years in the century and there was a prolonged coal strike in the autumn. According to Barnsby's figures, the miners were working six days a week on average between 1870 and 1874. These were among the best trading years of the century, but even so according to the testimony of the South Staffordshire, England witnesses who appeared before the Select Committee of 1873 the miners were working only 4 and a half days a week on average. A further problem is that Barnsby takes full employment as representing six days work per week throughout the year. The extent to which the purchase of truck goods adversely affected the miner's purchasing power was a matter of controversy, though it was frequently claimed that they cost between one third and one quarter more than equivalent goods purchased from independent stores.

The article presents a methodology for differentiating between disease and famine and assesses mortality in the counties of Cumberland and Westmoreland in England from 1580-1640. All plague is caused by the same microorganism, Pasteurela pestis, but there are three discernibly different forms that the disease can take, bubonic, septicemic, and pneumonic. Before the introduction of sulfa drugs and antibiotics, the death rate ranged between 90 per cent of those stricken at the outset of an epidemic to about 30 per cent towards the end of the epidemic. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, bubonic plague was predominantly an urban disease, a pestilence of cities and towns that only rarely visited rural areas. Plague in England was also characteristically a warm weather disease, it almost always became dormant during the winter. Epidemic outbreaks of typhus usually begin in winter, when the cold discourages bathing and changing clothes, and disappear with the coming of warm weather. One of the perplexing aspects of this epidemic was its widespread incidence throughout the two counties at the same time. In view of the evidence, the mortality was apparently caused by starvation, not by epidemic disease.

The article analyzes the economic difficulties faced by the Tudor Church and the bishops of Ely in England during the 16th century. The economic difficulties of the Tudor church, which, as the future archbishop penetratingly observed, were not merely economic either in cause or effect, have been relatively neglected by historians of the Reformation. Although all the clergy were faced with the double problem of a demanding laity and the price inflation in the sixteenth century, it can be argued that the bishops were in a uniquely vulnerable position. Not only might their large estates and ample revenues arouse the envy of crown and aristocracy, but they employed their wealth to maintain a leading political and social position within the early Tudor commonwealth. Therefore, once the economic independence of the bishops was assailed, the rest of their social role was also threatened, and their capacity to defend the church diminished. Some differences have been shown to exist between the financial fortunes of the various bishoprics which have been studied in detail.

Presents comments on an article regarding the development of class structures and agricultural organization in England in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Changes in the preferences of the landlords towards farm profits; Options available to the landlord to adopt to the increasing value of land; Distinction between the continuity of the payment arrangements and the stability of rental payments.

Discusses the competence of businessmen in England from 1860-1914. Notion of adverse social attitudes towards entrepreneurship as a major factor causing retardation in economic development; Overview of the social structure of pre-industrial revolution England; Improvements in the educational standards of the nobility and gentry.

Focuses on the evidence of the freemen's list in York, England in the later Middle Ages depicted in a chronological survey of the economic history of the city. Lack of uniformity in urban privileges or progress; Effect of the composition of the original manuscript on the validity of the freeman admission; Overview of forfeiting freedom because of a serious offense against the liberties of the city or failure to fulfill their financial obligations tot he mayor and commonalty.

The purpose of this article is to examine whether hallage duties on cloth trade can provide an approximate statistical commentary on the course of economic change in England. In this article, attention is devoted to the question of whether any branch of the London cloth trade was in fact exempt from the statutory market requirements. Circumstantial evidence suggests that hallage receipts are sensitive to the more extreme fluctuations of trade; but in the light of all the difficulties analyzed above, it seems unlikely that a percentage measure of the yield fluctuation would supply a reasonably accurate measure of the actual trade fluctuation. The hallage receipts provide a remarkably continuous chronology of at least the major trade fluctuations in the London cloth markets; and behind these fluctuations, major trends of growth in the level of activity are discernible, although quite obviously, given all the problems discussed above, the precise points of trend changes are difficult to identify. As such, these receipts supply important new evidence, which confirms, by and large, previous views of the course of change in the seventeenth-century English economy.

This article examines the hypothesis on management of real estate in Whitchurch in Bristol, England, proposed by economist M.M. Postan. Whitchurch's suitability as a case study is fourfold. First, it provided revenues from all the principal sources of landed and seigneurial income in the fifteenth century. Five-sixths of the lands were in the hand of copyholders paying fixed rents, which in 1400 provided approximately one-third of the income. Secondly, there were no special advantages such as offered by the cloth industry on the Castle Coombe estate of John Fastolf. Whitchurch was not geared to a special sector of the economy. Thirdly, the estate was administered at different times both personally by its lord and on his behalf by a well-established bureaucracy. One factor that cannot be ignored in the study of the fifteenth-century economy is the difficulty of making generally applicable conclusions for a kingdom with very marked regional differences, which tended to make economic movements and the responses to them less than uniform. There would seem, for instance, to have been significant differences between the counties feeling the pull of the London market, the midland plain, and the lands of the Welsh and Scottish marches.

The article focuses on the investment decisions in the Midland Railway's London Extension scheme in the 19th century England. In October 1862, the Midland Board decided to submit a Bill giving the company powers to build a railway from Bedford to a new terminus at St. Pancras in London, at great expense, although it had at the time access to London both via Rugby, by the exchange of traffic with the London and North Western, and via Hitchin through a running powers agreement with the Great Northern. In present-day large industrial concerns, the single most important source of capital for fixed investment expenditure is retained profits. The success enjoyed by Midland ordinary shareholders in the years shortly before the London Extension scheme came before them was due to three interrelated factors, the growth in the net disposable balance, capital structure changes and distribution policy. The market expansion of 1858 to 1862 occurred in spite of a probable upward shift in unit costs of operations.

The article is intended as a pilot study, consisting largely of an inquiry into such expenditure upon repairs and improvements to the fixed equipment of farms as can be found in the estate records of a particular region, East Anglia, England. The chronology and the pattern of capital investment were obviously influenced by questions of social prestige, by the accidents of inheritance, and by traditional concepts of the functions of landownership. An absentee owner was likely to plough back less than a residential proprietor, and an energetic landowner coming into a long-neglected estate often laid out much more of his income in retrieving run-down capital than the owner of an estate which had always been adequately maintained. Estate capital was generally more comprehensive than the landlord's capital in agriculture. Most East Anglian estates had, or acquired during the late eighteenth or early nineteenth centuries, extensive cottage properties which formed part of the general housing facilities of villages.

The article discusses the performance of the glass industry in 16th century England. For window glass the available prices were perhaps fewer than one would wish but are nevertheless sufficient to suggest that the industry was able to thrive while holding its prices down in real terms. For glass, before the radical change from wood fuel to coal in the early part of the seventeenth century, a series of small improvements in method were brought and perhaps further developed after 1567 by workers from Lorraine and Normandy, who not only enabled production to respond to increasing demand, but served to enhance demand still further by improving quality and holding down costs and prices. The evidence for the increasing use of glass in buildings is widespread, although inappropriate to strict quantitative measurement. It has been inferred that the medieval tradition of glass-making in England was moribund by the middle of the sixteenth century and that imports provided for the greatest proportion of the market.

The article discusses the cereal yields on the Sussex estates of the Abbey of Battle during the later Middle ages in England. One of the general deficiency of most of the early studies of medieval productivity was the examination of yield data in almost complete detachment from the environmental, socio-economic and technical conditions, which seemingly influenced the production under review. The types of arable farming practised on the Battle Abbey estates in Sussex at Alciston, the principal estate and home-farm, Apuldram, Barnhorne and Lullington invest the yield data with special interest and importance. By the late thirteenth century, when the extant documentation first reveals the economy of the Battle Abbey manors, cultivation for commercial purposes flourished and this was most clearly manifested in the arable husbandry by the suppression of fallow on the best or most conveniently manured land. The density of seed sown per unit of land is a much neglected aspect of medieval farming despite the importance of the relationship between the seeding rate and the yield, which up to a certain point increases as seeding is intensified.

This article discusses various issues related to the commercial policy of England by the middle of the 17th century. The article makes specific reference to colonial wars of the seventeenth century. English commerce during the first half of the seventeenth century was characterized by a fundamental duality. England was a competitor in the international trade in textiles. She was also a competitor in the international carrying trade. It is the first feature that is usually emphasized at the expense of the second to the point where trade with Europe sometimes appears to be synonymous with London's textile exports and with the export of "new draperies" in particular. It is no accident that evidence for increased demand for English shipping should coincide with general war in Europe. How closely the demand for English shipping depended on the state of relations between Spain and the Netherlands had been demonstrated during the first quarter of the century. Indeed, the fortunes of the shipping and the cloth industries appear to have been closely linked. Opportunities for expansion in both tended to come when the Dutch were inconvenienced by war and embargo.

The article focuses on statistics of coal output in southwest Lancashire, England during 1590-1799. No one doubts the central role of coal in the Industrial Revolution, but statistics of coal output before the mid-nineteenth century are meager on both the national and the coalfield scales. Moreover, that those which do exist contain potentially serious flaws is admitted by their authors and by those who have subsequently used them. No comparable body of coalfield estimates exists for the eighteenth century. Regional statistics could not be used to corroborate or refute national estimates. It has not yet been demonstrated that there was an English economy rather than a collection of self-contained or trading regions within England by the end of the eighteenth century, and even if a cohesive national economy did exist regional rates of economic growth would differ. In such a situation national aggregate data are of chimerical value, and regional statistics are more useful for testing hypotheses about the role of coal production in the Industrial Revolution.

Focuses on the impact of financial crisis on the government in England. Effect of the change of ministers on financial credit of the country; Developments in techniques of public credit; Role of politicians in the creation of the structure of post revolution public finance.

This article analyses cloth exports between 1600 to 1640 from London, England. To test this conclusion it is necessary to transform the quantities of short-cloth exports into values in order to permit them to be added to the given values of exports of new draperies. It will be noticed that the estimates of the share of London and of the out-ports in the national total are not particularly sensitive to the value chosen for the short-cloth. On the other hand, the various uncertainties in the basic data on quantities and prices and the fact that different years have to be chosen for different ports imply that the margin of error in many of the figures must be considerable. It is true that a further decline of wool exports and of the older style of "worsteds", of which a few were still exported in the mid-sixteenth century, is to be offset against this increase. But wool exports on the eve of the debasement appear to have been only about 5 per cent of the total by value, and worsteds substantially less than that.

This article examines the standard of living of working people in the Black Country, England during the nineteenth century. The standard of living is determined by what people can buy with their earnings. Several recent writers on the subject have pointed to the need for regional and local studies to get away from the national aggregates which often obscure more than they reveal, and to get down to the study of what real groups of people actually earned, bought, and consumed. Knowledge of wages and prices is important for any assessment of the standard of living, but above all the level of earnings forms the essential key to the assessment of real wages in the nineteenth century, and a realistic index of unemployment and short-time working is in turn the key to earnings. The index used by the early wage statisticians and by various later investigators is based on the returns made by certain trade unions from 1851 onwards of unemployment among their members. Short-time working was the major cause of the poverty of the Black Country, which on a number of occasions in the nineteenth century became a matter of grave national concern.

This article presents information on the contrast between the underlying economic trends in the twelfth century and the thirteenth century in England. There is a real and substantial contrast between the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; but there is much to suggest that it is one rooted in the policies and attitudes of landlords rather than in the basic economic situation. Both centuries, despite short-term periods of dislocation, were centuries of economic expansion. For that reason the policies followed by landlords during the twelfth century are not easily explained in terms of analogies with the later Middle Ages, even though, just as in the fourteenth century, twelfth-century demesnes crumbled, labor services were commuted, and manors were leased. These common features of two disparate centuries, however, seem to be compatible with very different economic circumstances. In the late Middle Ages landlords had learned to adjust their policies to the play of rewards and costs. In the twelfth century, on the other hand, manorial dissolution was sometimes a consequence of the farming of manors; and the farming of manors looks like a traditional method of land management which had grown up during a time when subsistence was the end in view, when the rate of economic advance was relatively slower, and when unused resources were relatively abundant.

This article focuses on the role of the country gentry in the adverse balance of payments in transactions involving London, England. For the economic historian a series of questions about balances of payments is inherent in this fact, not only for such other centers and for regions but also for occupational and social groups. Among the latter, the social group which must continuously have shown, from every district of its habitation, an adverse balance of payments in transactions involving London was the country gentry, especially those among it who regularly spent several months of each year in London as their occasions required: as members of Parliament; visitors to London whether or not Parliament was in session because social and business interests could better be cultivated during the season; or courtiers or office-holders. Coming to London thus, for a career, for business for pleasure, most likely for all three, staying often for two or more months at a time in lodgings, houses or parts of houses which they rented, or permanent residences which they owned, their need for funds to spend in London was insistent during such periods, while their incomes were for the most part drawn from country sources. To make these incomes available in London was an essential duty of estate stewards.

The article examines the issue of aristocracy in England in the late 16th century. Laurence Stone's book "The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558-1641" has extended the discussion of this very important work from the primarily economic aspects, which have been the concern of most earlier reviewers, to more general considerations about the role and activities of the nobility within the state in this crucial century of English history. Stone's book is so challenging that it is sure to continue to arouse discussion from a wide range of viewpoints. Among these, it is of importance to compare Stone's evidence and conclusions about the English aristocracy with the situation of their continental peers. Such a comparison is likely to suggest in what ways the experiences of the English nobility differed from those of continental nobilities, and hence test Stone's conclusion that the crisis of the nobility was one of the three main causes of the English revolution, the other two being the decline in respect for and obedience to the Monarchy, and the failure of the Established Church to comprehend within itself all but the Roman Catholics.

The article presents a discussion on the book "England's Treasure by Forraign Trade," by Thomas Mun, which deals with the economic significance of foreign trade in England. The book has been almost universally accepted among economists as the epitome of seventeenth-century mercantile doctrine. This acceptance implies two related presuppositions about the development of economic thought, both of which deserve sharp challenge. They are that a body of doctrine definable as mercantilism existed in Mun's time, and that England's economy is a representative item of mercantile analysis. The first assumption has been attacked with some regularity since the early 1950s by such scholars as D.C. Coleman, Charles Wilson, and Barry Supple on the grounds that the policies, events, and literature of the seventeenth century are much too diverse to accommodate a single descriptive category. As these critics prevail, the traditional status of England's economy is eroded and need arises for a re-examination of its origins. This article links the pamphlet directly with the lobbying activities of the East India Company, for whose interests Mun was a capable spokesman, and reconstructs the sequence which led Mun to abandon an earlier analysis of England's economic difficulties in favour of the simplistic balance of trade.

The article examines the relationship between the fluctuation in Bank of England notes and deposits in 1844. Gold payments for notes were restricted at the Bank of England in 1797 and resumed in 1821. Peel's Act in 1844 tied Bank note-issues to gold reserves and took steps to eliminate country issues. The correlation coefficients indicate that during the Restriction and after Peel's Act deposits fluctuated in the same direction as notes. The highest proportion of the variance in deposits explained by the contemporaneous variation in notes is only 36 per cent and occurs during the Restriction period. Hence for Bank of England notes and deposits, there is little support for the proposition that fluctuations in notes closely controlled fluctuations in deposits. The level of London bank deposits surpassed the level of Bank notes and increased at a greater annual rate than Bank notes between 1824 and 1844. This evidence indicates that London bank deposits were a quantitatively significant item in the inventory of financial assets.

The article discusses personal wealth of the business community in seventeenth-century England. The business community in the seventeenth century is not easy to define: such contemporaries as economist C. Molloy tied themselves in knots trying to categorize merchant and retailer, and the complexity of economist George Unwin's work stems largely from the material. The term "merchant" was conventionally reserved for overseas traders, the term "tradesman" for skilled craftsman, and the term "retailer" for those who resold the goods of others. In fact, however, the distinction between wholesaler and retailer, producer and distributor, and even clothier, retailer, and farmer was vague. The decline of specialization along the lines of the medieval guilds makes it difficult to classify the business community in this period by commodity, area and function, even in London. The occupations stated in wills and inventories relate more to status and skill than to economic function. The distinction between tradesman and merchant was economic rather than functional, a question of wealth and volume of business rather than type of trade.

The purpose of this article is to examine a particular part of the process, namely the growth of provincial markets for shares and their evolution into a national share market. Much of the capital raised for canal, railway, bank, and public utility promotion between 1800 and 1850 came from the provinces, but the institutional facilities which aided the process have been somewhat neglected by economic historians. An important factor influencing the growth of stock exchanges was the supply of shares. Between 1817 and 1850 the total nominal value of shares quoted on the London Stock Exchange rose from 810 million pounds to 1,215 million pounds, an increase of about 50 per cent, the bulk of this being attributable to foreign and domestic utilities. A small extra figure for purely provincial issues should be added to this to give a national total. The major sources of new shares were banks, canals, railways, and local utilities and institutions. The demand for shares varied wildly between boom and slump but there was a secular increase in demand for shares as income rose and savers' preferences changed.

The article discusses draperies as an example of a technical innovation in the English textile industry. During its rise to importance in the later Middle Ages, the products of the English cloth industry which entered into international trade and are thereby known to historians, had certain noteworthy technical and economic qualities. First, they were or at least it is generally assumed that they were mainly true woolens, made of short-stapled carded wool, in both warp and weft and fulled so that the woven mass of fibres was thoroughly felted, to give an enduring, strong, weather-resistant fabric. Second, although these processes obviously gave scope for variations in colour, size, quality, weight and finish, exports seem mainly, though not wholly, to have comprised good or medium-quality fabrics. So long as the market was dominated by such products, neither producers nor sellers could expect any great increase in turnover through the growth of replacement demand. So long as buyers were buying recognized qualities attached to particular types, it remained in the interests of producers to try to ensure the maintenance of those qualities.

Presents information on the later medieval economy of Cornwall, England during the Middle Ages. Danger of accepting hypotheses on economic fluctuations in the agrarian sector as uniformly applicable to all regions of medieval England; Discussion on the contrasting trends exhibited by the aggregate rents of the customary lands of several documented assessionable manors.

This article presents information on the strike staged by merchant seamen in northeast England in 1815. At the end of the Napoleonic War the greater part of the Royal Navy and of the mass of hired shipping operated as transports, tenders, etc. by the government during the war was paid off. This caused much unemployment among the seamen and consequent troubles in the ports. The first serious hint of trouble came in mid-August, with a move among the British sailors to prevent the employment of foreigners in local ships. This grievance had also sparked off trouble in the Port of London; on Tyne side there were a number of instances of the forcible expulsion of foreign seamen from local vessels, and at the same time the local seamen collectively put forward to the principal local authority a demand that no foreign seamen should be employed in local shipping while local sailors were out of work. In these circumstances it was possible for disinterested opinion among the propertied classes, and even for those occupying positions of authority, to display considerable sympathy with the seamen. If the seamen had been enrolled under the banner of democracy, if their demands had extended to a drastic remodeling of the constitution and the existing framework of society, then there would have been much less sympathy and restraint in the treatment accorded them.

This article explores labor productivity in England's agriculture sector during 1850-1914. The diversity of agricultural output and the variety of tasks involved render it impossible to calculate figures of output per man for each area. Piece-rates prevailing in the different counties might appear to afford some clue, but this proves not to be the case. Piece-rates were widely flexible to allow for the variety of conditions imposed by the weather. The regional divergences in productivity and the cause of these variations help to put into perspective parts of the discussion on the nineteenth-century standard of living and welfare. In the high-wage areas proximity to industry and superior education, among other factors, were together attracting large numbers out of agriculture, and it is probable that the more capable were among the first to go. It is significant that despite the migration of the more talented agricultural population labor productivity remained higher in the northern counties.