The "Hallage" Receipts of the London Cloth Markets, 1562-c.1720.

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.