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Existing long‐run consumer price indices for England rely on a fixed consumption basket. Here we construct a methodologically improved, chained‐Laspeyres price index for ordinary households based on their changing expenditure patterns between 1260 and 1869. Rather than offering a revisionist perspective on long‐run costs, it confirms the broad accuracy of existing indices for the pre‐industrial period. The dominant dependence of the key items of expenditure on agricultural, particularly arable, prices explains this finding. The industrial period introduced a new dynamic. The shift in household expenditure towards imported groceries and manufactured goods allowed for more substitution in response to relative price and income changes. Adding the current series to those chained‐Laspeyres indices available for later periods provides a CPI for ordinary households in England over nearly eight centuries; from 1260 to the present day. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Health improved in English cities in the last third of the nineteenth century, in tandem with substantial increases in public spending on water supplies and sanitation. However, previous efforts to measure the contribution of public expenditures to mortality improvements have been hampered by difficulties in quantifying public health investments and the lack of mortality data for specifically urban populations. We improve upon the existing evidence base by (1) creating measures of the stock of urban district sanitary capital, by type, on the basis of capital expenditure flows, rather than loan stocks; (2) using mortality and capital stock data that relate to the same administrative units (urban districts), and (3) studying the period 1880–1909 as well as the earlier period from 1845. The stock of sewerage capital was robustly related to improvements in all‐cause mortality after 1880. The size of this effect varied with the extent of public investment in water supplies, suggesting complementarity between the two assets. For the period 1845–84, investments in water were associated with declines in infant and child mortality but the effect was much smaller and less precisely estimated in later decades. Our results suggest that improvements in water and sewerage targeted different transmission pathways for faecal–oral diseases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides an overview of wealth inequality in England from the late thirteenth to the sixteenth century, based on a novel database of distributions of taxable household wealth across 17 counties plus London. To account for high thresholds of fiscal exemption, a new method is introduced to reconstruct complete distributions from left‐censored observations. First, we analyse inequality at the county level, finding an impressive stability across time in the relative position of the English counties, perturbed only by the tendency of the South and South‐East to become relatively more inegalitarian. Then, we produce an aggregate distribution representative of England as a whole, and we detect an overall tendency for inequality to grow from medieval to early modern times due largely to North–South divergence in average household wealth. We discuss our results in the light of the recent literature on historical inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article comments on an article written by Gary Saxonhouse and Gavin Wright in which the records of most of Lancashire, England's textile machinery makers from 1878 to 1920 were used to document investment in alternative spinning technologies in Lancashire prior to World War I. Saxonhouse and Wright argued that in prewar Lancashire, organizational structure did not constrain the diffusion of ring spinning. The availability of ring-frames that could spin yarn on paper tubes made it unnecessary to incur the heavy expenses of shipping ring yarn on wooden bobbins. With their focus confined to the constraint imposed by wooden bobbins, both the writers failed to explore a related, but more profound problem: the ring-frame was not cost-effective in spinning shuttle-ready weft for Lancashire's looms. Indeed, from the 1880s well into the interwar period, Lancashire's textile engineers devoted considerable inventive effort to the development of a ring-spinning machine that, like the mule, could spin shuttle-ready weft on the bare spindle, but without commercial success. In contrast to weft spinning, ring-frames were often used for warp spinning in specialized coarse and medium spinning mills in prewar Lancashire. Given the available evidence, it is reasonable to conclude that in cases where ring spinning would have been adopted anyway, a firm may well have opted to use paper tubes instead of wooden bobbins.

This article provides a novel framework within which to evaluate real household incomes of predominantly rural working families of various sizes and structures in England in the years 1260–1850. We reject ahistorical assumptions about complete reliance on men's wages and male breadwinning, moving closer to reality by including women and children's contributions to family incomes. Our empirical strategy benefits from recent estimates of men's annual earnings, so avoiding the need to gross up day rates using problematic assumptions about days worked, and from new data on women and children's wages and labour inputs. A family life‐cycle approach which accommodates consumption smoothing through saving adds further breadth and realism. Moreover, the analysis embraces two historically common but often overlooked family types alternative to the traditional male‐breadwinner model: one where the husband is missing having died or deserted, and one where the husband is present but unwilling or unable to find work. Our framework suggests living standards varied widely by family structure and dependency ratio. Incorporating detailed demographic data available for 1560 onward suggests that small and intact families enjoyed high and rising living standards after 1700, while large or disrupted families depended on child labour and poor relief until c. 1830. A broader perspective on family structures informs understanding of the chronology and nature of poverty and coping strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The effect of unions on workers' wage premiums for accepting on‐the‐job accident risk is a prominent subset of compensating differentials research. This article contributes to the literature by using a newly‐constructed balanced panel of railwaymen working in the traffic departments of three prominent Edwardian railway companies with operations in England and Wales. It avoids previous issues of endogeneity by controlling for a number of variables correlated with the risk rates, notably individual fixed effects. The results show that the largest railway union of the time, the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants, was able to transform growing union density into power that increased wage premiums for fatal accident risk, although railwaymen's wages did not compensate them for non‐fatal accident risk. This article also considers how this relationship differed by varying levels of company‐specific human capital as measured by tenure. It finds a non‐linear relationship for both risk rates across the tenure cohorts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on a reply by the authors to a comment by economist Donald N. McCloskey on their paper "Anachronistic Economics: Grain Storage in Medieval England," that appeared in the 1991 issue of the journal "Economic History Review." McCloskey suggests that the main purpose of this paper was to show that the cost of storage was "formidable" in medieval England. The point was to get a rough idea of storage cost (not storage amounts) in which he had only a "desultory" interest. He devotes the first two sections of his paper to the proposition that the storage amounts were small: (1) the direct evidence that storage was small and (2) using prices to show that storage was small. He spells out the significance of interest rates in subsequent sections. He says that the cost was high because the interest rate was high and the significance of high medieval interest rates. His conclusion reiterates his opening premise, namely that the cost of storage and the rate of interest were shockingly high. Stores of grain were therefore very low.

This article presents comments of authors on the criticism of their article on textile machinery by William Lazonick that was published in the February 1987 issue of the periodical "Economic History Review." The article used the records of most of Lancashire, England's textile machinery makers from 1878 to 1920--to document investment in alternative spinning technologies in Lancashire prior to World War I. Lazonick is correct in pointing out that the article on the persistence of the English mule did not include a comprehensive review and critique of his views on the decline of the Lancashire cotton industry. The central problem is that Lazonick does not use the term "constraint" in a consistent or rigorous way. Formally his analysis appears at first to be an attractive escape from the sterility of the debates over entrepreneurial failure: British managers made choices which were rational and appropriate given their constraints, but the industry collectively failed to transform its organization and technology so as to relax the constraints facing individual producers. The difficulties noted by Lazonick in his present comment relate exclusively to the case of existing spinning firms attempting to sell ring-spun weft yarn in the open market.

The article examines the long-term growth of the banking sector in Great Britain and money stock in the period 1844-1880. Detailed estimates of long-term monetary and banking growth in the country exist for the years after the late 1870s, although controversy remains as to their precise accuracy, but even reasonably accurate figures for the greater part of the nineteenth century have proved elusive. It is here that this paper makes a contribution by drawing heavily upon archive material to present new estimates for England and Wales for part of that early period, 1844-80. New estimates are made for commercial bank liabilities to the public and long-term trends in the growth of the money stock are calculated. Data for the number of banks and banking offices are readily available from 1844 in the directory "Banking Almanac," providing one measure of the growth of the commercial banking sector with some breakdown as to the institutional nature and geographical location of firms within the sector. However, they can provide but a crude measure of the growth and density of banking services.

The article discusses the role of the Bank of England in the supply of credit during the period of the suspension of cash payments in the country from 1797 to 1821. The Bank of England played a key role in the supply of credit during the Suspension of Cash Payments. In London, the hub of the nation's commercial and financial affairs, the cessation of private issues in the 1770s had given it a monopoly of the note circulation. Bank notes were used as the basis of all sizable transactions and increasingly, as gold coins disappeared after 1797, for small payments. The Bank made advances principally through investments in government securities, the so-called private loans and discounts of commercial paper. For much of the period, the government advances were uncontrollable because the directors felt obliged to satisfy the urgent wartime demands of the Treasury. To some extent, the private loans can similarly be considered essential, designed as they were to assist subscribers to war loans and to tide solvent firms over temporary difficulties. They comprised a fluctuating but generally much smaller portion of Bank credit than the other two categories.

Numerous Acts of Parliament changed the financing of transport infrastructure in eighteenth-century England. This paper examines the economic effects of turnpike acts, which greatly improved road infrastructure by introducing tolls. It shows that turnpike trusts increased property income in local areas by at least 20 per cent. The findings shed light on why local property owners promoted and managed turnpikes. They also show that turnpike trusts accounted for at least 20 per cent of the total growth in real land rents between 1690 and 1815, and added at least 1.65 per cent to national income in 1815. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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.

This article presents information on periodical literature that was published during the year 1976 on economic history in England and Europe from 1700 to 1850. The prolonged decline of speculative general articles seems to have been reversed in 1976. Inspired by the bicentenary of economist Adam Smith, W.D. Grampp's paper "Scots, Jews and Subversives Among the Dismal Scientists," published in the periodical "International Economic History," assesses the opposition to free trade, and scholar R. Roehl's survey of French industrialization suggests closer parallels with England than are commonly admitted. At a further level of abstraction scholar J. Mokyr's paper "Growing up and the Industrial Revolution in Europe," considers the dualism of the cottage and modern sectors of industry and its significance in the analysis of economic growth, and in so doing has raised some interesting challenges for future empirical work, particularly on the labor market. In this field scholar H. Freudenberger and G. Cummins speculate amusingly in the paper "Health, Work and Leisure Before the Industrial Revolution" and suggest that the increased supply of effort from labor after 1750 may have been the lagged effect of earlier nutritional improvement.

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.

Allegations of British capital market failure are numerous, but frequently contentious. This paper revisits the literature by highlighting the post-1945 market for initial public offerings (IPOs) as a clear instance of capital market failure. Despite the tender method delivering substantially lower underpricing than the traditional fixed-price offer method, it was adopted by only one in 10 firms going public. This missed opportunity cost issuing firms between £1.7 billion and £3.5 billion in real proceeds forgone between 1960 and 1986, excluding privatizations, and was symptomatic of a lack of competition in equity underwriting before Big Bang. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Retail markets were a notable feature of urban England in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth, particularly in the midlands and north. Market halls were the most visible manifestation of this, and were important public buildings. This article looks beyond the imposing architecture to take a more critical view of their function and justification. It argues that while most were well‐managed and earned income in excess of current expenditure, very substantial investment in large and elaborate buildings was hard to justify in purely financial terms. The return on capital was often negligible. Food and drink traders were the largest group in almost all markets, but there were significant numbers of traders selling clothing, textiles, and household goods. There was some justification to complaints that local authorities were providing publicly financed miscellaneous shops in competition with rent‐ and rate‐paying shopkeepers. Most retailers supplying basic necessities operated from shops rather than markets. Saturday night markets were important in working‐class culture and as a source of cheap food, but most day‐to‐day necessities were purchased from local shops or street traders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This article considers deficiencies in the designation and reassessment of Legal Quays (those authorized for foreign trade), and the detrimental impact of these and other Elizabethan customs reforms from the perspective of Christchurch, a small coastal town then in Hampshire. Throttling the flow of merchandise through such places drove trade, and consequently economic growth, to those other places that enjoyed a convenient Legal Quay. In places without such quays, regulation and the farming of customs caused (and also facilitated) the suppression not only of international trade but also of domestic maritime trade. Though otherwise encouraged by Crown policy, entrepreneurial endeavour in Christchurch was stifled by customs regulation, in particular by the logistical burden introduced with remote record‐keeping for coastal trade in the port books. The town seemed unable to break free of Southampton's controlling influence in order to realize its own apparent economic potential. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Clark's claims about the scale of English agricultural output from the 1200s to the 1860s flout historical and geographical reality. His income‐based estimates start with the daily real wages of adult males and assume that days worked per year were constant. Those advanced in British economic growth make no such assumption and instead are built up from the output side. They correlate better with population trends and are consistent with an economy slowly growing and becoming richer. Clark's denial that such growth occurred, his assertion that substantially more land must have been under arable cultivation, his belief that conditions of full employment invariably prevailed in the countryside at harvest time, his concern that the wage bill would have exceeded the value of output in British economic growth, his refusal to consider the possibility that the working year was of variable length, and his assertion that output per acre must have been equalized across arable and pasture are all shown to be figments of his ‘Malthus delusion’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Estimates of English income in Broadberry et al.’s British economic growth, 1270–1870 are founded upon a fourfold growth of farm output, and output per farm worker, over this interval. This article shows, using four separate tests, that farm output growth must have been much more limited. The tests are, first, whether in 1300 there was enough work at harvest to employ all the labour force; second, whether the value of output per worker in agriculture was greater than the annual earnings of workers; third, whether the implied relative outputs per acre of arable versus pasture were reasonable; and fourth, whether a much shorter medieval work year was possible. An alternative index of farm output consistent with the labour supply, wages, and farm rents is derived. This shows much less growth during the period 1270–1800. Overall economic growth in England during these years must consequently have been far less than Broadberry et al. estimate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the economic significance of variation in the number and size of towns across Europe during the early 14th century by comparing the towns of England and of northern Italy. The paper starts by examining the towns of the two countries more closely, distinguishing between those that were very large, large, middle-sized and small. In comparison with rural communities, all towns had more people employed outside agriculture, but this was proportionally more marked in a metropolis like London or Florence than in a small town. The larger the town, the higher the proportion of non-agricultural occupations, the stronger the commitment to producing goods in restricted demand, and the greater the weight of commercial and professional activities. The fact that the contrast between northern Italy and England is so sharp at the top end of the urban scale implies that there was more employment in manufacturing and services in Italy. It also suggests that northern Italy had a wider range of specialized occupations. Studies of urbanization and urban hierarchy characteristically go beyond the statistical classification of towns to establish and explain rank-size relationships between them in different economic regions.

The article proposes a personal wealth distribution for late eighteenth-century England and Wales using fire insurance policy registers of the Sun Fire Office and Royal Exchange Assurance insurance companies. Fire insurance policy registers constitute perhaps the most extensive inventory of British wealth-holding for the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Samples drawn from them have already been used as data sources for a number of purposes, but their most important application may well be in studying inequality, for which detailed data of almost any sort are scarce for the eighteenth century. The author shows here that the distribution of insured property can be adjusted to take account of the under-representation of poor and/or outlying wealth-holders in the sample. In this paper, therefore, he develops a personal wealth distribution for England and Wales c. 1780 using fire insurance policy registers of the Sun Fire Office and Royal Exchange Assurance insurance companies.

The article discusses productivity growth in the English coal trade during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. There are three methodological steps to related to productivity change in the coal trade: Identifying sources of productivity change; Measuring their effect on the productivity of the trade; Assessing the wider consequences for economic development. The bulk of the author's original article was concerned with identifying very clear sources of productivity change. Economist W. Hausman accepts the author's remarks concerning sources of productivity change and adds no further comment about them. His concentration is upon measuring productivity growth where he comes to different and more specific conclusions. On the third methodological step, the impact of productivity growth, he appears equivocal. On the one hand he suggests the impact was minimal and on the other that great benefits were brought to the economies of London and the north-east. Even if one were to accept Hausman's conclusion of minimal falls in shipping costs or freight rates, this does not rule out a growth of total factor productivity of the magnitude outlined in the author's paper.

This article focuses on the standard of living of English workers during the Industrial Revolution in England and Wales. This paper mines an expanding data base and emerges with a far clearer picture of workers' fortunes after 1750. While optimists and pessimists can both draw support from the enterprise, the pessimists' case emerges with the greater need for redirection and repair. This is a rich source for consistent time series on well-defined occupations. Annual earnings are reported there for large numbers of employees in each occupational category', spanning the whole earnings distribution over age, tenure, and skill within a given occupational group. In the latter half of the eighteenth century, farm and non-farm common labourers gained ground 021 higher-paid workers,, the labour aristocracy especially. From 1815 to the middle of the nineteenth century, on the other hand, the gap between higher- and lower-paid workers widened dramatically. Finally, the cost-of-living index should use commodity weights which reflect workers' budgets shares.

This article presents information on periodical literature that was published during the year 1976 on the variety and complexity of landlord-peasant class relations in England from 1500 to 1700. R. Brenner's insistence, in his wide-ranging and thought-provoking paper "Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-industrial Europe" that was published in a 1976 issue of the periodical "Past and Present" that the question of who was to gain and who was to lose from a growing demand for land would be determined by the qualitative character of landlord-peasant class relations thrusts a fundamental Tawney theme to the foreground of the picture. A number of other writers illustrate its variety and complexity. In the paper "The Agrarian Problem in Sixteenth- Century Lincolnshire: Two Cases from the Court of Star Chamber" by R.W. Ambler and M. Watkinson that was published in the periodical "Lincolnshire History and Archaeology" print documents illustrating two such conflicts. The plaintiffs in one case were villagers, complaining about a newly risen landlord who was converting, harassing copyholders, and depopulating in a pure Tawney manner. In the other case, however, it was the encloser who was complaining about villagers entering into, and grazing their beasts upon, land, which he was set upon farming in severalty. In neither case, unfortunately, have the judgments survived, so we are unsure as to whether landlord or peasant prevailed.

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.

In this article we develop new tools to survey the development of lending-of-last-resort operations in the mid-nineteenth century. One finding is that free lending and extensive liquidity support against good collateral developed gradually after 1847, and was already a fact of life before Bagehot published Lombard Street. Another is that the extension of the Bank of England's lender-of-last-resort function went along with a reduction of its exposure to default risks, in contrast with accounts that have associated lending of last resort with moral hazard. Finally, we provide a new interpretation of the 'high rates' advocated by Bagehot. We suggest they were meant to prevent banks from free-riding on the safety offered by the central bank, and were aimed at forcing them to keep lending during crises so as to maintain a critical degree of liquidity in the money market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses data from the ledgers of the financial broker Charles Blunt to explore the market in equity options that emerged in London during the stock market boom of the early 1690s. Blunt's ledgers provide a unique opportunity to observe the workings of an early modern derivatives market. They reveal a broadly based and highly active trade in options. The market functioned well, determined value using agreed criteria, and was utilized by a diverse range of individuals to facilitate both risk-seeking and risk-averse investment strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses William Petty's 1665 estimate of the wealth of England and Wales—the first set of national accounts—and compares it with Gregory King's (1696), which is shown to be heavily influenced by it. There are conclusions about the methodology of the first political arithmeticians, the kinds of national resources which could be measured for the first time in the seventeenth century, and the lacunae which made it likely that Petty and King underestimated per caput and aggregate incomes. An appendix prints a contemporary analysis of hearth tax returns for every county. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the location patterns of manufacturing plants in Greater London, England. The London conurbation represented the most dynamic growth area of interwar Britain, accounting for almost 35 per cent of national population growth compared with only 17.5 percent during the decade to 1911. This was accompanied by a relative employment shift in favor of manufacturing, which increased its share of total employment in London and Middlesex from 30.2 to 31.4 percent between 1911 and 1931, while the national ratio had declined from 33.5 to 32.5 percent. Meanwhile, London's cultural and social facilities also proved important in attracting particular types of valuable labor, such as management, technical, and scientific staff. This was especially important with regard to overseas-based multinationals, whose staff showed a strong preference for London both on account of its general cosmopolitan culture and because of the presence of expatriate communities. The capital's highly developed business and financial services sector also constituted a strong attraction to firms, allowing them to outsource some activities that might be done internally and facilitating access to services generally provided externally, such as advertising and banking.

The fifteenth century rebates to the fifteenth and tenth form a large body of evidence which has rarely been used to assess economic change. They were set by local commissioners who employed their knowledge of the conditions within their counties. In many cases the commissioners can be demonstrated to have applied the reductions in a thoughtful and proportionate manner, often revealing local economic conditions. There is considerable variation in their application between counties and their use is greatly enhanced when compared with other sources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between the eleventh century and mid-thirteenth century a Sterling Area evolved in the British Isles, with a common currency based upon the English silver penny and equivalents of it produced in Scotland and Ireland. This Sterling Area began to contract in the second half of the fourteenth century, when reductions in the bullion content of Scottish coins ended the equivalence of the English and Scottish currencies, and in the fifteenth century Ireland developed its own coinage. Estimates of the currency of the Sterling Area are provided, taking the chronology of its growth and contraction into account. Estimates of the sterling currency are not estimates of the currency of England, and they cannot be combined with data relating exclusively to England in economic modelling, without qualification. Per capita currency estimates and values of coin hoards and single coin finds are at a high level around 1400, falling in the second half of the fifteenth century, indicating that the European 'bullion famine' of the 1390s to c. 1415 had less effect on the currency than the second late medieval bullion crisis, from the 1430s to the 1460s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1716 Edward Lord Harley took possession of one the country's most iconic studs when his wife, Henrietta, inherited Welbeck Abbey (Nottinghamshire) on the death of her mother. At the time, the stud, made famous by her great grandfather, William Cavendish, 1st Duke of Newcastle, was in temporary eclipse and run down. He resolved to restore its fortunes. However, beset by debts and with other expensive interests to distract him, including the purchase of books and manuscripts, he allowed the stud to decay, winding it up just over a decade later. With careful management and sound, timely investment, Harley could have restored its fortunes. However, he hoped to re-establish the stud 'on the cheap', utilizing the top class stallions and mares he had at his disposal to produce first-rate foals, from which he would select the best as replacements. Sadly, too few of the foals came up to expectations. In vain, his agent advised him to retire the ageing mares and invest in suitable replacements. His failure to do so soon impacted on the quality and the number of horses produced. Inevitably, he failed, providing contemporaries and historians alike with an object lesson on how not to run a 'top-end' stud. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Poor relief in the pre-industrial period is a much-investigated topic, but we still lack an idea of its quantitative importance and development, especially in a comparative perspective. This article estimates the magnitude of the various kinds of formalized relief for three present-day countries ( Italy, England, and the Netherlands) in the very long run (1400-1850). The results show that in this period a substantial share of GDP, up to 3 per cent, could be spent on formal relief, offering subsistence to up to 8-9 per cent of the population, with a gradual rise over time and the highest figures being reached in the Netherlands in the eighteenth century. The three cases show a steep decline around 1800, a pattern found more generally in Europe. Next, these results are placed in a broader geographical perspective. This highlights the sharp differences within countries-which could be even larger than those between countries-and the high levels reached in the regions bordering the southern shores of the North Sea. In the last section, the results are used to discuss the possible causes underlying these long-run patterns and geographical differences, including urbanization, wealth, religion, and social-organizational features. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a paper which aims to document the impact of the plague-induced demographic crisis of the second half of the fourteenth and first half of the fifteenth centuries on the succession patterns of the English landed aristocracy. The figures suggest that there was a high rate of failure of families in the direct male line even in stable demographic conditions and thus, assuming common-law rules of inheritance, a significant degree of land transmission through heiresses. This expansion in the percentage of common-law heiresses must, however, be viewed against the background of the control that landowners could exert over the descent of their inheritances. In the use and the entail they had a potential solution to the problem of natural wastage of male lines. The later medieval period was one of developed and developing avenues of wealth acquisition outside land. The ready convertibility of new money into land was given added significance in the period of demographic crisis and beyond by the connection between the acquisition of land by purchase and its acquisition by marriage.

This article focuses on the industrial revolution in England. The industrial revolution emerges from recent reconstructions of macroeconomic data as a protracted process of unbalanced growth. Apparently, the relocation, reorganization, and mechanization of industry proceeded slowly from 1660 to 1860 and for more than a century remained confined to a handful of advanced industries, the smelting of iron, transportation, and above all cotton textiles, which alone accounted for about 60 per cent of the growth in total factor productivity achieved by the British industry between 1780 and 1860. The ancient technique of block printing appeared in Europe in the fifteenth century if not long before. The development of the British skills in the finishing of textiles was therefore not the product of trade with India. This first restriction on trade with Asia took place at a time when London merchants trading with the East Indies had incurred not simply the enmity of the woollen and silk industries but also the hostility of the Levant Co. for invading its markets in Persia with exported woollen cloth as well as undercutting its return trade in raw and finished silks. In retrospect British pragmatism appears more productive than Dutch free trade or French-style mercantilism.

The article comments on the literary works related to the late medieval English economy. Economics historian A.R. Bridbury's forceful arguments on the late medieval English economy reveal emphatic declarations in favour of the health--and wealth--of the later medieval economy, particularly that of towns. Bridbury grants that urban populations were lower in 1500 than in 1300, yet he feels that the relative importance of the urban sector had increased over these years and, in evidence, cites the astonishing growth in the towns' share of national taxation between 1334 and 1524. Nevertheless, nowhere does he assert that towns at the latter date were absolutely wealthier than in 1334. In his contribution he had made it abundantly clear that he regards the evidence as too fragile to support any such conclusion; his argument is about relativities, not absolutes. Economics historian S. H. Rigby has not been the only scholar to assume that Bridbury was arguing on both a relative and an absolute plane; since it has been confirmed that he was arguing only on the former, criticism of the latter is thus somewhat irrelevant.

The article discusses the nature of productivity change in the English shipping industry during the period of industrialization, by focusing upon the coal trade between the north-east coast and London. The coal trade employed a greater volume of English shipping than any other trade. Frequently, the tonnage of coal shipped from the north-east ports exceeded the total volume of English imports. Significantly, London received more coal than any other port in the world. The importance of the coal trade also lies in the substantial amount of labour and capital which it employed. Over 3 million pounds of capital was invested in the coal trade on the eve of the French Wars by mine owners, shipowners and merchants and in 1830 it was estimated that 45,000 people were employed in the coal trade. The coal trade was also fundamental to the economic development of London and the north-east. Various other factors serve to illustrate the importance of the coal trade to English development including its contribution to government revenue, technological progress and national warfare.

This article focuses on the recycling industry in pre-industrial England. The recycling of buildings and their constituent materials was commonplace in pre-industrial society. Dwellings were frequently rebuilt for a variety of reasons, including changes in an individual's economic standing or the desire to accommodate a new fashion in house design, the sixteenth-century fad for chimneys--necessitated in part by the increasing use of coal as domestic fuel is a good example. Much rebuilding work took place in the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, although it has been argued that there was an even greater building and rebuilding boom a century later. Materials from the original dwelling were commonly re-used during rebuilding, and were supplemented, as necessary, by new materials. Where the demand for stone was weak the costs of immediate demolition could make the exercise uneconomic. Nevertheless, the removal of roofs and partial dismantling of walls made buildings uninhabitable, and a monastic revival unlikely. The evidence relating to the re-use of monastic buildings is particularly plentiful, but it is clear that change of use was also common for secular buildings.

This article discusses why the English cotton industry was so much slower than the rest of the world to make the switch from mules to ring-frame spinning. This article presents the records of six textile machinery companies. These records are now available at the Lancashire Record Office in Preston. The new figures show that Lancashire's commitment to mule-spinning prior to World War I was indeed overwhelming, so much so that it calls into question attempts to explain the choice in terms of demand patterns and labour skills. The data also allows the direct testing of subsidiary hypotheses in a comparative international setting. In trying to make sense of these diverse national adoption patterns, it is helpful to remember that the ring and the mule represented basically different principles of spinning which had been in competition since the early days of the Industrial Revolution. The mule is based on the principle of intermittent spinning, in which spinning and winding operations alternated. The late nineteenth-century ring-spinning machine, on the other hand, rested on more than one hundred years of development of the principle of continuous spinning.

This article reports that England's land tax was determined annually from 1692 to 1798; at that time the amount voted for the year became a perpetual charge, subject to redemption or purchase. It is informed that hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of pages of detailed information from tax records chronicle the history of the 1,100,000 property tax values assigned in 1798 as well as the course of their redemptions from 1798 to 1963. The tax allocation to counties in 1798 appears not to have kept pace with improvements to land and houses, or, more broadly, with productivity and market prices of these assets. Much more challenging than the summaries of aggregate statistics are the explanations for the apparent stability in wealth inequality. Surely the inheritance mechanism played a dominant role in perpetuating inequality from generation to generation. The rise in literacy may have counterbalanced increasing occupational and wage differentiation and helped to maintain a constant inequality of human capital. The detailed study of the land tax in specific counties and parishes before and after 1798 will provide greater understanding.

The article focuses on the amplification of an aspect of commutation not fully considered by Eric Evans in his study of tithes and English agriculture, namely the implications for farm incomes of the method by which the commutation payments were calculated. Tithes, it was argued, were a disincentive to improvement because a significant proportion of any increase in output could be claimed by the tithe-owner. One other possible influence on farm incomes stemming from the use of the corn averages was the employment of a national price to determine local tithe payments. Evans suggests that this caused friction in South Wales where the market prices were much lower than the national ones and the effect of using the latter was to burden landowners with higher increases than in the rest of the country. Until the Commutation Act, payments had included incomes from non-cereals and this was reflected in the calculation of the initial tithe rent charge, but afterwards grain prices alone were the variable influencing payments.

The article presents a historical overview of the agricultural revolution and land ownership problems at Warwickshire, Great Britain in the eighteenth-century. When speaking of its soil and topography most writers have observed that Warwickshire is distinguished by "the quality of variety in a high degree" all placed within the confines of a fairly narrow compass. At the end of the seventeenth century the Arden, lying north and west of the county town, was a neighborhood of mixed light soils formerly wooded, where common fields had never been a significant feature of the organization of farming. To the south and east of the Arden lay the Feldon, itself an area of contrasts in soils and farming pursuits. Extending in an arc from Stratford in the southwest to Rugby in the northeast, the Avon formed a band of rich loamy soil three to four miles deep on either bank. Beyond the river valley the most significant feature of the east and southeast Feldon was the extensive tract of Lower Lias Clay, which stretched up to the marlstone of the Cotswold plateau.

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.