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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.

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]

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.

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]

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.

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 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]

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 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 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.

The article comments on the paper titled "Fisher's 'Flu and Moore's Probates: Quantifying the Mortality Crisis of 1556-1560," by Michael Zell, published in the 1994 issue of the journal "Economic History Review." It is pleasing that Zell has been stimulated by the author's attempt at revisionism. However, the author claims that he did not re-assert economist F.J. Fisher's claim that as much as one-fifth of England's population died as a result of harvest failures and epidemics between 1556 and 1560. The author's own calculation of overall population decline was 15.9 per cent, explicitly termed speculative, and he described Fisher's estimate of "around 20 per cent" as "unintentionally exaggerated." Zell in fact refers to Moore's more cautious estimate of 12 to 18 per cent, though the author's estimate of 18 per cent resulted from the application of Fisher's estimated vital rates to his new data, and that of 12.5 per cent resulted from the application to the new data of economists E.A. Wrigley and R.S. Schofield's 'normal' birth rate and my revised death rate.

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 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]

This article draws on quantitative and descriptive data from Robert Campbell's manual for prospective apprentices, The London tradesman (1747), to demonstrate the responsiveness of apprenticeship premiums in mid-eighteenth-century London to market forces of supply and demand. It first shows that Campbell's data on mid-eighteenth-century journeymen wages, apprenticeship premiums, and masters' set-up costs in London are consistent with other sources. It then applies instrumental variable regressions to estimate the elasticity of apprenticeship premiums with respect to journeymen wages and set-up costs, using Campbell's education and ability requirements by trade to instrument for wages. We find an elasticity of one with respect to wages, and of 0.25 with respect to set-up costs, both statistically significant at a p-value less than 0.1%. We interpret these findings as supporting the thesis that apprenticeship played an important role in adapting the English workforce to the skill requirements of the industrial revolution in its early stages, insofar as the institution of apprenticeship in London was representative of other parts of England. Furthermore, by demonstrating the internal and external consistency of Campbell's observations, our findings should encourage their use as an unparalleled source of detailed, trade-specific wage data from the early years of the industrial revolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nearly every conceivable aspect of the old poor law in England appears to have been studied. Yet some fundamental questions about parish-level provisioning remain hard to answer. These include the amount that people received from the parish, from all sources, each week; how the balance between types of payments shifted over the period, and (correspondingly) within the individual life-course; the range of services or supplements that such individuals received, from the parish, over the course of their lives; and how this spectrum of relief adjusted to the massive macro-level changes that we know occurred in the poor relief system between the 1760s and 1834. This study attempts to answer these questions in new depth, by employing a dataset that encompasses all payments to named individuals within the Essex parish of Terling between 1762 and 1834, totalling 143,801 payments to 1,508 recipients. Analysis of this dataset provides new insights into the size, scope, changes, and significance of poor relief in labouring families' lives in southern England in this period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most prior work on historical female labour supply has been confined to looking at the female labour force participation decision. This article uses the detailed information on weekly hours of work and wages contained in the New Survey of London Life and Labour ( NSLLL) (1928-32) to provide the first estimation of both the participation and the hours-of-work decisions for female workers prior to the Second World War. The main finding is that the labour supply curve was negatively sloped-women worked longer hours at lower wages. It is also possible to compare the determinants of the labour force participation decision and the hours of work decision among females in the NSLLL. It appears that the labour force participation decision was more strongly related to household income level than to own wages, while the hours of work decision among working women was more strongly related to the wage level than to household income. Finally, the article also examines the differential labour market behaviour of married women, female household heads, and young single women; most striking among these results is the evident added-worker effect on married women of the onset of the Great Depression in 1930. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses newspaper advertisements to chart the changes in speeds and fares of stage coaches, identifying the main periods of increasing speeds among London coaches as the 1760s-80s and 1810s-20s, separated by a period when speeds declined. It then measures productivity growth. Fares of London coaches in 1835-6 were about 27 per cent of what they would have been but for improvements in horses, vehicles, and roads from 1750, and the two main periods of productivity growth correspond to those of rising speeds. Speeds and productivity of regional coaches increased more smoothly. The rising productivity firmly identifies road transport as one of the modernizing sectors of the economy. New figures are put forward for the growing number of London and regional coaches, indicating rapid growth in passenger miles. While turnpike trusts had little impact before the 1750s, their increasing effectiveness, together with the use of steel springs and improved horses, was crucial to the rising productivity of the 1760s-80s, and even more so to that of the 1810s-20s. The cross roads were apparently poorer than London roads in the late eighteenth century, but thereafter the gap narrowed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Existing studies find little connection between living standards and mortality in England, but go back only to the sixteenth century. Using new data on inheritances, we extend estimates of mortality back to the mid-thirteenth century and find, by contrast, that deaths from unfree tenants to the nobility were strongly affected by living standards. Looking at a large sample of parishes after 1540, we find that the positive check had weakened considerably by 1650 even though living standards were static at best, but persisted in London for another century despite its higher wages. In both cases the disappearance of the positive check coincided with the introduction of systematic poor relief, suggesting that government action may have played a role in breaking the link between harvest failure and mass mortality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article challenges the growing consensus in the literature that medieval manorial managers were price responsive in their production decisions. Using prices of and acreages planted with wheat, barley, and oats on manors held by the bishop of Winchester from 1325 to 1370, price elasticities of supply are estimated for each grain in aggregate and on each particular manor. Aggregate price elasticities of supply for wheat, barley, and oats were rarely statistically significant and when significant were very low compared with elasticities estimated for developing and developed countries in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The low levels of agricultural supply response in fourteenth-century England suggest that commercialization was not as dominant in the medieval economy as has been argued. Thus, structural changes in the economy, such as the leasing of demesnes, the growth of wage labour, and the end of villeinage, may have been more important than price fluctuations in driving long-run economic change after the Black Death. Likewise, a shift from low price responsiveness to higher price responsiveness could have been an important part of the capitalist transformation of agriculture in the early modern period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents new data on mill location in Manchester in 1850 to show that water-transport infrastructure played a key role in determining the intra-urban pattern of factory development. The shift from water to steam power introduced new patterns of industrial water use, rather than the relocation of factories away from waterways. Five new public canals and 23 private canal branches activated a major expansion of Manchester's waterfront, providing the majority of the manufacturing sites that enabled the town to become the world's foremost factory centre. Without effective municipal water supplies, canals were the best available water source for steam engines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The transition to industrial capitalism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was accompanied by a decline in irregular work attendance. The chronology of that decline is unclear due to a lack of quantitative evidence. This article examines detailed colliery records from a crucial period of industrial transition and shows that traditional patterns of attendance and work effort survived in one of the leading sectors of the industrial revolution well into the second half of the nineteenth century. The study shows how regional and local sources can throw new light upon problems for which national quantitative data are unavailable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Peasant producers are now recognized as having played an important part in the late medieval economy: this can also be said of peasant producers in eastern England before the Conquest. In the wake of the Viking invasions Scandinavian settlers from the second half of the ninth century entered a region that was already commercially active. Independent farmers raised sheep, possibly a newly introduced breed, on the Lincolnshire Wolds and marketed their wool. A network of Anglo-Scandinavian shippers and traders, members of a merchant elite, controlled important places on river routes. That Lincolnshire was an area of light manorialization and many sokemen had an invigorating effect on its economy. Peasant producers had comparative freedom and by controlling markets and extracting cash from the inhabitants of their sokes Anglo-Norman lords profited from an economy that had been invigorated by Scandinavian enterprise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this article is to estimate the workforce involved in spinning from the late sixteenth century until the eve of mechanization. In addition, the potential contribution to family earnings from spinning will be examined. Just about all of the millions of yards of woollen yarn that went into making English cloth had to be spun by women and children, but this activity has not been investigated to the extent that it deserves. Spinning was a skilled occupation where there was a great demand for the best quality product. Sources exist which make it possible to make general estimates of the amount of spinning needed in the economy, and its cost. This evidence shows that employment in spinning increased dramatically from the late seventeenth century, and continued to increase until there were probably over one million women and children employed in spinning by the mid-eighteenth century. In addition earnings increased to the extent whereby earnings from spinning could contribute over 30 per cent of household income for poorer families. This has implications for looking at trends in real wages over time, as well as for the concept of the industrious revolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historians have documented rising farm sizes throughout the period 1450-1850. Existing studies have revealed much about the mechanisms underlying the development of agrarian capitalism. However, we currently lack any consensus as to when the critical developments occurred. This is largely due to the absence of sufficiently large and geographically wide-ranging datasets but is also attributable to conceptual weaknesses in much of the literature. This article develops a new approach to the problem and argues that agrarian capitalism was dominant in southern and eastern England by 1700 but that in northern England the critical developments came later. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]