On the Authorship and Dating of 'For the Understanding of the Exchange'

Focuses on the authorship and dating of the memorandum "For the Understanding of the Exchange." The most telling argument against attributing the memorandum to the author Thomas Gresham is that its whole line of thought runs counter to Gresham's point of view. The treatise argues that the only "naturall exchaunge" is at mint par, making allowances for costs. The Huntington copy of the memorandum apparently contains more material than other copies. The two introductory pages are from a different quire of paper than the rest of the manuscript and bear a different watermark. Furthermore, numbering of the pages begins after the first two pages. The memorandum is full of anachronisms which throw doubt on any effort to infer a specific date between 1553 and 1576. The most glaring is the use of a balance-of-payments account for the year 1354 in a paper written two hundred or more years later. But of all the people who might have written the memorandum, Richard Martin is the only one to be firmly connected with it by documentary evidence of any significance. To sum up, even if the memorandum is not actually by Gresham, it incorporates most of his ideas and suggestions.