The Evolution of the English Corn Market - From the Twelfth to the Eighteenth Century #271826

The following essay, based upon a study of printed materials and manuscript sources in the English archives, had its beginning in a class thesis and in its present form is an expansion of a doctoral dissertation submitted at Harvard University. Such an extended treatment of the early corn (grain) trade of England as is here presented is not to be justified on the ground of a lack of general information concerning the subject. The use, however, of new manuscript materials and the adoption of new points of View seem to form an adequate basis for a fresh study of the subject. The chief of these manuscript sources are the communications between London and the central government in the Tudor and Stuart periods, the account books of various London companies, and the national customs accounts and port books. From the second and third of these sets of documents have been compiled statistics of corn prices and of the corn trade, both foreign and domestic. In the compilation of these statistics, as indeed in other parts of the work, I have had in mind both the old interest in corn legis lation, to which one chapter is exclusively devoted, and the new interest in market development, with which the other chapters deal at length.