The Evolution of the English Corn Market from the Twelfth to the Eighteenth Century

by Norman Scott Brien Gras

1915 · Harvard Economic Studies

Excerpt from The Evolution of the English Corn Market: From the Twelfth to the Eighteenth Century 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. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.