LONDON
G. BELL AND SONS, LTD.
YORK HOUSE, PORTUGAL STREET, W.C. 2
Seventeenth Impression
First published October, 1914
Printed in Great Britain by Jarrold & Sons, Limited, Norwich
[Pg v]The object of this book is to supply teachers and students of EnglishEconomic History with a selection of documents which may serve asillustrations of their subject. It should be read in conjunction withsome work containing a broad survey of English economic development,such as, to mention the latest and best example, Professor W.J. Ashley's"The Economic Organization of England."[1] The number of historical"source books" has been multiplied so rapidly in recent years that weought, perhaps, to apologise for adding one to their number. We venturedto do so because in the course of our work as teachers of EconomicHistory in the University Tutorial Classes organised by the Workers'Educational Association, we found it difficult to refer our students toany single book containing the principal documents with which they oughtto be acquainted. That Economic History cannot be studied apart fromConstitutional and Political History is a commonplace to which wesubscribe; and we are not so incautious as to be tempted into adiscussion of what exactly Economic History means. It is sufficient forour purpose that a subject which is called by that name is beingincreasingly studied by University students, and that while theprincipal documents of English Constitutional History are available inthe works of Stubbs, Prothero, Gardiner and Grant Robertson, there is nobook, as far as we know—except Professor Pollard's "The Reign of HenryVII. from Contemporary Sources"—which illustrates English economicdevelopment in a similar way. We are far from comparing our own minnowwith these Tritons. But it may perhaps do some service till morecompetent authors take the field. It is hardly necessary for us toapologise for translating our documents into English, and for[Pg vi]modernizing the spelling throughout. We are likely not to be alone inthinking that it would be a pity if a passing acquaintance with thematerials of mediæval economic history were confined to those who canread Latin and Norman-French.
A word of explanation as to the selection and arrangement of ourextracts may perhaps be excused. Our object was not to produce a work oforiginal research, but to help students of economic history to see itmore intelligently by seeing it through the eyes of contemporaries.Hence, though a considerable number of our documents are published herefor the first time, we have not consciously followed the lure of theunprinted, and have chosen our extracts not because they were new, butbecause they seemed to illustrate some important aspect of our subject.For the same reason we have not confined ourselves entirely to"documents" in the strict acceptation of that term, but have includedselections from such works as Roger of Hoveden, The Libel of EnglishPolicy, The Commonweal of this Realm of England, Hakluyt's Voyages, andthe Tours of Defoe and Arthur Young, when they seemed to throw lightupon points which could not easily be illustrated otherwise. Thearrangement of our selections caused us some trouble. It is, perhaps,hardly necessary to urge that a document must be studied with refere