Prices in England, 1170-1750

Abstract

Understanding the movement of prices must be one of the most fundamental of the economic historian’s tasks, but it remains one of the most difficult. This article seeks to understand the movement of English prices over the whole period 1170 to 1750, which saw two great episodes of inflation, each followed by long decades of price stability. It is argued that monetary factors exercised the most important influence on the general price level, though of course the size of the economy was determined above all by demographic changes. This article also argues that medieval and early modern prices behaved in similar ways, which have much in common with the behaviour of prices today. We are fortunate that the basic spadework on English prices was done long ago. Building on the foundations laid by Thorold Rogers in the nineteenth century, David Farmer and Peter Bowden have provided invaluable and concise statements of how commodity prices behaved in the medieval and early modern period.1 E. H. Phelps Brown and Sheila Hopkins provided an index of prices for a cost of living basket of consumables for the whole period from the thirteenth century to the mid twentieth century. A composite index of this sort describes the behaviour of the general level of prices, within which the prices of individual commodities may move differently relative to one another. Phelps Brown and Hopkins also investigated the movement of wages over the same extended period, so the price series thus enabled them to address not only nominal wages, but also vital questions about what nominal wages would have enabled the wage-earner to buy.2 In more recent times both Gregory Clark and Robert Allen have adjusted their baskets to propose their own indexes, and both of these scholars have made the prices series on which their indexes are based available online.3 They also offer nominal prices converted to weight of silver prices to facilitate comparison with other countries and over long periods of time.