vi PREFACE. 



enquiry by men who have been constrained to deal 

 with those formidable facts, which I trust I shall 

 show to have been the inevitable outcome of what 

 occurred during the hundred and twenty years of my 

 enquiry. But little or no notice is taken of the events 

 which I have to dwell on. The times were too stirring. 

 We do know that a great plague occurred in 1665, 

 and a great fire in 1666, but the best information we 

 have of the former is from an imaginary narrative 

 written a generation and a-half later by Defoe ; and 

 though the latter could not escape comment, the fullest 

 knowledge which we get of it is from Dutch contem- 

 poraries. I am not aware, and I have searched pretty 

 carefully, that any English writer makes any allusion 

 to the great famine of 1661-2, or to the prolonged 

 dearth which characterised the five years 16461650. 

 But even in the fifteenth century, dark as the annals 

 of that century are, the famine of 1438 is duly com- 

 mented on. 



The first and most obvious economical feature of the 

 period before me is the effect which the influx of the 

 precious metals from the New World had on prices. 

 It appears that this operation was completed at about 

 the middle of the seventeenth century, from which time 

 till the last quarter of the eighteenth but little change 

 in prices, other than can be assigned to minor but 

 ascertainable causes of cheapness or dearness, as for 

 example economies in the process of production, can 

 be discerned. During the seventeenth century also 

 there was an increasing demand for a gold currency, 



