22 INTRODUCTORY. 



John Houghton, apothecary, who kept a shop successively in 

 St. Bartholomew Lane, near the Royal Exchange, and at the 

 Golden Fleece, Gracechurch Street, and the corner of Little 

 Eastcheap. Houghton is plainly very proud of his fellowship, 

 for he never signs his name without the three initials. I am 

 certainly under great obligations to this worthy tradesman, 

 who was the first person to edit a scientific weekly paper, to 

 publish a weekly price list of principal articles, of stocks and 

 shares, and to discover the advantages of advertising. There 

 is no more instructive periodical at the end of the seventeenth 

 century than Houghton's weekly collection of husbandry and 

 trade. He began it in 1692, and after a short interval, during 

 which it was suspended, he continued it till near the end of 

 September, 1703. Then, as the honest man informs us, his 

 business had so greatly increased, that he was forced to 

 relinquish his weekly paper. Of these newspapers, the 

 Bodleian Library fortunately has a perfect collection. 



Houghton's practice was to give a copy of his weekly sheets 

 to any one who would keep him regularly supplied with 

 weekly prices and weekly commercial news. He was in the 

 immediate neighbourhood of the city markets for goods and 

 stocks, and though I have thought it wise to print his records 

 in a separate form, I have had many opportunities of testing 

 their accuracy. I get from Houghton, not only corn prices, 

 and generally agricultural produce, but also a weekly price 

 of Bank of England stock within three weeks of the charter 

 being signed, and of other stocks, such as the East India Com- 

 pany and the Hudson's Bay Company, and even the discount 

 on Bank bills and the price of bullion, the former in 1696, 

 the latter in 1693-6. Besides these, he chronicles weekly the 

 foreign exchanges between London, and the principal centres 

 of commerce in Europe l . 



In each of these weekly papers there is an essay on some 

 subject of public interest, as agriculture, the writer being 



1 Some of these have been dealt with in my ' First Nine Years of the Bank of 

 England ; ' University Press, Oxford. 



