PREFACE. vii 



century supply market prices regularly, though the 

 number of articles quoted diminishes in the later periods. 

 There is a large and valuable collection of such newspapers 

 in the British Museum, known as the Burney Collection, 

 and I found it was chiefly from these that my father 

 had collected the prices he was going to publish. With 

 the exception therefore of a few private accounts, chiefly 

 in the first decade or two of the century, and some corn 

 prices from two colleges in Cambridge and one in Oxi 

 all the quotations that were tabulated were strk 

 market prices, and even these were chiefly from London. 

 i would of course have been easy to extract numerous 

 additional market quotations from the same collection ; 

 but such figures should be accepted with caution, except 

 when regulated or ascertained by law, as in the case of 

 corn. They are frequently vague, and there is no 

 lence that they represent real transactions. Even 

 where they are the figures at which actual sales took 

 place, we cannot be sure that they represent the true 

 average of the market ; and, worst of all, we can too 

 often only guess what the quality of the article sold may 

 have been. When therefore my friend Mr. Hugh C. 

 Fairfax-Cholmeley, who had recently succeeded to his 

 family estate in Yorkshire, invited me to come and 

 examine the papers at Brandsby Hall, I hoped to be 

 able to find among the deeds and other documents 

 there some domestic accounts which might corroborate 

 these newspaper prices. But my surprise and delight 

 may best be imagined when I found, in addition to 

 many other documents of great interest, an almost com- 

 plete collection of receipted bills from about the year 

 1740, when the real founder of the family, Francis 

 Cholmeley, began to build the manor house and started 



