PREFACE. 



Revolution would have been impossible in such a country. 

 But they were no Squire Westerns, or Tony Lumpkins. 

 The books entered as bought are few, but they are 

 mostly of a high order ; and if the Squire read the 

 whole of Guicciardini, to whom he is expressly stated 

 to have subscribed, he must have been an assiduous 

 student. 



These then are the sources from which I have taken 

 the additional prices, and I hope that they will not 

 only serve to illustrate the life of an English country 

 gentleman's family of the time, but will also supply the 

 student of economic history with information about the 

 conditions of other persons and things. They contain an 

 almost unbroken series of weekly prices of beef for some 

 forty years, and I am confident that such information has 

 never before been published. The tables of wages, more 

 especially those in which the number of days worked per 

 week for a year or longer, will, I trust, prove useful. 

 Prices of tea, many of which have been drawn from the 

 Brandsby and Castle Howard papers, have not been given 

 in any previous volume of this History. There is also 

 much information to be got from a study of the articles 

 of wearing apparel, especially in that period in which the 

 new inventions began to affect prices. In one other re- 

 spect this volume differs from previous volumes. It cannot 

 be too often insisted on that the years described in this 

 book are cereal years beginning in October of the calendar 

 equivalent, and the sequence of months will, I hope, remind 

 the student of the system which has been adopted. But 

 in order to fix dates more definitely, the day and the 

 month on which any purchase was ordered or paid for are 

 given in this volume wherever they can be found. The 

 advantages of this system, which I am sure would have 



