medieval-atlas/economic-development/326

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Prices and wages The fiars 'struck' each Candlemas by the sheriff courts provide an unparallelled series of seventeenth-and eighteenth-century grain prices. Established by ajury oflandowners, farmers and merchants, these referred to, and took the date of, the preceding year's crop. Their purpose was to regulate the settlement of debts, the conversion of rents in kind to cash, and the discharge of any other payments Scots shillings per boil Oatmeal 100 1550 1570 1590 1610 1710 years Scots shillings per boil 200 Bear 100 1550 1570 1590 1610 1630 1710 years based upon that crop. Surviving fiars seldom pre-date the 1620s, although isolated examples from a number of counties show that they were being struck as early as the mid-sixteenth century. Only for Fife is there to be found anything approaching an unbroken series charting the movement of grain prices during the second half of the sixteenth century. 1650 1670 1690 Fiars for oatmeal and bear, Fife Carefully regulated markets were one ofthe earliest features of Scottish burgh organisation. The quality and price of a great many goods and services were subject. to intermittent legislation as burgh officials strove to protect jealously guarded privileges and counter the medieval crimes of forestalling and regrating. Wheat bread, ale and tallow were of particular concern and were subject to annual price statutes for much of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These ostensibly set prices on the basis of the cost of the raw materials from which they were made; a process most explicit in the case of wheat bread. Tables were produced allowing burgh officials, after having established the price at which wheat was commonly sold, to read off the price at which wheat bread should be sold. Such tables were in use as early as the twelfth century and find counterparts in England and Ireland. The same prin~ ciple was used to fix the price of ale and, in Aberdeen at least, was probably also used to set the price of tallow. It is for Edinburgh and Glasgow that the most complete series are available. Predating the emergence ofregular fiars prices, these burgh statutes are invaluable as the only major price series covering the sixteenth-century price revolution. They do, however, demand some care as it is uncertain how strictly they were adhered to or to what extent they were subject to political influence. AGi 326

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