In Scotland, the history of prices and wages has until very recently been very much neglected. For the middle ages and the period up to the Union of the Crowns in 1603, the main nineteenth-century work is R.W. Cochran-Patrick's great volumes, Records of the coinage of Scotland, which have provided ever since a mine of information on debasement. The record societies, and the Scottish Record Office itself, printed a series of sources from which price quotations can be culled, of which the most useful beyond doubt are the Exchequer rolls of Scotland. From these the twentieth-century historians of mediaeval Scotland, whose concerns like those of their predecessors have been almost exclusively political, have made a number of observations on price trends incidental to their main purpose. Recent, more detailed work on the Scottish currency has been undertaken for the middle ages by Stewart, Metcalf, Scott and others and for the price revolution of the sixteenth century by Challis. Nevertheless, the course of commodity prices and wages even in the very critical sixteenth century lacked systematic investigation: there is no volume on the economic or political history of Scotland in that period which contains as much as a single table or graph relative to price history, and scarcely any that contain more than a paragraph or two of generalised comment.