Before examining the early history of the law of bills of exchange, one must clear up a common misconception about early English commercial law in general. The starting point of most treatments of the early history of English mercantile law is the assumption that there were essentially no cases concerning commercial matters in the common law courts before the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries. Thomas Scrutton began his influential work on the history of mercantile law by noting that ‘if you read the law reports of the seventeenth century you will be struck with one very remarkable fact; either Englishmen of that day did not engage in commerce, or they appear not to have been litigious people in commercial matters, each of which alternatives appears improbable’. In the same vein, a mid-twentieth-century American treatise on the law of bills and notes notes that ‘from the 1000's to the 1600's scarcely a case, dealing with commercial paper, was reported in the common law courts of England, though these instruments were in use in England, as well as in Europe, as early as 1300’. A careful examination of the early English sources, however, belies this assumption. As J. H. Baker has shown, the common law courts regularly dealt with commercial matters from the earliest times.