The practice, common throughout much of the seventeenth century and the whole of the eighteenth, whereby sheriffs held annual courts to determine the prevailing price of the commonest sorts of grain in their counties, has long been appreciated by scholars attempting to chart the movement of prices in early modern Scotland. Termed ‘fiars’, many of these price series survive, and some provide an almost unbroken record of grain prices from the mid seventeenth to the twentieth centuries. The fiars were not finally abolished until the Local Government (Scotland) Act of 1973. However, although apparently providing what is beyond doubt the most comprehensive and uniform source on Scottish grain prices available (tables 3.1–3.19), they also pose interpretative difficulties. A detailed appraisal of their purpose, method of calculation and value as a guide to actual market prices is clearly necessary.

The derivation and meaning of the word ‘fiars’ and the origin of the practice of ‘striking’ such prices are both obscure. The word itself seems to mean ‘market price’. Identical in meaning to Middle English ‘feor’ and Old French ‘feur’, it is derived from the Latin ‘forum’ in the sense of a market, and hence market price. However, it is clear that sheriffs did not hold courts to strike the county fiars prices just as an academic exercise. In one sense, they were, in the words of a not disinterested critic, ‘conventional prices struck for a particular purpose’.