It is now well over a century since the appearance of Thorold Rogers' great study of English prices and wages, and fifty years since Beveridge was diverted from his study of price history to devote himself to his more famous Report. Why, then, has there been no similar price history for Scotland? The chief deterrent to such work has been the absence of sufficient data. While English historians are blessed with one of the largest body of surviving contemporary records in Europe, medieval Scottish documents are rare, and documents containing prices especially so. English price historians can reject large bodies of evidence, choosing instead only the best series of most reliable and comparable material, while the Scottish price historian seems in contrast often to be grasping at straws. Whereas the English evidence permits the calculation of mean prices and even of means of means, in Scotland there are often periods of years at a time for some commodities which have failed to yield a single price. The task had not been attempted in the past quite simply because it did not seem feasible. The rules drawn up by the International Scientific Committee on Price History in 1930 called for data to be collected only from a single city or limited area, with each commodity series drawn from the same set of records for the whole of the period studied. Within the terms of this council of perfection, no Scottish medieval price history can ever be written.

Nevertheless, it was an English analogy which led me to explore a different approach.