During the fifteenth century the style of legal recording in Colchester changed to the historian's disadvantage. From the 1430s it became unusual for clerks to give details of pleading in court, and the court rolls consequently become poorer as a source of economic information. It is rarely possible to distinguish between debts for wages, for rent, for purchases or for loans, and there is no longer the wealth of evidence relating to prices and commodities which is available for the years when Colchester developed most rapidly. Even the number of pleas of debt becomes more difficult to establish between 1442 and 1482 as a result of labour-saving reforms in the listing of new pleas. The latter obstacle, however, may be overcome, and Table 14.1 shows changes in the number of pleas of debt between 1381/2 and 1524/5. The amount of litigation for debt, having reached a peak in the 1380s and 1390s, contracted sharply in the fifteenth century, particularly during the 1480s, so that the number of pleas of debt between 1491 and 1525 was only 30 per cent of what it had been at its highest point.

These figures greatly distort any changes in the level of Colchester's trade during the period they cover. This is not, however, because of any decrease in the efficiency of the courts. The surprising decline in litigation for debt between the late fourteenth century and the early fifteenth may in fact have been due to improvements in the courts' speed of operations which were introduced at a time of extraordinarily voluminous litigation in 1388.