Abstract

Prices are a critical measure of the workings of any money economy. They tell us about the impact of weather and climate, plague, war, demographic change, money supply, access to markets and trade. Most of what we think we know about the behaviour of prices in later medieval England is based on evidence from the midlands, East Anglia, and the south. We also tend to take the figures within existing price series as ‘given’. This paper, based on research in the archives of Durham Priory, offers a new approach. It looks beyond the figures themselves to the circumstances of the transactions that produced them such as the relationships between the parties involved and the effect on prices of quantities, quality, processing, and carriage. Some prices were annual valuations of renders in kind made by the monastic landlord in light of harvest conditions; others were fixed by contracts lasting over several years; others yet were the subject of commercial negotiations. The behaviour of all prices, however, shows that the economic history of the northeast, while certainly subject to many of the influences experienced in other regions, nevertheless has its own distinctive story to tell.