The Movements of Scottish Corn Prices in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries
VVW ith the present interest in the trends of corn prices in seventeenthand eighteenth-century England 1 it seems profitable to study those of Scotland for contrasts or parallel developments. It was recognized by Adam Smith that the material for this study was easily available in Scotland,2 and it is also unusually substantial and consistent. Every year, nominally at Candlemas, the sheriff courts of the country 'struck' and recorded the 'fiars prices', the prevailing prices of the most common sorts of grain, as a basis for the settlement of various fixed payments such as feu duties and rents, and also for legal processes. Numerous sets of these 'fiars' exist, either in print or manuscript,3 and can provide consecutive series for analysis. The fiars were supposed to be struck soon after Candlemas every year, but took the title of the crop of the preceding year which by then was in the market. Thus the Candlernas fiar for I 740 will have been settled at the end of February I74 I, by the memory or record of recent markets, to be used as a basis for payments which had become due in I740. Some counties (e.g. Lanarkshire until I 704 and Roxburghshire into the nineteenth century) also struck separate fiars at Lammas. The fiars prices were confined to grains which had actually been grown and bought inside the county, and were supposed to cover all the main types of 'victual'.4 Many surviving sets of fiars start with only 'bere' or 'bere' and 'meal' (which always means oatmeal) but enlarge in the seventeenth century to include wheat, malt, rye, and peas and beans, sometimes differentiating between the qualities of grain, or the districts where it has been grown.