Description

A new unused book.

About the book >.>.> First though Bristol was clearly the second trading port of England in the later seventeenth century and its merchants were the dominating group this is the only Bristol merchant’s ledger of the period known to survive. There is no other source which gives such a detailed picture of a Bristol merchant’s trading at this time. It is especially valuable because Speed was engaged both in the old trade with Southern Europe and the new with the Americas. More fundamentally the ledger also supplies an insight into the rationale and ethos of overseas trading. Moreover the detailed picture which it affords over nine years can be fitted into an outline of Speed’s trade over forty years. In fact Speed is by far the most fully documented of all the merchants and of all the Quaker leaders in the city where both so flourished in the second half of the seventeenth century. The historical significance of his ledger thus parallels that of John Smythe another man of consequence over a century earlier (Bristol Record Society vol. XXVIII 1974). The Ledger itself is one of the main sources for the life of the man as well as the merchant. This is not as surprising for a seventeenth-century ledger as it might be today. There was no formal distinction between business and private life. Household expenses were entered in the same account with business overheads. Nevertheless there can be few ledgers with such a story to tell: Speed’s abortive retirement his fourth marriage his spectacularly disappointing heir not to mention the mystery of the sinister soap. The Ledger is an unusual human document as well as a business record. (MP)