Mr. Aecroid’s Tables: Economic Calculations and Social Customs in the Early Modern Countryside

Abstract

In the 1610s and 1620s, a new computational technology took hold in England: printed mathematical tables for compound interest and discounting (“present value”) problems. Historians of finance and accounting have long recognized these paper tools as predecessors of essential modern techniques like “discounted cash flow.” Yet the history of these tables remains hazy. What did early seventeenth-century users do with them? Who used them? Why did they appear when they did? This article turns to one obscure but influential text—Ambrose Acroyd’s Tables of Leasses and Interest (1628)—as a guide to these questions. Two key facts emerge. First, despite the prominence of similar calculations in financial applications today, these early tables were not confined to England’s nascent financial sector. Rather, their foremost use related to agricultural property, specifically in assessing certain payments (“fines”) landlords charged tenants for farm leases. Second, among the leading “early adopters” were institutions of the Church of England. Amidst the inflation of the early modern “price revolution,” bishops, cathedrals, and colleges confronted a complex of economic, political, and social pressures. Mathematical tables like Acroyd’s emerged out of long-running conflicts between church landlords and tenants over how to determine just and reasonable fines on church lands. Discounting tables were thus not tools of instrumental rationality evincing a new capitalist mentality, but tools of social accommodation and products of the era’s “economy of obligation.” This early modern tale offers a vivid example of how and why one community turned to a mathematical algorithm to resolve conflicts about fairness.