Note on the Calendar, Money, and Translations

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NOTE ON THE CALENDAR, MONEY, AND TRANSLATIONS From 1700 until 1752, Britain’s Julian calendar ran eleven days behind the Gregorian system used in France and much of the rest of western Europe. Moreover, in Britain, the start of the year was often dated from 25 March. Britain switched to the Gregorian calendar in 1752, skipping the eleven days between 2 and 14 September, and simultaneously adopted 1 January as the start of the year. I have cited all dates as they appear in original sources, but to avoid confusion, I alter the year where necessary to conform to the Gregorian style. In the eighteenth century, monetary sums in both France and Britain were denominated in monies of account known as the livre tournois in France and the pound sterling in Britain. The actual coins in circulation, which varied widely in metallic content, and were often foreign in origin, did not conform to the livres, sols, and deniers, or the pounds, shillings, and pence of the monies of account. But the value of the latter in terms of silver or gold was strictly regulated in law, and prices and contracts were designated in these monies of account. From the late 1720s through the mid-1780s, the exchange rate of the livre tournois to sterling hovered around twenty-one livres to the pound. Before the stabilisation of the French currency in the late 1720s, frequent official manip- ulation of the silver value of the livre led to widely ranging exchange rates, making cross-Channel equivalents difficult to specify without attention to exchange rate listings in the contemporary commercial press. While the modern reader might wish to see direct equivalents for the many sums mentioned in the book in connection with trade and public borrowing, such equivalents would generally be misleading. They would have to account xxvi NOTE ON THE CALENDAR, MONEY, AND TRANSLATIONS not only for changes in the buying power of money but vast differences in the size and structure of economies. Instead of offering direct equivalents in the text, I have tried, where possible, to indicate contemporary scales of value. As a very rough indicator of the value of eighteenth-century sums of money, a yearly income of £50 in the early eighteenth century would have placed a family comfortably in the top 20 per cent of earners in Britain. A century later, £100 might have been necessary to achieve the same status. In 1734, Jacob Vanderlint suggested that £500 per annum was necessary to live as a ‘gentleman’ in London.1 Far less would have been adequate in France, especially in the provinces, where the cost of living was lower than in Britain. A noble family in France could live gently for less than 5,000 livres a year. The labouring poor, meanwhile, might have eked out a living in France on 200–300 livres a year.2 All translations are my own unless otherwise indicated. xxvii.

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