MALYNES, Gerard [with] DAFFORNE, Richard.

Third edition of Malynes’ popular vade mecum for merchants, first published 1622, including the first edition of Dafforne’s examples of double-entry bookkeeping ‘after the Italian manner.’ This is the most complete state in its earliest form (STC 17224 state 2.a.), with the cancel title-page to the first part present and the second part dated 1635, as opposed to the reset state dated 1651; some copies have neither the cancel title nor the second part (cf. Wing D102).

Gerald Malynes was one of the first English authors to integrate the concept of natural law into economics, which was a crucial part of the development of modern economic science. He believed that the lex mercatoria was not a system of local customs but was an inherent set of principles, the chief of these being foreign exchange. Malynes operated in the Low Countries and later in England, speculated in mining and also advised the government on questions such as the weight of cloth. Malynes’ scheme to introduce new farthing tokens as small coins currency failed when traders in most counties refused to accept them, and his backers insisted on paying him in his own worthless tokens. His treatise covers financial arithmetic, weights and measures used on the Continent and the Indies for cloth and precious metals and stones, maritime insurance, mining, currency and exchange, laws governing monopolies, bankruptcy and manufacture, maritime law, etc. Malynes describes the commodities of the West-Indian and American trade: gold and silver, sugar, indico, ginger, pearls and precious stones, logwood, tobacco, cotton, salt and medicines, etc. He also criticises the slow progress in the colonies of Bermuda and Virginia and describes his own preference for plantations in Newfoundland, and predicts that the Spanish will colonise the newly-discovered Australian territories, to great advantage.  

Richard Dafforne was an accountant who had also practised in the Low Countries and ran a bookkeeping school in Northampton, the title-page demonstrating his ability to teach accounting in both English and Dutch. The first part, an introduction to the science of accounting, credit and debt, is in the form of a didactic dialogue between ‘Philo-Mathy’ and ‘School-Partner.’ Following the method of the fifteenth-century Franciscan monk Luca Pacioli (d. 1517), Dafforne stated that the necessary tools for bookkeeping were the waste-book, in which basic transactions are first noted; the journal, in which each transaction is assigned creditor to one account and debtor to another; and the ledger, in which each transaction is listed twice, once under credits and once under debits, so that in the final calculation the total debits should equal the total credits, thus ensuring there were no arithmetical errors. The mock waste-books, journals and ledgers are dated and signed from London and Amsterdam, the first including transactions with merchants in Lisbon, Rouen and Danzig for cloth, sugar, pepper and figs, etc.