Daniel Harvey's ledger, 1623–1646, in context

Abstract

The double-entry ledger (1623–1646) of Daniel Harvey and Company was kept in a sealed wrought-iron chest from 1821 to 2001. It is a large, heavy book recording the business dealings of the substantial Harvey partnership under the management of Daniel Harvey, brother of the famous physician William Harvey. This article deals with selected features of the double-entry ledger, considered in the context of practice at the time.

Keywords:

• early account books
• double-entry bookkeeping
• mercantile accounts
• two-currencies accounts

Acknowledgements

I am most grateful to Stephen Freeth, Keeper of Manuscripts, to Philippa Smith, Deputy Keeper of Manuscripts, and to their colleagues in the Manuscripts Section of Guildhall Library for the friendly help they have given me. I am also indebted to two anonymous referees for their comments and suggestions.

Notes

See Bloomsbury Book Auctions, Documents from the Papers of Dr William Harvey (1587–1657), catalogue of auction, items 3 and 32.

Guildhall Library, City of London Corporation, Ms 35025. I have been advised that most of the archive and manuscript collections and archive services for the City of London are now concentrated at London Metropolitan Archives. Access to Harvey's ledger is now through the reading rooms at London Metropolitan Archives.

Dr Fabio Guisberti has very kindly given me this information.

Grassby (1994, 207). (Stephen Freeth has given me the precise wording.) Grandell (1944, 74) notes that the memorial (daybook) of Jonas Dykander of Viborg (Sweden), commenced in 1768, has the following inscription on its first page: ‘Omnia cum Deo & nihil sine Eo!’

Information given in catalogue entry. It seems that account books of the large business partnerships (such as the Peruzzi) engaged in both trading and banking operations in fourteenth-century Italy were among the earliest examples of ready-bound books made up of blank pages – ‘quite singularly for the period’, according to Professor Justin Steinberg (2007, 134): ‘The merchant-banking account books … were complete, intact, and bound even before coming into contact with ink. Indeed, their binding became an important marker in the various cross-references among [account] books used in the same company; contemporary books in one company [partnership] often refer to each other by their particular binding, such as “libro rosso”, “libro nero”, or “libro dell'asse” [with wood-reinforced covers]’.   There are references in surviving account books to the prices paid for blank books: see, for example, Melis (1962, 347) and Carrière (1973, 769). Melis records the purchase made in 1388 by a Datini partnership of several account books, including a ledger with a yellow cover made of leather. Carrière notes that in 1714 a Marseilles merchant bought several account books for a correspondent in Lisbon. The purchase included a ‘grand livre’ of 200 leaves, covered in sheepskin (coloured green) which, together with its ‘roubrique’ (index), cost 25 livres. A bookkeeper at that time was paid around 1600 livres a year.

The practice of having the owner's merchant's mark on the cover of the account book is indicated in some of the early accounting treatises. Thus, according to James Peele (1553, ch. 3), the ‘quaterne or greate booke of accomptes, ought to have on the outside, the owners marke’. According to Samuel Ricard (1709, XVII), who was born in France but for most of his life was a merchant in Amsterdam, the cover of the memorial should include, among other things, the merchant's ‘marque ordinaire’ – his merchant's mark. Daniel Harvey, as a merchant engaged in overseas trade, would have had a distinctive mark.

 Some portrait paintings of Dutch merchants in the seventeenth century include account books on which a merchant mark or monogram is clearly visible. See, for example, Pieter van Slingelandt's portrait of Johannes van Crombrugge, a textile merchant of Leiden (Ekkart 1995, 182–3 and plate p. 44). The cover of the book bears the title ‘Memoriael’, the date ‘Anno 1676’, and the merchant's mark. The painting is signed and dated 1677, on the fore-edge of the memorial. The merchant's mark consists of a vertical line on a base ‘XX’: the letter ‘C’ (for Crombrugge) is written across the line.

 Another example is Jan Steen's portrait of 1665 of Gerrit Gerritsz Schouten, a brewer of Alkmaar. The cover of an account book propped upright behind the sitter has the title ‘Journ.’, date ‘1665’, and monogram of the intertwined letters ‘G’ and ‘S’ (Chapman, Kloek, and Wheelock 1996, 193–4).

Quotations from the ledger are given in modern spelling.

No copy of the Oldcastle book is known to have survived. Its text was re-issued by John Mellis in 1588. Mellis added material much of which he had taken, without acknowledgement, from other English authors. However, wherever the Mellis text corresponds closely to the Pacioli text it is reasonable to assume that Mellis was reproducing Oldcastle. The word quaderno currently has several meanings, including that of account book.

The Oxford English Dictionary gives Mellis (1588) as the earliest use of the word ‘ledger’ in a commercial context. However, as noted above, the term was used in Weddington (1567).

‘… the Journall Parcells [entries] must bee transported into the Leager in such manner, that all what doth concerne one mans particular, must (under one accounts Title) bee gathered together, to wit, all his Debit parcells upon the Left-hand; and all his Credit parcells, upon the Right-hand of the Open-lying-Leager …’ (Dafforne 1635).

There were variant formulations, e.g. for accounts with plural titles, and abbreviations. In Genoa and Milan, merchants often used a kind of Latin in their ledgers. The common formulation for debit and credit entries, respectively, was ‘debet nobis’ (owes us) and ‘recepimus in’ (we received from). See, for example, the ledger (1456–1459) of Giovanni Piccamiglio (Heers 1959), which is alla veneziana.

The model set of account books is missing from the only known copy of the English version of Ympyn (1547).

The cancelling strokes are visible in several ledger pages reproduced photographically in Melis (1972). A good example is plate 140, with the text printed on page 434. It is from the ledger (1396–1397) of the ‘Società di Catalogna’ of Serrainerio and Dugnano, of Milan. The two sides of the particular account – an account of 20 sacks of wool bought in Valencia (Ratio sachorum 20 lane emptorum Vallenzie) – are on the same page of the ledger. The wool was disposed of at a profit. The account includes a crossola – debit entries are continued on the credit side. Both sides of the completed account are crossed through. The first entry on the debit side includes the words ‘debent dare’, and on the credit side ‘debent habere’ (cf. the Piccamiglio ledger, note 11 above).

Yamey, Edey, and Thomson (1963, 192, n. 16 and plates VIII and IX). See also ibid. (192–3), for a similar balance account of Sir Charles Peers.

Cocks ended his career in disgrace. He was accused of several misdemeanours by his superiors in Batavia. Among other things, he delayed sending his journals and ledger (relating to the affairs of the factory) to Batavia. When eventually he did send the two journals and the ‘balance of the leager to Jaccatra’, he noted that the ‘last balance cometh not out so right as I desire, for I had noe tyme to seek out the error’ because, he claimed, he and his principal clerk had had to go to the imperial court in Edo. Cocks's superiors reported in 1624 that ‘wee never saw a greater confusion’ than in his account books, ‘there being nothing perfected since the yeare 1617’ (Farrington 1991, 854, 958).

The compound journal entries in some treatises indicate the number of separate ledger accounts to be debited or credited: for example, ‘Pr. Cochenille: an 3 Creditores …’ (Rademann 1714, journal p. 8). Grandell gives several examples of this practice in account books in Finland (Grandell 1944, 81, 110, 203).

Several authors noted that the word ‘cash’ in English came from the Italian ‘cassa’ meaning ‘chest’. Thus, Stephen Monteage (1683, n.p.): ‘The word cash comes from the Italian word Cassa, signifying a Chest, and so the Money it self vulgarly is called Cash …’ According to North (1714, vocabulary), ‘CASH, is from the Italian Cassa or Chest, in which they keep their Specie of Money; and it is a pleasant Metonymy, when the Chest is full of Money’. Monteage noted in his preface that several words used in merchants’ accounts were ‘borrowed from other Languages, such as the words Leidger, Cash, Debtor, Creditor’. He states that he would have ‘coyned English [words] in their steads, but that I dare not arrogate being Author of new Terms …’

Merchandise and voyage accounts are discussed in Yamey (2000).

The Cotrugli manuscript is transcribed in Tucci (1990). The manuscript of 1458 was eventually published in Venice in 1573. Professor Tucci has demonstrated that the published version is seriously inaccurate and misleading. For example, the passage discussed in the text above is not included in the published version.

If the two-currencies account method was not used, it would have been necessary for a record to be kept, in foreign-currency units, outside the ledger in order to keep track of the debt owed to or by the foreign correspondent.