Since early times, agriculture has been pivotal to England's economy. This is the sixth in a magisterial seven-volume, eight-piece compilation by the economist James E. Thorold Rogers (1823–90), which represents the most complete record of produce costs in England between the thirteenth and eighteenth centuries. Drawing on a variety of sources including college archives and the Public Record Office, Rogers documents the fluctuating prices of commodities such as livestock, wheat, hay, wool, textiles and labour in a time of great economic change, when the growing economy of the early middle ages was shaken by famine and the Black Death, and then gradually recovered towards the Agrarian Revolution. First published in 1887, Volume 6 presents in tabular form the data from 1583 to 1702, showing the prices of a range of products in towns and cities across the country, which are discussed in essays in Volume 5.