Food prices and the standard of living in London in the ‘century of revolution’, 1580‐1700

This article presents a new price series for seventeenth-century London and uses the data to construct the first cost of living index for the capital for that period. Comparison with the Phelps Brown Hopkins (PBH) series suggests that although short-term variations were very similar, there is some suggestion that prices in London were more inflationary after the middle of the seventeenth century than in the PBH series. A new London real wage series, also presented, is consequently less buoyant than that constructed by PBH for their southern building craftsmen.