The Overseas Trade of Boston in the reign of Richard II

In the fourteenth century, Boston was not only the outport for the major city of Lincoln, but was also one of the largest and wealthiest English towns in its own right. Yet, because the townsmen of medieval Boston lacked formal powers of self-government, there is no surviving local borough archive for the period before its incorporation in 1545, which means that the town has been relatively neglected by historians.
Given this lack of a local archive, the port’s Exchequer customs accounts now constitute one of the main sources for the history of medieval Boston. However, very few of these accounts have yet appeared in print even though they offer fascinating insights into Boston’s trade with Scandinavia, the Baltic, the Low Countries and Gascony. They also provide important information about the merchants involved in overseas trade and about the work of the officials who administered the customs system.
This volume provides an English calendar of all of the surviving accounts of the port's customs and subsidy collectors from Richard II's reign (a time when Boston was still one of the leading ports in England) along with all the surviving counter-rolls compiled by the customs controllers as a check on the honesty of the collectors. In addition, it gives translations of a number of other documents preserved in the National Archives relating to Boston during this period which offer important information on the crown's regulation of overseas trade and the workings of the port's customs administration.