ABSTRACT
There is more to economic history than counting sheep, and it need not be as sleep-inducing either. That’s not to say that there is no place at all for such counting. For instance, thanks to some clever statistical analysis of wool and cloth exports by a dedicated economic historian, we now know that there were over 15 million sheep in mid sixteenth-century England: about 6 for every single person. By comparison there are about 5 people for every sheep that grazes in England today. 1 But, as will be seen, there is a practically unlimited range of sources that can be used to study economic relations and material life in the early modern period, and many of these sources are not as amenable to statistical analysis as wool exports or livestock numbers.
