ABSTRACT
Discussion of early accounting methods in England has been based very largely on the textbooks published in the second half of the sixteenth century. The few account books surviving from the early part of the century have not been subjected to detailed analysis and the general impression has been that, though they might be in bilateral form, the methods of book-keeping employed were both primitive and careless. A study of the ledger of the Bristol merchant, John Smythe, who traded to Spain and Gascony and whose account book spans the years 1538–1550, has shown that he was using a system of venture accounting very similar to that used in fifteenth-century Italy. 1
