ABSTRACT
INTRODUCTION This paper will be concerned mainly with early insurance in and around the Royal Exchange, but additional material will be considered where relevant. The geographical area under discussion, just to the south of the Royal Exchange and Lombard Street, can be seen at the lower left corner of the detail from John Rocque's Plan of the Cities of London and Westminster reproduced as Fig. 1 on p. 5.This is a small area: one can walk around it comfortably in six minutes.The events that took place in this small area span a long period of time. The importance of the Royal Exchange and Lombard Street to the history of insurance can hardly be overstated, but some of the developments that these two places stimulated occurred outside the period which is the focus of the essays published in this volume. Nonetheless, the bulk of the following discussion revolves around the general state of insurance, and matters affecting insurance, within the Elizabethan and Stuart periods.
