When preparing a catalogue of the Scottish coins in the Ashmolean Museum, I quickly discovered the need for a book on Scots medieval prices. No such study then existed, so I set out to provide one. In so far as I have made any progress at all towards that goal, it is largely due to the help that I have received along the way. The earliest assistance came from the Pitlochry Colloquium for Scottish Medieval and Renaissance Studies, who adopted this research as one of their Economic History Projects, and from the University of Glasgow who elected me to a Newlands Visiting Fellowship. It soon became apparent that part-time and voluntary work was unlikely to make much impact on the task, but in 1986 the University of Oxford awarded me a one-year grant which permitted the appointment of Dr Elizabeth Gemmill (then Davies) as research assistant. On the basis of the work prepared in that first year, we were able to win two further years' funding from the Economic and Social Research Council. This essential support permitted the collection and analysis of a large body of data. Dr Gemmill worked from the first with a degree of enthusiasm and palaeographic expertise which quickly transformed her role from that of research assistant to one of co-author. Moreover, she has sustained that commitment, unpaid, throughout the four subsequent years which it has taken us to complete our task.

While research grants permitted the employment of Dr Gemmill, my own involvement in this project was only made possible by the support of my own institution, the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.