This study is based upon a detailed listing of individual Scottish prices, but the evidence thus accumulated requires some degree of organization and analysis if it is to be more readily understood. Accordingly, each commodity is considered below in turn, and the more reliable prices have been averaged in chronological periods to reveal the likely trends for each commodity more easily. By the 1460s these averages fall readily into ten-year periods, but before that date the incidence of the data varies from one commodity to another, so in the tables and graphs which follow it is important to note the time periods covered by each grouping before 1460. It is also important to realize that for the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries the numbers of individual prices behind these mean figures are often lamentably small.

Before Scots debasement begins in 1367 prices in England and Scotland can be compared directly with one another, without currency exchange complications. In the discussion which follows there is a table setting out such an Anglo-Scottish price comparison for the period before 1367 for most commodities. After 1367 Scots mean prices are calculated both in actual money terms, and after adjusting the money price to allow for Scottish debasement producing a figure more directly comparable with English money and prices. In fact in the absence of information about the exact nature of the coins involved in any payment this process can never be more than a most approximate correction. Nevertheless, the value of the Anglo-Scottish comparison is such that the process seems worthwhile despite the inevitable inaccuracies it may entail.