The Earliest Books on Bookkeeping 1494 to 1683

At the time the pamphlet was written, ICAEW had been collecting early books on accounting for over sixty years. This text was prepared to accompany the books when they were exhibited, providing an outline and general picture of the origins of double-entry bookkeeping.

The origins of modern accounting, based on double-entry bookkeeping, go back certainly to the fourteenth century probably much earlier. Examples from the books of the commune of Genoa kept "after the manner of banks" show an early form of double-entry from about 1327. The Datini ledgers of Florence show the use of rather primitive double-entry in vertical form until about 1380 when the lateral form was introduced. The earliest Venetian accounts to have survived are advanced double-entry in lateral form superior to both Genoese and Florentine practice. These are the ledger records of possessions of citizens of Padua which Venice had just annexed and they are dated 1407. It was these "methods of Venice" which Fra Luca Pacioli set out at length in his great work on mathematics which was published in 1494.

Luca Pacioli was born in 1445 at Borgo San Sepolcro in the Duchy of Urbino in the territory of Florence. He studied in the famous library of the Count Federigo of Urbino and at the age of about 20 went to Venice as house tutor to the three sons of Antonio de Rompiasi in the Giudecea, a merchant. He continued his studies while in Venice and travelled for Rompiasi in ships on trading ventures.

The famous artist Piero della Francesca, 1416-1492, was also born at Borgo and he gave to Pacioli much encouragement in his early years. In this age artists, architects and mathematicians had much in common. A realism of perspective and proportion was being introduced to paintings, sculpture and buildings which, added to their skill in the use of light, colour and form, produced the masterpieces of the times. Another even more famous artist friend of Pacioli's was Leonardo da Vinci whom he met in Milan in 1496. Pacioli was professor of mathematics at the university in Milan and already by 1498 he was in close friendship with da Vinci. And it was da Vinci who drew the regular bodies which are such a feature of Pacioli's Divina Proportione.

In 1494 Pacioli was back in Venice to supervise the production of his Summa de Arithmetica¹ which included a chapter giving the first published exposition of double-entry bookkeeping. He was already well known as a teacher of mathematics. He had lectured and was later appointed professor at Perugia University, he had lectured in Rome, where he lodged with the great architect Leon vlattista degli Alberti, and he had been professor of mathematics at the University of Naples. He was already on the way to becoming the leading teacher of mathematics of his day.

His second printed work, the Latin version of the Elements of Euclid,² was published in 1509. Only summaries of this classic had existed previously and the current work was the translation into Latin of Giovanni Campano of Novara, made in the 13th century but printed in 1482 by Ratdolt. Pacioli's is superior with new figures and supplemented by a valuable commentary.

The third work was De Divina Proportione.³ He describes the divine proportion as the proportion derived from the division of a segment into two parts, in such a way that the square on the greater part equals the rectangle having as its sides the whole segment and the smaller part. Known to Pythagoras and his contemporaries it was given the name the golden section in the 19th century. In this divine proportion Pacioli detects an aesthetic principle found in architectural forms, in the human body and in properly designed capital letters of the Latin alphabet.

To return to Pacioli's Summa, this was the first general work printed which dealt with mathematics and it included the first instructions for double-entry bookkeeping. After the dedication to Guidobaldo, Duke of Urbino, comes a long list of acknowledgments to Euclid, Böethius, Leonardo of Pisa, Jordannes Nemorarius, Sacrobosco (the Englishman, Holywood), Regiomontanus and others. It contains the first printed demonstration of the formula of Heron, the first examples of calculus and of a calculated logarithm. In the section on algebra he solves a complete equation of the fourth degree but says that none higher than the second degree can be solved by general rule ".... just as there is as yet no method of squaring the circle."

Pacioli did not invent anything and he is at pains in all his writings, in the Summa de Arithmetica, in his Divina Proportione and in his Euclid, to make the fullest acknowledgments to the work of others which he presented and to those who helped and encouraged him. With regard to bookkeeping, which is dealt with in the Summa in Section IX Treatise XI, Pacioli writes "This treatise will adopt the system used in Venice, which is certainly to be recommended above all others." No doubt there were before 1494 manuscripts used to teach bookkeeping and there will have been instruction manuals in counting houses of large concerns. There may have been in Venice one manuscript which was superior and better known than all the others which Pacioli followed. But it was in the main Pacioli's description of the methods of Venice which became the fountain head of all the books on accounting that followed for the next two hundred years.

In spite of his university professorships, his lecturing and his teaching, Pacioli was basically a practical man and the Summa was a practical book. In the first place it was quite unusually written in Italian whereas most learned books of the day used Latin. His purpose was to make it useful to those who would not necessarily be able to follow Latin through lack of a formal education. In the second place it was intended to improve the method of teaching mathematics and to make available subject matter and examples by which standards could be raised. Business arithmetic, foreign exchange and interest, algebra and geometry all found their place with various practical problems. Autobiographical stories and anecdotes enliven his examples and theological moralizing appears frequently as in most books of the times. He joined the Francisan Order in about 1475 and he writes as a deeply religious man and a devoted servant of the Order.

In the contemporary painting by Jacopo de Barbari⁽⁴⁾ in the National Museum in Naples, Fra Luca Pacioli is portrayed in his friar's garb demonstrating Chapter XIII of Euclid. The young nobleman with Pacioli is Guidobaldo who had become Duke of Urbino at the age of 10 in 1482. At the time of the portrait he would be about twenty and Pacioli about fifty years of age. It is to Guidobaldo that he addresses the long dedicatory letter in the front of the Summa but it was to Federigo, Guidobaldo's father, that Pacioli owed so much. It was he who built the palace which still stands at Urbino and who founded the famous library in which Pacioli first studied as a young man. On the table to his left is a book, closed and bound in red with silver clasps. This was the standard type of binding used for manuscript volumes in the collection made for the Duke's library at Urbino and it may well be that the volume in the picture is meant to be a copy of the Summa.

Antwerp was the first centre to be invaded by the new Venetian system of accounts. Here Ympyn's "Nieuwe Instructie" ⁵ was published in 1543 with a French version⁶ in the same year and an English one with the title "A Notable and very excellente woorke . . . ." in 1547.⁷ All these versions of Ympyn were printed and published in Antwerp which had by this time succeeded Venice as the most important trading centre of Europe. Another English work of 1543, A Profitable Treatyce,⁸ was printed in London but no copy has survived. It was reproduced in 1588 by John Mellis in his "Briefe Instruction".⁹

The first book in German to follow Pacioli was Schweicker's Zwifach Buchhalten printed at Nurnberg in 1549.¹⁰ The earliest one in Spanish was a translation of a French book by Mennher von Kempten printed in Barcelona in 1565¹¹ and this was followed by the wholly Spanish book, "Libro de Caxa" by Solorzano, Madrid, 1590.¹² Finally one was published in Silesia, "Arithmetica oder Rechenbuch" by Schultz printed at Lignitz in 1611.¹³ It is no reflection on Scotland that their first was Colinson's "Idea Rationaria" printed in 1683 in Edinburgh¹⁴ because it is known that a copy of another book printed in Antwerp, Weddington's "Breffe Instruction" of 1567,¹⁵ was in use in Scotland long before that date.

After the first book in English, "A Profitable Treatyce ...." by Hugh Oldcastle, 1543, which has not survived, and the second one, the English Ympyn printed in Antwerp of which only one copy has survived, the third was James Peele's "The Maner and fourme . . ." of 1553.¹⁶ Both of the last two of these first three books in English were printed by Richard Grafton. Born in 1507, he became a very prosperous citizen of London, Treasurer of Christ's Hospital, City Councillor and Member of Parliament.

When he was a young man, Grafton fished in very dangerous waters, how dangerous it was is clear by the fate of others with whom he associated. At 19 he was apprenticed to a grocer and in due course became a member of the Grocers' Company. In 1536 his friend William Tyndale was executed at Vilvorde in the Low Countries and his translation of the New Testament from the Greek and Hebrew was not the least of the crimes of which he was accused. And yet in 1537, Grafton and his great collaborator Whitchurch were in Antwerp to arrange the printing of a new Bible in English based on the Tyndale and Coverdale translations. In 1538 he was in Paris with Whitchurch supervising the reprinting of the New Testament and this was published the same year, the first book to bear Grafton's name. He was, with Whitchurch, the publisher—not the printer. However before the task was finished they came to the notice of the Inquisition and had to flee, no doubt speeded on their way by thoughts of Tyndale's fate.

Thomas Cromwell managed to get the presses and type back to London and in 1539 they were set up by Grafton in the "house of the Late Grey Freers." It was in this way that he became a printer and the work of printing the Matthews or Great Bible — ordered later to be installed in every church throughout the country — proceeded. Between 1539 and 1541 there were seven editions, half with Grafton's name and half with Whitchurch's. This work must have brought him in close touch with Archbishop Cranmer and with Bishop Ridley, who later in 1552, preached the famous sermon which inspired Edward VI to establish Christ's Hospital.

It was in 1547 that Grafton printed the English translation of Ympyn, using a most elaborate title-page border subsequently used, and most surely intended for, another work he printed, Halle's Chronicle which he brought out in 1550.¹⁷ The publication of this chronicle, which was subsequently used by Shakespeare for his early historical plays, had been delayed by the author's death. The actual border is a woodcut depicting a grape-vine following the descent of Henry VIII, tactfully placed at the top, through the two families of Lancaster and York which had fought each other for so long, from Henry IV at the bottom. Also in this book, and made use of in the English Ympyn, are decorated letters illustrating scenes from the Bible stories. These letters are of considerable merit and in the small area of two inches they manage by simplicity of line and clever draughtsmanship to illustrate very clearly the incidents portrayed.

It was in 1547 that he became King's Printer to Edward VI and in the years that followed he also became increasingly involved in the affairs of the City of London as a member of the Common Council and of Christ's Hospital.

Then, in 1553, the year of the last printing of his "Great Bible," Grafton printed "Peele's Maner and Fourme,"⁽¹⁶⁾ the third book in English on double-entry bookkeeping. Only two copies of this are known, a complete one in the Institute's collection, and an incomplete one in the British Museum, so of the first three books in English on double-entry one has not survived at all and of the other two only three copies are known. The main reason for this high casualty rate among the early books in English on accounting is no doubt that they were used in counting-houses until they fell to pieces and were replaced by later works.

"The Maner and Fourme" is not merely a translation nor does it just plagiarize the work of others. In the year that this book came from Grafton's presses, the printer himself was appointed Treasurer of Christ's Hospital, to become Chief Master in 1560. And in 1562 James Peele became Clerk to the Hospital and immediately started on the work of writing up the books on double-entry principles. The ledgers he wrote are still in existence and preserved in the London offices of Christ's Hospital.

1553 was the year of the accession to the throne of Lady Jane Grey on the death of Edward VI to whom Grafton had been King's Printer. Peele's Maner and Fourme was printed early in that year and the title page bears the words "printer to the Kinges Majestie." Grafton printed the proclamation of Lady Jane's accession on 9th July and his subsequent printing of the proclamation of Mary's accession did not save him from the loss of the office of royal printer. This was his third narrow escape. The first was from the French inquisition in 1538. The second was in 1540 on the fall of Thomas Cromwell who had supported his printing of the bible in English. Those who brought about Cromwell's downfall were also after Grafton, Whitchurch and Coverdale. Coverdale fled abroad while Grafton and Whitchurch were both jailed. And in September of 1554 there was a fourth. A commission had been appointed by Mary to investigate Christ's Hospital of which Grafton was then Treasurer. Bishop Gardener found the children learning from Grafton's own English Primer instead of from the Latin so he threw him into the Fleete prison again but he was released after two days.

This gives some picture of the sort of man Grafton was. Quite definitely one who did not just theorise and leave others to take the action and incur the risks. He forwarded the ideas being propounded by those who believed in the New Learning to the point of personal danger.

Just as Ympyn, having travelled the trade route between Antwerp and Venice brought knowledge of the "methods of Venice" to the traders of North-Western Europe, so Grafton surely brought it from Antwerp to England. Grafton, like Pacioli, was no originator; both had their critics but that is common with anyone who achieves any success. There is no evidence that it was he who brought double-entry into England but the conclusion seems inescapeable that if credit is to be given to anyone for its general introduction among merchants, it must go to Richard Grafton.

1. Summa di Arithmetica Geometria Proportioni & Proportionalita; by Luca Pacioli. Venice. 1494.

2. Euclidis megarensis philosophi acutissimi mathematicorum...Lucas paciolus....; (ed. by Luca Pacioli). Venice. 1509.

3. De Divina Proportione: opera a tutti glingegni perspicaci e curiosi necessaria ove ciascun studioso di Philosophia, Prospectiva, Pictura, Sculptura, Architectura....; (by Luca Pacioli). 1509.

4. Portrait of Fra Luca Pacioli and Guidobaldo, Duke of Urbino by Jacopo de Barbari, c. 1495. Coloured reproduction 18.5" x 15".

5. Nieuwe Instructie ende bewijs der looffelijcker consten des rekenboecks....; by Jan Ympyn (Christoffels). Antwerp. 1543.

6. Nouvelle Instruction et Remonstration de la tresexcellente science du liure de compte; by Jan Ympyn Christoffels. Antwerp. 1543.

7. A Notable and very excellente woorke, expressyng and declaryng the maner and forme how to kepe a boke of accomptes or reconynges...Translated...out of Frenche into Englishe. (Jan Ympyn Christoffels). 1547.

8. A Profitable Treatyce called the Instrument or Boke to learne to knowe the good order of the kepyng of the famouse reconynge called in Latyn, Dare and Habere, and in Englyshe, Debitor and Creditor; by Hugh Oldcastle. London. 1543.

9. A Briefe Instruction and maner how to keepe bookes of accompts after the order of debitor and creditor....; by John Mellis. 1588.

10. Zwifach Buchhalten, sampt seinen Giornal des selben Beschluss auch Rechnung....; by Wolffgang Schwcicker. Nurnberg. 1549.

11. Compendio y breve instruction por tener libros de cuenta, deudas, y de mercaduria:....tradudizo de Frances en castellano por Antich Rocha. Barcelona. 1565.

12. Libro De Caxa y manual de cuentas de mercederes,....; by Bartolome Salvador de Solorzano. Madrid. 1590.

13. Arithmetica oder Rechenbuch....; by Anthonius Schultz. Lignitz. 1611.

14.Idea Rationaria, or the perfect accomptant, necessary for all merchants and trafficquers: containing the true forme of bookkeeping, according to the Italian methode....; by Robert Colinson. Edinburgh. 1683.

15. A Breffe Instruction, and manner, howe to kepe, Merchantes Bokes, of Accomptes....; by John Weddington. Antwerp. 1567.

16. The maner and fourme how to kepe a perfecte reconyng, after the order of....debitour and creditour,....; (by James Peele). 1553.

17. The Union of the twoo noble and illustre families of Lancastre & Yorke.....; (by Edward Halle). 1550.

Atti dell' Accademia de' Nuovi Lincei, 1863.

Barciulli, F. Memorie....Luca Paciolo.

Bonnani. Metodo Facile di Tenere i Libri. Padua, 1834.

Brunet, J. C. Manuel du Libraire. Paris, 1860, vol. i, p. 116.

Corniani. I Secoli, vol. iii, p. 217.

Crivelli, P. An Original Translation of the Treatise on Double-Entry Book-keeping by Frater Lucas Pacioli. London, 1924. Preface.

Essling, Prince d'. Les Livres á Figures Venitiens. Florence and Paris, 1907 et seq., vol. iii, pp. 185-7.

Geijsbeek, J. B. Ancient Double-Entry Book-keeping, Denver, Colorado, 1914, pp. 5 and 8.

Hanan, E. Weigel. Archiv für die zeichn. Künste 1856, vol. ii, pp. 231-44.

Jäeger, E. L. Der Traktat des L. Paccioli von 1494 über den Wechsel. Stuttgart, 1878.

Libri, G. Histoire des Sciences Mathematiques. Paris, 1838-41, vol. iii, pp. 277-94.

Manzoni, G. Studii di Bibliografia Analitica.

de Morgan, A. Arithmetical Books. London, 1847, p.2.

Morison, S. Article in Encyclopaedia Britannica, 14th ed., vol. iv, p. 615, and bibliography, pp. 617-18.

Morison, S. Fra Luca Paciolo of Borgo S. Sepuliro. Cambridge, 1933

Morley's Life of Cardan, vol. i, pp. 213-14.

Narducci. Intorno a due Edizioni della Summa de Arithmetica di Fra Luca Pacioli, etc. Rome, 1862.

Pollard, A. W. Italian....Early Printing: A Catalogue of....the Library of C. W. Dyson-Perrins. Oxford, 1914, pp. 160-1.

Riccardi, P. Biblioteca Matematica Italiana. Modena, 1870, vol. ii, Part i, pp. 226-30 incl. And 1893 edition, p. 115.

Smith, David Eugene. Rara Arithmetica, pp. 54-9 incl., and pp. 87 and 89.

Sotheby's Sale Catalogue. London, 1861, #578, #2522, and #5475-7 inclusive.

Taylor, R. E. No Royal Road: Luca Pacioli and his Times, Chapel Hill, 1942.

Thomas-Stanford, Charles. Early Editions of Euclid's Elements. The Bibliographical Society, London, 1926, pp. 6, 22-3, and plates 5 and 6.

Thomson, H. W. and B. S. Yamey. Bibliography of Bookkeeping and Accounts, 1494 to 1650. Accounting Research, 1958, vol. ix, p. 239.

Tiraboschi, G. Storia, vol. vi, p. 554.

Vermiglioli. Biografia, vol. i, p. 214.

Vianello, V. Luca Paccioli nella storia della ragioneria, etc. Messina, 1896.

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Winterburg, C. Von. Fra Luca Pacioli. In Quellenschriften für Kunstgeschichte, etc. Vienna, 1889.

Yamey, B. S., H. C. Edey and H. W. Thomson. Accounting in England and Scotland: 1543-1800. 1963.