HISTORY OF INVENTIONS
AND
DISCOVERIES.
ITALIAN BOOK-KEEPING.
Those who are acquainted with the Italian method of book-keeping must allow that it is an ingenious invention, of great utility to men in business, and that it has contributed to extend commerce and to facilitate its operations. It requires no less attention, care, and accuracy, than many works which are styled learned: but it is undoubtedly true, that most mercantile people, without knowing the foundation of the rules on which they proceed, conduct their books in as mechanical a manner as many of the literati do their writings.
The name, Italian book-keeping, Doppia scrittura, with several words employed in this branch of science and still retained in all languages, make it probable that it was invented by the Italians; and that other nations borrowed it, as well as various short methods of reckoning, from their mercantile houses, at the time when all the East-India trade passed through Italy.
De la Porte says[8], “About the year 1495, brother Luke, an Italian, published a treatise of it in his own language. He is the oldest author I have seen upon the subject.” Anderson, in his Historical and Chronological Deduction of the Origin of Commerce[9], gives the following account: “In all probability, this art of double-entry accounts had its rise, or at least its revival, amongst the mercantile cities of Italy: possibly it might be first known at Venice, about the time that numeral algebra was taught there; from the principles of which science double-entry, or what we call merchants’ accounts, seems to have been deduced. It is said that Lucas de Burgo, a friar, was the first European author who published his algebraic work at Venice, anno 1494.”
This author, who was one of the greatest mathematicians of the fifteenth century, and who is supposed to be the first person who acquired a knowledge of algebra from the writings of the Arabians, was called Lucas Paciolus, e Burgo S. Sepulchri. He was a Franciscan, and so surnamed from a town in the duchy of Urbino, on the Florentine confines, called Burgo S. Sepulchro[10].
Anderson tells us[11], that he had in his possession the oldest book published in England in which any account is given of the method of book-keeping by double-entry. It was printed at London, in 1569, in folio. The author, whose name is James Peele, says, in his preface, that he had instructed many mercantile people in this art, which had been long practised in other countries, though in England it was then undoubtedly new. One may readily believe that Mr. Anderson was not ignorant of the difference between the method of book-keeping by single and that by double-entry; but he produces nothing to induce us to believe that Peele taught the latter and not the former; for what he says of debit and credit is of no importance, as it may be applied also to the method by single-entry.
Of this Peele no mention is made in Ames’s Typographical Antiquities; but in that work (p. 410) there is an account of a still older treatise of book-keeping, entitled A briefe instruction and manner how to keepe bookes of accompts, after the order of debitor and creditor, and as well for proper accompts, partible, &c. by three bookes, named the memoriall, journall, and leager. Newly augmented and set forth by John Mellis schole maister. London 1588, 12mo. Mellis, in his preface, says that he is only the re-publisher of this treatise, which was before published at London in 1543 by a schoolmaster named Hugh Oldcastle. From the above title, and particularly from the three account books mentioned in it, I am inclined to believe that this work contained the true principles of book-keeping by double-entry.