Mr. Aecroid's Tables: Calculations and Customs in the Early Modern Countryside

> In the 1610s and 1620s, a new computational technology took hold in England: printed mathematical tables for compound interest and discounting (“present value”) problems. [...]

> Mathematical tables like Acroyd’s emerged out of long-running conflicts between church landlords and tenants over how to determine just and reasonable fines on church lands. Discounting tables were thus not tools of instrumental rationality evincing a new capitalist mentality, but tools of social accommodation and products of the era’s “economy of obligation.”