 The focus on corn prices also unleashed another central principle of economics, the law of demand (quantity demanded is an inverse function of price). The so-called King-Davenant law, attributed to Gregory King (see Evans 1967) and Charles Davenant (1698) of the late seventeenth century, provided a time series analysis of corn prices (see Hutchison 1988: 46–53). They argued that in the case of a severe shortage of corn, a fall by fifty per cent of the normal supply, the price could increase by forty-five per cent. They also provided data in the case of a bountiful harvest. Their chart established that the function was an inverse one and, significantly, nonlinear.