I do not have a good general source, but there was an article in the 
National Geographic of all places
maybe a decade ago that included the tidbit that in Britain a futures 
market in wool was started during
the 12th century by Cistercian monks.  It may have been the world's 
first futures market, although I
recently saw a claim that the Chinese had one in rice possibly as 
early as the tenth century, although
most sources I have seen have put the earliest such market in Asia in 
Japan for rice in more like the
15th century.


Barkley Rosser