Credit and Debt in Medieval England c. 1180-c. 1350 (review)

Widespread interest in the so-called "new economy" and the sometimes undignified jostling of entrepreneurs to profit under its conditions are ubiquitous features of everyday life in the twenty-first century, but they are hardly novel. As medievalists have long known, western Europe experienced a dramatic surge in trade, commerce, and industry around the year 1100, and for some two and a half centuries thereafter, few people were left untouched by expanding markets in wool, cloth, grain, other commodities, and luxury items. The six essays in this collection illustrate, if in different ways, how the "new economy" of the high medieval period influenced English consumers, creditors, and debtors from all walks of life.

This is a small collection, but it boasts big ambitions and delivers on its promise to close the gap between the work of scholars interested in purely legal aspects of credit and debt in the Middle Ages, and that of social and economic historians. Several themes run through the essays, including the effects of royal legislation relating to credit and debt (the Statutes of Jewry of 1275, of Actor Burnell of 1283, and of Merchants [de Mercatoribus] of 1285), the influence of the church's pronouncements on the legitimacy of business transactions, and the impressive yields of a wide variety of extant record materials pertinent to the subject of credit and debt.

Although the editors stress (more than once) that the contributions of the six authors do little more than build on earlier investigations, the volume includes much that is novel and thought-provoking, methodologically and theoretically. Most notably, the business dealings of great nobles and wealthy merchants receive scant notice. The essays focus instead on the participation of the menu peuple in the world of credit: artisans and craftsmen from the urban centers of England, peasants free and unfree in the English hinterland, and parish priests and lesser clerics.

In an essay that reviews the laws regulating credit and debt between the late twelfth and the early fourteenth centuries, Paul Brand argues that under royal influence, a subtle redefinition of the boundaries between secular and ecclesiastical jurisdiction in the matter of debt took place; legal practice increasingly favored creditors. Robin Mundill's comparison of Jewish and Christian moneylenders shows that people of relatively low social and economic status frequently made arrangements for the loan—and repayment—of commodities such as wheat and oats. The elaborate provisions for the repayment of loans found in the Exchequer of the Jews served, in the later thirteenth century, as a model for Christian creditors, who used the provisions of the Statute of Acton Burnell to record their own credit and debt arrangements. As Christopher McNall shows, this legislation, closely followed by the Statute Merchant in 1285, proved as attractive to creditors of modest means as it did to wealthier financiers, and offered new opportunities for a host of middling sorts to become involved in the ever-expanding market.

The remaining essays, by Pamela Nightingale, Schofield, and Chris Briggs, are the most significant in the collection. All explore the participation of people hitherto considered unlikely in the world of credit and debt. All attest the existence of a rigorous "informal economy," regulated and enforced by an equally rigorous system of "informal justice." Thus, Schofield casts intriguing new light on the innumerable distraints, assaults, house breakings, and minor scuffles so drearily familiar to historians of county court records in portraying such fracases as the consequences of attempts to recover small loans from recalcitrant debtors. Similarly, both Nightingale and Briggs show that rural credit was widely available and eagerly sought, not merely by wealthy free peasants but also by their poorer unfree neighbors.

This is a strong collection in which economists, social and legal historians, and especially scholars of the medieval peasantry will find valuable new perspectives on how English people...