The Moneylenders of Late Medieval Kyoto

Chapter Two Overlords

C h apt e r Two Overlords Until about the early sixteenth century most Kyoto merchants, like the moneylenders, were not independent agents. Rather, like most peasants , they were members of occupational groups bound by prescribed obligations to overlord families, temples, and warriors. In return the overlord was expected to bestow patronage: exemption from other taxes and monopoly protection from competitors. (The monopoly protection extended to the brewer-lenders was on sake, not on moneylending; the overlord may have been helpful in dunning tardy debtors as well.) How effectively patronage was in fact bestowed depended on the overlord and the time. It seems to have diminished over the course of the medieval age, especially after the Ōnin War. To the moneylenders and other commoners, the overlord was for the most part an annoying intrusion from above, an everpresent if not primary feature of life. Moneylending and sake brewing were central, along with general aspects of life in an urban neighborhood. Like static in the background was the need to keep the overlord satisfied. The moneylenders paid their taxes as necessary and otherwise lived their lives as merchants and as townspeople. When they could, they charged their customers to the limit, avoided taxes, played overlords off against each other, and generally maneuvered around them whenever possible. Nevertheless , the overlord presence was an unavoidable fact of medieval life, and deference to him was an ingrained habit. Already in the late Heian period aristocratic families and religious institutions in Kyoto had become the overlords of nonagrarian occupational groups of merchants and craftsmen. This arrangement was essentially the commercial equivalent of their role as estate overlords.1 In return overlords 57 for exemption from the taxes levied by the civil government, the groups submitted taxes privately to their aristocratic or religious overlords in the form of commodities or services, and later cash. This relationship was the basis for a control mechanism similar in function and organization to the medieval European guild. It was the main channel through which the medieval Kyoto elites, including the Muromachi shogunate, sought to derive income from the commercial sector. From the Kamakura period, the economic life of the central cities of Japan, notably Kyoto and Nara, was defined to a great extent by such guilds, among which were the moneylenders.2 Guilds of the early medieval period were composed of people sharing a trade, and could include merchants, artisans, entertainers, or those involved in transportation. They have been labeled “service guilds,” because their most distinguishing feature was service rendered to their overlords.3 The first appearance in sources of such a guild was in 1092: a group of woodcutters in Yase, north of Kyoto, received the right to sell firewood in Kyoto in return for cutting timber and bearing the palanquin for their overlord, the religious retirement villa Shōren’in.Other early service guilds included Tōdaiji’s swordsmiths’ guild, formed around 1118; a group of Kyoto leather workers, probably outcastes, active by 1153; and a sake guild from about 1183 which rendered sake to its overlord, Genpukuji in Nara.4 The word “za,” the most common term for these guildlike arrangements , literally means seat, and may have derived from the practice of assigning members special seats at the overlord’s ceremonial functions or of reserving a space for them at specific markets.5 Some guilds were granted stipendiary lands rather than tax exemptions in return for providing goods and services to the overlord. As guild members began to sell their surplus on the market, these lands became superfluous and were disposed of, for the most part. But the overlord’s protection, in the form of monopolies , monopsonies, and exemptions from tolls and other taxes, could be helpful to a guild’s successful operation, in some cases even through the late medieval period. By the thirteenth century there were also rural guilds in the provinces organized on the same principles. Some of them answered village needs, while others participated in the Kyoto-centered national market . But central Japan, especially Kyoto with its intense degree of commercial activity, remained the locus of most guild activity (see Map 4). From about the fourteenth century a gradual change occurred in the character of the guild—namely, trade or business aspects became more prominent than service to the overlord.6 The overlord–client relationship became more contractual in nature, offering the latter autonomy in his the lives of the...