Mortality, Trade, Money and Credit in Late Medieval England (1285-1531) 2020009755, 2020009756, 9780367260194, 9780429291081

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
CONTENTS
List of illustrations
List of abbreviations
Preface
Acknowledgements
1 Some new evidence of crises and trends of mortality in late medieval England
2 Alien finance and the development of the medieval English economy, 1285–1511
3 The impact of crises on credit in the late medieval English economy
4 English medieval weight standards revisited
5 Finance on the frontier: money and credit in Northumberland, Westmorland and Cumberland, in the later middle ages
6 The intervention of the crown and the effectiveness of the sheriff in the execution of judicial writs, c. 1355–1530
7 The rise and decline of medieval York: a reassessment
8 The rise of London as a financial capital in late medieval England
9 Gold, credit, and mortality: distinguishing deflationary pressures on the late medieval English economy
10 Credit and the effect of the Black Death on regional commercial economies, 1350–1369
11 A crisis of credit in the fifteenth century, or of historical interpretation?
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Mortality, Trade, Money and Credit in Late Medieval England (1285–1531)

The eleven articles in this volume examine controversial subjects of central importance to medieval economic historians. Topics include the relative roles played by money and credit in financing the economy, whether credit could compensate for shortages of coin, and whether it could counteract the devastating mortality of the Black Death. Drawing on a detailed analysis of the Statute Merchant and Staple records, the articles chart the chronological and geographical changes in the economy from the late-thirteenth to the early-sixteenth centuries. This period started with the triumph of English merchants over alien exporters in the early 1300s, and concluded in the early 1500s with cloth exports overtaking wool in value. The articles assess how these changes came about, as well as the degree to which both political and economic forces altered the pattern of regional wealth and enterprise in ways which saw the northern towns decline, and London rise to be the undisputed financial as well as the political capital of England. Pamela Nightingale was a scholar of Newnham College, Cambridge, where, for her Ph.D., she worked on the history of the East India Company in the eighteenth century. Her thesis was published in 1970 as Trade and Empire in Western India, 1784–1806, by Cambridge University Press. While her three children were young she taught for the Open University and subsequently published further books on British India and Kashgar in Chinese Central Asia, before making the major change of subject involved in writing A Medieval Mercantile Community. This focused on the Grocers’ Company of London and its part in the economic and political developments of the city and of the medieval English economy. In 1999 she was elected a member of Oxford University’s History Faculty, and in 2010 she was awarded an Oxford D. Litt degree. She is also a fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

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VARIORUM COLLECTED STUDIES

Mortality, Trade, Money and Credit in Late Medieval England (1285–1531)

Pamela Nightingale

Mortality, Trade, Money and Credit in Late Medieval England (1285–1531)

First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business This edition © 2021 Pamela Nightingale The right of Pamela Nightingale to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Nightingale, Pamela, author. Title: Mortality, trade, money and credit in late medieval England (1285–1531) / Pamela Nightingale. Description: Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2020. | Series: Variorum collected studies | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020009755 (print) | LCCN 2020009756 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367260194 (hardback) | ISBN 9780429291081 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Finance—England—History—To 1500. | Monetary policy—England—History—To 1500. | England—Economic conditions—1066–1485. | Mortality—England—History—To 1500. Classification: LCC HC254 .N53 2020 (print) | LCC HC254 (ebook) | DDC 330.942/04—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020009755 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020009756 ISBN: 978-0-367-26019-4 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-29108-1 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Apex CoVantage, LLC VARIORUM COLLECTED STUDIES SERIES CS1091

CONTENTS

List of illustrations List of abbreviations Preface Acknowledgements

ix x xi xii

1 Some new evidence of crises and trends of mortality in late medieval England

1

Past & Present, 2005, vol. 187, issue 1, pp. 33–68. Re-printed by permission of The Past and Present Society, Oxford University Press 2 Alien finance and the development of the medieval English economy, 1285–1511

30

The Economic History Review, 2012, vol. 66, issue 2, pp. 477–496. Re-printed by permission of the Economic History Society, John Wiley & Sons 3 The impact of crises on credit in the late medieval English economy

52

A.T. Brown, A. Burn and R. Doherty (eds), Crises in Economic and Social History: A Comparative Perspective, Boydell Press, 2015. Re-printed with the permission of the Boydell Press 4 English medieval weight standards revisited British Numismatic Journal, vol. 78, British Numismatic Society, London, 2008. Re-printed with the permission of the Society

vii

71

CONTENTS

5 Finance on the frontier: money and credit in Northumberland, Westmorland and Cumberland, in the later middle ages

94

M. Allen & D’M. Coffman (eds), Money, Prices, and Wages: Essays in Honour of Professor Nicholas Mayhew, 2015. Reprinted with permission of Palgrave Macmillan 6 The intervention of the crown and the effectiveness of the sheriff in the execution of judicial writs, c. 1355–1530

114

The English Historical Review, 2008, vol. CXXIII, issue 500, pp. 1–34. By permission of Oxford University Press 7 The rise and decline of medieval York: a reassessment

145

Past & Present, 2010, vol. 206, issue 1, pp. 3–42. By permission of The Past and Present Society, Oxford University Press 8 The rise of London as a financial capital in late medieval England

176

M. Lorenzini, C. Lorandini and D’M. Coffman (eds), Financing in Europe: Evolution, Coexistence and Complementarity of Lending Practices from the Middle Ages to Modern Times, 2018. Reprinted by permission from Palgrave Macmillan 9 Gold, credit, and mortality: distinguishing deflationary pressures on the late medieval English economy

195

The Economic History Review, 2010, vol. 63, issue 4, pp. 1081–1104, Re-printed with the permission of The Economic History Society, John Wiley & Sons 10 Credit and the effect of the Black Death on regional commercial economies, 1350–1369

219

Previously unpublished 11 A crisis of credit in the fifteenth century, or of historical interpretation?

239

British Numismatic Journal, vol. 83, British Numismatic Society, London, 2013. Re-printed with the permission of the society Bibliography Index

260 280 viii

ILLUSTRATIONS

Figures I.1 Map of the Statute Merchant registries in the period 1285–1349 1.1 Mortality of the creditors, 1305–1529 (in percentages averaged over 5-year periods) 2.1 Imports of foreign bullion and totals of alien and denizen credit (x5), 1285–1310 2.2 Alien and denizen credit in the Statute Merchant certificates of debt, 1285–1311 2.3 Exports of wool and imports of foreign bullion, 1284–1309 7.1 York creditors and debtors, 1285–1529 9.1 Credit and population as decadal percentages of 1300–1309 totals

xiii 19 36 40 46 148 197

Tables 1.1 Quinquennial death rates of the creditors, 1305–1529 2.1 Alien and denizen credit in the Statute Merchant certificates, 1285–1311 6.1 The sheriffs’ returns to Statute Staple writs, 1355–1529 6.2 Social class of debtors in the Statute Staple writs, 1415–1529 8.1 National and London Credit in the Statute Merchant and Staple Registries, 1290–1529, with London’s total calculated as a percentage of the national one

ix

17 37 123 141 184

ABBREVIATIONS

Agric. Hist. Rev.: Agricultural History Review Amer. Hist. Rev.: American Historical Review BAR, or, Brit. Archaeol. Rpts.: British Archaeological Reports Brit. Numis. J., or, BNJ.: British Numismatic Journal Bull. Instit, Hist. Research.: Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, now called Historical Research EcHR or Econ. Hist. Rev.: Economic History Review Engl. Hist. Rev.: English Historical Review J.Eur. Econ. Hist.: Journal of European Economic History Northern Hist.: Northern History Numis. Chron.: Numismatic Chronicle Proc. Suffolk Instit. Archaeology and Hist.: Proceedings of the Suffolk Institute of Archaeology and History

x

PREFACE

This second collection of eleven articles follows the seventeen that were re-issued in my earlier volume in this series of Variorum Collected Studies entitled ‘Trade, Money, and Power in Medieval England’, which was published in 2007 by Ashgate, and re-issued in paperback in 2018 by Routledge. Some of these articles were written as preparatory work for my projected major study of the Statute Merchant and Staple certificates in the National Archives. The first part of this study was published in 2018 by Palgrave Macmillan entitled ‘Enterprise, Money and Credit in England before the Black Death, 1285–1349’. My plan to complete a second volume, taking the subject up to 1530, was frustrated when, unknown to me, Dr Richard Goddard published in 2016 his own book on the Statute Staple certificates from 1353. This drew on my calendar of the documents that I had compiled over the previous eleven years, but had been obliged by the terms of the grant given to me by the Economic and Social Research Council to deposit with them for open use before I myself could complete my own book. This meant that Dr Goddard’s book included much of the material that I had intended to use in my new book and it obliged me to re-consider how I could best use of the chapters I had already written. In these circumstances, to avoid needless repetition, it seemed more appropriate just to re-print those of my articles which had not appeared in the first volume, many of which had been written in preparation for the second one, relating mostly to the period after the Black Death, and to add to them a new, hitherto unpublished article, which investigates the immediate effect which the Black Death had on credit and enterprise in the provinces. This subject raised the question whether high mortality was the principal cause of the severe contractions of credit which shaped the economy in the later fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, or whether it was most influenced by a combination of circumstances in which money, credit, and state policy also played a crucial part. The articles also show how both political and economic forces altered the pattern of regional wealth and enterprise in ways which saw the northern towns decline and London rise to be the undisputed financial capital of England.

xi

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am grateful for the early support of Professor Nicholas Mayhew who helped me initially to obtain a one-year research grant from the University of Oxford to work on the Statute Merchant Rolls of the City of London, and also supported my application to the Leverhulme Trust, which financed the first Senior Research Fellowship that I held at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. With the support of Dr David Crook of the National Archives, I was subsequently awarded another five-year Senior Research Fellowship by the Economic and Social Research Council (Award No. R000271010) to calendar the information contained in the Statute Staple certificates in Class C. 131 which give details of the debtors’ lands and possessions. Towards the end of this work I discovered the large broken bundle of documents in Class C. 152 which I realised were mis-identified C. 131 certificates, and at the request of the National Archives staff I re-assembled and numbered these, while also retaining their place in Class C. 152. I have incorporated the alterations which these documents produced into my final figures. I was helped financially in this work by the award of a Leverhulme Emeritus Fellowship. I am most grateful to these funding bodies for their support, and to Mrs Roslyn Britton-Strong of the Ashmolean Museum for her practical help over many years, and the staff of the National Archives who granted me editorial privileges which allowed me to work there for extended hours. My late husband gave me invaluable assistance in creating the database in the early years of the project, and he used his own palaeographical knowledge to transcribe the details of the oldest and most difficult documents. When illness meant he could not continue, our daughter, Mrs Sophia Joyce, was able to provide me with constant aid, in particular by doing extensive and demanding work on the bibliography and index of this volume, to which her husband, Dr Christopher Joyce, also contributed. Their help made it possible for me to complete the volume when I myself became ill and increasingly disabled. An Oxford D.Phil. student from Kenya, Jacob Katuva, provided the map and was always willing to contribute his own computer skills while earning his doctorate, as, recently, even more prominently, has another Oxford D.Phil. student, Vance Tan, from Brunei. I am most grateful to them, and to Oxford friends, led by Dr Robert Peberdy, who has helped me with bibliographical references and encouraged me to re-publish these articles. xii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Scotland Northumb.

Newcastle Newcastle Newcastle

Appleby

Co. Durham Cumberland

N.R. Yorks

York E.R. Yorks

W.R. Yorks

Lancs.

Irish Irish Sea

North Sea Noth Sea

Hull

Lincoin

Chester

Notts.

Derbys.

Cheshire

Lincs

Nottingham Statts.

Botolph’s St. Botolph’s Boston Fair Boston

Stamford

Shrewsbury

Norwich

Leics. Selop. Salop.

Norfolk

Coventry Cambs.

Northants

St. Ives Fair Northampton

Worcs. Warwicks. Herefords.

Suffolk

Beds

Wales Wells Bucks

Hereford. Gloucester

Herts

Oxford

Essex

Oxon.

Glos.

London

Bristol

London

Canterbury Canter bury

Wilts Hants

Surrey

Kent

Somerset Devon

Exeter

Southampton

Winchester

Sussex

Dorset

Cornwall

Lostwithiel

English Channel

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

London, 1283. Bristol, 1284. Winchester, 1284. Lincoln, 1281. Newcastle-on-Tyne, 1284. York, 1284. Shrewsbury, 1284. Appleby, 1285.

9. St. Botoph’s Fair. Boston, 1286 10. St. Ives Fair, 1287 11. Stamford Fair, 1288. 12. Hereford, 1290. 13. Nottingham, 1290. 14. Chester, 1291. 15. Exeter, 1292. 16. Norwich, 1298.

17. Oxford, 1301. 18. Southampton, 1314. 19. Northampton, 1319. 20. Hukk, 1335. 21. Canterbury, 1336. 22. Gloucester, 1341. 23. Lostwithiel, 1341. 24. Coventry, 1346.

Figure I.1 Map of the Statute Merchant registries in the period 1285–1349 Note: The black circles represent the local registries, and their varying size roughly indicates the relative amounts of credit they recorded throughout this period.

xiii

1 SOME NEW EVIDENCE OF CRISES AND TRENDS OF MORTALITY IN LATE MEDIEVAL ENGLAND

Since M.M. Postan made demography the key to understanding the economic development of late medieval England, crises of mortality have lain at the heart of the debate about the declining population of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and its relationship with the economy.1 However, few historians would now follow Postan in ascribing the high mortality of this period to the inability of medieval agriculture to feed a rising population without suffering the kind of devastating famine which occurred in 1315–18.2 Recent studies have shown how dense populations could succeed in raising yields by higher inputs of labour, and how even land of poor quality could be cultivated profitably provided that easy access to markets permitted specialisation.3 The bad harvests and famines which did occur are seen more as the consequence of chance extremes of climate, while

1 For a survey of differing interpretations of the medieval economy, see John Hatcher and Mark Bailey, Modelling the Middle Ages: The History and Theory of England’s Economic Development (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); Christopher Dyer, Making a Living in the Middle Ages: The People of Britain, 850–1520 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002). Views on the demography of the early fourteenth century vary between that expressed by Edward Miller and John Hatcher in their Medieval England: Rural Society and Economic Change, 1086–1348 (London: Routledge, 1978), 58, that ‘famine conditions had become almost endemic by the early fourteenth century’, and their later view in Medieval England: Towns, Commerce and Crafts (London: Routledge, 1995), 420, that it is much less certain how the population trend developed. See also Richard Smith, “Human Resources”, in Grenville Aston and Annie Grant (eds.), The Countryside of Medieval England (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988); Richard M. Smith, “Demographic Developments in Rural England, 1300–1348: A Survey”, in Bruce M.S. Campbell (ed.), Before the Black Death: Studies in the ‘Crisis’ of the Early Fourteenth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991). For the later period, see Jim Bolton, “The World Upside Down. Plague as an Agent of Economic and Social Change” in Mark Ormrod and Philip Lindley (eds.), The Black Death in England (Stamford: Paul Watkins Publishing, 1996), 17–78. 2 Michael M. Postan, Essays on Medieval Agriculture and General Problems of the Medieval Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 35–9, 105–9, 139–42. 3 See, for example, Bruce M.S. Campbell, “Agricultural Progress in Medieval England: Some Evidence from Eastern Norfolk”, Econ. Hist. Rev., 2nd ser., 36 (1983); Mark Bailey, A Marginal Economy? East Anglian Breckland in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).

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pandemics spreading across Asia to Europe can explain many of the diseases which ravaged the population. Agreement on the importance of external and fortuitous influences of this kind does not mean, though, that historians have ceased to debate the interactions between economic and demographic change. Important divisions remain between those who think that that the economy affected the size of the population by influencing the age and extent of marriage, and hence of fertility, and those who dispute this and give primacy to the incidence and rate of mortality. The latter interpretation has as its most cogent advocate John Hatcher. His recent article in Past and Present reiterates his long-held views that high mortality shaped the population history of late medieval England, and it builds on them with a wide-ranging and powerful critique of Wrigley and Schofield’s Population History of England, 1541–1871.4 This book, which has been accepted for over twenty years as the standard work on English post-medieval demography, identified in England a distinctive demographic system characterised by moderate mortality, in which the course of the population was dependent on the incidence and age of marriage.5 To the authors what mattered more than epidemics of disease were the economic circumstances which encouraged or discouraged people from marrying and having children, and they suggested that this kind of ‘low-pressure’ demographic regime may also have operated in the late medieval period.6 In his article Hatcher rejected this interpretation of late medieval demography on the grounds that high mortality continued throughout the fifteenth century, that mortality crises were of unusual severity in the 1520s, and that there were volatile periods of high death rates at least up to the middle of the sixteenth century.7 He also rejected the idea that fertility was influenced, through the marriage rate, by changes in the economy, on the grounds that the later Middle Ages enjoyed very high living standards and yet was an era of depressed fertility. The difficulty with this double rejection is that it leaves unanswered the question why the population should start growing again, since most historians accept that this change began in the early sixteenth century.8 Another related, but much less discussed question is: if lower mortality was the key to the recovery of the population, why should it be so delayed in England, when Europe suffered from similar mortality crises but growth became apparent there in some

4 John Hatcher, “Understanding the Population History of England, 1450–1750”, Past & Present, 180, 1 (2003): 83–130. 5 Edward A. Wrigley and Roger S. Schofield, The Population History of England, 1541–1871: A Reconstruction (London: Edward Arnold, 1981), 435, 451. 6 Ibid., 451–3. 7 Hatcher, “Understanding the Population History of England”, 95–9, 102. 8 Ibid., 94. On the general acceptance that population did start to increase in the early sixteenth century, see Mark Bailey, “Demographic Decline in Late Medieval England: Some Thoughts on Recent Research”, Econ. Hist. Rev., 2nd ser., 49 (1996): 16.

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areas before the middle of the fifteenth century?9 This question is particularly relevant because, despite the long-term persistence of plague in England, serious epidemics tended to follow the introduction of a more virulent strain of the disease from the Low Countries, and yet in Brabant, from 1495 there was a decisive upward movement of population.10 Discussion of these questions is constrained by evidence which in the 1980s was called ‘barely adequate’, and to which little has been added since.11 The direct evidence relates chiefly to special groups in the population, such as the clergy, monks and tenants-in-chief, or it is limited geographically to particular towns, or manors, while little of it permits comparisons over the whole of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. One exception to this, the evidence from the tithing rolls for thirteen Essex manors, indicates fluctuations in the population from the late thirteenth to the sixteenth century. However, besides its geographical limitation, it does not reveal the effects of migration.12 Similarly, the indirect, economic evidence, which could indicate long-term demographic trends, has to allow for other factors. Prices and wages, for example, were influenced not just by changes in the size of the workforce, but also by the supply of coin.13 In view of these uncertainties, any additional direct evidence of mortality in England, particularly any which extends from the fourteenth to the early sixteenth century, and covers all areas of the kingdom, must be of value, even though, like all medieval demographic evidence, it, too, has its limitations and interpretive pitfalls.

I The new evidence was created by the enforcement of debts registered under the Statute Merchant of 1285, later expanded by the Statute Staple of 1353. Creditors registered debts in towns throughout the kingdom which were chosen for their economic importance, and whose number was increased as demands arose for local access to the system. Creditors, or their executors, who sought to enforce a registered debt obtained certificates giving details of the loan which they sent

9 Christopher Dyer, “Rural Europe”, in Christopher Allmand (ed.), The New Cambridge Medieval History, vii, c. 1415–1500 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 106, 11. The eating of contaminated food by poor people, as happened in the famine years of 1316–17, could have spread epidemics of typhoid even among the more prosperous classes. 10 Ibid., 111; Paul Slack, The Impact of Plague in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford: Routledge, 1985), 68. 11 Smith, “Human Resources”, 189. 12 Smith, “Demographic Developments in Rural England”, 73–6; David Postles, “Demographic Change in Kibworth Harcourt, Leicestershire in the Later Middle Ages”, Local Population Studies, 48 (1992): 46. See also the temporary influx of migrant workers to the Glastonbury manors after the 1317 famine: Martin Ecclestone, “Mortality of Rural Landless Men before the Black Death: The Glastonbury Head-Tax Lists”, Local Population Studies, 63 (1999): 15. 13 See, for example, Nicholas J. Mayhew, “Money and Prices in England from Henry II to Edward III”, Agric. Hist. Rev., 35 (1987).

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to the Chancery, some 36,000 of which survive in the National Archives for the medieval period. The great majority of the creditors whose status or occupation appears in the certificates could be said to represent the ‘middling classes’ of late medieval England. About half were townsmen, for whom hitherto there has been little evidence of long-term mortality rates. Most of them were merchants, but they also included some craftsmen. Among the rural creditors were a few members of the aristocracy, many knights and gentry, clergy of all ranks, and some village merchants and chapmen. Among small landowners are some specifically described in the fifteenth century as yeomen and husbandmen. This social mixture is reflected in the wide range of the credit they gave, from a few shillings to hundreds of pounds. The creditors were mainly men, young enough to be still economically active, but since they had surplus capital to lend, or could give substantial sales credits, they were likely to be aged from thirty to fifty. The certificates used for this study date from 1300 to 1530, although there is a gap when files are missing between 1506 and 1514. Although deceased debtors are also noted in the certificates, it is the creditors who are the subject of this article because they provide the most chronologically precise evidence of mortality. The death of a defaulting debtor might be concealed, or as sometimes happened, creditors preferred to wait for a better chance of repayment by the debtor’s heirs. By contrast, when a creditor died, his executors were obliged to call in debts owed to him before they could settle his estate, and so his death had usually occurred not many months before they sought a certificate of default against his debtors. Its date is therefore likely to be the year of, or the year following, the creditor’s death, and it is only in exceptional circumstances that more time might elapse between the death and the date of the certificate. When this did happen it was usually because of mortality crises, such as the Black Death, which caused such severe dislocation that the executors needed an extended period in which to act. Delays of this kind raise the first difficulty in interpreting the evidence, because when such crises occurred, instead of the certificates appearing soon after the deaths of the creditors, they are usually spread over two or more years. Consequently, the death rate for the critical year is diluted. This has to be allowed for in calculating the mortality rate for those years, but it does not affect the calculation over decades. Another difficulty arises from the lack of a standard form for the certificates before 1353. Of the three possible dates on them, namely, that when the debt was registered, the date when repayment was due, and the date when the certificate of default was issued, only one, the date of repayment, is common to them all in this period. If no date of issue is given, then there is no date to indicate when the creditor died. This is true of most certificates issued by the City of London before 1350, and so most London creditors have to be excluded from the analysis up to this point. If London had a higher rate of mortality than elsewhere then the effect of this exclusion is to underestimate the scale of mortality among the creditors before the Black Death.

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Additionally, the absence from some certificates of a date when the debt was registered means that in these cases it is only possible to estimate when the credit was given from the first term of repayment, which was generally a few months, but, occasionally, could be some years after its registration. Since it was also quite common for creditors to allow several years to pass before enforcing an overdue debt, the inclusion of very old debts of this kind in the analysis could mean including deaths of creditors who died naturally, in old age. When the sample population is small this could distort the pattern of crisis mortality. To reduce this chance, the analysis is based only on those certificates which have dates showing that the creditors registered their loan within the six years preceding its enforcement. Thus, across the whole period of over two hundred years, analysis is limited to those creditors who, within six years of registering their loans, either enforced them or died. This limitation has the effect of emphasizing crises of mortality among creditors who were economically active, at the expense of death rates that might include much older people. However, by showing how prevalent, and how punishing, mortality crises were among adults of working age throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, it is also possible to make deductions about background and long-term trends. A further difficulty in analysing the material is that of individual creditors with more than one debtor. Since one is counting creditors and not the number of their debts, the many creditors with multiple debts have to be identified and counted as single people, and the year of their death has to be ascertained. Lawrence de Bootham, merchant of York, for example, is described in many certificates as a deceased creditor in each of the years 1301–4. He has therefore to be counted only once, when he is first named as deceased, in 1301, and all the later certificates have to be excluded from the analysis. By these methods a moving annual percentage of deceased creditors is created from those who registered their debts over the previous six years, and who either enforced them, or died, in a particular calendar year. Thus of 1,089 certificates for debts which were initially registered between 1303 and 1308, a total of 97, representing 70 individual creditors, were enforced in 1308. Of these 70 creditors, two had died in, or shortly before, that year, and their executors acted for them. This means that the mortality rate in 1308 for creditors who were active between 1303 and 1308 is 2.85 per cent. There can be no pretence that this figure will be wholly accurate, because the certificates obviously postdate the creditors’ deaths by some months, but it is an indicator which helps to trace marked changes in the pattern of mortality for this group from year to year. This exercise is then repeated by moving forward one year at a time. Years of mortality crises show up not only by high percentages of deceased creditors over two or more years, but also, often, in unexpectedly severe falls in the numbers of debts registered at that time. Since the certificates of default appear to represent a steady proportion of about 20 per cent of the debts which were originally registered, it seems that unexpected falls in the annual number registered reflect not mere chance but the creditors’ decision to withhold credit because they feared they

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might not recover their money.14 Such falls are therefore typical of crisis years which included bad harvests and political upheavals as well as years of pestilence. One such example is from 1317–21, when the famine years and acute agrarian crisis brought depression to the whole economy, making it unwise to lend money. However, such disruptions of the trend do become more frequent with the advent of plague, since creditors naturally hesitated to lend to debtors who might not live long enough to repay them. Equally, plague made the registration and enforcement of loans difficult, since creditors would be unwilling to travel to towns, especially London, in times of high mortality. Such interruptions in the normal trend of registrations and enforcements introduce the possibility that the certificates may at times either underestimate or exaggerate the creditors’ mortality rate. This applies particularly to the fifteenth century when the number of certificates falls in some years to very low numbers. The average annual number of creditors at risk plunged from 90 in the first half of the fourteenth century and 97 in its second half, to 32 in the first half of the fifteenth century, and even lower, to 22, in the second half, before rising to 68 for the eighteen years for which calculations are possible between 1500 and 1528.15 Obviously, such marked changes in the size of the population at risk raise the real possibility that they either obscure or distort the pattern of mortality. However, there is no apparent relationship between the numbers at risk and the number who died. An annual average of a mere 19 creditors at risk from 1420–59 reveals no fewer than fifteen years of high mortality, while an annual average of 24 creditors in the years 1460–99 shows very few. What must be emphasized is that if low numbers do give a bias to the evidence then it must be in favour of exaggerating mortality. This is because the executors were obliged to act for the deceased creditors even in difficult times, whereas surviving creditors were then far more inclined to postpone enforcement. The years from 1311 to 1322 prove this point. The certificates then shrank in number because the Statute Merchant system was restricted to merchants only, while the prolonged agrarian crisis reduced credit. Notwithstanding, high mortality still shows up for the creditors in 1320–4, as it does in the equally low numbers from 1420–59. Accordingly, one cannot explain the falling number of deceased creditors after that date as merely a reflection of the small number of

14 The evidence on which this proportion of 20 per cent is based comes from the City of London Statute Merchant recognizance rolls in the Corporation of London Record Office. The eight that date between 1291 and 1315 record almost three thousand legible debts. The proportion of these which match with the Statute Merchant and Statute Staple certificates in the National Archives (Class C. 241) varies between 18.8 and 22.9 per cent per roll, with a mean of 20.7 per cent. This is remarkably consistent with the mean of 20.5 per cent of defaulters for the published Coventry rolls of Statute Merchant recognizances between 1292 and 1409, although the economic and political conditions of the years covered by both the London and Coventry rolls varied considerably. 15 The numbers in the first half of the fourteenth century, despite the much higher population, are reduced by the restriction of the system to merchants only between 1311 and 1322, and also by the large number of certificates without the necessary dates.

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creditors. Furthermore, because all the certificates used in the analysis represent debts which were enforced within six years, any possible distortions of mortality in individual years disappear in averages calculated over decades.

II Of the mortality rates already calculated by historians for this period, Zvi Razi’s work on the peasant population of Halesowen between 1270 and 1348 has suggested one of between 3.6 and 4 per cent for adult males aged twenty or over, a rate also proposed by Hollingsworth.16 Similarly, Martin Ecclestone has calculated a crude death rate of 3.65 per cent for all male landless men, aged twenty or over, on the bishop of Winchester’s two Wiltshire manors in the first half of the fourteenth century.17 The monks of Canterbury Cathedral Priory and Westminster Abbey make up a group which comes closer socially to the majority of the creditors because of their age, standard of living and urban connections; Hatcher computed for the Canterbury monks a crude average death rate of 3.31 per cent for the fifteenth century, and, similarly, Barbara Harvey found for the Westminster monks in the same period an average ranging between 3 and 4 per cent.18 Christopher Dyer found for a rural and poorer group, the tenants on the bishop of Worcester’s estate in the 1520s and 1530s, a lower death rate of 2 to 3 per cent.19 The average annual death rate for the creditors, at 3.3 per cent over the whole period from 1305 to 1529, therefore falls in the middle of this range, but it follows them in being higher in the first half of the fourteenth century and falling markedly in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The credibility of the certificates as evidence of mortality, as well as the reliability of the analytical method, can be tested most effectively by comparing the individual years of high mortality they reveal with those evident in other sources. Obviously, there will be some divergences because the creditors were too rich to die of hunger in famine years. However, it was less easy for them to escape infectious diseases, and so the pattern of their deaths should reveal some of the mortality crises visible elsewhere. In analysing the certificates, 5 per cent

16 Zvi Razi, Life, Marriage and Death in a Medieval Parish: Economy, Society and Demography in Halesowen, 1270–1400 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 45; David Loschky and Ben D. Childers, “Early English Mortality”, Jl Interdisciplinary Hist., 24 (1993): 88; Thomas H. Hollingsworth, Historical Demography (London: Hodder & Stoughton Ltd., 1969), 380. 17 Ecclestone, “Mortality of Rural Landless Men before the Black Death”, 24. Despite the wide coverage of the records for Longbridge Deverill and Monkton Deverill, they do not include 1310 and 1311, two years of high mortality elsewhere. 18 John Hatcher, “Mortality in the Fifteenth Century: Some New Evidence”, Econ. Hist. Rev., 2nd ser., 39 (1986): 32; Barbara Harvey, Living and Dying in England, 1100–1540: The Monastic Experience (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 124. 19 Christopher Dyer, Lords and Peasants in a Changing Society: The Estates of the Bishopric of Worcester, 680–1540 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 222.

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has been chosen to indicate years of high mortality and 8 per cent and over to identify a crisis.20 Before the Black Death the main, but disputed, evidence for mortality in individual years is that of the heriots recorded in manorial court rolls. These were used by Postan and Titow in their study of five manors on the bishop of Winchester’s estates in Hampshire, Berkshire and Somerset. They concluded that the rising number of heriots from 1306 signified a new era of higher mortality, which Postan famously explained by over-population exhausting the land and creating the conditions which made famine more likely.21 Harvey, who first criticised this interpretation, has questioned whether heriots can be accepted at all as evidence for mortality since they were also paid by living people when land changed hands. She argued that since the number of heriots declined when prices fell, they reveal not so much a rate of mortality as the extreme sensitivity of the land market to scarcity.22 Goran Ohlin also criticised the reliability of the heriots as evidence before 1300, but he found them after that date ‘firmer ground’ for computing levels of mortality, and concluded that they then indicated ‘very forcefully . . . an increase in secular mortality’.23 That increase he charted from the first decade of the fourteenth century.24 By contrast, Ecclestone has recently concluded from his work on the Winchester head-tax lists that the ‘heriot approach’ of Postan and Titow ‘is badly flawed’.25 Although one must take these criticisms seriously, it is still worth comparing the pattern revealed by the manorial heriots, with evidence drawn from other sources, to see how they match that of the creditors’ mortality. The heriots on the Winchester manors rose from 58 in 1300 to 78 in 1306, reached 98 in 1308, 96 in 1310, and 102 in 1311, before the next spectacular rise up to 171 in the famine years 1316–18.26 Richard Smith found them ‘unambiguous in showing that years

20 Ibid., 223: Dyer chose 6 per cent as the level of crisis mortality. See also Loschky and Childers, “Early English Mortality”, 89. 21 Michael M. Postan and John Titow, “Heriots and Prices on Winchester Manors”, Econ. Hist. Rev., 2nd ser., 11 (1958–1959). Heriots were feudal dues paid to the lord of a manor on the death of a tenant, usually the latter’s best beast, or its monetary value. 22 Barbara F. Harvey, “Introduction: The ‘Crisis’ of the Early Fourteenth Century”, in ed. Bruce Campbell, Before the Black Death, 8–9. 23 Goran Ohlin, “No Safety in Numbers: Some Pitfalls of Historical Statistics”, repr. in Roderick Floud (ed.), Essays in Quantitative Economic History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), 74, 76; Loschy and Childers, “Early English Mortality”, 88–9. 24 Ohlin, “No safety in Numbers”, 74 (table 6). Christopher Thornton points out in a private communication that the work has not yet been done which can identify the proportion of inter-vivos transactions among the heriots, the numbers of which may also have been increased by the creation of more small customary tenancies from the demesne. 25 Ecclestone, “Mortality of Rural Landless Men before the Black Death”, 24. 26 Postan and Titow, “Heriots and Prices on Winchester Manors”, table 1. The annual number of priests instituted in Cornwall reached its highest peak before the Black Death in 1308–9, indicating a high death rate for incumbents then; John Hatcher, Rural Economy and Society in the Duchy of Cornwall, 1300–1500 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 294 (appendix E).

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of high prices . . . saw marked rises in the numbers of recorded deaths, especially among the poorer tenants’. In confirmation of this trend he published figures for heriots in four other English manors, Rickinghall and Redgrave in Suffolk, Chesterton in Cambridgeshire, and Halesowen in Worcestershire. Their totals show an even more pronounced rise from 51 in 1307–9 to 113 in 1310–12. He interpreted the peak in 1310–11, as did Zvi Razi for Halesowen, as evidence of a high death rate following the bad harvest of that year.27 However, in 1306, when the rise in the Winchester heriots began, the harvest was moderate, and the link between high numbers of heriots and bad harvests is by no means general.28 Prices were rising noticeably from 1306 for monetary reasons and not just because of scarcity.29 But it is also significant that wages, too, began to rise rapidly in some areas in 1306–8, which at the very least indicates that there was no surplus pool of labour, and there could have been at this time a sudden shortage caused by high mortality.30 Titow’s work on the bishop of Winchester’s account rolls showed that rising numbers of heriots cannot be explained by bad harvests in at least four years in the first half of the fourteenth century, and he speculated that their cause was summer epidemics of enteric infections.31 Two of these years were 1308 and 1311.32 The pattern of the heriots is echoed by a marked rise in mortality among the wealthy Statute Merchant creditors from an average of under 2 per cent between 1304 and 1308 to 8.1 per cent in 1309, and it stayed very high at 6.32, 8.24, 9.82, 10.07 and 8.69 per cent respectively in the successive calendar decade of the fourteenth century, when the number of certificates was rising rapidly. They then fell suddenly from 746 registered in 1307 to 600 in 1308, before recovering to 682 in 1309 and 870 in 1310. Since there was no interruption in the huge output of coin in these years, this sharp fall in the certificates in 1308–9 could be explained by a sudden epidemic with high mortality which shook the commercial confidence on which credit relied. Moreover, this pattern is echoed in the wills recorded in the

27 Smith, “Demographic Developments in Rural England”, 53–6; Razi, Life, Marriage and Death in a Medieval Parish, 37 (table 5), 38. 28 John Z. Titow, English Rural Society 1200–1350 (London: George Allen & Unwin,1969), 98 (appendix A). 29 Mavis Mate, “High Prices in Early Fourteenth-Century England: Causes and Consequences”, Econ. Hist. Rev., 2nd ser., 28 (1975): 6–9. 30 Ibid., 14. Mate cites carpenters’ wages at Witney rising from 1 1/2d a day in 1305 to 2d and 2 1/2d in 1306, and 2d and 3d in 1307. Carpenters’ wages at Esher rose from 3d a day in 1304–5 to 3 1/2d and 4d in 1307 and 4d in 1308. 31 John Z. Titow, “Evidence of Weather in the Account Rolls of the Bishopric of Winchester, 1209– 1350”, Econ. Hist. Rev., 2nd ser., 12 (1959–60): 363–5. 32 Ibid., 364. Bruce Campbell found no major mortality crisis at Coltishall in this period but an unusually large number of minors and non-filial heirs inheriting between 1312 and 1323, which points to a higher than average mortality rate: Bruce M.S. Campbell, “Population Pressure, Inheritance and the Land Market in a Fourteenth-Century Peasant Community”, in Richard M. Smith (ed.), Land, Kinship and Life-Cycle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 99.

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London Husting Rolls, which show a noticeable increase in 1308 and 1312.33 The head-tax list for Monkton Deverill also shows a significant increase of deaths in 1308, and the number of institutions of priests to Cornish benefices rises at this time well above the level for the 1270s and 1280s34 There is also other evidence of high mortality before the famine years. Russell calculated from the Inquisitions Post Mortem on tenants-in-chief between the ages of thirty and fifty years a mortality rate for 1310–12 of 10.5 per cent compared with 8.1 per cent for the creditors.35 None of these deaths, apart possibly from those of the landless men in Monkton Deverill, can have been caused directly by hunger. Bondswomen’s merchets on the prior of Spalding’s estates in Lincolnshire also fell precipitously between 1311 and 1315.36 Although the famine years of 1315–18 mark a peak for general mortality in the early fourteenth century, these were not years of crisis for the creditors. Similarly, there was no mortality crisis in those years among the London will-making population. The extremely high yield on the assessment for the lay subsidy of 1316 (at 98.7 per cent the highest of any between 1290 and 1346) suggests that the tax-paying classes generally escaped high mortality that year.37 By contrast, the years 1320–4 reveal unprecedented mortality, averaging 13.5 per cent, among the creditors. In 1321 their mortality actually reached 25 per cent. This figure may well have been exaggerated by the severe contraction of mercantile credit, and also by the great reluctance of creditors to foreclose during a year of a disastrous barley harvest, which meant that executors had to act when other creditors delayed. However, mortality on this scale was later exceeded at Downham near Ely before the Black Death, and the mortality rate for the creditors remained high at 8.7 per cent in 1323, which was another year of high prices, and at 10 per cent in 1324, when prices fell and the number of certificates was rising again.38 Heriots

33 Jens Rohrkasten, “Trends of Mortality in Late Medieval London (1348–1400)”, Nottingham Medieval Studies, 45 (2001): 172–209. 34 Ecclestone, “Mortality of Rural Landless Men before the Black Death”, 25; Hatcher, Rural Economy and Society in the Duchy of Cornwall, 294 (appendix E). 35 Josiah C. Russell, British Medieval Population (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1948), 200. 36 Henry E. Hallam, “Population Density in Medieval Fenland”, Econ. Hist. Rev., 2nd ser., 14 (1961– 1962): 79, n.1. The number of merchets (payments made to their lords by unfree tenants for their daughters’ marriages) fell from 74 in 1301–5 and 80 in 1306–10 to 46 in 1311–15. 37 Rohrkasten, “Trends of Mortality in Late Medieval London”, 184; William M. Ormrod, “The Crown and the English Economy, 1290–1348”, in ed. Bruce Campbell, Before the Black Death, 153 (table 5.1). In 1321 their mortality actually reached 25 per cent. Although this may have been affected by the contraction of mercantile credit, mortality on this scale was later exceeded at Downham near Ely before the Black Death, and the mortality rate for the creditors remained high at 8.7 per cent in 1323, which was another year of high prices, and at 10 per cent in 1324, when prices fell and the number of certificates was rising again. 38 See n. 43 below: see also E. Henry Phelps Brown and Sheila V. Hopkins, “Seven Centuries of the Prices of Consumables”, in Eleanor M. Carus-Wilson (ed.), Essays in Economic History (London, 1962), 193 Appendix B (London: Edward Arnold, 1966).

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also rose at Rickinghall and Halesowen in 1322–4, while at Monkton Deverill in Wiltshire there was exceptional mortality of 8 per cent among the landless men in 1323–4.39 The number of merchets on the prior of Spalding’s estates, which had risen in the famine years 1316–20, fell again in 1321–5. This may indicate that in Lincolnshire, like East Anglia, the highest mortality came from disease after the famine.40 As far north as County Durham enclosure of the waste had continued energetically into the famine years, despite the incursions of the Scots. But a sudden end to this expansion, and the shrinking of settlement, came in the 1320s.41 In the second quarter of the fourteenth century, there was another period of high mortality beginning in 1327 when there was a conspicuous rise both in the Winchester heriots and in the number of wills in the London Husting Rolls.42 In Downham near Ely, probably half the population died in 1327–8 from a virulent epidemic which was not connected with a bad harvest.43 There was also a sudden rise in wages in these two years.44 In 1330–1 the harvest was bad and there was an exceptional number of deaths that year among the peasantry of manors in Kent and Sussex.45 The mortality of the creditors was 4.5 per cent in 1326 and 4 per cent in 1331, but it reached a peak of almost 10 per cent in 1331, falling to 5 per cent in 1332. Although Halesowen seems to have escaped this period of high mortality, its death rate was rising from 1337, and its heriots markedly increased, like those of the Winchester manors, in 1344–5, when the creditors’ mortality reached 4.5 and 4.9 per cent.46 There was also a sharp dip then in the number of debts registered.47 The price of wheat was higher in 1343, following a poor harvest, but not

39 Smith, “Demographic Developments in Rural England”, 54; Ecclestone, “Mortality of Rural Landless Men before the Black Death”, 25. 40 Hallam, “Population Density in Medieval Fenland”, 79, n.1. 41 Helen M. Dunsford and Simon J. Harris, “Colonization of the Wasteland in County Durham, 1100– 1400”, Econ. Hist, Rev., 2nd ser., 56 (2003): 35, 48–9, 53. 42 Postan and Titow, “Heriots and Prices on Winchester Manors”, table 1: the Winchester heriots rose from 76 in 1327 to 109 in 1328, even though in 1328 the total for one manor is missing. In 1330 there were 96 heriots and 83 in 1331; Rohrkasten, “Trends of Mortality in Late Medieval London”, 184; Titow, “Evidence of Weather in the Account Rolls of the Bishopric of Winchester”, 364. 43 M. Clare Coleman, Downham in the Isle: A Study of an Ecclesiastical Manor in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1984), 94. 44 Phelps Brown and Hopkins, “Seven Centuries of the Prices of Consumables”, 193 (appendix B). 45 They include Wye in Kent, Battle in Sussex (where the death rate between the end of October and December 1331 was four to five times the normal one) and Beddingham, where 22 per cent of the tenants died that year: Mavis Mate, “The Agrarian Economy of South-East England before the Black Death: Depressed or Buoyant?”, in ed. Bruce Campbell, Before the Black Death, 95. 46 The Halesowen heriots rose from 12 in 1344 to 22 in 1345, of which 17, unusually, were for women: Razi, Life, Marriage, and Death in a Medieval Parish, 27–32, 42–3. The heriots for the Winchester manors, which had twice fallen as low as 61 in the 1330s, rose in 1344 to 101 and to 103 in 1345: Postan and Titow, “Heriots and Prices on Winchester Manors”, table 1. 47 The number, calculated by the date of repayment, fell from an annual average of 446 in the calendar years 1342–4 to 318 in 1345.

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abnormally so, and it was below average in the following year.48 Since the higher price could have had little effect on the creditors, it seems that, again, infection, rather than poor nutrition, was the cause of most of their deaths. The uniquely savage onslaught of the Black Death on the whole population in 1348–9 shows itself in six years of high mortality for the creditors from 1348–53 of 7.7, 13.7, 21.8, 9.8, 8.1 and 10.6 per cent respectively. These reflect the difficulty which executors had (if indeed they themselves escaped death) in proceeding against debtors who had themselves probably died. The overall death rate for the creditors in 1348–53 is 12 per cent, but this is diluted by being spread over six years. If the low average mortality of 2.4 per cent recorded from 1354–61 is projected back to 1350, and the surplus deaths of creditors who recorded their recognizances in 1349, or earlier, are added (as they almost certainly should be) to those of that year, then the mortality of the creditors in 1349 is 34 per cent, higher than the 27 per cent calculated for tenants-in-chief, but lower than the rates calculated for beneficed clergy and for many, but not all, of the peasantry.49 A death rate of 34 per cent for the creditors also fits in with the sudden drop of about one-third in the number of certificates which were registered in the 1350s, compared with those of the previous decade, even though the 1350s had an abundant supply of coin. The first major outbreak of plague which followed the Black Death, that of 1361–2, shows up in mortality for the creditors of 14 per cent in 1362 and 10.5 per cent in 1363. The 1362–3 figures compare closely with a mortality rate of 14 per cent in this plague for the beneficed clergy in the diocese of York and with tenantsin-chief aged thirty to thirty-nine.50 For the third outbreak of 1369 the figures,

48 Titow, English Rural Society, 99 (appendix A), The striking of large numbers of halfpennies by the Mint from 1341, and particularly in 1342–3, suggests that shortages of coin would not have kept the price of wheat artificially low in these years: see ed. Christopher E. Challis (ed.), A New History of the Royal Mint (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 679 (Appendix). 49 John Hatcher, Plague, Population, and the English Economy, 1348–1530 (London: Palgrave, 1977), 21–5. The death rate calculated by Ohlin from Russell’s data was 33 per cent for tenants-inchief and their heirs aged thirty-five to thirty-nine: Ohlin, “No Safety in Numbers”, 68 (table 5). It seems that the Pepperers’ fraternity of prosperous merchants and retailers in Sopers Lane in the heart of London suffered a death rate during the Black Death of 34.2 per cent, almost identical to that of the creditors: Pamela Nightingale, A Medieval Mercantile Community: The Grocers’ Company and the Politics and Trade of London, 1000–1485 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995), 196. By contrast, 977 young and landless men on Glastonbury manors suffered mortality of 57 per cent: Ecclestone, “Mortality of Rural Landless Men before the Black Death”, 25. At Downham near Ely about one-third of the peasants died: Coleman, Downham in the Isle, 95. 50 Russell, British Medieval Population, 220–2; Ohlin, “No Safety in Numbers”, 68 (table 5). These figures, like those for the creditors, reflect deaths among adult males, whereas chroniclers claimed that the plague of 1362 particularly caused the deaths of children. How much more serious this was in its long-term demographic effects, compared, for instance, with the deaths of women of child-bearing age, who, if they survived, could go on to bear more children, is hard to say. Samuel K. Cohn, Jr., “The Black Death: End of a Paradigm”, Amer. Hist. Rev, 107 (2002): 734, argues from Italian evidence that the deaths of ever higher proportions of children in succeeding plagues indicates that more and more adults had acquired immunity.

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adjusted from two years to one, indicate mortality among the creditors of about 10 per cent, compared with the 13 per cent calculated for the beneficed clergy of the diocese of York and for heirs and heiresses.51 Mortality, though, may have been unevenly spread throughout the region. For example, Walsham-le-Willows in Suffolk seems to have been little affected by the two plagues of 1361 and 1369, and in Downham near Ely, despite evidence of plague-deaths in 1361, the acreage of cultivated demesne increased that decade and rents remained high.52 For the fourth outbreak of 1375, the Inquisitions Post Mortem give a mortality rate of 12.5 per cent, but there was no high mortality among the tenants of the bishop of Worcester.53 Neither does 1375 appear as a year of high mortality for the creditors, and there was no fall in the number of debts registered. But their mortality was rising in 1376, and was 8.9 per cent in 1377, when the number of registered debts also fell.54 This would appear to indicate, as do the disagreements of chroniclers about the dates of these later epidemics, that the plague was already assuming the characteristic it had in the sixteenth century of spreading slowly along the lines of communication from town to town, and region to region, with different rates of mortality in each.55 It does seem, though, as in Italy, that the mortality rate fell with each succeeding plague.56 Hatcher has listed sixteen epidemics of a national or extra-regional scale after 1369.57 Ten of them coincide with or immediately precede death rates of 5 per cent or more for the creditors.58 There are also five years of mortality of 8 per cent or more which do not appear on his list.59 In the fifteenth century the creditors were increasingly concentrated in London and, after 1420, chroniclers recorded epidemics there in two of these critical years, 1433 and 1466.60 The last appears to be part of an epidemic of plague which extended over the years 1463–7. Colchester

51 Russell, British Medieval Population, 217–18, 222. 52 Ray Lock, “The Black Death in Walsham-le-Willows”, Proc. Suffolk Inst. Archaeol. and Hist. 37 (1992): 322; Coleman, Downham in the Isle, 96. 53 Russell, British Medieval Population, 218; Dyer, Lords and Peasants in a Changing Society, 225. 54 Compare the epidemics in Devonshire and the North referred to variously in the years 1376–8 and listed by John F.D. Shrewsbury in A History of Bubonic Plague in the British Isles (London: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 135; See also Slack, Impact of Plague in Tudor and Stuart England, 66–7. 55 Shrewsbury, History of Bubonic Plague in the British Isles, 138–9, 60–3; Charles Creighton, A History of Epidemics in Britain, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1891–4), i, 207, 217, 230. 56 Cohn, “Black Death”, 732; Ohlin, “No Safety in Numbers”, 68–9 (table 5). 57 Hatcher, Plague, Population, and the English Economy, 25, 57. The dates he gives are 1375, 1379–83, 1389–93, 1400, 1405–7, 1413, 1420, 1427, 1433–4, 1438–9, 1457–8, 1463–4, 1467, 1471, 1479–80 and 1485. 58 These are 1379, 1382, 1384, 1390, 1400, 1406, 1421, 1433, 1439 and 1465–6. 59 These are 1377, 1417, 1418, 1447 and 1449; see also Slack, Impact of Plague in Tudor and Stuart England, 61 (table 3.3). 60 Robert S. Gottfried, Epidemic Disease in Fifteenth-Century England: The Medical Response and the Demographic Consequences (Leicester: Rutgers University Press, 1978), 47–9.

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experienced exceptional mortality in 1463–4, while the creditors’ death rate in 1465 was 8.3 per cent, their highest since 1439, followed in 1466 by one of 6.6 per cent.61 The year 1465 was also critical for the bishop of Worcester’s tenants in Hartlebury.62 However, of the fifteen years of above-average mortality identified by Harvey for the monks of Westminster in the period 1390–1500,63 only 1421 matches years of crisis for the creditors.64 This accords with Harvey’s own observation that few of the years of high mortality at Westminster co-incided with years when epidemics attracted notice in London or elsewhere.65 This fact illustrates most strikingly the extent to which episodes of high mortality could be of local significance only. Similarly, of the fourteen years when plague visited Christchurch Canterbury, only four coincided with those deemed to be national crises.66 Even fewer matched those among the bishop of Worcester’s tenants.67 While the mortality of the creditors clearly reflects more of the wider epidemics than do these other groups, it also emphasizes that after the 1460s the frequency of mortality crises on a national scale was much diminished.

III These instances in which there is a close convergence throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries between years and rates of high mortality among prosperous Statute Merchant creditors and other groups in the population, including much poorer manorial tenants, help to create confidence in the certificates of debt as evidence of mortality. It would seem, therefore, that when their evidence differs from established interpretations of medieval English demography it should still be taken seriously. However, one must ask whether the creditors themselves, or the nature of the evidence, changed in ways which could have made them less representative of the adult population (particularly through the steady restriction of their geographical range) in the course of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Not all the certificates identify where the creditor lived, and so the following analysis is based only on those which do give their place of residence.

61 Richard H. Britnell, Growth and Decline in Colchester, 1300–1525 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 202. 62 Dyer, Lords and Peasants in a Changing Society, 221. In 1465 there were nine recorded deaths in Hartlebury compared with two in normal years. 63 Harvey, Living and Dying in England, 122–3. 64 Ibid., 123: above-average mortality was also identified for the Westminster monks in 1508–9, when missing certificates preclude a comparison with the creditors. 65 Ibid., 126–7. 66 Hatcher, Plague, Population, and the English Economy, 17. 67 Dyer, Lords and Peasants in a Changing Society, 225. Wills in the diocese of York reveal a similar diversity in the pattern of high mortality: Peter J.P. Goldberg, “Mortality and Economic Change in the Diocese of York, 1390–1514”, Northern Hist., 24 (1988): 41–2.

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Apart from the exclusion of the Londoners, for the reason given, every county provided some creditors in the period 1300–48, and approximately 37 per cent of the debts were owed to creditors who lived in seventeen of the larger towns, led by Norwich, York, Bristol, Lincoln, Nottingham, Exeter, Hereford, Shrewsbury and Northampton.68 In the second period, from 1349 to 1399, creditors still came from every county, but since Londoners are now included, the proportion of urban credit rises to about 40 per cent of the whole, and Londoners account for more than two-thirds of this share, or 26 per cent of the total.69 In the first half of the fifteenth century credit contracted sharply, and the population of creditors shrank to less than one-third of the previous number. However, every county continued to provide at least some creditors, apart from Cheshire, Westmorland and Rutland. Urban creditors were now responsible for about 50 per cent of the total credit, but Londoners account for 85 per cent of this share, or about 40 per cent of the whole. The second half of the fifteenth century saw these trends become even more pronounced. London, with its satellites of Westminster and Southwark, now accounted for 63 per cent of the total credit, and the provincial towns for only about 4 per cent. Creditors from the counties appear in single figures while five northern counties and Herefordshire had none. Although credit began to expand again from 1500 up to the end of the study in 1529, London creditors continued to increase their share of the total to about 73 per cent. The implications for the mortality of the creditors seem clear: if towns, and London in particular, did exact the ‘urban penalty’ of a higher death rate for those who lived in them, then one would expect to see the mortality rate for the creditors rise significantly after 1349, and most of all from the second half of the fifteenth century.70 The expectation is the stronger because, compared with a total of five supposedly national plagues in the period 1420–85, there were seven which were apparently confined to London, just as London features most prominently in outbreaks in the sixteenth century.71 However, if the urban creditors, particularly the Londoners, were at the same time increasing in wealth, then there is the possibility that the better food, housing and standards of hygiene they could command would give them greater protection from disease. Comparisons between the trend shown by wills (which were rarely made by the poor) and burial registers in the sixteenth century indicate that plague hit the poor more than the rich because of their closer proximity to rats, whereas other diseases, such as influenza, did not spare the upper classes.72 Any changes in the status and occupations of the creditors must therefore be considered. Those

68 The others, in descending order of the number of their creditors’ certificates, were Yarmouth, Canterbury, Oxford, Southampton, Winchester, Coventry, Salisbury, and Boston. 69 The proportions in this case are based on the number of debts, not their value. 70 On the urban penalty see Edward A. Wrigley, Population and History (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1969), 95–7. 71 John M.W. Bean, “Plague, Population, and Economic Decline in England in the Later Middle Ages”, Econ. Hist. Rev., 2nd ser., 15 (1962–1963): 430. 72 Slack, Impact of Plague in Tudor and Stuart England, 128.

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certificates that give relevant information indicate that plague brought about few changes in the social status and occupations of the creditors in the fourteenth century. Clergy, about half of whom held benefices or higher offices in the Church up to that of bishop or abbot, accounted roughly for 13 per cent of the total credit, knights and gentry for about 8 per cent, and the aristocracy for about 1 per cent in both halves of the century. Urban craftsmen increased their share from about 3.5 per cent in the first half of the century to 6 per cent in the second, but merchants kept much the same proportion of about 28 per cent. In the first half of the fifteenth century the clergy, knights, gentry and aristocracy preserved their shares with little change, although that of the knights dropped from 6 per cent in the fourteenth century to 4 per cent in the fifteenth. However, the growing dominance of London’s capital market is reflected in the continued growth of the urban craftsmen’s share to 8 per cent, and of the mercantile share to 40 per cent. In the second half of the century almost all the creditors are described by an occupation or social status, and 63 per cent of them were Londoners. One major change is a striking fall in the number of clergy, who had been mainly rural creditors. Their share of credit fell from 11 per cent to less than 3 per cent. The share of the aristocracy and knights remained unchanged, but ‘gentlemen’ were now responsible for 25 per cent of the credit. However, it seems that that these were mainly London gentlemen, of whom probably a good many were lawyers, and others were probably retired merchants. London’s dominance also explains the continuing rise of the craftsmen’s share to 14 per cent and the mercantile share to 53 per cent. The pastoral duties of resident parochial clergy had always made them more vulnerable to infection, but compensation for their diminishing share of credit in the second half of the fifteenth century came from the rising share of London craftsmen whose work kept them in the city.73 The same might be said of London’s aldermen, who increased their share of credit from 1.4 per cent in the first half of the fifteenth century to 5.7 per cent in the second half. Accordingly, there is little reason to think that these changes in the geographical origins and social status of the creditors over two centuries would do other than increase their average chances of mortality.

IV Since the mortality crises of the creditors show a close match with those already documented for the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, one can proceed with some confidence to plot the trend of their mortality. Table 1.1 and Figure 1.1 show the surprising fact that their average annual rate of mortality for 1305–49 was slightly higher, at 4.98, than that for 1350–99, which was 4.33 per cent. One reason for this

73 Richard Gottfried, Epidemic Disease in Fifteenth-Century England: The Medical Response and the Demographic Consequences (Leicester: Rutgers University Press, 1978), 195: urban craftsmen in the fifteenth century had a very low replacement rate.

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Table 1.1 Quinquennial death rates of the creditors, 1305–1529*

1305–09 1310–14 1315–19 1320–24 1325–29 1330–34 1335–39 1340–44 1345–49 1350–54 1355–59 1360–64 1365–69 1370–74 1375–09 1380–84 1385–89 1390–94 1395–99 1400–04 1405–09 1410–14 1415–19

No. of creditors at risk

% deceased creditors

308 617 143 91 201 476 809 869 685 514 635 582 367 469 527 484 465 465 375 394 242 212 151

2.27 8.74 3.49 10.98 2.98 3.99 3.09 3.22 6.13 10.50 2.51 6.70 2.45 3.83 4.93 3.71 4.08 3.01 1.60 3.04 4.54 3.46 5.96

1420–24 1425–29 1430–34 1435–39 1440–44 1445–49 1450–54 1455–59 1460–64 1465–69 1470–74 1475–79 1480–84 1485–89 1490–94 1495–99 1500–04 1505–09 1510–14 1515–19 1520–24 1525–29

No. of creditors at risk

% deceased creditors

115 115 105 120 92 75 108 62 182 95 123 100 198 73 138 152 287 Missing Missing Missing 392 361

3.47 1.73 4.76 5.00 2.17 4 3.70 0 1.09 4.21 0.81 0 0 0 0.72 0.65 0 – – – 1.27 0

Source: National Archives, London, C. 241 Certificates of Statute Merchant and Statute Staple.

was the period of very high mortality in 1310–24 inclusive when the cumulative deaths of the creditors reached 23.21 per cent. This compares with the estimate of losses of about 15 per cent in the population of Halesowen between 1310 and 1320, and of 20.6 per cent for Great Waltham in Essex in the years 1306–19.74 However, the experience of the creditors shows that high mortality was not caused only by deficient harvests and years of famine. Certainly, there is a strong link with some years of bad weather and high prices, but because of their wealth the creditors must have died from disease and not hunger. The eating of contaminated food by poor people, as happened in the famine years of 1316–17, could have spread epidemics of typhoid even among the more prosperous classes.75 The high mortality at Longbridge Deverill in Wiltshire in 1316–17, when eighteen young, landless men died, was in contrast with the low

74 Lawrence R. Poos, “The Rural Population of Essex in the Later Middle Ages”, Econ. Hist. Rev., 2nd ser., 38 (1985): 521, n.20; Razi, Life, Marriage and Death in a Medieval Parish, 40. 75 Thomas Walsingham, Historia Anglicana (1272–1422), ed. Henry T. Riley, 2 vols. (Rolls ser., London, 1863), 14; Razi, Life, Marriage and Death in a Medieval Parish, 40–1.

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mortality on its neighbouring manor of Monkton Deverill. This suggests that the deaths were the result of the national pestilence of that year, rather than of malnutrition, although high prices could have led the victims to eat bad food, and typhus, known as ‘the famine fever’, often follows periods of acute scarcity.76 However, the years when high mortality was not preceded by a bad harvest indicate that other diseases probably contributed to the death rate. One real possibility is the introduction of new infections from Europe, spreading from the south-west where the Winchester estates lay. Severe mortality seems to have afflicted a large part of northern Europe at this time.77 In 1321 Adam Murimuth reported the widespread poisoning of wells in France, which suggests enteric disease of some kind on the Continent.78 Another possibility is that epidemics of typhus fever were increasingly spread by body lice.79 The certificates of debt indicate that 1305–11 were years of great prosperity for urban merchants, and presumably for their towns. This in all probability increased the amount of employment they could offer and encouraged urban immigration. Equally, in times of rural crisis towns were magnets for the poor, who sought work or alms there, as they did in the 1320s in Norwich.80 Nils Hybel has argued from customs statistics for the grain trade that from 1308 England changed from being predominantly an exporter of wheat to an importer of rye and oats in order to provide cheap food for the increasing population of urban poor.81 Immigrants to towns had to crowd into confined areas of poor housing ill-provided with clean water or sanitation. These circumstances could only encourage dysentery as well as lice. The intensification of trading networks between towns and their surrounding areas meant that infectious diseases like typhus would spread more rapidly through the population, but townsmen would still be the most vulnerable group. At an average of 4.8 per cent, the creditors’ mortality rate before the Black Death was considerably higher than the 3.65 per cent for the landless men of the two Winchester manors in Wiltshire, and higher than that for the peasants of Halesowen (up to 4 per cent). Undoubtedly the Wiltshire men were much younger than the Statute Merchant creditors, but the main difference between them was the high proportion of the creditors who lived in towns and were exposed to the infectious

76 Although the yields of crops were higher at Monkton Deverill this was most likely because it did not lose, as its neighbour did, about 17 per cent of its labour force: Ecclestone, “Mortality of Rural Landless Men before the Black Death”, 24, n.40. On typhus and famine see Andrew B. Appleby, “Disease or Famine? Mortality in Cumberland and Westmorland, 1580–1640”, Econ. Hist. Rev., 2nd ser., 26 (1973): 413. 77 Dyer, Making a Living in the Middle Ages, 233. 78 Adae Murimuth Continuatio Chronicarum, ed. Edward M. Thompson (Rolls ser., London, 1889), 32. 79 Shrewsbury, History of Bubonic Plague in the British Isles, 124–5. 80 Elizabeth Rutledge, “Immigration and Population-Growth in Early Fourteenth-Century Norwich: Evidence from the Tithing-Roll”, Urban History Year Book (1988): 25–6. 81 Nils Hybel, “The Grain-Trade in Northern Europe before 1350”, Econ. Hist. Rev., 2nd. ser., 55 (2002): 244–5.

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12 10 8 6 4 2

13

05 13 – 0 15 9 13 –1 25 9 13 –2 35 9 13 –3 45 9 13 –4 55 9 13 –5 65 9 13 –6 75 9 1 3 –7 85 9 13 –8 95 9 14 –9 05 9 14 –0 15 9 14 –1 25 9 14 –2 35 9 14 –3 45 9 14 –4 55 9 14 –5 65 9 14 –6 75 9 14 –7 85 9 14 –8 95 9 15 –9 05 9 15 –0 15 9 15 –1 25 9 –2 9

0

Figure 1.1 Mortality of the creditors, 1305–1529 (in percentages averaged over 5-year periods) Source: National Archives, London, C. 241 Certificates of Statute Merchant and Statute Staple.

diseases which flourished best in them. Evidence of a falling population in London and Westminster in the 1320s, and of falling rents in Oxford and Canterbury, could reflect difficult trading conditions, but they could also have been influenced by high rates of urban mortality in that decade.82 This interpretation could also explain the fact that in the first half of the fourteenth century the creditors’ general level of mortality fell substantially below 3 per cent in only one five-year period, 1305–9, when it was 2.27 per cent. By contrast, in the second half of the century there were three periods when it did so: 1355–9 (2.51 per cent); 1365–9 (2.45 per cent); and 1395–9 (1.65 per cent). If growing urbanization led to higher mortality in the first half of the fourteenth century then it is understandable why the advent of plague might lower the background rate in the second half of the century. The Black Death swept like wildfire through the populations of towns, and even though many subsequently enjoyed years of prosperity, their density of population was lower. More space, higher wages and better food made possible a healthier life for their poorer inhabitants, and although recurrent epidemics still brought new peaks of mortality there were also long periods of recovery in between, particularly for the creditors in the 1390s, when their annual death rate averaged 2.3 per cent.83 This fall in mortality is supported by evidence from London’s Court of Orphans, which cared for the

82 Nightingale, Medieval Mercantile Community, 138–9; Gervase Rosser, Medieval Westminster, 1200–1540 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 169–70; Andrew F. Butcher, “Rent and the Urban Economy: Oxford and Canterbury in the Later Middle Ages”, Southern Hist., 1 (1979): 30. 83 Rohrkasten, “Trends of Mortality in Late Medieval London”, 209.

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children of deceased freemen. It shows that 77 per cent of widows survived their husbands in the years 1375–99 and acted as guardians of their children, while 1.84 children per family survived beyond the age of twenty-one, a rate which is higher than previously thought.84 The average mortality of the creditors in the first half of the fifteenth century fell to 3.81 per cent, and roughly ten years separated the crises when it rose close to, or above, 8 per cent.85 Between 1450 and 1470 their average mortality rate fell even more strikingly to 2.25 per cent, and subsequently, despite increased numbers at risk, to less than 1 per cent. Support, nationally, for this broad picture of falling mortality from the 1390s comes from the chronology of labour legislation tabulated by Chris GivenWilson. He shows that the statutes were not a mere reiteration of old legislation, but contained amendments and extensions which reflected current shortages in the labour market.86 The pattern that they reveal shows that statutes were passed in, or contiguous to, six years of mortality crises for the creditors.87 Moreover, the overall pattern of legislation matches the high quinquennial figures for mortality in 1350–4, 1375–9 and 1385–90 (see Table 1.1). It also shows a similar fall in the 1390s. Strikingly there was no new labour legislation at all between 1449 and 1495, whereas the average for 1349–1449 was three statutes a decade. Obviously economic conditions influenced this pattern, but it suggests that the late fifteenthcentury recession was not caused by an increased shortage of labour. This evidence in favour of falling mortality of course stands in opposition to the rising mortality and lower life expectancy experienced in this period by the monks of Christ Church Canterbury, Westminster Abbey, and Durham, who were suffering mortality rates of up to 4 per cent at the end of the fifteenth century. One possible explanation is that London was becoming healthier for its richer citizens, who now formed the majority of the creditors, as the density of occupation in the central area fell before 1450.88 Also, as disease in the provinces became more localised, prosperous Londoners could send their wives and children to the countryside, and even escape there temporarily themselves.89 By contrast, Westminster and Southwark were more congested, particularly when the mid-century recession encouraged men to move there to avoid the City’s taxes, while poor immigrants, escaping unemployment in the provinces, sought cheap housing there, as well as a

84 Barbara Megson, “Life Expectations of the Widows and Orphans of Freemen in London, 1375– 1399”, Local Population Studies, 57 (1996): 25, 28. 85 See Cohn, “Black Death”, 727–32. There is no evidence of a high death rate among Cornish incumbents in the first half of the century: Hatcher, Rural Economy and Society in the Duchy of Cornwall, Appendix E. 86 Chris Given-Wilson, “Service, Serfdom and English Labour Legislation, 1350–1500”, in Anne Curry and Elizabeth Matthews (eds.), Concepts and Patterns of Service in the Later Middle Ages (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2000). 87 The years are 1377, 1385, 1390, 1406, 1421, and 1446. 88 Derek Keene, “A New Study of London before the Fire”, Urban History Yearbook (1984): 18–19. 89 Ibid.

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toe-hold in London’s economy.90 By the beginning of the sixteenth century about a sixth of London’s population was living in Southwark and Westminster, which must have made them the most congested areas in the kingdom.91 Accordingly, the ‘urban penalty’ of high mortality became in London after 1450 more a suburban experience. This would explain the low correlation between mortality crises in London and Westminster Abbey. It is noticeable that from 1449 parliament began to find Westminster so unhealthy that it adjourned to other towns, and on one occasion even to Ludgate in the city to avoid infection.92 Some confirmation of the decline in the mortality of rich Londoners and their children comes from Robert Gottfried’s study of London wills and from his conclusion that it was in the 1460s and 1470s, for the first time in thirty years, that the London elite achieved a replacement ratio which surpassed unity.93 The Inquisitions Post Mortem also indicate that replacement rates among its rich subjects were increasing.94 The monks of Westminster enjoyed many of the domestic comforts of the rich but unlike wealthy Londoners they mixed freely with neighbours from an increasingly crowded and unhealthy environment. In these circumstances it is not surprising that the monks’ life expectancy fell.95 It is most unlikely, though, that Canterbury and Durham shared the same degree of urban congestion, and given the different patterns of mortality at Westminster and Canterbury, it is hard to explain the uniformity and severity with which life expectancy fell at all three monasteries in this period if the overriding factor was not the nature of their common institutional life.96 Tuberculosis was a highly infectious scourge of religious communities until modern times, and it became particularly virulent in the fifteenth century. It appears to have flourished most in surroundings such as communal dormitories, and it is significant that its incidence was ‘strikingly high at almost a third of those who died’ at Christchurch Canterbury between 1485 and 1507.97 It may also explain the high mortality among the young monks of Westminster.98 In view of their particular vulnerability to this disease (and because of the small size of the sample), the declining life expectancy of monks cannot

90 Gervase Rosser, “London and Westminster: The Suburb in the Urban Economy in the Later Middle Ages”, in John A.F. Thomson (ed.), Towns and Townspeople in the Fifteenth Century (Gloucester: Sutton, 1988), 110; Martha Carlin, Medieval Southwark (London: Hambledon Press, 1996), 119–27, 157–62. 91 Dyer, Making a Living in the Middle Ages, 304. 92 Creighton, History of Epidemics in Britain, I, 228. 93 Gottfried, Epidemic Disease in Fifteenth-Century England, 195. 94 Hollingsworth, Historical Demography, 379; Gottfried, Epidemic Disease in Fifteenth-Century England, 39, 228. 95 Rosser, Medieval Westminster, 78–96; Barbara Harvey and Jim Oeppen, “Patterns of Morbidity in Late Medieval England: A Sample from Westminster Abbey”, Econ. Hist. Rev., 2nd ser. (2001): 235–6. 96 Hatcher, Piper, and Stone, Monastic Mortality in Durham Priory, 1395–1529. Econ. Hist. Rev., LIX (2006): 667–87. 97 Hatcher, “Mortality in the Fifteenth Century”, 30–1. 98 Harvey and Oeppen, “Patterns of Morbidity in Late Medieval England”, 235–6.

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be unchallengeable evidence for the general population ‘that life expectancy fell precipitously during the second half of the fifteenth century as waves of epidemic disease pushed mortality to savagely high levels’.99 Gottfried’s analysis of about 15,000 wills for eastern England included many made by less affluent testators, as well as those for the rich from London and the neighbouring counties. He concluded from them that between 1430 and 1480 infectious disease was the primary factor controlling population growth, and that although mortality diminished in some areas in the 1440s and 1450s (an observation supported by the falling mortality of the creditors in that period), there was a return of high mortality in the 1470s.100 In the case of the creditors this occurred in the 1460s rather than in the 1470s. However, Gottfried concluded that by 1480 the population had at least stopped declining.101 Hatcher disputes this in his recent article. Claiming that Gottfried’s data ‘tells a different story of a marked increase in both the frequency and severity of mortality crises after mid-century’, he maintains that heightened mortality did not cease in 1480, and that ‘both background and crisis mortality increased sharply’ as lethal epidemics and mortality crises continued’.102 The data he refers to are presumably the list of epidemics Gottfried drew up from literary sources. Gottfried was well aware that literary accounts claimed a particular virulence for later epidemics like the sweating sickness, because they were new and therefore more frightening diseases, but his analysis of the wills indicated that epidemics in the 1480s had only a local, or at most a regional, impact, and that the mortality rate was not high by the standards of plague, since it was about half that of the epidemics of the 1470s.103 It is possible that the new diseases affected older people, like the London aldermen who were prominent victims of sweating sickness, more than the young and those in the prime of life. Both Gottfried, and Jeremy Goldberg for York testators, found evidence from c. 1470 of a shift in the pattern of deaths from summer to spring, which appears to indicate that diseases with a lower death rate than plague had become more prevalent.104 However, the wills show unmistakably that the ratio of surviving children to testators was increasing in the 1470s and continued to do so for the whole sample in the 1480s, even though there were some local exceptions to this trend – notably Hertfordshire.105 Also, the gains in population were almost entirely rural, so that

99 Bailey, “Demographic Decline in Late Medieval England”, 15. The same author’s work on Breckland found, by contrast, that rents and economic activity showed some signs of recovery after the 1470s; Bailey, Marginal Economy, 318. 100 Gottfried, Epidemic Disease in Fifteenth-Century England, 225–6. 101 Ibid., 206. 102 Hatcher, “Understanding the Population History of England”, 96. 103 Richard S. Gottfried, “Population, Plague, and the Sweating Sickness: Movements in Late Fifteenth-Century England”, Jl. British Studies, 17 (1977): 22–7. 104 Ibid., 26; Goldberg, “Mortality and Economic Change in the Diocese of York”, 47, 49. 105 Gottfried, Epidemic Disease in Fifteenth-Century England, 189 (table 7.1.1), 197 (table 7.1.6); “Population, Plague, and the Sweating Sickness”, 29 (table 2), 31 (table 4).

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towns still had to rely on immigration to maintain their numbers.106 It is to be expected that with localized epidemics there would always be some areas with higher mortality than others. Dyer’s study of the bishop of Worcester’s tenants showed that the years of crisis differed from manor to manor.107 His evidence also indicated that the fifteenth-century epidemics tended to be localised and not very virulent, and that they actually intensified in frequency and severity in the 1520s when the population was growing again.108 When this evidence is combined with that of Gottfried, with the marked decline of mortality among the creditors, with the diminishing pattern of labour legislation, and with falling mortality in the last three decades of the fifteenth century among testators of the diocese of York, it cannot simply be ignored.109 If the falling mortality of the creditors is not untypical of the wider population in England from the 1470s, the question remains: why did its recovery lag so much behind that of Europe when the Continent experienced a similar incidence of plague? Before the Black Death the high birth rate of the thirteenth century seems to have continued long enough in England to allow the population to cope with high mortality. The fact that wages did not rise conspicuously above the increase in prices before 1327–8 suggests that up to that point there were adequate supplies of labour to take the places of those who died in epidemics. However, by the late 1320s the reserves seem to have been running low, and wages remained high in relation to prices. It looks as though the famine years and subsequent agrarian crises had reduced the marriage and birth rates in the 1320s, as they did in Halesowen, causing an incipient shortage of labour.110 But then years of good harvests in the 1330s, a prosperous agrarian economy, and (to judge by the Statute Merchant certificates) buoyant credit can only have encouraged early marriages and a high birthrate. The number of merchets on the prior of Spalding’s estates rose considerably in the period 1326–35, and there was a substantial rise in the number of marriages in Halesowen between 1325 and 1348.111 Moreover, it seems that mortality noticeably declined. The mortality rate for the creditors fell from an annual average of 7.73 for the years 1310–24 to 3.32 per cent for the period 1325–44. If typhus was responsible for much of the previous high mortality there is some evidence to sug-

106 107 108 109

Gottfried, “Population, Plague, and the Sweating Sickness”, 32. Dyer, Lords and Peasants in a Changing Society, 223. Ibid., 224–5. Goldberg, “Mortality and Economic Change in the Diocese of York”, 49; Dyer, Lords and Peasants in a Changing Society, i, 234–5. 110 Phelps Brown and Hopkins, “Seven Centuries of the Prices of Consumables”, 193 (appendix B); David L. Farmer, “Prices and Wages, 1042–1350”, in Henry E. Hallam (ed.), The Agrarian History of England and Wales, ii, 1042–1350 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 719 (chart 7.1); Razi, Life, Marriage and Death in a Medieval Parish, 47. 111 Hallam, “Population Density in Medieval Fenland”, 79, n.1: the number rose from 58 in 1321– 1325 to 79 in 1326–13230 and was still 78 in 1331–1335. See also Razi, Life, Death and Marriage in a Medieval Parish, 47.

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gest that children were less affected by it than adults, in which case the replacement rate would have remained high.112 The population showed considerable recovery in places like Halesowen, Breckland, Coltishall, Downham near Ely, and in the Deverill manors in Wiltshire.113 Increases of rent on the estates of Chertsey Abbey were quite common when land changed hands in the 1330s and 1340s.114 The peasant land-market on the Titchfield Abbey estates boomed in the 1330s, as the population recovered and the peasants exploited the opportunities presented them by good harvests and high wheat prices.115 Also the value of demesne land in ten counties round London increased significantly in the 1330s.116 The new generation reared in that decade would be too young to reverse the decline in cultivation evident in the Nonarum Inquisitions of 1342, but could have been numerous enough to assist in the rapid filling of the tenancies made vacant in 1348–9.117 Certainly by 1340 there is clear evidence that wages were falling in relation to prices.118 However, since the average annual mortality rate for the creditors in the first half of the fourteenth century was 4.98 per cent, and the reproductive capacity of the population is normally no higher than 5 per cent, it seems that the higher mortality to be expected in the population as a whole, including children and the old, may still have outstripped its capacity to recover completely in that period. The countryside, though, was almost certainly healthier than the towns.119 After 1349 high mortality, concentrated now in epidemics rather than in a persistent background trend, caused the demographic decline to continue up to the middle of the fifteenth century. There were, though, two possible periods of recovery in between, one from about 1380 to 1404, when the creditors’ average annual mortality fell to 3.08 per cent, and a second, from 1420 to 1429, when it sank to 2.6 per cent before rising again between 1430 and 1449 to almost 4 per cent.120 This raises the question, which becomes more pressing when the creditors’ mortality fell steadily in the second half of the fifteenth century, whether it was factors

112 Appleby, “Disease or Famine?”, 408–9. 113 Razi, Life, Marriage and Death in a Medieval Parish, 94; Bailey, Marginal Economy?, 317; Coleman, Downham in the Isle, 95; Ecclestone, “Mortality of Rural Landless Men before the Black Death”, 15–16: the unpledged, or non-migrant proportion of landless men, which had fallen from 70 per cent before 1317 to 54 per cent in 1327, had almost recovered its former level by 1348. 114 Barbara F. Harvey, “The Population Trend in England between 1300 and 1348”, Trans. Roy. Hist. Soc., 5th ser., 16 (1966): 28, 39, 41. 115 David G. Watts, “A Model for the Early Fourteenth Century”, Econ. Hist. Rev, 2nd ser., 20 (1967): 544–7. 116 Bruce M.S. Campbell, James A. Galloway and Margaret Murphy, “Rural Land-Use in the Metropolitan Hinterland, 1270–1339: The Evidence of Inquisitions Post Mortem”, Agric. Hist. Rev., 40 (1992): 20–1. 117 Alan R.H. Baker, “Evidence in the ‘Nonarum Inquisitions’ of Contracting Arable Lands in England during the Early Fourteenth Century”, Econ. Hist. Rev., 2nd ser., 19 (1966): 518–32. 118 Farmer, “Prices and Wages, 1042–1350”, 765–7, 768 (table 7.7), 774 (table 7.9). 119 Smith, “Demographic Developments in Rural England”, 60. 120 Cohn, “Black Death”, 734.

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affecting the birth rate which contributed to the falling population and prevented it from recovering before the sixteenth century.121 A full discussion of this question lies outside the scope of this article as the certificates give no information on the age of the creditors, on whether they were single or married, or on other questions which affect population trends, such as the age of marriage and the re-marriage of widows.122 But just as an improving economy contributed, with falling mortality, to the recovery of the population in the 1330s, so it seems likely that economic influences had a part to play in the population trends of later decades. Historians have variously pointed to increased opportunities for the employment of women, which caused them to postpone marriage, or to opposing economic pressures which obliged young people to spend many years as living-in servants both on farms and in towns, before they sought, or could afford, relatively late marriages.123 Both may have been significant in different periods. The opportunities for single women to work could have increased the age of marriage when towns were prospering in the second half of the fourteenth century, but it is more likely that prosperity encouraged early marriages in which women could continue to earn. However, the recessions of the fifteenth century undoubtedly made it harder for both men and women to acquire the means of setting up the independent household which was traditionally required for marriage.124 What the Statute Merchant and Staple certificates can contribute to the debate is additional evidence of varying economic experience from the late fourteenth century which brings into question the notion that living standards were consistently high and improving. They indicate that there was growing poverty in provincial towns towards the end of the fourteenth century which may well have contributed to a lower marriage rate. This could have counteracted the effects of falling mortality in crucial periods. Credit began to contract in the 1390s, and the value of the certificates halved in the next decade as a shortage of silver coin began to affect the whole economy.125 The recession of the mid-fifteenth century, which began in the 1440s, was even more serious and long-lasting. Again there was the same fall in credit which particularly affected the provincial towns, the amount

121 See the discussion in Dyer, Lords and Peasants in a Changing Society, 228–35. 122 For a survey of recent work on the subject, see Bailey, “Demographic Decline in Late Medieval England”. 123 See the discussion in Lawrence R. Poos, A Rural Society after the Black Death: Essex, 1350–1525 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), chs, 6–7, and the criticisms of these theses by Bailey, “Demographic Decline in Late Medieval England”, 514. 124 Dyer, Making a Living in the Middle Ages, 156–60. 125 On the shortage of silver, the contraction of credit, and its effect on the economy, see Pamela Nightingale, “Money and Credit in the Economy of Late Medieval England”, in Diana Wood (ed.), Medieval Money Matters (Oxford: Oxbow, 2004), 56–66. Goldberg dates the decline of the regional economy from 1438: see his “Mortality and Economic Change in the Diocese of York”, 55. This is supported by Andrew J. Pollard, North-Eastern England during the Wars of the Roses (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 71–80.

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of employment they could offer, and the size of their populations.126 Although a smaller urban population contributed to the fall in mortality, it also reduced the demand for labour, as the cessation of labour legislation indicates, and it thereby undermined the traditional means by which young people, by working in towns, could save money to marry and take up tenancies of land. Also, although land was cheap and easily available, reduced urban demand for the produce of the countryside caused agricultural prices to fall, and profits with them. This trend could only discourage the young from borrowing the capital they needed to acquire holdings, to buy the equipment, stock and seed necessary to work them, and to rent the dwellings they required to establish their own households.127 It should not be forgotten that well over two-thirds of the land was occupied by peasant producers in the fifteenth century, and they gained little from higher wages compared with what they lost from lower prices.128 In this period even tenants of large holdings were often poor, and, despite the cheapness and abundance of land, few moved up to the status of yeoman.129 The evidence also indicates that economic recession caused ‘discernible downward pressure on the wages of a range of labourers, servants and artisans between the 1440s and the 1480s’ and probably a reduction in the amount of full-time work available to them.130 Marjorie McIntosh’s work on an extensive sample of court records from 1370 onwards shows a significant rise from the mid-fifteenth century in the proportion reporting offences connected with poverty.131 Even when carpenters’ wages and those of other building workers can be seen to rise, this can be explained primarily not by a new scarcity of skilled labour but by the pressure which landlords were under, in a time of economic recession, to repair their property quickly to a reasonable standard in order to attract or keep tenants. Certainly, London companies like the Goldsmiths and Grocers found themselves suddenly obliged to spend money in this way from the mid-1440s, and the trend is visible elsewhere. Canterbury Cathedral, for instance, was forced to spend up to 16 per cent of its income in the middle of the fifteenth century on building repairs.132

126 John Hatcher, “The Great Slump of the Mid-Fifteenth Century”, in Richard Britnell and John Hatcher (eds.), Progress and Problems in Medieval England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 266–70; Britnell, Growth and Decline in Colchester, 202–5. 127 David L. Farmer, “Prices and Wages, 1350–1500”, 491, (table 5.11), 494. 128 Richard Britnell, Britain and Ireland, 1050–1530: Economy and Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 403. 129 Hatcher, “Great Slump of the Mid-Fifteenth Century”, 261–2. 130 Ibid., 263; Farmer, “Prices and Wages, 1350–1500”, 494 (table 5.13); Poos, Rural Society after the Black Death, 212–22. 131 Marjorie Keniston McIntosh, Controlling Misbehaviour in England, 1370–1600 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 81–2. 132 Thomas F. Reddaway and Lorna E.M. Walker, The Early History of the Goldsmiths’ Company, 1327–1509, Including the Book of Ordinances, 1478–83 (London: Arnold, 1975), 134–5; Nightingale, Medieval Mercantile Community, 466, 522; Dyer, Making a Living in the Middle Ages, 335.

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At the same time the recession intensified the concentration of capital and trade in London. The 63 per cent of creditors who were Londoners in the second half of the century is echoed closely by the 66 per cent of London creditors in the pardons for outlawry.133 Young immigrants flocked to London as opportunities for employment near their homes diminished, while masters in London tried to cut their costs by employing cheap apprentice labour. The London tailors and skinners in the 1480s were able to draw apprentices from as far afield as Northumberland and Yorkshire, and increasingly the new recruits stayed in London because there was nowhere else to go.134 In an effort either to restrict the flow, or to profit by it, the City and many livery companies dramatically raised their fees for registering apprentices, and later, as the newcomers threatened the prospects of their established members, they sought to restrict the number of young freemen and immigrants who could become shop-holders.135 In these circumstances of more labour than London’s economy could employ, it is not surprising that wills in the 1440s and 1450s show an increase in the number of London testators who had never married.136 The same trend was visible in the towns of Norwich, Ipswich and St Albans.

V Thus, at the time when periods of lower mortality might have led to a recovery of the population, it seems likely that that economic depression contributed to later marriages and a lower birth rate.137 Although from the 1470s the evidence of the creditors and the York testators indicates that mortality was beginning to fall, at least among the richer classes, and the wills studied by Gottfried show a trend of higher replacement rates, there is still little evidence that the population as a whole was growing. As Dyer has commented, if high death rates were the only force behind population change, then it is doubtful that there would have been any growth before 1570.138 Gottfried attributed the survival of more children not only to lower mortality, but also to the increased proportion of married people among the wealthier testators of the 1480s, and to the earlier age of marriage which they could afford.139 Nonetheless their replacement rates were still below unity, and compared with the extremely low percentage of the population (between 4.2 and 8.4 per cent) which Wrigley and Schofield found unmarried in the middle of the

133 Pamela Nightingale, “England and the European Depression of the Mid-Fifteenth Century”, J. Eur. Econ. Hist., 26 (1997): 647. 134 Matthew Davies (ed.), The Merchant Taylors’ Company of London: Court Minutes,1486–1493 (Stamford: Richard III and the Yorkist History Trust in association with Paul Watkins, 2000), 31–3. 135 Ibid., 40; Nightingale, Medieval Mercantile Community, 478–81. 136 Gottfried, Epidemic Disease in Fifteenth-Century England, 178 (table 6.3.3). 137 Bolton, “World Upside Down”, 38–40. 138 Dyer, Lords and Peasants in a Changing Society, 224. 139 Gottfried, Epidemic Disease in Fifteenth-Century England, 228–9.

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sixteenth century, the average of 26 per cent identified by Gottfried as unmarried in the 1480s was still very high.140 The decline in the marriage rate among urban testators in the deep depression of the 1440s, and its subsequent recovery, indicate that marriage was sensitive to economic factors, but it is doubtful if the economy was sufficiently buoyant to encourage many more and earlier marriages much before 1500. The certificates of debt began to rise in number and value in the 1490s, and by 1529 were back to the numbers of the 1380s and 1390s. Increased economic activity of this kind implies greater chances of employment and profitability, which could only lead to more and earlier marriages. Such a trend, combined with lower background mortality, would have made possible the demographic recovery which was visible in the 1520s, despite the epidemics of that decade.141 In summary, it appears from the death rates of the creditors that disease, independently of the relationship of population to resources, may have played a greater part than has been thought in the mortality crises which are evident in the first half of the fourteenth century. Infections may have been spread by growing urban densities and the intensification of trading networks. These contributed also to a high background rate of mortality even among the rich elite. These losses would seem to have added considerably to those of the poor population which were caused by the famine of 1315–18. The later 1330s and early 1340s were a period of relative recovery based on lower mortality and a more prosperous economy. This recovery ended with the arrival of plague. The first epidemic of 1348–9 caused mortality of about one-third among the richer classes to which the creditors belonged, although mortality was almost certainly much higher among the mass of the population. Subsequent outbreaks of plague produced lower death rates among the creditors, while the reduced density of population, particularly in the towns, and an improved standard of life for the majority, seem to have caused the background rate of mortality to fall. Epidemics continued, but after 1470 the mortality of the creditors fell markedly, as did that of testators in the diocese of York. At the same time, replacement rates for richer testators in eastern England and London began to rise and continued to do so in the 1480s. It seems, though, that that it was not until c. 1500 that improved economic conditions began to encourage more and earlier marriages for the general population. That shift, with a lower background rate of mortality, provided the conditions needed for the population to grow. This article has sought to integrate the evidence of the annual death rates for Statute Merchant and Staple creditors into that available from other sources about the population trends of late medieval England. The conclusions indicate that apart from a few significant decades, such as the 1330s and 1390s, epidemic disease

140 Wrigley and Schofield, Population History of England, 260 (table 7.28); Gottfried, “Population, Plague and Sickness”, 30 (table 3). 141 Ian Blanchard, “Population Change, Enclosure, and the Early Tudor Economy”, Econ. Hist., Rev., 2nd ser., 23 (1970): 428, 439–43.

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and high mortality dominated the population trends of late medieval England to at least the middle of the fifteenth century. But they do not support the case that high mortality alone accounts for the failure of the population to grow in the late fifteenth century at the time when it was growing in Europe. Instead one can apply to this period the conclusion which Wrigley and Schofield drew from their study of later centuries that the age and incidence of marriage, influenced by the economy, also had a key part to play in determining the size of the population. If we are to look more critically at their interpretation of England’s population history and accept that mortality as well as fertility contributed to its changing pattern, it is not unreasonable to see both forces at work in the population of late medieval England. Since the Black Death did not uniformly lead to a period of prosperity and rising living standards, one cannot exclude the possibility that population was limited in certain periods by economic constraints on marriage, as well as by mortality. If one accepts that the relative strength of mortality and fertility might change from decade to decade, and from region to region, then the demographic debate can escape from the over-rigid interpretations which have been imposed upon it, and it may assume more of the subtlety and complexity one would expect from the interaction of population with external influences, which included that of an ever-changing economy.142

142 Hatcher, “Understanding the Population History of England”, 89.

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2 ALIEN FINANCE AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE MEDIEVAL ENGLISH ECONOMY, 1285–1511 1

The contribution made by Italian companies to the medieval economy of northern Europe has been compared with that made by today´s multi-national corporations through transfers of capital and technology to the under-developed world. That comparison has long divided historical opinion. In 1951 Michael Postan famously dismissed the impact of Italian firms on the English economy as ‘very secondary and relatively unimportant’, and more negative than positive. He doubted whether the capital they invested in English trade made much difference to English economic development. Much of it, he believed, came from domestic sources, and included the proceeds of papal taxation in England which were usually deposited with Italian firms, and were employed by them mainly to finance royal wars.2 Since Postan wrote, historians have put forward differing views. Michael Prestwich agreed that the main contribution of the Italian companies was to state finance, but he concluded that they also assisted English trade by deploying more capital than denizens could hope to raise, and by providing essential facilities of credit and exchange.3 T. H. Lloyd also doubted whether English wool exports would have achieved the high levels they did in the early fourteenth century without the Italian contribution.4 Richard Britnell, though, has re-asserted Postan’s view that it is not evident that Italian

1 I am grateful to the Leverhulme Trustees and to the Economic and Social Research Council (Award no. 000271010) for financing my calendaring of the Statute Merchant and Staple certificates and the Extents on Debt, Classes C. 241, and C. 131, in the National Archives. 2 Michael M. Postan, “Italians and the Economic Development of England in the Middle Ages”, Journal of Economic History, 11 (1951): 339–41. 3 Michael Prestwich, “Italian Merchants in Late Thirteenth and Early Fourteenth-Century England”, in Fredi Chiapelli (ed.), The Dawn of Modern Banking (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 93–5, 103–4. 4 Terrence Lloyd, Alien Merchants in England in the High Middle Ages (Sussex: Harvester Press, 1982), 204–5.

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merchants drew on capital from outside England.5 There is also uncertainty about when and why Italian influence on the economy began to wane, and how English merchants were able eventually to overtake the aliens as wool exporters in 1305–6. Lloyd concluded that ‘it may have been only protective measures, whether intended or not, which actually enabled them to gain and hold the lead’.6 Lloyd´s work on the particular customs accounts confirmed Schaube’s conclusions from the export licenses of 1273–4 that aliens then accounted for at least two-thirds of wool exports. Since this was after the Flemings had been expelled from England, it would suggest that much of the £154,510 of silver which passed through the English mints between June 1275 and November 1279 was imported by Italians, who succeeded the Flemings as the leading alien wool-exporters.7 Imports of foreign bullion increased further to a peak between 1285–1287, but it is not possible to calculate the alien share of wool exports precisely until 1303, when the customs accounts first distinguish between those of alien and denizen merchants. Those figures indicate that alien domination was by then almost at an end, even though the Riccardi of Lucca remained the leading mercantile company and were still the principal financiers of the crown.8 It is clear, therefore, that major changes occurred between the 1270s and 1303 which allowed the English to overtake the aliens as wool-exporters, first in London by 1305, and in Southampton and Hull by 1310. The main exception was Boston, where aliens, mainly Germans and Brabanters, continued to dominate wool exports until c. 1330.9 Nonetheless, by 1311 denizens had gained 65 per cent of the total, and despite the competition of later Italians firms, they never subsequently lost their lead over alien exporters. This seems to justify Lloyd´s description of the first decade of the fourteenth century as one of triumph for English merchants.10 What factors led to the English success? This article suggests that the key was not protectionist measures but financial and political developments in Europe which undermined Italian competitiveness. It argues that imports of foreign bullion played an important part in financing Italian purchases of wool for export, and, because they also influenced financial confidence and liquidity in England, they affected the

5 Richard Britnell, “England and Northern Italy in the Early Fourteenth Century: The Economic Contrasts”, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th Series, XXXIV (1989): 169–71, 178– 9; Britnell, Britain and Ireland, 1050–1530, 307. See, also, Raymond de Roover, Money, Banking and Credit in Medieval Bruges (Cambridge, MA: Medieval Academy of America, 2013), 40. 6 Lloyd, Alien Merchants, 205. 7 Challis, New History of the Mint, Appendix, 675. 8 Richard Kaeuper, Bankers to the Crown: The Riccardi of Lucca and Edward I (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), passim, and especially 27–46, chapter 2, and 222–3. 9 Terrence Lloyd, The English Wool Trade in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 125; Eleanor Carus-Wilson and Olive Coleman (eds.), England’s Export Trade, 1275–1547 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), 41, 44. 10 Lloyd, Wool Trade, chapter 4.

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extent to which credit could finance trade. It illustrates this by comparing figures of wool exports, and those for imported foreign bullion, with statistics drawn from extensive samples of alien and denizen credit. By 1290, as supplies of silver in Europe diminished, the aliens were bringing less bullion to the mints and this made it more difficult for them to advance payments in cash for wool. Although England´s war with France damaged the wool trade generally between 1294–8, and reduced the credit of all its participants, Europe’s continuing monetary problems after the truce reduced the Italians’ share of exports further. This left English merchants, aided by the resources of landed and clerical investors, to increase their share of the trade, while after 1300 new supplies of bullion from the Kutna Hora mines expanded the volume of the kingdom’s currency and of mercantile credit.

I Italians could not emulate the Flemings in financing purchases of wool in England mainly by their own imports, because these were still predominantly luxury goods for which there was limited demand.11 Although some English people deposited coin with the Italian firms, it was usually for transfer to Europe, and Lloyd agrees, on balance, with Prestwich that deposits were not an important source of their working capital.12 The Italians’ financial strength lay in the multi-faceted nature of their European trade, the capital which their partners and shareholders contributed in Italy, and the links of their numerous branches with the bullion and money market which had developed in the Champagne fairs.13 The international nature of Italian finance is demonstrated by the advice given by a Siennese banker in 1260 to his partner in Champagne to borrow French money there at the fairs because it would be more profitable than borrowing money in Italy, or selling sterling. He also advised him to lend money in England rather than in France to earn higher interest.14 The Riccardi boasted at the end of the thirteenth century that they could borrow in Champagne up to 200,000 livres tournois (£50,000 sterling).15 Spufford has concluded that the Italians’ ability to borrow bullion more cheaply than Flemish merchants enabled them to capture some of the Flemings’ wool trade, even before the Flemings were expelled from England.16 The mint records

11 Ibid., 201–2; Georges Bigwood and Armand Grunzweig, Les livres des comptes des Gallerani (Bruxelles: Palais des Académies, 1961), II, 108, 225–6. 12 Prestwich, “Italian Merchants”, 96–7; Lloyd, Alien Merchants, 196–7. 13 Prestwich, “Italian Merchants”, 95; David Herlihy, Medieval and Renaissance Pistoia: The Social History of an Italian Town, 1200–1430 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967), 164–8; Bigwood and Grunzweig, Les livres des comptes des Gallerani, II, 69–70; Edwin S. Hunt, Medieval Super-Companies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 128. 14 Robert S. Lopez and Irving W. Raymond, Medieval Trade in the Mediterranean World (New York: Columbia University Press, 1955), 388. 15 Kaeuper, Bankers to the Crown, 2–4, 20–3. 16 Britnell, “England”, 170–1; Peter Spufford, Power and Profit: The Merchant in Medieval Europe (London: Thames and Hudson, 2002), 46.

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show Italian merchants bringing foreign coin to the English mints where their compatriots were not only prominent officials but also acted apparently as their agents to expedite the process of exchanging bullion for sterling.17 The Crown prosecuted most Italian companies in 1299 for importing banned foreign coin, while in 1310 two of them were convicted of exporting 14,000 florins, which, like the Genoese financier, Pessagno, they most likely had previously imported.18 It was their supplies of ready coin that had enabled the Italians to secure, through large advance payments, wool contracts of a scale and duration that English merchants could not match. Of the 143 contracts for wool which appear in the royal records between 1280 and 1311, only seven show Englishmen investing for more than one season, whereas there are 39 such contracts for alien merchants, 32 of which were made by Italians.19 The latter provided for wool to be delivered over periods which averaged 5.5 years, while six contracts recorded commitments lasting from 10 to 20 years. The Italians recorded their monastic contracts for the most part in the Chancery or Exchequer, so that, in case of default, they could bring royal pressure to bear on abbots and priors. These aspects of their business, as well as their loans to the Crown, have already been studied extensively, and do not form part of this enquiry about their contribution to the wider English economy, except insofar as they indicate general trends of credit.20 The proceeds of the papal taxation agreed in 1274, and transferred to Edward I, were deposited with 16 Italian firms in England. However, in Lloyd’s view, the extent to which they could be used by them as trading capital has been greatly exaggerated, since many deposits were simply repayments for previous loans.21 Moreover, the Riccardi, the greatest of the companies, were only papal bankers for about half the period they were serving the king, while the frequency of royal demands for huge sums in coin to pay for troops, the construction of castles, and household expenses, meant that Edward was indebted to them at least until 1291.22 There were also occasions when he overstretched even the Riccardi’s resources, obliging them, for example, in 1284 to ask their Paris branch to send them urgently £1,000 in coin.23 Without additional resources, the papal deposits and royal revenues are unlikely to have allowed the Riccardi to fulfil their huge financial commitments to the Crown, while at the same time providing them with sufficient coin in England to purchase their substantial exports of wool.

17 Challis (ed.), A New History of the Royal Mint, 153–4. 18 Ibid., 64; Lloyd, Alien Merchants, 84, 172, 190–2, 199. 19 Adrian Bell, Chris Brooks, and Paul Dryburgh, English Wool Market: The English Wool Market, c. 1230–1327 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), app. 3, 23, 53, 70, 84, 111, 115, 148. 20 For the loans for monastic wool recorded in the Chancery and Exchequer, see ibid., English Wool Market, 14–18. For loans to the Crown, see Adrian R Bell, Chris Brooks, and Tony K Moore, Accounts of the English Crown with Italian Merchant Societies, 1272–1345 (Kew: List and Index Society, 2009), 331. 21 Lloyd, Alien Merchants, 169–71, 185–92. 22 Kaeuper, Bankers to the Crown, 46, 218. 23 Prestwich, “Italian Merchants”, 98; Kaeuper, Bankers to the Crown, 177, 188.

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Nor could the Italians’ need for sterling for wool purchases be met by transfers of money from Europe by letters of exchange since this practice was prohibited by the Crown in 1283 on the grounds that it reduced imports of bullion.24 Even where letters of exchange were used to make international payments, it was difficult to honour them when financial imbalances between countries became too great. Their costs then soared, making it cheaper to send bullion. Spufford and Lloyd have concluded that bills of exchange did not, in fact, diminish the quantity of bullion transported across Europe, and that ordinary international payments were still made primarily in this way.25 Either means of payment meant that the exchange rates of French and Flemish currency with the florin, and with sterling, were a matter of great importance to Italian merchants.26 Their anxiety on this score increased from the 1280s, when the stability which had characterized coinages outside Italy for a century began to dissolve under the pressures of greater competition by European mints for silver.27 Italians also used the gold florin as their money of account, as well as their principal coin in southern Europe, whereas their trading partners in northern Europe mostly used silver coinages. This meant that they were particularly affected by exchange rates which reflected the relative abundance or scarcity of either metal.28 For these reasons, Italian merchants in England were recording losses from exchanges of coin in the 1290s.29 Since they borrowed extensively, as well as lent money, rising interest rates, like unfavourable exchange rates, could reduce the profitability of their international business. In 1302 the Frescobaldi claimed that they had raised loans in Champagne and Florence, totalling £32,886, which had cost them £15,245 in interest.30 The Italians dealt extensively with private individuals in England, as well as with monasteries and the Crown. They made loans and advanced money for wool to landowners and urban middlemen. They generally recorded these transactions on the rolls of Statute Merchant registries, which legislation of 1283–5 had established in leading towns throughout the kingdom. When the loans were not repaid, the registries sent certificates giving details of the debt to Chancery to initiate the process of enforcement. Comparisons of the certificates with the few surviving recognizance rolls from London and Coventry suggest that, despite varying economic and political circumstances, the certificates offer a consistent sample of about

24 Lloyd, Alien Merchants, 199. 25 Spufford, Power and Profit, 37; idem, Handbook of Medieval Exchange, xxxiii–iv; Lloyd, Alien Merchants, 199. 26 Michael Prestwich, “Early Fourteenth-Century Exchange Rates”, The Economic History Review, 32, 4 (1979): 472, 474. 27 Peter Spufford, Money and Its Use in Medieval Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 288–95. 28 Spufford, Power and Profit, 34–46; Hunt, Medieval Super-Companies, 61–5, 133–4, 141–2; Prestwich, “Exchange Rates”, 471–5. 29 Bell, Brooks, and Moore, Accounts, 55 (17.8), 79 (20.87); also see below, nn. 81 and 82. 30 Robert J. Whitwell, “Italian Bankers and the Crown”, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 17 (1903): 198.

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20 per cent of the credit originally recorded.31 This consistency is explicable by the fact that creditors would stop lending when they feared that they might not be repaid. A shortage of coin was one such compelling reason, since this was a common occurrence in the medieval economy. When coins were made from precious metal, the weight and fineness of their silver determined their value. This meant that the currency could not be expanded, or even maintained, unless sufficient bullion was brought to the mints by merchants. Since investors feared that, should the supply of bullion decline for any reason, a diminishing circulation of coin would lead to hoarding, and to increasing numbers of defaults, this affected their willingness or not to give credit. Contrarily, because more bullion meant there would be more coin to sustain and expand economic activity, investors gained more confidence that they would be repaid, and they were therefore more willing to lend.32 Although the Statute Merchant certificates exclude small debts typical of the retail transactions which employed most of the currency, and they therefore produce totals which may seem modest in comparison with the circulation, they nonetheless provide samples of the comparative trends of alien and English credit. This is because their high average value was typical of the wholesale and export trades in which aliens competed with English merchants. The likely default rate of about 20 per cent means the figures from the certificates must be multiplied by five to gain some idea of the amounts of credit originally registered. The alien certificates record chiefly investments in wool, apart from those of the Gascons, which mainly reflect their sales of wine. Those for denizens show a far more varied character, but both reveal changing levels of credit in England, which, as previous analyses indicate, reflect national economic trends.33 As Figure 2.1 shows, they also correspond, apart from significant exceptions to be discussed below, with fluctuations in the imports of foreign bullion to the mints.

II Aliens recorded their credit at different registries, but only four were really important to them, reflecting the areas where their trade was concentrated. London was always the chief centre because it provided the richest market for alien imports. In 1285 Edward I took over the city’s government and suspended its liberties, which included the citizens’ right to exclude aliens from their retail and distributive trade.34 London’s registry issued certificates for alien creditors in 1285–9

31 For an account of the Statute Merchant certificates of debt, and the detailed evidence that they represent about 20 per cent of the number of debts originally recorded in the registries, see Nightingale, “Money and Credit in the Economy of Late Medieval England”, 63–4. 32 Ibid., 60, 64, 66–8. 33 Ibid., 63–8. 34 Gwyn Williams, Medieval London: From Commune to Capital (London: Athlone Press, 1963), 109–10, 255–8.

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120,000 100,000 80,000

£ 60,000 40,000 20,000 1284–5 1285–6 1286–7 1287–8 1288–9 1289–90 1290–1 1291–2 1292–3 1293–4 1294–5 1295–6 1296–7 1297–8 1298–9 1299–1300 1300–01 1301–2 1302–3 1303–4 1304–5 1305–6 1306–7 1307–8 1308–9 1309–10

0

Foreign bullion Credit

Figure 2.1 Imports of foreign bullion and totals of alien and denizen credit (x5), 1285–1310 Sources: TNA, C. 241, Statute Merchant certificates of debt; Mate, ‘Monetary policies’, app.

which were worth £3,921. This was 46.6 per cent of the total recorded for aliens throughout the kingdom in those years. Lincoln produced certificates worth 21.3 per cent of that total, Boston fair 15.1 per cent, and Winchester 12.45 per cent. York, Bristol, and Newcastle trailed behind with respectively 2.0, 1.74, and 0.75 per cent. The particular importance of alien creditors to London’s economy was that they gave credit which averaged more than twice the value of that given by individual denizen merchants. In 1285–9 the certificates indicate that Italians, chiefly from Lucca and Florence, accounted for almost 70 per cent of alien credit in London. Gascons were responsible for 13.4 per cent, Flemings and Brabanters together for 6.65 per cent, and Cahorsins for only 0.85 per cent. A few German, French, and Spanish creditors made up the rest. The picture was similar at the other main registries. This pattern echoes the Italians’ dominance of alien wool exports, which is evident in the customs accounts for Hull and Boston and was almost certainly true of London.35 Only at Winchester and Bristol were Gascons the chief alien creditors. Despite the new privileges the aliens enjoyed in London from 1285, the certificates reveal that before the end of the decade their credit was in marked decline.

35 Lloyd, Wool Trade, 46–7; Carus-Wilson and Coleman, England’s Export Trade, 64–74. There are no surviving customs particulars for London in these years from which to judge the Italian contribution.

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Table 2.1 Alien and denizen credit in the Statute Merchant certificates, 1285–1311 Year

Alien credit £

Alien % of whole total

Denizen credit £

1285 1286 1287 1288 1289 1290 1291 1292 1293 1294 1295 1296 1297 1298 1299 1300 1301 1302 1303 1304 1305 1306 1307 1308 1309 1310 1311

1,456.45 1,896.22 2,186.00 1,440.40 1,354.00 1,785.00 1,067.30 692.10 1,050.00 362.80 219.00 99.99 55.60 92.66 609.70 491.20 216.40 551.76 171.15 76.32 498.22 964.40 1,143.00 389.66 514.00 336.00 538.00

36.2 34.1 30.4 27.8 24.1 25.7 16.9 9.1 15.0 4.8 5.7 2.1 1.4 3.0 12.7 5.4 2.8 7.0 2.0 0.9 3.1 5.0 6.0 2.7 2.8 1.4 2.9

2,561 3,660 4,986 3,747 4,254 5,159 5,262 6,834 5,930 7,187 3,601 4,641 4,007 2,987 4,203 9,544 7,505 7,245 8,064 8,336 15,683 17,680 18,760 14,151 18,099 23,892 17,364

Source: TNA, C. 241, Statute Merchant certificates of debt.

The records of the Riccardi, and the alien wool contracts in the royal records, indicate a similar trend.36 When the Statute Merchant system was first fully operating in 1285 alien credit accounted for 36 per cent of the value of all the certificates for that year, but that proportion fell quickly. As Table 2.1 illustrates, by 1290 it had dropped to 25.7 per cent, and within another year, to 16.8 per cent, before plunging to 9.1 per cent in 1292, by which date it was worth less than half of its value in 1285. It rose briefly to 15 per cent in 1293 but fell again into single figures on the outbreak of the war against France in 1294. It did not climb beyond the single digits until the truce of 1298 contributed to its recovery to 12.6 per cent in 1299, even though its value was then still less than it had been in 1292. Throughout the next decade the alien share fell back again to single figures.

36 Kaeuper, Bankers to the Crown, 32; Bell, Brooks, and Moore, English Wool Market, app. 3, shows the chief fall came in 1288–9.

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ALIEN FINANCE AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT

Since changing levels of credit usually reflect changing volumes of economic activity, and, in this case, varying levels of alien trade, it seems that the reasons for the declining alien proportion of England’s wool exports must be sought initially between 1285 and 1294, when their share of the credit recorded in the certificates fell by half. This cannot be explained by the strains of meeting royal demands for cash because, as Kaeuper concluded, the only occasion when the Riccardi suspended loans to individuals because of the king’s inroads into their capital was in 1282–3.37 Nor can it be explained by the aliens’ disillusionment with the operation of the statute since the Riccardi, along with the other Italian firms, always had the alternative of recording their loans in the Exchequer and Chancery.38 The fact that the credit they recorded there was also falling, as was that recorded by Florentine firms in the certificates, is therefore significant. Moreover, the same firms continued to use the system, while Germans and Brabanters did so increasingly after 1302. Despite a high default rate by modern standards, it seems they still valued it as a way of effectually recording and safeguarding the bulk of their investments. Like alien credit, imports of foreign silver show a marked decline from the late 1280s.39 Figure 2.1 shows that they fell from £42,387 in the 15 months between May 1285 and August 1286, to £1,218 in the similar period from July 1290 to September 1291. Although in the latter year the drop was influenced by friction between England and Flanders, this only exacerbated a trend established from 1288 which seems to have had monetary rather than political or commercial causes. The increased competition for silver between European mints affected numerous ones in the Low Countries whose connection with the English wool trade had led them for some time to produce coins which imitated but, initially, did not counterfeit sterling. Since wool exports ensured a favourable balance of payments for England, the quantity of foreign silver its mints received in return, and struck into coins of high quality, meant that sterling was sought after and used as a common currency throughout north-western Europe. In this period exports of sterling also supplied some of the bullion that other countries needed for their own coinages. For both reasons it appears that between 1247 and 1279 sterling worth about £900,000 had been exported to Europe and was not available for Edward I’s re-coinage of 1279–81.40 That re-coinage restored sterling’s reputation and increased its attraction as an international currency, which led to its official use in France in 1282.41 However, the following year, fearful that he was losing too much of his coinage, Edward I

37 Kaeuper, Bankers to the Crown, 187. 38 Ibid., 121–2. 39 Mavis Mate, “Monetary Policies in England, 1272–1307”, British Numismatic Journal, 41 (1972): app., 75, tab. 1. 40 Nicholas Mayhew, “The Circulation and Imitation of Sterlings in the Low Countries”, in Nicholas Mayhew (ed.), Coinage in the Low Countries (800–1500): The Third Oxford Symposium on Coinage and Monetary History (Oxford: British Archaeological Reports, 54, 1979), 56–8. 41 Ibid., 59; idem, “Circulation and Imitations”, 21–2.

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ALIEN FINANCE AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT

prohibited its export and took increasingly strict measures to prevent evasions of the ban.42 Alien merchants, who had previously brought foreign silver to England to re-export as sterling coins, promptly reduced their imports of bullion by 25 per cent between 1283 and 1285, and wool exports also fell.43 With their mints deprived of English silver, rulers in the Low Countries began to issue coins which were similar to sterling but were increasingly of lower weight and fineness. When merchants brought these to England, Edward issued the Statuta de Moneta in 1283 which prohibited the use of foreign coin in his realm.44 Competing European mints continued to bid up the price of bullion and created unpredictable flows of silver between them.45 These offered speculative profits on the Continent high enough to encourage alien merchants to bring more foreign silver to the English mints between May 1285 and June 1287 with the intention of exporting it illicitly as sterling coin.46 Their preference for financial speculation over commercial investment may explain why the alien proportion of credit in the certificates fell from the 36 per cent of the total which it had enjoyed in 1285 to 30.4 per cent two years later, and then to 24 per cent in 1288–9.47 Officials of the French mint claimed later that £50,000 of sterling entered France in the 1280s.48 The certificates show denizen credit rising conspicuously in 1287. This suggests that English merchants saw in reduced alien competition the chance to increase their own share of wool exports.49 However, friction between England and Flanders from 1290 until the spring of 1292 reduced wool exports and contributed to a sharp drop in imports of foreign bullion by nearly two-thirds. They did not recover their former level until the first decade of the fourteenth century.50 This abrupt fall marked the beginning of an extended period of intensified monetary instability, and of even sharper competition for silver. The French king tried to attract more bullion to his mints by increasing the face value of the gros tournois from 12 deniers to 13 in 1290, and Edward I followed

42 Mate, “Monetary Policies”, 56–7. 43 Whereas the average monthly inflow of foreign bullion between 30 Sept. 1281 and 21 Oct. 1283 was £1,852, between 21 Oct. 1283 and 20 May 1285 it was only £1,380; Mate, “Monetary policies”: app., 75, tab. 1. Wool exports fell by over 20 per cent from 30,483 sacks between Easter 1283 and Easter 1284 to 23,931 sacks between Easter 1285 and Easter 1286; Carus-Wilson and Coleman, England’s Export Trade, 36–7. 44 Mate, “Monetary Policies”, 56–8. 45 Mayhew, “Circulation and Imitation”, 62. 46 Ibid., 56; Nicholas Mayhew and David R. Walker, “Crockards and Pollards: Imitation and the Problem of Fineness in a Silver Coinage”, in Nicholas Mayhew (ed.), Edwardian Monetary Affairs (Oxford: BAR, 1977), 126. See also fig. 2 above. 47 Michael Prestwich, “Edward I’s Monetary Policies and Their Consequences”, Economic History Review, 22 (1969): 407–9; Mayhew, “Circulation and Imitations”, 21–2. 48 Mayhew, “Circulation and Imitation”, 59. 49 The foreign silver imported in those years totalled £83,938. 50 The amount of foreign silver taken to the mint fell from £33,017 in the 12 months beginning 3 Nov. 1287, to £16,153 in the following 17 months; Mate, “Monetary policies”: app., 75, tab. 1.

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ALIEN FINANCE AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT

30,000 25,000 20,000 15,000

Alien Denizen

10,000 5,000

89 12 91 12 93 12 95 12 97 12 99 13 01 13 03 13 05 13 07 13 09 13 11

87

12

12

12

85

0

Figure 2.2 Alien and denizen credit in the Statute Merchant certificates of debt, 1285–1311. Source: TNA, C. 241, Statute Merchant certificates of debt.

his example by lowering his seigniorage charge that year from 9d. to 6d. in the pound, but with no effect.51 Rulers in the Low Countries also began to issue coins known as crockards and pollards, which, though of inferior quality, were now more obviously designed to counterfeit sterling.52 Their similarity meant that alien merchants could pass them off to unsophisticated English customers as genuine sterling in payments for wool. Of some 90 million imitations struck in the Low Countries in the 1290s probably half were brought to England to purchase wool.53 As they did not pass through the English mints, they no longer feature in the mint figures, which fell alarmingly. But despite official warnings, they were accepted in payments in England because they provided much-needed cash to compensate for the falling output of the mints.54 Their use by English merchants undoubtedly explains why Figures 2.1 and 2.2 show a marked contrast between the falling mint figures and the buoyant denizen credit recorded in the certificates between 1290 and 1294. The reduced demand for wool, occasioned by the friction with Flanders, caused alien credit in the certificates to plunge from 17 per cent in 1291 to 9 per cent in 1292. This steep fall also reflects what was happening to Italian merchants in France. The French king, Philip IV, arrested all those in his kingdom in 1291 and extorted huge fines from them for permission to continue trading. At the same

51 52 53 54

Mate, “Monetary Policies”, 61; Challis (ed.), A New History of the Royal Mint, 134–5. Mayhew, “Circulation and Imitations”, 22–4. Ibid., 61. Mate, “Monetary Policies”, 61–2, and app., 75, tab.1.

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ALIEN FINANCE AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT

time, the papacy demanded that Italian firms in France surrender the large sums collected in papal taxation which had been deposited with them. Both measures deprived them of substantial trading capital and inevitably reduced the amount of credit they could offer in England.55 Edward also increased his efforts between 1291 and 1294 to stop the invasion of the counterfeit sterling which was robbing him of his accustomed revenues from the mints. While his actions apparently failed to deter his subjects from using them, the harsher regulations he issued in 1291, which included the confiscation of all the money and goods of offenders, and the death penalty for a third offence, apparently deterred the aliens. As the chief suspects, they were inevitably the main targets of thorough searches for foreign coins which were made in London and elsewhere, including the fairs. Large numbers of merchants were convicted of importing and distributing the counterfeits, and it seems likely that the penalties deterred aliens from using them freely to buy wool.56 At St Botolph’s fair, the certificates for alien creditors slumped from an annual average of 18 in the years 1286–90 to 11 in 1291 and plunged further from 1293. It seems likely that similar fears explain why the receipts from St Giles’s fair in Winchester also declined strikingly from 1293, after the warden of the Exchange searched them for bad money.57 Monasteries, which had been accustomed to receiving advance payments from aliens for their wool, must have hesitated to accept them when royal officials were directed in 1294 to scrutinize all their deposits, and to confiscate bad money.58 These measures, followed by the even more serious disruption of trade caused by the outbreak of war with France, explain why prices for wool began to decline.59 Lower prices, suspicion of alien payments, and reduced alien credit and competition allowed denizen merchants to increase their own share of the trade. Moreover, the dispersal of the counterfeit coins throughout England for purchases of wool had increased the local money supply and contributed to the growth of English credit in the certificates which, as Table 2.1 illustrates, increased from £5,262 in 1291 to £6,287 in 1292, and then to £7,187 in 1294, at a time when the low output of the mints would normally have caused credit to contract.

III These events left the aliens with an average of only 15 per cent of the total credit recorded in the certificates for 1290–4, which was half of their proportion in the previous five years. Nonetheless, they continued to compete with denizen merchants in the chief wool-growing areas. The Riccardi remained active in Lincoln,

55 Kaeuper, Bankers to the Crown, 209–12, 213. 56 Mate, “Monetary Policies”, 58. 57 Derek Keene, Survey of Medieval Winchester, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 1120–4, and tab. 55. 58 Mate, “Monetary Policies”, 59. 59 Terrence Lloyd, The Movement of Wool Prices in Medieval England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 48, tab. 3.

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ALIEN FINANCE AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT

buying wool, and they sent 17 certificates from its registry in 1290–4. Germans, Cahorsins, and Gascons also joined Italians in sending 26 certificates from Boston fair.60 Despite this, alien credit in Lincolnshire sank in that period by almost 80 per cent. Lincoln had become so dependent on visiting aliens that its own merchants were ill-prepared to exploit the latter’s difficulties, with the consequence that sellers, rather than buyers, now had to give credit. Numerous rectors and vicars throughout the county did so for sales which almost certainly included wool, while it was left to the bishop, dean, and canons of the cathedral to increase Lincoln’s own credit.61 However, new mercantile creditors appeared from the county’s smaller towns and ports. They included Louth, Yarborough, Stamford, Gainsborough, Grantham, and the northern ports of Barton-on-Humber, Saltfleetby, and Grimsby.62 As a consequence, denizen credit increased throughout the county by 28 per cent. Nottingham also produced new mercantile creditors and acquired its own Statute Merchant registry in 1290 to meet their needs. Shrewsbury’s merchants, unlike those of Lincoln, had experienced little alien competition locally, and with their cash boosted by their own imports of counterfeit coin, they increased the credit they recorded in the certificates by 33 per cent over the period 1290–4. Totalling £3,193, it averaged £2.38 per square mile of the county. This was the highest value for denizen credit achieved by any county outside London. Despite producing some of the finest wool in the kingdom, Shropshire had escaped Italian domination by reason of its distance from the eastern ports, and because of the de Ludlow family’s early success in controlling Shrewsbury’s wool trade through their close financial and personal ties with the local gentry and peasants who produced it. The weakening of alien investment also encouraged Hereford’s merchants to end their previous dependence on alien merchants in London, and they too established their own Statute Merchant registry in Hereford in 1290 to record their increasing credit.63 The Riccardi had registered only modest amounts of credit for wool in York’s registry because they dealt mainly with the county’s monasteries.64 But from 1292 they registered even less there, and Germans took their place, moving inland from Hull.65 However, with their own resources increased by the counterfeits, local merchants managed to outbid German competition and increased their credit in the certificates by 38 per cent in 1290–4. The creditors were mainly York middlemen

60 For Germans, see TNA, C. 241/2/90; 12/2. For Gascons, see TNA, C. 241/16/139, 140. For Cahorsins, see TNA, C. 241/12/3, 4, 66, 67, 71; 16/20. 61 For the bishop and cathedral canons, see TNA, C. 241/13/101; 15/126B; 22/104; 23/93; 27/117; 28/29. For parochial clergy, see TNA, C. 241/26/14; 23/98; 25/42; 26/85; 32/218; 33/16. 62 TNA, C. 241/12/39; 16/91, 95; 17/39, 60; 21/33; 22/76, 105, 145, 147, 231; 23/1; 24/11; 25/1, 7, 71, 106; 26/9; 35/16, 17, 18; 74/323. 63 The certificates sent from Hereford increased from six with a date for repayment in 1291 to 15 with a date for repayment in 1294. The earliest one is TNA, C. 241/23/68. 64 TNA, C. 241/8/120; 9/231, 299, 300; 17/23. 65 TNA, C. 241/22/127, 128; 25/205, 207.

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ALIEN FINANCE AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT

who advanced money to buy wool from neighbouring landowners and peasants. The median value of their numerous certificates was only five pounds, reflecting the small scale of their advances, and it is doubtful if they could have defeated German competition if the clergy of York, led by the dignitaries of the minster and the archbishop, had not contributed substantial investment, drawn from their landed revenues. Clerical investors were responsible for 29 per cent of the credit recorded in York’s certificates in 1290–4, some of which stated it was specifically given for wool. Hampshire, though, exhibited the greatest growth of denizen credit in those years. Its increase by 51 per cent, from £1,013 in 1285–9 to £2,078 in 1290–4, suggests that it was easier to bring in the counterfeit sterlings through Southampton, and the minor ports of the south coast, than through the more stringently policed Dover, Sandwich, and, of course, London, where every ship, and everyone who crossed the bridge, was searched for them.66 But, as the flow of counterfeits increased, and the risks involved became more severe, it appears that Hampshire merchants saw an opportunity to exploit local fears that aliens would pay in counterfeit coin. The falling receipts from St Giles’s fair coincided with the stipulation in Winchester’s certificates from 1290 that debts should be repaid in good sterling coin. Also, the large number of Winchester certificates which had recorded credit given by local merchants for sales of imported cloth and wine all but disappeared after 1291, and they were replaced by others showing leading Winchester wool merchants advancing money to knights and other landowners in Berkshire and Oxfordshire.67 It appears that heightened local suspicions of aliens had given Winchester merchants the chance to displace them as wool merchants. Consequently, they invested less in alien imports and diverted their capital to purchase more wool for export. The flow of pollards and crockards allowed denizen Londoners to increase their own credit in the certificates of 1290–4 by 30 per cent, to a total of £6,831. As in York, they achieved this only with the aid of increased investment by royal and civic officials, including Chancery clerks. Clerical investment, though, increased the size of Londoners’ transactions rather than extending their geographical range, while aliens were so well established in London that they were able to maintain 30 per cent of the credit recorded in its certificates. The Italian firms contributed half of this, and from London they continued to deal directly with customers in all but five English counties, including wool-producers as far away as Lincolnshire and Cumberland, whereas denizens still confined their credit to the counties closest to the city.68 It could be argued that in extending the capital’s economic reach, the aliens thereby contributed to English economic development. But it could also be said that alien competition had limited the opportunities which

66 Mate, “Monetary Policies”, 58. 67 TNA, C. 241/2/196; 4/28; 12/26, 32, 109; 14/38; 15/116; 22/135; 25/276; E.122/136/9, 11, 24. 68 TNA, C. 241/2/82,148; 10/22; 12/119; 18/11; 24/41; 34/26.

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ALIEN FINANCE AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT

could have increased the numbers of urban merchants in the eastern counties. Only when alien competition diminished were towns like Nottingham and Hull able to increase their mercantile numbers and the smaller Lincolnshire towns were able to expand their trade.

IV By 1293 alien credit throughout the kingdom had already fallen to 15 per cent of the total in the certificates for that year; however, what caused it to sink to a catastrophically low level from 1294 was the war which broke out between England and France. This proved ultimately to be a mortal blow for the Riccardi and for several other Italian firms connected with them. Philip IV arrested their members in France, and his continued enmity meant it was difficult for them to maintain their accustomed financial links between England, their French branches, and the bullion and money markets of Champagne.69 The closeness of these links is emphasized by the fact that when Edward bankrupted the Riccardi in England, the abundant credit they had always obtained from the Champagne fairs disappeared overnight, and in 1294 the war’s adverse effects on trade caused alien credit in the certificates to plunge to less than 5 per cent of the whole.70 In addition, the king inflicted on the economy disastrous policies to pay for the war, including levying unprecedented levels of taxation and enforcing both interruptions of trade and a prise of wool at the same time that he was seizing private deposits of coin in churches and exporting possibly up to a third of the currency in a fruitless search for victory in France. The falling credit recorded in the certificates for denizens and aliens reflects, as does the falling number of recognizances on the Close Rolls, the ensuing shortage of coin. The totals for the certificates fell from £7,550 in 1294 to £3,819 in 1295, and only crept up to £4,062 in 1297 when a truce was declared in the war. However, it is clear that the aliens suffered most, for by then their credit had plunged to 1.4 per cent of the total. In 1298 London regained its independence and, with it, the commercial privileges which restricted alien trade. Only when the national economy recovered in 1299–1300 did alien credit reach 13 per cent of the total. Much of the circulation of coin which made this recovery possible after the truce consisted of an intensified flow of pollards and crockards which were imported in huge numbers from 1298.71 Their quality, though, was much poorer than that of their predecessors because of the French king’s debasement of his currency from 1295 to pay for the war. Debasement spread by contagion to the mints of the Low Countries and the money market of Champagne.72 The circulation that the pollards and crockards attained in England allowed credit to expand, but it also brought

69 70 71 72

Kaeuper, Bankers to the Crown, 225–7. Ibid., 227–30. Mayhew, Sterling Imitations, 24. Mate, “Monetary Policies”, 63–6.

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ALIEN FINANCE AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT

inflation to domestic prices and wages and threatened the international value of sterling. Edward reacted decisively to prohibit imports of all sterling imitations in the Statute of Stepney of 1299, and he proceeded to demonetize at least 48 million of them in 1300–2. Their holders received only half their nominal value in new sterling coins. Undoubtedly many merchants suffered considerable financial loss, although some Italian firms made a profit by re-minting them.73 The mints classed the counterfeits as foreign bullion, which explains why their output under this heading suddenly surged in those years.74 English wool exporters did not immediately benefit from falling alien credit and competition, as their own reduced credit in 1301–2 shows. Undoubtedly this was because they, too, suffered from the loss of capital and the deflationary effect of withdrawing the counterfeits. Furthermore, the Flemish market was closed to them from the summer of 1302, when the French invaded Flanders and provoked a conflict which reduced wool exports.75 This also cut imports of bullion, as shown in Figure 2.2. The greater familiarity of Brabanter and German merchants with the wool market of Brabant enabled them more easily to divert their wool to Brabant′s ports. It is also likely that they were the first merchants to benefit from the prolific output of the newly exploited silver mines at Kutna Hora near Prague, because from 1302 they began registering substantial advance payments for wool in York, Nottingham, Lincoln, and London. Imports of silver probably also explain why they were able to continue their domination of wool exports from Hull and Boston.76 Germans normally made little use of the Statute Merchant registries, and, generally showed more distrust of credit and banking than other merchants. The Hansa towns had no organized money market, and there were no Italian banks in Lubeck. This explains why Germans lodged their money in Bruges with innkeepers, rather than with bankers.77 By 1302, though, they realized that if they were to profit from falling Italian competition for English wool they had to meet the local demand for cash. The closing of the Flemish market caused the value of sterling to fall further against the florin between 1301 and 1305.78 Although this made English wool cheaper for the Italians to buy, it also discouraged Italian credit. The Frescobaldi complained in 1302 of losing 2,000 marks on a repayment which the king had assigned to them the previous year, because they had accepted the sterling mark at a value of five gold florins and it had since fallen to less than four.79 Consequently the

73 74 75 76

Ibid., 69. See fig. 1 above. Lloyd, Wool Trade, 99. TNA, C. 241/22/128; 27/196; 31/10, 13; 40/139; 43/79, 85; 80/85; 81/134; Lloyd, Wool Trade, 85–6; idem, Alien Merchants, 154–6; idem, England and the German Hanse, 1157–1611 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 44–6. 77 de Roover, Money, Banking and Credit in Medieval Bruges, 336–8. 78 Spufford, Handbook, 198. 79 Prestwich, “Italian Merchants”, 81; Whitwell, “Italian Bankers”, 198.

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ALIEN FINANCE AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT

100,000 90,000 80,000 70,000 60,000 50,000 40,000 30,000 20,000 10,000 1284–5 1285–6 1286–7 1287–8 1288–9 1289–90 1290–91 1291–2 1292–3 1293–4 1294–5 1295–6 1296–7 1297–8 1298–9 1299–1300 1300–01 1301–02 1302–3 1303–04 1304–05 1305–06 1306–07 1307–08 1308–09 1309–10

0

Wool sacks

Bullion £

Figure 2.3 Exports of wool and imports of foreign bullion, 1284–1309. Note: There are no figures for wool exports in 1291–4. Sources: Carus-Wilson and Coleman, England’s export trade; Mate, ‘Monetary policies’, app.

Italians reduced their commercial credit. They had to contend, too, in these years with the wild fluctuations in the exchange rate between the florin and the French tournois, which affected their financial dealings with their French branches and with the Champagne fairs.80 These difficulties contributed to the fall in alien credit in the certificates from £609 in 1299 to £216 in 1301, and then to £48 in 1304. What may also have precipitated the severe fall in 1304 was Edward I’s concession of new commercial privileges to alien merchants in the Carta Mercatoria of 1303. It allowed the aliens to sell their imports directly to provincial merchants in London and to buy wool from them in return. The city had emerged during the war as the leading wool port when the danger to shipping had encouraged merchants to use the shortest sea crossing for their wool. By 1303 Boston’s share of wool exports had fallen to only 44 per cent of London’s total.81 Their new freedom to deal directly with provincial merchants in London encouraged the Italians to increase their imports of luxury goods. By doing so they could hope both to increase their

80 Spufford, Handbook of Medieval Exchange, 174. 81 Carus-Wilson and Coleman, England’s Export Trade, 41.

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profits and to use the proceeds of their sales to buy wool, thereby reducing their reliance on imports of bullion.82 Alien imports to London soared in value in 1304, and Italian mercery and spices accounted for well over half of them.83 However, despite their new policy, and despite the booming demand for wool, the number of Italian wool contracts in the royal records shrank in the next five years, as did their credit in the Statute Merchant certificates. Even more surprising, in 1305 they cut their imports into London by 40 per cent.84 The consequence was that in 1305–6 the wool exports of denizens exceeded those of the aliens nationally for the first time since records began.85 What explains this outcome? It is clear that the Italians were experiencing more severe financial difficulties from 1302, and that these were linked with those of their branches in Paris. The Ammanati collapsed that year, and the Mozzi, a firm which had traded in England since the late 1270s, was bankrupted in 1304 after its Paris headquarters dishonoured the London branch’s letters of exchange. The same year the Magalotti fled from Paris owing the Gallerani there 1,700 livres.86 In early 1305 the Pistoian firm of the Corone dishonoured a large number of letters of exchange, and the same year they defaulted before fleeing England secretly to avoid their creditors.87 When the king threatened the other Florentine companies with arrest and imprisonment in 1306, it is not surprising that they considered withdrawing from London and that alien wool exports continued to decline for the rest of the decade.88 The brief revival of alien credit in 1307 was due chiefly to the transactions of Germans and Gascons. Although persistent royal demands for loans had caused the fall of the Riccardi in 1294, and the king’s failure to repay others may have contributed to the Italians’ difficulties, they were not the chief explanations for the crisis, which was clearly linked with the troubles of their continental branches. These were caused chiefly by the destabilizing effect that the debased currencies of France and the Low Countries had on financial transactions, credit, and trade in north-western Europe. Debasement had caused the French tournois to fall against the florin from 10 sous in 1297, to 25 sous 6 deniers in 1302, and then to 42 sous 6 deniers in 1304–5, before the French king revalued it at 13 sous in 1306.89 The sterling mark also fell from 5.25 florins in March 1305 to 3.25 florins in the following December, probably because the new flow of silver into the English mints increased the relative value of gold.90

82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90

Nightingale, A Medieval Mercantile Community, 117–19. Lloyd, Alien Merchants, app. I, tab. A 1.9, and 52–4. Ibid., tab. A 1.9. Bell, Brooks, and Moore, English Wool Market, app. 3, nos. 169–75. There are four wool contracts for 1301, two for 1302, one for 1303, two for 1304, two for 1305, one for 1306, and two for 1307. Bigwood and Grunzweig, Les livres des comptes des Gallerani, II, 162. Lloyd, Alien Merchants, 172, 192–3. Ibid., 194; Carus-Wilson and Coleman, England’s Export Trade, 41. Jean Duplessy, Les Monnaies Françaises (Paris: P. Maison Platt, 1989), 86; Spufford, Handbook of Medieval Exchange, 174; idem, Money and Its Use, 141–2. Prestwich, “Italian Merchants”, 89; idem, “Exchange Rates”, 472, 475.

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This made Italian imports much more expensive in England and contributed to their severe reduction in 1305–6. It also meant that wool bought by giving advances of sterling early in 1305 was worth less in florins a few months later, to the disadvantage of the Italian creditors. These severe fluctuations in exchange rates reduced the profits the Italians could earn from England and were a deterrent to investment.91 The Gallerani in London would only buy wool from the Knights Templar in instalments in 1305, effectively reversing the normal flow of credit from the Italians to their suppliers. Their own financial difficulties were such that they had to borrow £133 5s. for 15 days so that they could pay for lead they had bought.92 Similarly, the swings against the florin of both the tournois and sterling affected the ability of the Italian banks in France to honour the letters of exchange drawn on them in England.93 It is therefore not surprising that the Cerchi Bianchi were convicted in 1310 of attempting to illegally export 4,000 gold florins from England, which they obviously did not want to change into sterling.94 As the branches of the Italian companies formed a single unitary business with their head offices, the financial problems of one part could cause a whole company to collapse with far-reaching consequences for others.95 By contrast, from 1304 foreign silver began surging into the London mint to an extent that took even its officials by surprise. The Kutna Hora silver mines in Hungary were producing huge amounts of bullion from 1300 which began replenishing the currencies of northern Europe.96 Foreign investors may have brought some of it to be minted in England, attracted by what was now a sound and stable English currency, in contrast with the heavily debased coins of the French. But it was the renewed demand for wool in Flanders which earned most of the silver brought to the English mints, as exports accelerated from a previous average of under 28,000 sacks a year to nearer 40,000 sacks in 1304–11, while the price of wool rose steadily.97 The reduction of Italian credit from the 1290s had left English merchants in the best position to profit from the increased demand for wool, while the new flow of coin from the mints enabled them to make advance payments to wool-growers. Denizen wool exports through London rose strikingly from 1304–5 as the alien share fell. The renewed flow of bullion expanded the currency by the end of the decade to between 1.5 and 1.9 million pounds, and in the process made possible a huge increase in denizen credit.98 By contrast, Lloyd

91 92 93 94 95 96 97

Spufford, Handbook of Medieval Exchange, 198; Prestwich, “Exchange Rates”, 471–5. Bigwood and Grunzweig, Les livres des comptes des Gallerani, II, 223–5. Prestwich, “Edward I’s Monetary Policies”, 414. Lloyd, Alien Merchants, 172. Spufford, Power and Profit, 24. Spufford, Money and Its Use, 124–5. Lloyd, Wool Trade, 123, tab. 12; idem, Wool Prices, 45; Carus-Wilson and Coleman, England’s Export Trade, 41. 98 Martin Allen, “The Volume of the English Currency, 1158–1470”, Economic History Review, 54, 4 (2001): 607, tab. 2.

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has calculated that between 1303 and 1311, the net contribution of silver made by aliens to the English mints was now only £10,000 out of an average annual inflow of £107,000.99 The certificates indicate the extent and distribution of the increased denizen credit. Their value doubled in 1305 and increased every year thereafter until it reached a peak of over £24,000 in 1310. Credit increased in 31 counties, and its pattern indicates that provincial merchants were the first to increase their imports of silver, since credit grew first in Yorkshire in 1300–4, followed by Shropshire and Nottinghamshire. All three were counties where the aliens had concentrated on contracts with the monasteries and had not competed with urban merchants for the wool of knights and peasants. By contrast, London’s share of denizen credit actually fell from 25 per cent of the total in 1295–9 to less than 18 per cent in 1300–4. This was because the Carta Mercatoria helped the aliens to maintain their hold longer in the city, while denizen credit was growing faster in the provinces. Although more wool exports from the provinces were now going through London, the relatively slow growth of London’s share was reflected in the low proportion of wool exporters using its port between 1297 and 1306 who were London citizens.100 By 1312–13 that proportion had grown to 41 per cent. Denizen wool exports then accounted for 77 per cent of the total, and the denizen Londoners’ share of all the credit recorded in the certificates had recovered to 23.5 per cent by 1311. For the first time they were now also extending their reach beyond their neighbouring counties. In the provinces the number of towns whose merchants recorded Statute Merchant credit had increased from 19 in 1285–9 to 31 in 1305–9. Local exporters also multiplied in Yorkshire, Lincolnshire, Norfolk, the midlands, Hampshire, and the south-west, as the more numerous and wealthier merchant class began to develop, which was to help Edward III to finance his continental wars.

V Even though foreign investment was declining in the English wool trade at the end of the thirteenth century, can it still be said that it was essential before the 1280s for the development of the English economy? The dearth of English wool exporters in eastern England in the 1270s, compared with the success of those in Shropshire, suggests that the Flemings had crowded out local investment and enterprise over the previous century, while their imports had also helped to undermine the kingdom’s cloth industry.101 The finance the Italians acquired cheaply

99 Terrence Lloyd, “Overseas Trade and the English Money Supply in the Fourteenth Century”, in Nicholas Mayhew (ed.), Edwardian Monetary Affairs (1279–1344) (Oxford: British Archaeological Reports, 1977), 100–3. 100 Williams, Medieval London, 149, tab. A; Lloyd, Wool Trade, 131, questioned the validity of these figures because they showed that Londoners were not joining the boom in wool exports, but the credit data support Williams’s general conclusion. 101 Lloyd, Wool Trade, 53–4.

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from the international money market in Champagne had enabled them to take over the monastic wool contracts, and also provided the loans that earned them privileges from the royal government. Although their mercantile investment in England was beneficial to the extent that they helped monasteries to restore flocks which had become infected with scab, it is likely that if they had not intervened, leading English merchants like the de Ludlows of Shrewsbury or the Basings of London would have seized the chance to expand their own investment in monastic wool and, accordingly, could have earned a greater share in wool exports.102 If modest Shrewsbury, which did not enjoy the wealth that cathedral clergy elsewhere contributed to mercantile capital, could, by virtue of its geographical distance from most alien competition, still produce, in Lawrence de Ludlow, the richest English wool merchant of his generation, as well as the highest value of credit per square mile for its county, then more merchants, given similar conditions, could presumably have enjoyed similar success. They could have earned the bullion, and the higher profits from exports, which were needed to expand English mercantile capital and to build up the mercantile fleet. Instead, it seems that alien competition had long inhibited the growth of a powerful denizen class of wool exporters in London, Boston, Lincoln, York, and Hull. Contrarily, it could be argued that it was the war with France, more than alien competition, which delayed English economic development, through the king’s increased taxes, huge exports of coin, and interruptions of trade. These certainly set back mercantile expansion, as is evident from the severe reduction of both denizen and alien credit in the war years. But it is clear from the reasons why their credit in England was declining before the war, that in replenishing England’s supplies of bullion, alien merchants had also begun to introduce destabilizing factors into the English economy. They had profited from currency speculations that led to the export of sterling in 1283–5, while their involvement in international finance made their trade particularly vulnerable to the fluctuating exchange rates which became more common from the 1280s and were subsequently made more unstable by the scourge of debasement. The Italians’ reliance on the international money market in Champagne also subjected them to political pressures and conflicts in northern Europe, as happened in 1291–2, when the fines levied on them by the French king, and the Pope’s withdrawal of deposits, affected their ability to give credit.103 They also helped import the pollards and crockards produced by Flemish and French mints, which posed a very serious threat to the international value and stability of sterling and led to inflation and popular unrest in England.104 By contrast, the English were capable, as events were soon to show, of maintaining uncomplicated bilateral exchanges of wool, or cloth, for Flemish and

102 Bell, Brooks, and Moore, English Wool Market, 26–31. For the Basings, see ibid., app., nos. 6–8, 23, 64; Prestwich, “Italian Merchants”, 93; Williams, Medieval London, 112. 103 Hunt, Medieval Super-Companies, 3–4, 133–6, 189. 104 Nightingale, Medieval Mercantile Community, 115–16.

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German silver without Italian assistance, provided that they had unhindered access to European markets, and provided their own government did not interfere with the wool trade or with the flow of bullion to the mints. Their ability to increase their credit from 1285 shows that they could draw on the reserves of sterling coin held by government servants and landowners, and on the revenues of the English church, which were richer, even, than church revenues in northern Italy.105 They could also obtain credit from wool-growers. These advantages enabled them to win a dominant share of wool exports even before the overseas wool staple in 1313 exerted a protectionist effect. Also, despite his rash expenditure of English coin overseas and the damage caused by his interference in the wool trade, Edward I showed by his bullionist policies and his demonetization of the crockards and pollards that he understood the need to preserve a sound currency of a sufficient size to finance increased transactions and to create the confidence on which credit depended. His most crucial contribution was to resist the French policy of financing warfare by debasing the coinage.106 He also provided the legal framework that encouraged mercantile investment by enforcing the repayment of loans and credit. What his subjects needed to develop their economy further was some means of restraining their rulers in future from wasting their mercantile capital on continental wars which achieved little of permanent value in return for all the blood and treasure expended on them.

105 Britnell, “England”, 179–80. 106 Spufford, Money and Its Use, 301–5.

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3 THE IMPACT OF CRISES ON CREDIT IN THE LATE MEDIEVAL ENGLISH ECONOMY 1

The complex financial instruments that contributed to the banking crisis and ‘credit crunch’ which plunged the economy of the Western world into recession in 2008–09 would seem to have little in common with the use of credit in late medieval England. Yet when medieval merchants asserted that ‘the best ware is ever-ready money’, it was not because they deplored credit, despite its possible taint of usury, but because they had to rely on it too much, and experience taught them that in crises it was unlikely to meet their needs.2 Even at its highest, the volume of the medieval English coinage is thought to have been worth no more than £2.3 million.3 Since this amount could only be increased by an improved balance of trade bringing more gold and silver to the mint to finance an economy with a GDP that has been estimated at £4 to £5 million, this meant that even in normal circumstances there was a shortage of coin, and various forms of credit, as well as barter, had to fill the gap.4 The numerous actions for petty debts recorded on manorial and borough court rolls, the loans and credit of much higher amounts recorded on those of the royal government, and the debt cases heard in the central courts show how at every level of society credit was used to meet personal needs and to provide the investment and liquidity necessary for agriculture, trade, and industry to flourish, for governments to function, and for armies to fight wars.

1 I am grateful to the Leverhulme Trustees, and to the Economic and Social Research Council (Award no. 000271010) for financing my calendaring of the Statute Merchant and Staple certificates and the Extents on Debt in the National Archives. 2 John Scattergood, Politics and Poetry in the Fifteenth Century (London: Blandford Press,1971), 336. 3 Martin Allen, Mints and Money in Medieval England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 4 Nicholas Mayhew, “Modelling Medieval Monetisation”, in Richard Britnell and Bruce Campbell (eds.), A Commercialising Economy: England, 1086 to 1300 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 58, Table 4.1; Bruce Campbell, “The Agrarian Problem in the Early Fourteenth Century”, Past & Present, 188 (2005): 15–16.

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Historians have identified volatility in prices, wages, and incomes as characteristic of economic crises.5 Since credit was so crucial to the economy, it seems likely that it would also reflect crises by volatile changes, which included sudden, severe falls in the number and value of transactions. How common were such occasions in the medieval English economy, and what effect did they have on longterm trends of credit? Since the only banks in medieval England were concerned chiefly with financing overseas trade and were run by alien merchants in London, the provision of domestic credit depended mainly on the financial resources of local people or of trading partners in nearby towns or in London. As the number and wealth of English merchants grew in the fourteenth century, so they accounted for more of the creditor class, and fewer were clerics, officials, and landowners. However, since all creditors, whatever their status, were risking their own money, their first concern was to assess the likelihood of repayment. This was particularly true of merchants because cash flow was vital to their businesses, and they were likely to be enmeshed in multiple debts to others that could bankrupt them if their own debtors defaulted. Caution therefore normally characterised their decisions. Consequently, there was little chance that credit would create financial bubbles, and far more likelihood that its volatility would reflect their decisions to withhold it in any crises that made repayment doubtful. Such crises might occur for various reasons, and could affect demand for credit, as well as the willingness of creditors to supply it. However, the general shortage of coin meant that creditors always held the upper hand, and it was their decisions that mainly determined whether credit expanded or contracted. They were particularly influenced by any threats to the circulation of coin since this affected the likelihood of repayment. As merchants supported the English government’s opposition to expanding the currency by debasement, any serious fall in the output of the mints, or drain of coin to pay for campaigns in Europe, was likely to make creditors more wary of financial commitments.6 When the supply of bullion from the continent diminished, either because rival mints were prepared to pay merchants a higher price for it, or, more intractably, because the existing mines had become exhausted, the output of the English mints might fall to a trickle, as they did in the early fourteenth century. Similarly, any events that reduced the wool exports that earned the bullion, such as disease in sheep flocks, interruptions of trade through war, and disputes with Flanders, were likely to reduce both the demand for credit and the willingness of creditors to advance it.

5 Mark and Catherine Casson, “Economic Crises in England, 1270–1520: A Statistical Approach”, in Alex Brown, Andy Burn, and Rob Doherty (eds.), Crises in Economic and Social History: A Comparative Perspective (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer), 79–107. 6 Nicholas Mayhew, “From Regional to Central Minting”, in Christopher Challis (ed.), A New History of the Royal Mint (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 135, 145–6, 148.

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Other factors could also undermine creditors’ confidence in repayment. Bad harvests would cause food prices to rise and create the possibility of famine, which would reduce the demand for other goods. Attacks by the Scots on the border counties occurred nearly every year between 1296 and 1346, and were a continuing threat to the northern economy.7 Political instability caused by factions among the nobility, or by weak kings, could lead to civil war and undermine confidence in the rule of law, in the safety of trade, and in the enforcement of debts. No threat, though, could match the fear caused by the unpredictable, repeated onslaughts of plague, which made the period after 1348 quite different from that which went before. Although there had been years of high mortality earlier, especially during the famine of 1315–18, the scale of mortality inflicted by the Black Death in 1348–9 was unprecedented in English experience. The frequent return of plague in subsequent years contributed to the failure of the population to recover and created a psychological climate that undermined confidence in investment.8 Clearly it exacerbated the volatility of credit, but did it also determine its main trends?

Interpreting the evidence The extent to which crises affected credit in the late medieval English economy can only be analysed by taking a sample of debts that covers the entire kingdom. The 36,595 Statute Merchant and staple certificates of unpaid debt in the National Archives provide such a sample between the years 1284 and 1530.9 Although they mainly record mercantile activity, they do not exclude private loans. Also they reflect both the rural and urban economies, since landowners and peasants in every village were involved in the cash economy and in trade, and they too depended for their livelihood, and often for their survival, on the availability of money and credit.10 Unfortunately, historians’ assessments of the certificates have long suffered from the views that M.M. Postan published in an article on credit in 1930.11 From a very limited investigation of some early London Statute Merchant rolls, and ignoring the related Statute Staple certificates, Postan concluded that by the late fourteenth century the system was recording mainly penal bonds which were used to enforce contracts, rather than ordinary credit. He thereby missed

7 Pamela Nightingale, “Finance on the Frontier: Money and Credit in Northumberland, Westmorland and Cumberland in the Later Middle Ages”, in Martin Allen and D’Maris Coffman (eds.), Money, Prices and Wages: Essays in Honour of Professor Nicholas Mayhew (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 109–28. 8 On the general background and interpretive problems of the medieval English economy, see Britnell, Britain and Ireland, 1050–1530; Hatcher and Bailey, Modelling the Middle Ages. 9 The National Archives, Classes C.241, C.131 and C.152. 10 Chris Briggs, Credit and Village Society in Fourteenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), passim. 11 Michael M. Postan, “Private Financial Instruments in Medieval England”, Viertelsjahrschrift für Sozials – und Wirtschaftsgeschichte, 23 (1930), reprinted in Edmund Fryde, Medieval Trade and Finance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 28–64.

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the fact that because the Statute Staple of 1353 provided a cheaper and more efficient system for registering and enforcing debts in those towns where Staple courts were established, they were able to attract almost all mercantile business in their localities. In London the city’s Statute Merchant registry lost most of its mercantile business to the Westminster Staple court, even though both registries sent their certificates of default to Chancery for enforcement. This means that the certificates issued by both systems have to be analysed together. Their huge bulk has deterred other historians from investigating the evidence independently, and they have been content for the most part to repeat Postan’s views, and to dismiss the statistical value of the certificates.12 However, a full analysis of them shows that penal bonds account for no more than 3.2 per cent, and were more commonly under 2 per cent, of the total, and are easily recognised and discounted. It is also clear that all classes of people, both clerical and lay, from nobles to husbandmen, recorded debts in the registries, even though their common use by merchants for debts of high value raised their average considerably above those recorded on borough or manorial court rolls. Although the certificates show only the debts that were unpaid, it appears from comparing them with the surviving original rolls of different dates, from the London and Coventry registries, that they represent fairly consistently about one-fifth of those that were originally registered.13 The consistency of this figure is explained by the speed with which creditors reacted to any threats to repayment by withdrawing credit. This is confirmed by significant falls in the number of transactions on those surviving London rolls that coincide with economic recessions. Furthermore, the value of the certificates as evidence of crises and trends in credit nationally, and not just in registered credit, is confirmed by similar trends visible in other sources. These include the outlawries for debt recorded on the Patent Rolls, the gifts of goods and chattels given as security for debt, which are recorded on the Close Rolls and on the London Plea and Memoranda Rolls, and the records of debt cases that came before the central law courts of King’s Bench and Common Pleas, and the London Mayor’s Court, as well as from those recorded in towns like Colchester, Exeter, and Coventry, and from some rural manorial courts.14

12 The most recent, albeit inaccurate, exponent of Postan’s views on this subject is Jim Bolton, Money in the Medieval English Economy, 973–1489 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012), 275–80, and in “Was There a ‘Crisis of Credit’ in Fifteenth-Century England?”, British Numismatic Journal, 81 (2011): 144–64. For my refutation of his claims, see Pamela Nightingale, “A Crisis of Credit in the Fifteenth Century, or of Historical Interpretation?”, British Numismatic Journal, 83 (2013): 144–64. 13 For a detailed discussion of the Statute Merchant certificates and the evidence that that they represent c. 20 per cent of the debts originally registered, and possibly 7 per cent of the total credit used in late medieval England, see Nightingale, “Money and Credit in the Economy of Late Medieval England”, 51–71, reprinted in Pamela Nightingale, Trade, Money and Power in Medieval England (Aldershot, 2007), XV, and id., “Gold, Credit and Mortality: Distinguishing Deflationary Pressures on the Late Medieval English Economy”, Economic History Review, 63 (2010): 2, notes 10–11. 14 Nightingale, “England and the European Depression of the Mid-Fifteenth Century”, 639–40, 644–8.

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If one identifies crises of credit by the most serious falls of 40 per cent or more in the value of the certificates in any one year, then the contrast is clear between the few in the fourteenth century, and the far more numerous ones in the fifteenth. In the 115 years between 1285 and 1399, only four years are marked by falls of 40 per cent or more. These were 1295, 1318, 1349, and 1365.15 There were also two years, 1362 and 1375, that saw falls of 30–40 per cent. By comparison, the 130 years after 1400 included fourteen when there were falls of 40 per cent or more, and another six when the falls were between 30 and 40 per cent. These indicate that the Black Death ushered in a period of much greater volatility of credit. There are also considerable differences in the main trends in these two periods. In the years 1285 to 1294, falls in credit were stable or increasing. The war against France then initiated a marked decline in 1295–99 before there was a return to high growth between 1300 and 1311. Legislation under the Ordainers, which was influenced by their desire to win mercantile allies in their political struggles with Edward II, then decreed that from 1311 to c. 1322 only creditors and debtors who were merchants could use the registries, and in most cases that restriction seems to have lasted up to 1327 or 1330. This meant that the number of certificates fell significantly in that period, with falls in value most notable in the years of agrarian crisis between 1314 and 1322. After the restriction to merchants ceased, the number of certificates grew markedly in the next two decades, but they plunged both in number and value by approximately one-third in 1349–51 with the arrival of the Black Death. Despite this initially severe fall, the certificates subsequently maintained fairly stable figures in the following decades until a drop of 27 per cent in value in 1398 proved to be the prelude to a fall of 32 per cent in their total for the first decade of the fifteenth century. Thereafter the decadal totals dropped steadily to their lowest point in the 1440s. Some recovery began in the late 1450s and continued in the 1460s but fell back in the next two decades.16 Only in the 1490s did they begin to increase consistently, although growth is then partly obscured until the 1520s by some years of missing certificates. In view of the overwhelming impact of the Black Death on these trends in 1348–49, one must ask how much other individual years of crisis contributed to them.

Crises before the Black Death Crises are not noticeable in the first ten years of the certificates, between 1284 and 1294. Even though the amount of bullion brought to the mints was declining from 1289, and there is evidence that general prosperity was waning, previous high mintages had increased the currency sufficiently to maintain a reasonable

15 The dates cited from 1285 to 1311 refer to the date of repayment since the date of registration is not recorded on many of the certificates in this period. It usually occurred within the previous six months. After 1311 they are the dates of registration. 16 Nightingale, “England and the European Depression”, 644–8.

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circulation at least until 1294.17 In the ten years 1285–94, the certificates record average annual credit of £6,287, which did not vary much from year to year until it fell abruptly by 49.5 per cent in 1295. This was a year when a bad harvest, following a previous poor one, sent food prices to a height not previously recorded since 1272.18 There is evidence to show that bad harvests made peasants much more reluctant to lend money, but they probably mattered less to those creditors who registered larger sums in the Statute Merchant registries, since many of them were landowners who must have profited from the higher prices their grain fetched.19 Far more significant for many landowners was what happened to the wool they produced and sold, and to prices and taxation, after Edward I declared war on France in June 1294. Edward promptly seized all the wool in the realm as a royal prise, and in November 1294 raised the export duties on it by three marks (£2), or 47 per cent of the average value of a sack. Merchants responded by attempting to force the growers to accept lower prices. They met resistance, wool remained unsold, and exports fell to little more than half their level in 1290.20 These events reduced both the demand for credit, as well as the willingness to grant it, and caused the slump in the number and value of the certificates. A contributing factor was the fall in alien investment, which had been declining since the 1280s as the Italian firms found it harder to obtain the silver they needed for purchases of wool. The outbreak of war with France exacerbated their difficulties as it severed their links with the Champagne fairs where they were accustomed to borrow money. As a consequence, the Riccardi, who had financed the king, were bankrupted in 1294, while the certificates indicate that alien credit as a whole fell that year to less than five per cent of the whole.21 Falling exports earned less bullion and caused the output of the London mint to fall by a third in 1295–96.22 The Canterbury mint closed for lack of bullion in 1296, while the amount brought to the London mint plunged between September 1297 and October 1298 to the lowest value since records began in 1220. Credit fell again in 1297 after Edward I seized wool worth £14,000 and private treasure worth another £10,000 in an attempt to pay his troops and allies on the continent.

17 Eleanor Carus-Wilson and Olive Coleman, England’s Export Trade, 1275–1547 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), 37. Wool exports are largely unrecorded between 1290 and 1294. Allen, “The Volume of the English Currency, 1158–1470”, 607, Table 2; Campbell, “Agrarian Problem”, 16. 18 Henry Phelps Brown and Sheila Hopkins, “Seven Centuries of the Prices of Consumables, Compared with Builders’ Wage Rates”, Economica, 23 (1956), reprinted in ed. Eleanor Carus-Wilson, Essays in Economic History, II (1966): Appendix B, 93. 19 Phillipp Schofield, “The Social Economy of the Medieval Village in the Early Fourteenth Century”, Economic History Review, 61 (2008): 53–61. 20 Carus-Wilson and Coleman, England’s Exports, 389. 21 Pamela Nightingale, “Alien Finance and the Development of the English Economy, 1285–1311”, Economic History Review, 65 (2012): 7, 9, 11, 13–14. 22 Challis (ed.), A New History of the Royal Mint, Appendix, 676.

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These measures, and repeated heavy taxation of the laity and clergy, drained £350,000 in coin from the country to finance the French war.23 To maintain the circulation of coin necessary for trade, merchants imported quantities of foreign imitation sterlings from 1298.24 The reputation of sterling coins for their high silver content had encouraged foreign mints for some years to produce imitations. These had been of reasonable quality, but the new wave of imitations, known as pollards and crockards, contained up to one-third less silver than the sterling standard, and their wide distribution reduced confidence in the coinage and increased the general reluctance to give credit.25 As a consequence, the total recorded in the certificates in 1298 fell in value by 25 per cent, despite the truce with France in October 1297. As sound money became scarcer, and the economy contracted, creditors were obliged to extend the average time they took to foreclose after default from one year, eight months in 1295, to three years, eight months in 1299. Only when the king demonetised the pollards and crockards and ordered a recoinage in 1300 did confidence recover, and credit in the certificates rose in value by 47 per cent that year. However it was only in 1304, when silver from the newly discovered mines of Kutna Hora in Bohemia began to flood into England, that the certificates show that credit grew consistently until the Ordainers in 1311 restricted the system to merchants only.26 By 1310 the currency had reached a size of c. £1.5 to £1.9 million, and it was probably even larger at £1.8 to £2.3 million by 1319.27 Since Edward II did not export coin to finance wars in Europe, there was probably sufficient in circulation to maintain credit at a reasonable level for some years despite the reduced supply of new silver to the mints in the second and third decades. Additionally, much wool was now purchased with imported foreign gold coins, which English wool merchants also used in their own dealings with each other. These enabled them to release silver coin from savings.28 The restriction of the registries to mercantile creditors and debtors between 1311 and c. 1330 inevitably reduced the number of certificates, but they also declined because of several adverse events that reduced the demand for mercantile credit. Wool exports fell in 1315–16 when the renewal of war between France and Flanders adversely affected the Flemish cloth industry, and at the same time excessive rainfall between 1315 and 1318 created a Europe-wide famine, with high mortality. Furthermore, hostilities in 1317 between Flemish sailors and men of the Cinque

23 W. Mark Ormrod, “The Crown and the English Economy, 1290–1348”, in Bruce Campbell (ed.), Before the Black Death (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991), 183. 24 Nightingale, “Alien Finance”, 14. 25 Nicholas Mayhew, Sterling Imitations of Edwardian Type (Royal Numismatic Society Special Publication, 14, London, 1983), 24. 26 Challis (ed.), New History of the Royal Mint, Appendix, 677; Nightingale, A Medieval Mercantile Community, 123–33. 27 Allen, Mints and Money, 344, Table 10.12. 28 Nightingale, “Gold, Credit, and Mortality”, 5–6.

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ports hindered the full establishment of peaceful relations in 1318, with consequent effects on exports and credit.29 Although there was an improvement in 1319, bad harvests in 1321–22, and high mortality among creditors, prevented any speedy recovery.30 However, 1318 was the only year that stood out in this period for its sharp fall of 43 per cent in mercantile credit, almost certainly because of a decline of 21 per cent in wool exports following disease among the flocks.

Crises after the Black Death None of these crises, though, had an impact comparable with the arrival of plague in 1348, which cut the population by up to one-half, sparing neither rich nor poor, and thus reducing the numbers of likely debtors and creditors. It also made people temporarily fearful of travelling to towns to negotiate, as well as register credit, and also made them less confident that their debtors would live to repay them. The combined effect of mortality and fear reduced the number of transactions in the certificates by 46 per cent in 1349, and then in 1350 by another 30 per cent. The demographic impact of the Black Death on the economy has naturally suggested to historians that repeated high mortality from plague must also have been the main cause of the recurring crises, and exceptional volatility of credit, which become evident in the certificates in subsequent years. Was it, though, the prime reason for the long-drawn-out trend of falling credit that the certificates reveal in the fifteenth century, and for the fact that by the end of the series it was not until the 1520s that they recovered the number and value they had in 1310? Despite the initial huge fall of the population in 1348–49 it seems doubtful whether subsequent mortality crises were chiefly responsible for this pattern, because certificates show that if there were no other adverse circumstances, the effect of plague on credit was usually short-lived. Moreover, they confirm that the decade after 1348–49 was one of returning growth and increased prosperity per head. Besides inheriting the land, businesses, and money of those who died, survivors of the plague gained from an export boom in wool, and from increasing exports of cloth, which brought more silver flooding into the country and an abundant supply of coin. Combined with the shortage of labour, this created a rapid inflation of wages and prices. Wages of agricultural workers increased in purchasing power by 24 per cent in the 1350s.31 Credit followed suit. Although

29 Lloyd, The English Wool Trade in the Middle Ages, 108–9. 30 Carus-Wilson and Coleman, England’s Exports, 42; Challis (ed.), A New History of the Royal Mint, Appendix, 678; Pamela Nightingale, “Some New Evidence of Crises and Trends of Mortality in Late Medieval England”, Past & Present, 187 (2005): 53. 31 Output increased from £62,909 in gold and £6,143 in silver coins in 1359–60, to £207,869 in gold and £6,020 in silver in 1360–61: Challis (ed.), A New History of the Royal Mint, Appendix, 680–1; Nightingale, “New Evidence of Crises and Trends of Mortality”, 47; Gregory Clark, “The Long March of History: Farm Laborers’ Wages, Population, and Economic Growth, England 1209– 1869”, Economic History Review, 60 (2007): 116 and Figure 5.

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the loss of population reduced the number of transactions and the total value of the certificates in that decade by 35 per cent below that of the 1340s, the average value of each rose from £38 in the 1330s, to £44.50 in the 1340s, and then to £57 in the 1350s.32 Moreover, there were years when the certificates indicate that there were serious falls in credit for reasons other than high mortality. In 1356 the total fell by 32 per cent and did not recover for another two years. At the same time London’s share of credit surged to 45 per cent of the whole. It appears that the reason for both movements was the government’s decision in 1353 to respond to difficulties experienced by English merchants in Flanders by temporarily banning denizen exports of wool, and by obliging aliens to “make their purchases” in eight English towns, which were designated as staples.33 Since London was the only staple that was a port, it gained more trade than the others, while the ban on denizen exports reduced both the demand for credit and the ability of provincial English merchants to provide it. Furthermore, the impact on credit of plague’s second visitation, which is normally dated to 1361–62, is not clear-cut, even though deaths recorded for creditors rose to 14 per cent in 1362, and remained high at 10.4 per cent in 1363, compared with their normal average of 3.3 per cent.34 Although the certificates dropped in value in 1361 by 12 per cent, they rose again in 1362, probably because of an abnormally high output of gold coin in the previous two years, and equally high wool exports in 1361–62, especially from London.35 Demand for credit in the certificates actually fell more, by 35 per cent, in 1363–64, when merchants reduced their exports in protest against higher duties imposed by the Calais staple.36 The total plunged even further in 1365, by 45 per cent, even though the death rate among the creditors was less than half that of 1362–63, and no national plague was recorded. Again the most significant feature was the sharp fall in the share of Londoners, and this, too, was most likely the result of another temporary ban on denizens exporting wool for three and a half months between 31 January and 17 May 1365.37 Although 1368 was reportedly the year of the third plague, it was in 1370 that the creditors’ mortality rose to 7 per cent, and the value of their certificates fell by 17 per cent. The renewal of the war with France in 1369 most likely contributed more than mortality to this fall by causing a ban on denizen wool exports until August 1370.38 A fourth national outbreak of plague, traditionally ascribed to 1375, almost certainly began in London earlier, since the mortality rate of the creditors rose in 1374

32 33 34 35 36 37 38

Nightingale, “Gold, Mortality and Credit”, 7, Fig. 4. Lloyd, Wool Trade, 206–8. Nightingale, “Some New Evidence of Crises and Trends of Mortality”, 40–1, 47. Challis (ed.), A New History of the Royal Mint, Appendix, 680. Lloyd, Wool Trade, 210–12. Ibid., 213. Carus-Wilson and Coleman, England’s Exports, 50; Lloyd, Wool Trade, 216–17.

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to nearly 6 per cent. This time the total value of the certificates fell by 30 per cent but recovered the following year. There was then another drop of 35 per cent in 1376, which reflects a fall in wool and cloth exports, particularly from London. This most likely happened because of London’s conflicts with the Crown, and the political uncertainties and factional divisions in the city’s own politics, which were connected with the summoning of the Good Parliament that year.39 London was also the setting for an even greater political crisis in June 1381 when the Peasants’ Revolt brought three days of fire, destruction, and death to its streets, and set citizen against citizen, in a crisis that almost overthrew the royal government. However, the rebels’ occupation was brief, and although several counties were involved in the rebellion, it did not extend much beyond the month of June. Nonetheless, the shock to financial confidence is clear from the fall in the number of the Westminster staple certificates from the ten relating to debts registered in May, to none for any registered in the month between 27 May and 28 June. The London registry similarly issued none for that period. The revolt, though, made little change in the pattern of certificates throughout the rest of the country, and, overall, the certificates indicate that credit fell in 1381 by only 26 per cent below the total for 1380. The limited impact of these lesser crises helps to explain why the average annual value of the certificates in 1390–94 was, at £8,437, little short of the average of £8,974 for 1350–54, despite considerable volatility in the interval. It seems that after the first great onslaught of plague had reduced the size both of the population and of the economy, interruptions of the wool trade and political crises explain as much as epidemics the occasionally severe, but nonetheless temporary, falls of credit visible in the certificates. These falls did little to alter trends in which the total values fell modestly each decade by about 4.4 per cent in the 1360s and 1370s, and then by a mere 2.6 per cent in the 1380s. The introduction of a gold coinage in 1344 had helped to sustain credit by increasing the amount of coin per head from a level of 4–7 shillings in 1300, to about 5–9 shillings in 1351.40 Ransoms and booty from successful campaigns in France additionally made the 1350s and early 1360s years when there were high mintages of both gold and silver coins, while the new outbreaks of plague continued to raise wages. Thus, although the recurrence of plague prevented the population from recovering its former size, its effect on the distribution of wealth, combined with the expansion of the currency and the growth of cloth exports, enabled peasants and townsmen to increase both their own purchasing power, and their scope for individual enterprise. Both kept domestic trade and manufactures buoyant in these decades, and so created a fairly constant demand for credit. Those crises that did occur were clearly not sufficiently deep or protracted to offset these favourable developments.

39 Carus-Wilson and Coleman, England’s Exports, 51; Nightingale, Medieval Mercantile Community, 243–7. 40 Allen, “Volume of the English Currency”, 606–7.

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One countervailing trend, though, which became more obvious from the 1350s, was the increased concentration of credit in London. The flow of bullion and trade from the continent had always made the city the dominant financial centre, and even before the Black Death it accounted for 20 to 30 per cent of the credit recorded in the certificates. By the 1340s they record debtors of Londoners in every county except Cumberland, Westmorland, and Rutland. However, in the 1350s Londoners’ share of the credit in the certificates grew to 40 per cent, and from the 1390s to 50 per cent. Several factors contributed to this growth. Principal among these was the city’s geographical position, which gave it access through the Thames Valley to an extensive hinterland, as well as the shortest sea-route to the continent. This mattered particularly after 1362, when Calais became the principal home of the overseas wool staple. Its choice strengthened London’s advantages in the export and distributive trades and increased its merchants’ ability to accumulate greater amounts of capital and to give more credit over a wider area than could provincial towns and ports. London’s greater financial resources, and far-reaching trading links, also made it a magnet for the enterprising, who could now exploit the new demand for labour created by plague to escape from their villages to seek greater freedom and a higher standard of living in the city’s crafts and trade. These factors determined that when the economy plunged into recession in the fifteenth century, London was able to increase its share of credit in the certificates to 60 per cent by the 1450s, and to 85 per cent by the 1480s.

Falling trends of credit A deteriorating trend in credit is first marked in the certificates of the 1390s, when the total fell 11.5 per cent below that of the previous decade and did not again reach the level of 1390 until 1518. There was no significant mortality among the creditors in the 1390s, and no reports of serious outbreaks of plague. The fall in credit, though, did coincide with a significant decline in the output of silver coin from the London mint. This in turn was influenced by diminishing supplies of bullion from Europe. Despite the introduction of gold coins, silver mattered most in the everyday transactions in the economy, since gold nobles were of too high a value to be used much in the retail trade. As the kingdom’s stock of money was increasingly dominated by gold, a spreading trade depression becomes visible in falling totals of credit in the certificates. In the first decade of the fifteenth century the certificates plunged in value by 44 per cent, and the general fall in transactions was evident even in the Cambridgeshire villages of Oakington and Willingham.41 Although plague was recorded in 1400, 1406, and 1408, and mortality among the creditors was high, no one year reveals a fall of 40 per cent or more in credit. It is likely, therefore, that

41 Chris Briggs, “The Availability of Credit in the English Countryside, 1400–1480”, Agricultural History Review, 56 (2008): 9, Table 2.

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its contraction reflected mostly the shortage of silver coin caused by the plunging output of the London mint. Whereas in the 1380s the mint’s output of silver coin had averaged £2,500 a year, it dropped sharply in the 1390s and in 1405–06 fell to only £101, then to £80 in 1406–07, while in the following year its output was a mere £8 worth of silver coin.42 In the second decade there were two years, 1412 and 1419, which were marked by severe falls of credit in the certificates. Their value plunged by 51 per cent in 1412 and did not recover until 1429.43 Plague was reported, but since there was only 2 per cent of mortality among the creditors, and wool and cloth exports were not affected, it is likely that the severity of the fall is explicable more by anxieties caused by the recoinage of 1412, which reduced the weight of the gold noble and the penny by 16.7 and 10 per cent, respectively. This was the only way Henry IV had of responding to the desperate shortage of silver, but it meant that debtors could repay in coin of lower intrinsic value than that of their original debt, and imports became more expensive.44 In 1419 credit in the certificates fell by 45 per cent, with the fall most conspicuous in London’s share, from 47 to 27 per cent of the total. It was probably due to plague, as soldiers returning after Agincourt brought back new infections with their booty, and the creditors’ mortality rate rose to 12 per cent in 1417 and reached 13.3 per cent in 1418. Recovery came, though, by 1422. Similar outbreaks of plague recurred repeatedly in London, as well as nationally, in the next three decades. They created the same volatile pattern of sudden, severe falls of credit in the certificates, followed by fairly speedy recoveries. In the thirty years from 1420 there were six occasions when the national total in the certificates plunged by 40 per cent or more. The first, in 1423, occurred when the creditors’ mortality had risen to 6.45 per cent, but it was also likely to have been influenced by the reopening of the Calais mint from July 1422, which diverted bullion from London.45 Recovery came in 1425. The second occasion coincided with another outbreak of plague in 1427, and with 5 per cent mortality among the creditors. Recovery followed the next year. The third, in 1430, differed from the others because although the total value of credit in the certificates fell by 53.7 per cent, and mortality among the creditors reached 7.7 per cent, there was no corresponding fall in London’s share, which in fact grew to nearly 62 per cent. Furthermore, unlike the relatively brief effects of mortality crises, the certificates did not recover their value of 1429 until 1460. There can be little doubt that the main cause of the crisis was not mortality but the enactment in September 1429 of the parliamentary legislation known as the bullion

42 Challis (ed.), A New History of the Royal Mint, 682. 43 There are certificates for another £2,215, but these clearly relate to penalties for the performance of another obligation. 44 Challis (ed.), A New History of the Royal Mint, 172–3. 45 Allen, Mints and Money, 272–3.

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and partition ordinances, which were designed to bring more bullion to the English mint. They ended the normal arrangement by which wool was sold in Calais on credit, and customers were obliged to pay the entire price in gold or silver coin when the bargain was struck. Also, the rules about partition meant that individual wool merchants were only paid when all the wool taken to Calais was sold.46 This arrangement favoured the Londoners, with their greater financial resources, at the expense of provincial merchants. However, the consequence of all these changes was a significant drop in wool exports nationally, and of credit, in 1428–30.47 By contrast, the three other critical years in this period conformed with the pattern of sudden falls in credit and swift recoveries previously associated with high mortality. In 1433 the total in the certificates fell 70 per cent below that of the previous year. At the same time, the mortality of the creditors rose to 6.89 per cent, and London’s share of recorded credit fell to 28 per cent of the whole as plague struck the city.48 Little wool was exported that year, and cloth exports from London also fell. However, as with previous mortality crises, the level of credit substantially recovered the following year.49 Plague and famine in 1438 caused credit to fall again by 30 per cent. The creditors were too rich to be affected by famine, but their mortality was high at between 6.25 and 9 per cent in 1439–41. It was also high in 1445, 1447, and 1449. However, 1444 was the only year in that decade when the total in the certificates fell by more than 44 per cent. The cause appears to have been falling wool and cloth exports from London, which significantly reduced the mint’s output of both gold and silver coin.50 Recovery followed the next year. The third major crisis of this period occurred in 1450. It was probably the result of a serious outbreak of plague that began in London the previous year, when there was a death rate among the creditors of 11.1 per cent.51 Credit in the certificates fell by 48 per cent, and there was also another sharp fall in London’s cloth exports. However, both recovered the following year, and by 1452 were expanding vigorously.52 Despite the severity of these mortality crises, in four of them, those of 1427, 1433, 1444, and 1450, credit recovered within one year, and from that of 1419 within three years. It also began to rise generally in the certificates of the 1450s and reached heights in 1457–58 which had not been seen since 1429, despite the political crises and conflicts caused by the Wars of the Roses. This decade also saw evidence of agricultural recovery, including renewed expansion of sheep flocks.53 It was aided by the absence of national epidemics, but it also coincided

46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53

Lloyd, Wool Trade, 260–2. Carus-Wilson and Coleman, England’s Exports, 58–9. Gottfried, Epidemic Disease in Fifteenth-Century England, 47, Table 2.2. Lloyd, Wool Trade, 261. Challis (ed.), A New History of the Royal Mint, Appendix, 683. Gottfried, Epidemic Disease, 48. Carus-Wilson and Coleman, England’s Exports, 97–8. Nightingale, “England and the European Depression”, 644–8; John Oldland, “Wool and Cloth Production in Late Medieval and Early Tudor England”, Economic History Review, 67 (2014): 28.

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with a greater output of silver coin by the London mint.54 This, though, proved to be temporary, and a renewed shortage of coin led Edward IV to carry out another devaluation in 1464 by a further weight reduction of 20 per cent. Plague also returned that decade in major epidemics, as well as in several lesser ones. National outbreaks were recorded in 1463–4 and in 1467, and mortality among the creditors was high at 7.4 and 6.45 per cent in 1465–66.55 The pestilence of 1467 probably began the previous year in London because the capital’s share of credit in the certificates fell then from 70 to under 40 per cent and failed to recover in 1468. Instead the outbreak developed into a nationwide epidemic, which caused the total credit in the certificates to fall in 1468 by 50.5 per cent. This time it did not recover to its previous height for another six years. Nonetheless, the total for the decade still showed a rise of 23.5 per cent above that of the 1450s. The number of epidemics increased in the 1470s, and they help to explain why credit in the certificates fell overall in that decade by 20 per cent. There was a single annual fall of 40 per cent in 1474, probably because of the flux, or dysentery, of the winter of 1473–4.56 In 1479–80 occurred what has been called ‘the fifteenth century’s most severe outbreak of epidemic disease’, a description that finds support in the fall of credit in the certificates of that year by 60.6 per cent.57 There followed a brief recovery until another fall of 55 per cent occurred in 1488. Since there was no reported plague that year, it is likely that this fall, coming after another in the previous year, was caused by the anxieties of the Merchant Adventurers about whether Henry VII would renew the commercial treaty made in 1478 with the ruler of the Low Countries, which affected their exports of cloth. Henry delayed until February 1489, and the Adventurers’ fears no doubt explain why denizen cloth exports from London plunged in 1486–88, and credit with them.58 That, though, proved to be the last of the crises indicated by the certificates before they end in 1530, apart from a lesser fall of 36 per cent in 1523, which coincided with Henry VIII’s extravagant spending on his French campaign, and a forced loan.

Short- and long-term changes in credit This brief survey shows that nine of the major crises in credit after 1350 – those in 1419, 1423, 1427, 1433, 1444, 1468, 1474, and 1480 – were linked with epidemics that had the most severe effects on London. These outbreaks reduced both the demand for, and supply of, credit because merchants would retire to the

54 55 56 57 58

Challis (ed.), A New History of the Royal Mint, Appendix. Gottfried, Epidemic Disease, 42. Ibid., 45, 148–9. Ibid., 45. Anne Sutton, The Mercery of London: Trade, Goods, and People, 1130–1578 (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2005), 319–20; Carus-Wilson and Coleman, England’s Exports, 109.

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countryside to escape pestilence, and creditors were also deterred by the possibility their debtors would die before they had repaid their loans, forcing them to wait for executors to settle estates and to satisfy competing claims. The more that credit was concentrated in London, and the more plague became endemic there, the more volatile mercantile finance was likely to be. Nonetheless, even though plague undoubtedly contributed in these years to a falling or stagnant population, it cannot be said that it was responsible for the most serious and long-lasting crises that shaped the trends of finance and credit. The certificates indicate that apart from the epidemics of 1467–68, 1474, and 1479–80, the recurrence of plague normally affected credit for usually no more than a year, unless there were other economic or political reasons for it to fall. Whenever plague returned for a few months, commercial activity was delayed, rather than lost. By contrast, those crises that caused credit to fall for economic or political reasons were likely to last much longer. This explains the outcome of the five crises in the same period that were not linked with plague, and from which credit did not speedily recover. After its fall in 1398 by 27 per cent, the devaluation of the coinage in 1412 influenced its severe fall by 51 per cent, from which it did not recover until 1429, only to fall again in 1430 by 54 per cent, with no full recovery before 1460. Again, this was a brief respite, before the total plunged again in 1461 by 59 per cent and did not recover until after 1500. Within that extended period there occurred a further fall in 1479 by 60.6 per cent, from which there was no recovery until 1486. Taken together, these falls amounted to a persistent serious decline of credit from 1398 that was not specifically related to high mortality, but nonetheless indicated major depressions of economic activity. Many of these extended periods were related to falls in wool exports. Cloth exports began to influence demand for credit more in the fifteenth century, but were not predominant until cloth overtook wool as the more valuable export in the 1460s.59 Even then, most of the proceeds of cloth sales were not remitted as bullion and taken to the mint, because the mercers invested them in the Low Countries in ever-growing imports of linen, to earn the profits of a double trade.60 Exports of wool, therefore, continued to be crucial earners of bullion. The sensitivity of credit to them arose not because most of the certificates directly reflect wool purchases, although some obviously did. Rather, it reflects how merchants’ perceptions of the link between wool exports and the output of the mint affected general sentiment in the London money market about the availability of coin. It therefore influenced general views on how likely it was that credit would be repaid, and so affected the willingness to grant it. Political crises also contributed to the pattern. The conflicts and upheavals which brought Edward IV to the throne explain the plunge of 59 per cent in credit in 1461,

59 Margaret Bonney, “The English Medieval Wool and Cloth Trade: New Approaches for the Local Historian”, The Local Historian, 22 (1992): 26. 60 Sutton, Mercery of London, 155–8; 295–302; Oldland, “Wool and Cloth Production”, 41.

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as rival Yorkist and Lancastrian supporters awaited the outcome of the three crucial battles that determined the deposition of Henry VI before they would commit themselves financially.61 Similarly, the prospect of further political upheavals after Edward’s defeat by Warwick in 1469, the restoration of Henry VI the following year, and then Edward’s return and victory in 1471 sent credit falling again. Such crises were not long-lasting, but they contributed to delayed recoveries. A fuller explanation of the pattern must also take into account the underlying monetary trends that exacerbated these crises. It was Europe’s depleted silver stocks, and the export of English coin to finance the French war, followed by the threat to the currency posed by the debased pollards and crockards, which had extended the credit crisis of 1295 up to 1300. Similarly, the sharp and prolonged fall in bullion imports from 1315 contributed to that of 1318 by reducing the output of coin from the mints, which shook mercantile confidence. Whereas after the catastrophe of the Black Death the decadal totals of credit had been buoyed up by high mintages of gold and silver coin until the 1390s, subsequently their decline became much more precipitate and prolonged, and crises became more frequent, and recoveries usually slower. The change can be linked with falling supplies of bullion from that decade. By 1422 the amount of silver coin per head had fallen to only about one-fifth of what it had been in 1351, and as late as 1470 it had still not recovered that earlier level. Furthermore, the number of gold coins in the currency totalled less than half their value in 1422.62 The provinces were the chief sufferers, as London’s share of credit in the certificates grew from 43 per cent in the 1380s to 50 per cent in the 1390s and reached almost 80 per cent in the 1470s. Consequently, even when new supplies of silver began to reach the mints, Londoners were in the strongest position to employ them to expand their own trade and credit, at the expense of provincial competitors.

Coping with falling coin and credit How did people cope with declining supplies of coin and credit over such long periods? Parliamentary petitions made the royal government well aware of the effect that shortages of silver coin had on the economy and on popular discontents, but it had little means of alleviating them. It could not print money, and in the long-term interest of preserving the high reputation of sterling abroad, which mattered also to English merchants, it was determined to avoid the continental choice of expanding coinages by debasing them. It had, therefore, to strike more coins of lower weight from the same amount of metal. Even these changes increasingly required parliamentary approval.63

61 Nightingale, Medieval Mercantile Community, 516–17. 62 Allen, Mints and Money, 344, Table 10.12. 63 Challis (ed.), A New History of the Royal Mint, 144–5.

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Laws had been passed since the thirteenth century to protect England’s supply of bullion by regulating foreign exchange, and by prohibiting the export of precious metals and coin without a royal licence. These were supplemented from 1340 by requirements that wool exporters should deliver specified amounts of bullion to the mint. From 1429 these rules were stiffened by various measures first to prohibit and then to regulate sales of wool on credit at the staple.64 Although some of these measures did help to increase supplies of bullion, their success was limited, while those that forbade wool sales on credit proved counter-productive by reducing trade. A less controversial way of increasing the supply of bullion was by raising the price that the mint offered for it to attract merchants away from rival European mints, and to persuade holders of old, heavier coin in England to exchange theirs. Edward IV did this in 1464–66, and, as a result, credit increased substantially in 1465–67. The improvement, though, was brief as mercantile confidence was undermined by a new outbreak of plague, and by the political intrigues and disaffection which led to Warwick’s rebellion and the defeat of Edward IV in 1469. Even without such crises, any remedial measures to improve the flow of bullion to the mints could only be short-term while Europe as a whole suffered from widespread bullion famines, particularly of silver. Henry VII tried to attract more bullion in 1489 by reducing the king’s seigniorage and the moneyers’ charges.65 This measure succeeded in doubling credit in the certificates the following year. More significantly, on this occasion growth was maintained, with only a few breaks in the next decades, primarily because the supply of bullion, especially of silver, was increasing in Europe. Until the supply was sufficient to ease credit generally, membership of a trade fraternity that could pledge financial support might help an aspiring borrower, but because merchants were usually indebted to each other in complex, multiple transactions, illiquidity could cause bankruptcies to occur in quick succession, with a consequent disruption of markets and widespread loss of commercial confidence.66 Even in recessions, money could still be borrowed at high interest rates by those willing to pay them and able to offer security in lands and valuables. Such opportunities for profit attracted London merchants like Gilbert Maghfeld, who, because his own debtors could not repay him, found it easier to give up trade and lend his capital instead to the nobility, who could offer jewels or lands as security and pay a handsome return by way of interest.67 Other creditors recorded from

64 John Munro lists all the relevant legislation in “Bullionism and the Bill of Exchange in England, 1272–1663: A Study in Monetary Management and Popular Prejudice”, in Fredi Chiapelli (ed.), The Dawn of Modern Banking (London, 1979), reprinted in John Munro, Bullion Flows and Monetary Policies in England and the Low Countries, 1350–1500 (Aldershot: Variorum, 1992), IV; Appendices B, C, E. 65 Challis (ed.), A New History of the Royal Mint, 195–7. 66 Nightingale, “A Crisis of Credit in the Fifteenth Century?”, 153. 67 Nightingale, “Money and Credit in the Economy of Late Medieval England”, 56–9.

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the 1430s in the Close Rolls and in London’s Plea and Memoranda rolls gifts of goods and chattels, some as modest as a hood or tools, which they accepted as security for loans. Despite such attempts to maintain credit, many sources make it clear that the falling number of prosecutions for defaults reflects its continued reduction. Although merchants continued to trade by juggling payments in kind with those for which they could obtain coin, and by negotiating to offset one debt against another, wool producers still demanded advance payments of up to 40 per cent of the total price in coin, and were likely to refuse to deal with small woolbroggers like John Heritage, who could not provide them.68 The consequence was that at best transactions slowed, financial crises became more common, and crises expanded more frequently into recessions. Only when the output of the mints increased persistently, as it did at the beginning of the sixteenth century, do the certificates record a permanent rise in the trend of credit. Confidence grew with the volume of the coinage to the extent that in 1520 John Heritage concluded that he could risk exploiting the new liquidity by venturing into money-lending.69 There is, though, no evidence to support J.L. Bolton’s claim that a form of paper money had developed in late medieval England which ‘more than made up for a shortage of coin’ through the circulation of negotiable bonds.70 Although such bonds could be legally assigned, they were not automatically negotiable because they were no more than personal I.O.U.s, unsupported by any issuing authority, and so were not comparable with royal gold and silver coins of intrinsic fixed value. Moreover, these bonds only had a limited circulation in London, and were unknown in the provinces. They were therefore simply another form of credit, geographically circumscribed, and subject to exactly the same limitations as other credit, in their dependence on confidence that individual borrowers had the means to repay.71

Conclusions This article has shown that credit, like modern stock markets, was extraordinarily sensitive in the Middle Ages to any crises that made potential creditors suspect that repayment was doubtful. This sensitivity brought volatility to the financing of the medieval economy and thereby exacerbated crises that occurred for a variety of reasons. So crucial was credit to a system of payment that had to rely on an inadequate supply of coin that its prolonged contraction could be as damaging as the warfare, political turmoil, bad harvests, heavy taxation, and interruption of wool exports that threatened prosperity more directly. One must, though,

68 Christopher Dyer, A Country Merchant, 1495–1520 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 97–8, 101–2. 69 Ibid., 96. 70 Bolton, “Was There a ‘Crisis of Credit’ in Fifteenth-Century England?”, 157, 162. 71 Nightingale, “A Crisis of Credit?”, 150–3 (see Article 11 in this volume).

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distinguish between crises that had short-term effects on credit and those that caused major changes in long-term trends. Once plague became a common occurrence, the former were much more numerous. But although plague inspired most fear, the certificates show that after the shock of its first devastating effects on the population, even the most serious of its recurrences rarely affected levels of credit for more than two years. There were always people to take over the businesses of those who died, even if it meant that capital and enterprise became concentrated in fewer hands, and increasingly in London. Far more influential on the overall pattern of credit, and on its contribution to the economy, were creditors’ perceptions of the amount of silver coin in circulation. Without some certainty that the mints were replenishing the silver needed to maintain liquidity, London merchants like Gilbert Maghfeld lost the confidence to commit their resources to trade and would lend only to the rich who could give security in land or jewels.72 Young people also had little hope of marrying and increasing the population without loans to set up separate households and to acquire and stock farms. It is therefore significant that new supplies of silver coin coincide with the expansion not just of credit, but also of the population in the early sixteenth century.73 Once monetary and demographic growth resumed, the impact of individual crises on credit diminished, because the more powerful financial currents were able to lift the economy over the obstacles that had previously delayed its recovery. Confidence replaced uncertainty, stimulating investment and enterprise, and thereby prevented any crises that occurred from deepening and coalescing into further decade-long recessions. Finally, this analysis has shown how credit, as revealed by the Statute Merchant and staple certificates, reflected the crises and trends in the real economy, a reflection which, by its very closeness, helps to validate the evidence that the certificates provide.

72 Nightingale, “Money and Credit in the Economy of Late Medieval England”, 58–9. 73 Nightingale, “England and the European Depression”, 648–50; John Langdon and James Masschaele, “Commercial Activity and Population Growth in Medieval England”, Past & Present, 190 (2006): 39–42, 73–81.

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4 ENGLISH MEDIEVAL WEIGHT STANDARDS REVISITED

It is with some hesitation that any historian would dispute the conclusions of so distinguished a numismatist as Dr Stewart Lyon on the subject of medieval weight standards. However, in his recent article ‘Silver weight and minted weight in England, c. 1000–1320’,1 he challenged the views I myself published more than twenty years ago, and so, despite leaving that particular field of research in the interval, I welcome this opportunity to re-examine afresh some of its more controversial aspects in the light of his views and also of research published since I wrote.2 This discussion, beginning with the evidence of Domesday Book, allows me to develop the subject into a more general survey of the weight standards of the medieval English coinage up to the fourteenth century, and, to discuss in particular, the use of troy and tower weight. Dr Lyon has added further comments on the latter subject below, which remains a disputed one between us.

I My approach to the subject, as a historian, perhaps differs from the numismatist’s in that I am interested in coins less as objects to be sorted, classified, weighed and dated, and more in what they can tell us about the economic and political circumstances that produced them. It seems to me that when it came to deciding on the weight standards of the coinage, governments might have respect for historical tradition, but that was unlikely to have more influence over their policy than the convenience and practicality of the coinage for their own needs, and particularly for the furtherance of their immediate political objectives. The latter included adding to their revenues by the substantial profits they could draw from changing the coin-types, which seems to have been the principal interest of the Anglo-Saxon

1 Stewart Lyon, “Silver Weight and Minted Weight in England c. 1000–1320, with a Discussion of Domesday Terminology, Edwardian Farthings and the Origin of the Troy”, BNJ, 68 (2006): 227–41. 2 For my work on weight standards and the coinage see the articles re-published in Pamela Nightingale, Trade, Money and Power in Medieval England, Vol. 13 (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Ltd., 2007).

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kings; the convenience with which they could collect taxes to pay their armies, which was probably the major interest of the Danes and Normans; and the ease with which they could exchange and use coins within territorial possessions that spanned the Channel, a matter of interest to both the Normans and Angevins. Because of these different objectives, I would not expect that what is written about weight standards in 1320 was necessarily true of the England of Domesday, or of Æthelred II.3 Historians tend, also, to differ from numismatists, in their greater use of documents; therefore, they have more awareness of the limitations of written records when these are used to support numismatic evidence. They know that the documents are often silent about what people took for granted or had no particular interest in recording. Dr Lyon argues that because Cnut’s laws do not indicate that any change was made in weights and measures in his reign, it was likely, despite the very different weight of their coins, that both Cnut and William inherited Æthelred’s ora.4 But as Professor Pauline Stafford has stressed, the laws that survive in that period do so only partially because their committal to writing depended on the clergy, who tended to record them haphazardly, or because they reflected their special interests. Even so important a reform as that of the coinage in 973 has no documentary record.5 Therefore, although Dr Lyon finds it highly significant that Pegolotti never mentions troy weight in an English context, and that the earliest recorded mention of it is in an English statute of 1414, this is not surprising if troy was the normal weight standard that Pegolotti was accustomed to use in Europe.6 It is even less surprising considering that as late as the fourteenth century significant changes in medieval weight standards could occur in England without any explicit, official record of the event. One example of this is the appearance of the 16-ounce mercantile pound in England. In 1372, as in earlier records, the City of London stated that the avoirdupois pound was composed of fifteen ounces.7 Each ounce weighed the same as the troy ounce of 480 gr.8 But we learn from the little-known records of the London Grocers’ Company, and not from the City’s, or from any royal edict or parliamentary statute, of a significant change shortly afterwards. The City had delegated control over its avoirdupois weighing beam to the Grocers’ Company,

3 See, by comparison, Dr Lyon’s suggested link in “Silver Weight and Minted Weight”, 234, between the deduction of the 14½ sterling pennyweights for mintage and seigniorage in the 1280s with what he claims was a clear surcharge of 1s 2½d. on Doomsday renders on royal manors in Somerset. 4 Ibid., 236. 5 Pauline Stafford, Unification and Conquest: A Political and Social History of England in the Tenth and Eleventh Centuries (London: Edward Arnold, 1989), 139. 6 Lyon, “Silver Weight and Minted Weight”, 240. 7 Reginald R. Sharpe, Calendar of Letter-Books Preserved among the Archives of the Corporation of the City of London: Letter Book G (London: Court of Common Council, 1905), 300. 8 Robert D. Connor, The Weights and Measures of England (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1987), 126.

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because its members habitually bought and sold their goods using the mercantile or avoirdupois pound, and so the company was given the authority to stamp, by way of authentication, the weights used by individual grocers in their retail trade. In 1386 the Company listed in its records all the weights that they held in their keeping, and by which they tested those held by others. They held thirteen weights ranging from ¼ oz to ½ cwt, and they specifically identified the ¼-lb weight as one of 4 oz.9 This meant that the avoirdupois pound was by then divided into 16, and not 15, oz. A medical treatise written in 1395 by a chaplain of St Bartholomew’s, Smithfield, confirms the change when it relates that the apothecaries used two different pounds, one of 16 oz, the avoirdupois weight, which they used to buy their supplies wholesale, and one of 12 oz in their retail trade. Both ounces were of 20 dwt, the troy weight used by the goldsmiths.10 This shows that people were undoubtedly using troy weight in the fourteenth century without naming it, because they took it for granted.11 Alterations in the weight standards of the coinage, though, were very different from any made in the mercantile pound, because control of the coinage from the earliest times belonged only to the crown, and the crown never surrendered it, or lost control of it, except temporarily during the anarchy under Stephen when some barons issued coins. It cannot be emphasised too much that whatever was the king’s policy towards the manufacture and exchange of coins, or the purchase of bullion, was determined by him and his advisers alone, and was usually, as the Dialogue of the Exchequer says, purely for his own profit.12 The king’s freedom to change his policies, or to delegate afresh the responsibility for administering them, was not limited by any supposed ‘rights’ of moneyers or local mints, or by the charters of his predecessors. The latter did not necessarily remain in force unless the king specifically confirmed them. Nor, in the era of changing coin types is there any evidence to support the assumption of some numismatists that the king was restricted to issuing new types at regular intervals of two or three years, regardless of whether it was in his interest to do so.13

9 John A. Kingdon, Facsimile of First Volume of Ms. Archives of the Worshipful Company of Grocers of the city of London AD 1345–1463 Transcribed and Translated with Extracts from the Records of the City of London and Archives of St Paul’s Cathedral: Pt. 1 (London: Richard Clay, 1886), 66; Nightingale, A Medieval Mercantile Community, 302. 10 Perceval H-S Hartley and Harold R. Aldridge, Johannes de Mirfield of St Bartholomew’s, Smithfield: His Life and Works (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936), 25, 92–3. 11 Connor, Weights and Measures of England, 127, gives fifteenth-century sources as the earliest references to a 16 oz commercial pound. 12 Charles Johnson, Dialogus de Scaccario, by Richard, Son of Nigel (London: Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1950), 38. 13 See, e.g., Robin J. Eaglen, Abbey and Mint of Bury St Edmunds to 1279 (London: Spink Books, 2006), 56. Dr Lyon is not committed to this view, and Ian Stewart has argued strongly against it: Stewart Lyon, “Some Problems in Interpreting Anglo-Saxon Coinage”, Anglo-Saxon England, 5 (1976): 195; see also n.20 below.

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Naturally, it was easier for kings to govern with the minimum of coercion, if they acted with some degree of consent and if they did not impose on their subjects the costs involved in exchanging coin-types more than was reasonable to do so. However, a king like William I, who had no hesitation in crippling his new subjects with oppressive taxation, would certainly have felt no obligation to observe any convention he may, or may not, have inherited from his predecessors about changing coin types at regular intervals, unless it suited his own financial and political interests. Although he profited by the practice, as his Anglo-Saxon predecessors had done, he, like the earlier, Danish, conquerors of England, had also to consider how best to exploit English wealth in coined silver so that it could most easily support his power both in England and across the Channel. This meant that the coinage had to be suitable, both in its weight and fineness, for the payment of mercenaries. My work on the weight standards of the Anglo-Saxon, Danish and Norman coinages in England sought to make sense of changes in the weight of contemporary coins within the context of this exploitation of English wealth by foreign conquerors for their own military and political purposes. However, subsequent research has shown that some of the statements I then made should now be modified. The first of these relates to the vexed question of the Domesday payments in pence de viginti in ora, which Dr Lyon also discusses in his new article. I argued, in ‘The ora, the mark, and the mancus’, that payments specified as de viginti in ora describe not a surcharge of 25 per cent, as was proposed by Dr Sally Harvey, but coin struck to a fixed weight standard of twenty pence to the ounce. The weight of that ounce, I argued, had been fixed at 27 g, c. 1031, and when, after 1053, Edward the Confessor began to strike the majority of his coins to a modal weight of c. 1.33 g, he introduced the standard of de xx in ora.14 This explains the pre-Conquest reference to a payment ad numerum de xx in ora at Leicester, which Dr Lyon can only account for, otherwise, as an unlikely scribal error.15 Although this continued to be the official standard of weight for the coinage, the crown continued to profit from striking coins above and below that standard at different mints. This meant that English coin was only acceptable to foreigners when it was paid by weight and not by tale. It was only when the Conqueror decided to end this system and replaced it by one based on a coinage of fixed uniform weight that coins struck to the Confessor’s standard of twenty to the ounce, became payable both in England and overseas by tale. Following Professor Grierson’s and Dr

14 Pamela Nightingale, “The Ora, the Mark and the Mancus: Weight Standards and the Coinage in Eleventh-Century England”, The Numismatic Chronicle, 143 (1984): Part I, 252–3; Part II, 244–5. The present article uses the modern metric weight, abbreviated to g. as the means of comparing the differing weights of coins struck to the medieval troy and tower standards. 15 Sally Harvey, “Royal Revenue and Domesday Terminology”, Econ. Hist. Rev., 2nd ser., 20, 2 (1967): 226; Domesday Book, f.230: Lyon, “Silver Weight and Minted Weight”, 234, n.58; Domesday Book I, f.230; Stewart Lyon, “Some Problems in Interpreting Anglo-Saxon Coinage”, 234, n.58.

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Lyon’s work on the Conqueror’s coinage, I concluded at the time of writing my article that the Conqueror made this change with his Sword type (BMC Type VI), which Grierson dated c. 1080–3. The weight of the coins was then close to twenty to the ounce, and the date of the issue appeared to be close to the first reference to ‘sterling’, c. 1078.16 Professor Metcalf’s subsequent work, though, shows convincingly that although a higher weight-standard of c. 1.37 g for the penny was introduced at Winchester in the Conqueror’s Type IV, and at Lincoln in Type V, weight standards still varied at London, and other mints, and continued to do so in Types VI and VII.17 Only in William’s Paxs issue, Type VIII, was a uniform higher weight imposed on all the mints.18 By Dolley’s scheme for dating the Conqueror’s coins, the Paxs issue belongs to the years 1083–6, but this date has recently been questioned on the grounds of Dolley’s ‘arbitrary juggling with two and three year periods’, and the tenuousness of the link he made between the extraordinarily large issue of this type with the oppressive six-shilling geld levied after Christmas 1083, and, also, between the extensive Beauworth hoard of Paxs coins and the fear of a Danish invasion in 1085.19 It has also been suggested that the symbolism of a Paxs coinage was far more appropriate to the beginning of the new reign of William Rufus than to the end of his father’s. All these judgments are necessarily speculative since there is no firm evidence to rely on. If, though, there was no compelling reason why kings, least of all a conqueror as ruthless as William, should be restricted to issuing new coin types at regular intervals, rather than when it suited his needs, then Dolley’s dating has more to recommend it than a scheme that, relying on fixed three-year intervals, makes William Rufus issue the Paxs type.20 What Metcalf has emphasised is the radical nature of the reform introduced by the Paxs type, of a single weight standard of c. 1.37 g–1.38 g at all the mints. Its significance is the greater because at least 65 mints struck the very large Paxs issue, and their usual ranking was changed. Although London, as the chief commercial centre, had hitherto been the dominant mint, it struck only 11 per cent of the Paxs issue, whereas 15 per cent was struck in Winchester, and some other mints, like Salisbury and Southwark,

16 Lyon, Ibid., 204; Philip Grierson, “Sterling”, in Reginald H.M. Dolley (ed.), Anglo-Saxon Coins: Historical Studies Presented to Sir Frank Stenton (London: Methuen, 1961), 267, 274–5. 17 D. Michael Metcalf, Atlas of Anglo-Saxon Coin and Norman Coin-Finds (London and Ashmolean Museum: British Numismatic Society, 1998), 182–7. 18 Ibid., 188. 19 Eaglen, Abbey and Mint of Bury St Edmunds, 56. 20 Ibid., 57. Lord Stewartby has strongly criticised the notion of a pre-ordained pattern of changing coin types as ‘an historical improbability . . . because competent governments are normally ready to respond to circumstances and to develop their policies in the light of experience, while incompetent governments are forced to do so’: Ian Stewart, “Coinage and Re-Coinage after Edgar’s Reform”, in Kenneth Jonsson (ed.), Studies in the Late Anglo-Saxon Coinage (Stockholm: Svenska Numismatiska Meddelanden 35, 1990), 480. I am indebted to Dr Lyon for this reference.

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also saw much higher levels of activity than normal.21 It would seem, therefore, that these changes were dictated by government policy, directed from Winchester, rather than by commercial need. Metcalf concluded, on balance, that the huge size of the issue was determined by the reform of the coinage, rather than by the need to pay the oppressive geld of 1084. He linked the reform with the Domesday survey, and saw both as examples of the king’s determination to enforce firmer, more centralised government on his realm. It is this aspect of the reform that raises doubts whether Paxs was first introduced by William Rufus. Only the strongest of kings would have risked making such a change in the coinage at the beginning of his reign since it potentially alienated subjects who found that they received in exchange for their old, lighter pence fewer new pennies of fixed weight. It is conceivable, in fact, that the bitter complaint made in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle’s obituary of the Conqueror, in 1087, that he took coin ‘by weight and with great injustice from his people with little need for such a deed’ was provoked by the recent imposition of the new uniform weight standard, because it must have appeared in this light to every holder of old coin.22 In 1087 William Rufus would have had little confidence in his ability to impose such a radical reform because he was regarded by many as a usurper, and he was uncertain of the extent to which his new subjects would support him against the claims of his elder brother, Robert. In these circumstances an unpopular change in the monetary system must have appeared to him and his advisers as a dangerous and unnecessary risk. In fact, the evidence suggests that the new king was anxious initially not to alienate his subjects by novel policies of this kind.23 In view of these uncertainties about the date when this important reform of the coinage was introduced, it is pertinent to ask what purpose it served and why the crown should then choose to make the change to a fixed, uniform weight for the penny. Because the ora of 27 g was used at this time in a large part of northern Europe, English merchants almost certainly benefited from the new fixed weight of the coinage. It is unlikely, though, that the Conqueror put their interests before his own. The change meant that he could collect taxes directly from his English subjects in coins whose fixed value would be instantly recognised by foreigners from the image they bore when they were paid out by tale. This was of the greatest benefit when he was paying foreign mercenaries to fight under his command. It also meant that William could predict the precise amount of silver he could collect from any geld. William was certainly conscious of the need to employ large numbers of mercenaries from 1083 onwards. They were needed to protect him against the rebellion of his son, Robert, and against Robert’s supporter, the French king, as well as against a rebellion in Maine, and subsequently

21 Metcalf, An Atlas of Anglo-Saxon and Norman Coin Finds, c. 973–1086, 188. 22 Whitelock and Douglas, Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, 164. 23 Barlow, William Rufus, 60, 68, 70, 74.

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against the threat of a Danish invasion of England.24 It is therefore conceivable that the uniform weight of the Paxs coinage was decided in late 1083, at the same time as the six-shilling geld was ordered. In that case the symbol of peace on the coins was meant to remind William’s English subjects that what they were paying for was the maintenance of the internal peace and order that he had given them, and to which the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle paid tribute on his death.25 What is certainly true is that the Paxs coins aptly fit the specification needed to explain the payments de viginti in ora that are recorded in 1086 in Domesday Book. One might go further and argue that at least two of the payments recorded there can only be explained if the Paxs coinage had been introduced a short time before it was written. Domesday records what appears to be a bewildering patchwork of various types of payment that reflects different layers of custom, and the different dates when renders had been settled. Some were paid by tale, some by weight, some weighed and assayed, and others specified as de viginti in ora. In a few cases, too, the latter refer to coins that had additionally to be assayed because they specify payment in libras alborum (or candidorum) nummorum de xx in ora.26 These can be explained by the fact that although the official weight standard was twenty pence to the ounce, and the Winchester mint was observing it from c. 1072, elsewhere standards continued to vary in the Anglo-Saxon tradition from mint to mint within the same type. It was therefore impossible for tax collectors to distinguish those of inferior weight and fineness without an assay.27 Assaying, though, required time and skill, and wasted 6d. in each pound in the late twelfth century. This was another compelling reason why William must have wanted to make it unnecessary by ordering the whole coinage to be struck to a standard weight and fineness.28 The entry for Dover in Domesday Book indicates the recent timing of the change to a fixed weight standard and is therefore evidence of the existence of the Paxs type by 1086. Dr Harvey has shown that the Excerpta of St Augustine’s, which is a text based on an earlier stage of the Domesday enquiries, initially recorded Dover’s render to the king of £24 as viginti et quattuor librae dantur regi de xx denariis in ora cum incensione et pensa. However, in Domesday Book this had become merely a payment of the same sum de viginti in ora, payable by tale.29 It is inconceivable that the king would accept this change if it meant giving up either a surcharge or the certainty that the actual coin he received by tale was of full weight

24 Douglas, William the Conqueror, 243–4. 25 Dorothy Whitelock and David Douglas, Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1961), 164. 26 Harvey, “Royal revenue and Domesday Terminology”, 223–4. Domesday Book, I, f.164, Tidenham, Arlington, Tockington. 27 Metcalf, Atlas of Anglo-Saxon and Norman Coin Finds, 184–9. 28 John Brand, The English Coinage, 1180–1247: Money, Mints and Exchanges (Alan Sutton for the British Numismatic Society, 1994), 66. 29 Harvey, “Royal Revenue and Domesday Terminology”, 224.

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and fineness. He could only have that certainty in Paxs and later issues, which could easily be recognised at sight by the tax collectors. The ubiquity of the Paxs coins by 1086 may explain why Battle Abbey was then content to receive by tale a render from the Kentish manor of Wye which before that year had been paid to the Crown, de xx in ora.30 Since the introduction of the new fixed weight standard was so very recent it is not surprising that it is stipulated in relatively few entries in Domesday Book, and only in payments to the crown. Once all earlier coin types had disappeared from circulation there would have been no need to specify in later charters that dues should be payable to the king in denarii de viginti in ora, since these would then be the only coins current. Dr Lyon objects that this interpretation is brought into question by the same Domesday entry for Dover that shows the reeve paying only 24 pounds to the king de denariis qui sunt xx in ora and 30 pounds to the earl ad numerum. He goes on to say, ‘The apparent absurdity of the king receiving less than the earl is one reason why Dr Sally Harvey argued forty years ago that de xx in ora meant ‘payable in pence with a surcharge of 25%’. But Dr Harvey did not give any such reason in her article, because as she would know well, there was no ‘apparent absurdity’ in the king receiving less than the earl in Dover.31 The distribution of local revenues between the king and his officials varied from place to place according to different needs. Certain estates allocated to the earl were to enable him to fulfil his official functions as the king’s deputy in the defence of the realm.32 Although the Conqueror was more wary than the Confessor of creating powerful earls, certain towns of strategic importance clearly needed men who enjoyed local authority and superior resources to defend them, and Dover was one of them. This was why it had been placed previously under the authority of Earl Godwin and also given specific responsibility for manning a fleet.33 For the same reason the Conqueror had put it under the control of his half-brother, Odo of Bayeux.34 It seems from the entry for Sandwich that Dover retained this responsibility for naval defence under William, and it thereby bore an additional financial burden which was over and above what the burgesses paid to the king in coin.35 Chester is another example where the townspeople apparently paid more money to the

30 Domesday Book, I, f. 11v.; William Dugdale, Monasticon Anglicanum: A History of the Abbies and Other Monasteries, Hospitals, Friaries, and Cathedral and Collegiate Churches, with Their Dependencies, in England and Wales . . ., 6 vols. (London, 1817–1829), Vol. 3, 244f. One of the witnesses to this undated charter was Maurice, Bishop of London, who was consecrated on 5 April 1086. 31 Harvey, “Royal Revenue and Domesday Terminology”, 224. She does not comment on the discrepancy between payments to the King and to the Earl. 32 Frederic W. Maitland, Domesday Book and Beyond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), 207–8. 33 Domesday Book, I, 3. Sandwich provided the same service to the King as Dover. 34 Ibid., I, 1a; ibid., 262v. 35 Ibid., I, 262v.

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earl than to the king. Again, it is likely that this was because Chester’s strategic importance required the earl to draw a substantial revenue from the place which he could use, if necessary, for its defence. It is also to be noted in Chester’s case that the payment to the king was not specified as de xx in ora. Therefore one cannot conclude, as Dr Lyon does, that the fact that the earl appeared to receive a higher payment in cash than the king from Dover meant that any payment to the latter, which was specified as de xx in ora, was a way of stating that it required a surcharge of 25 per cent, instead of being, as I argue, a payment to be made in the new coins of fixed weight of the current type.

II It is, however, on the significance of troy weight standards in the monetary history of medieval England that I differ most from Dr Lyon, and in particular with his bold conclusion, ‘There can be little doubt that what we know as troy weight was not employed in any way in the English coinage in Pegolotti’s time, and it probably never had been.’36 I argued in ‘The evolution of weight standards’ that although troy weight, which was the weight of the barley grain, was the ancient weight standard of the Anglo-Saxon people, the Danish conquerors replaced it by Roman standards for a period until it was re-introduced into England by Henry II in 1158 because, like the Normans and Danes before him, he wanted his English revenues to serve his continental interests.37 To do this he needed the English coinage to be related to the same troy weight standard as those of his ancestral possessions, Anjou, Normandy, Touraine and Maine. Dr Lyon thinks that even if Henry II had acquired control of the purchase of bullion by the mints in 1158, which he doubts, ‘it is improbable that he would have introduced a practice of purchasing by continental troy weight’.38 This view, though, reflects the insular tradition of seeing Henry II as essentially an English king, whereas he was an Angevin with little knowledge of England. He gained his English inheritance by conquest and saw it merely as the richest part of an empire that spread over half of modern France. In fact, between 1159 and 1167 Henry II spent all but three years on the continent, and in the thirty-four years of his reign he crossed the Channel no fewer than twenty-eight times and the Irish Sea twice.39 Although eight principal coinages were in use in his loosely federated continental possessions, it seems clear that Henry acted fairly speedily after his conquest of England to establish his authority over all his mints and exchanges.

36 Lyon, “Silver Weight and Minted Weight”, 240. 37 Pamela Nightingale, “The Evolution of Weight-Standards and the Creation of New Monetary and Commercial Links in Northern Europe from the Tenth Century to the Twelfth Century”, Economic History Review, 38, 2 (1985): 205–6. 38 Ibid., 230. 39 Wilfred L. Warren, Henry II (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1973), 93, 302.

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In Dr Barrie Cook’s view, his actions from 1158 onwards may exhibit a policy of achieving ‘significant administrative co-ordination’ between them in which, at the very least, the Angevin government was ‘viewing the mints and exchanges from across its territories as in some sense a unit’.40 Since the troy mark was used as the bullion weight in the Angevin territories by 1147, an Angevin ruler bent on harmonising his minting policy had every incentive to introduce it as the bullion weight in England.41 So complete was the control that Henry exerted over England by 1158 that if he then left moneyers with the power to exchange coins, he did so because it suited his purpose at the time, and contrary to what Dr Lyon thinks, this did not in any way prevent him from introducing troy weight as the means of purchasing bullion.42 Despite Henry I’s edict giving moneyers the sole right to exchange coin (which was intended merely to prevent counterfeiters from passing on their handiwork, and did not endow the moneyers with exclusive and permanent rights over exchanges), the Pipe Roll of 1130 refers to a cambium or exchange held in London by people (one of them a sheriff that year) whose names are not on any coins. Moreover, as Professor Mayhew pointed out in his chapter in the History of the Royal Mint, there is reason to think that people other than moneyers were involved, probably as exchangers, or financiers, at the Canterbury and York mints between 1158 and 1180.43 In 1158 Henry also raised the weight of the sterling penny to a standard that Derek Allen considered was 1.46 g. Dr Martin Allen has stated in his recent review of the weight standard of the Tealby, or Cross-and-Crosslets, coinage that it is certainly possible that the standard of 1158–80 was 240d. per tower pound with a penny weighing 1.46 g.44 This contrasts markedly with an average weight for the penny between 1153/4 and 1158 that Allen finds was 1.33 g, although those coins also appear to display regional variations round that figure.45 I have argued that the

40 Barrie Cook, “En Monnaie Aiant Cours: The Monetary System of the Angevin Empire”, in Barrie Cook and Gareth Williams, “Coins and History in the North Sea World, c. 500–c. 1250: Essays in Honour of Marion Archibald”, The Northern World, Vol. 19 (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 622–5. 41 Nightingale, “Evolution of Weight-Standards”, 205. 42 Obviously, the introduction of the troy pound for bullion did not affect the use of the tower pound to weigh the sterling coins which the sheriffs took to the Exchequer. The evidence of the Dialogue of the Exchequer quoted by Lyon (194, n.5–6) is therefore not relevant. 43 Pamela Nightingale, “Some London Moneyers and Reflections on the Organisation of English Mints in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries”, Numismatic Chronicle, 142 (1985): 34–50. Reprinted in V. Pamela Nightingale, Trade, Money and Power in Medieval England (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Ltd., 2007); Nicholas Mayhew, “From Regional to Central Minting, 1158– 1464”, in Christopher Challis (ed.), A New History of the Royal Mint (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 93–4. 44 Martin Allen, “The Weight-Standard of the English Coinage, 1158–1279”, The Numismatic Chronicle, 165 (2005): 228–33; Martin Allen, “The English Coinage of 1153/4–1158”, British Numismatic Journal, 76 (2006): 242–302. 45 Allen, Ibid., 262–3.

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new standard for the Cross-and-Crosslets pennies was fixed so that the difference between the troy pound used to buy bullion and that of the tower poise used to weigh 240 pence should amount to the weight of 12 tower pence. This was possible because the weight of the medieval English troy pound introduced by Henry II almost certainly matched the French livre de Troyes of 367.2 g instead of the modern troy pound of 373.48 g.46 It is to be expected that an Angevin king who wanted a common monetary system throughout his mainly French empire would use a French standard of weight, and it is likely that he also changed at the same time the weight of the grain from the English troy barley grain to that of the French and Flemish wheat grain, then weighing c. 0.0476 g.47 This would make the English troy pound one of 7,680 gr. × 0.0476 g = 365.6 g. The new tower pound of 7,200 wheat grains, which was the weight of 240 sterling pennies, was therefore derived from the weight of the troy pound, and its grain division had the convenience of giving each sterling penny a round number of 30 gr. and a pennyweight of 32 gr. It allowed the king to maintain a common bullion weight throughout his territories and to take by weight from every troy pound of bullion of sterling fineness received by the mints the English crown’s traditional seigniorage of six sterling pence in the pound, and also to pay the moneyers the traditional sixpence in the pound to cover the costs of manufacturing and exchanging the coins.48 That continental coins were exchanged in this way for sterlings during the Cross-and-Crosslets period, by using the troy bullion and the tower mint weights, appears from the reference in 1166 in Flanders to the petit marc de 10s. sterling. This Flemish mark for silver weighed half of a troy pound but it was valued at 10 shillings sterling.49 This indicates that the Flemings expected to exchange half a troy pound of their bullion by weight for 120 sterling pennies, with the difference in weight being retained as charges by the English exchanges. The weight and name of this Flemish mark indicates a clear connection between the troy bullion weight and the English coinage of the second half of the twelfth century that Dr Lyon does not comment upon, although he does identify the Flemish ounce as being the same weight as the English troy ounce.50

46 Harry A. Miskimin, “Two Reforms of Charlemagne? Weight and Measures in the Middle Ages”, The Economic History Review, 20, 1 (1967): 41. If one subtracts the 349.9 weight of the tower pound from the 367.2 g of the medieval Paris troy pound the difference amounts to 17.3 g. This is the equivalent of 12 tower pence each weighing 1.46g. 47 Nightingale, “Evolution of Weight-Standards”, 202. 48 Ibid., 205. I should have made clear in this article my understanding that the King would pay from this shilling the fees of the moneyers, which almost certainly would account for sixpence of it. There is no reason to doubt that the system also incorporated the adjustments that the moneyers made when they valued foreign coins in the thirteenth century to allow for differences in fineness between sterling and continental coins. 49 Carlos Wyffels, “Note sur les marcs monetaires utilise en Flandre et en Artois avant 1300”, ASEB, 104 (1967): 67–71, 83. 50 Lyon, “Silver Weight and Minted Weight”, 228.

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If, despite this evidence for the use of the troy bullion weight, it is still thought that Henry II did nothing before 1180 to relate the various Angevin coinages to the English currency, what, one wonders, was his purpose in raising the weight standard of the sterling penny to 1.46 g in 1158? This was likely to have been a very unpopular move with the King’s new English subjects, since as owners of the old coin of inferior weight they had to pay substantially to change it into the new pence. The King must have had good reason for risking such widespread unpopularity. It could be, therefore, that he saw the introduction of the new weight standard for the penny, and the troy weight for bullion, as the first steps towards linking his English and continental coinages. Since sterling was by far the strongest and most influential coinage at the time, it was sensible to begin any necessary changes with the English weight standard. As long as his various coinages were exchanged by weight, it may have appeared sufficient at first to link them by a common weight for bullion. Only when the flow of silver to England increased during the 1170s, and royal revenues grew with it, did it become desirable to strike coins that were exchangeable at face value in England and overseas, so that Henry could employ England’s wealth in coin more conveniently in his Angevin possessions. Dr Cook’s recent work on the monetary system of the Angevin empire stresses the importance of the additional changes that Henry made in 1180. He points out that unusually he brought over experts from Tours and Le Mans to participate in the Short Cross recoinage. Because the tournois/angevin, mansois, and sterling coins formed the three levels of the Angevin monetary system, Cook has suggested that the presence of experts in all three coinages may indicate that this was the occasion, rather than 1158, when measures were taken to make the English coins exchangeable by set rates with those of his Angevin lands.51 Two charters of the 1180s indicate that there was a known fixed relationship between sterling and Angevin money.52 The common presence of sterling pennies with other Angevin coins in continental hoards after 1180 support this interpretation. Martin Allen’s suggestion that the new Short Cross type introduced in 1180 may have been struck to a standard of 246 to the pound would seem to challenge this interpretation because it implies that there was no long-term aim behind raising the weight of the penny in 1156. But as Allen himself points out, the recorded assays of the Short Cross coinage in 1181 and 1196 do not support his hypothesis of a lower weight standard from 1180, because, in John Brand’s words, ‘any variance in the weight from standard would have an immediate effect on the result of the combustion’.53 Allen’s answer to this problem is to cite Brand as the authority for his suggestion that ‘the results of the combustion were silently adjusted to make

51 Cook, “Monetary System of the Angevin Empire”, 628. 52 Ibid., 629. 53 Allen, “Weight-Standard of the English Coinage”, 1158–279, 242–302; Brand, The English Coinage of 1180–1247–1158, 65.

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allowance for the lack of fineness of the coinage alloy and the loss of silver in the assaying process.’54 However, to carry out regular assays of English coins in a way that required silent adjustments of that kind seems an unsatisfactory and pointless exercise, especially, as Brand himself pointed out, ‘any competent goldsmith could have removed all but a percentage point or two of impurities without difficulty’.55 If one accepts, instead, the results of the assays of 1181 and 1196 at their face value, as signifying that the coins of those years were of full weight, and if one then analyses the weights of the coins in the Tealby and Short Cross hoards that Allen lists, the most significant difference in average weight appears not in 1180, but after the death of King John in 1216. The average of the 5,714 coins in the Tealby hoards is 1.42 g, while the average for the 1,217 Short Cross coins from 1180 to 1216 is 1.41 g.56 This is a slight difference considering the many factors that could influence the condition and weight of coins in the ground. One such factor was the special selection of coins for hoards so as to exclude those that were both over as well as under the standard weight.57 This continuity of weight is also surprising in view of the fact that after 1204, when Philip Augustus of France conquered Normandy, along with much of the Angevin empire, he ended the angevin and mansois deniers and imposed the tournois as the French royal coinage throughout his newly conquered lands.58 This meant that, from the point of view of English kings, there remained after 1204 no pressing political reason why they should any longer base their monetary policy on the need to make the sterling penny readily interchangeable at face value with continental coins, by fixing the weight of each coin at precisely twenty to the ounce. Since King John’s campaigns to preserve his continental possessions had also left him very short of money, it is not surprising that his last years reveal a greater readiness to tolerate coins of low weight. This was first made clear within a year of the loss of Normandy, when a partial recoinage, which was intended to eliminate coins of light weight, still allowed any old money not more than two shillings and sixpence in the pound light to remain current. As Nicholas Mayhew has observed, this was ‘an unusually tolerant limit’ which could be explained by the pressure on the coinage caused by the huge amounts exported to pay for Richard I’s ransom and in the struggle to defend Normandy.59 That such tolerance was seen as a temporary, if officially accepted, expedient

54 55 56 57

Allen, “The Weight-Standard of the English Coinage, 1158–1279”, 230, citing Brand, 69. Brand, The English Coinage, 1180–1247, 69. Allen, “The Weight-Standard of the English Coinage, 1158–1279”, 229. Marion M. Archibald and Barrie J. Cook, English Medieval Coin Hoards: 1. Cross and Crosslets, Short Cross and Long Cross Hoards (London: British Museum Press, 2001), 24, 48. The authors contrast the composition of the selected Tockholes hoard of c. 1218, 60 per cent of whose coins were over 95 per cent of the standard weight, with the much wider spread of weights found in the coins of the Wainfleet hoard of c. 1194–1204. 58 Cook, “Monetary System of the Angevin Empire”, 672–3. 59 Mayhew, An Atlas of Anglo-Saxon and Norman Coin Finds, c. 973–1086, 98; Brand, The English Coinage, 1180–1247, 13–15.

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appears from its coupling with the issue by the mint of a poise for weighing a penny which was up to one-eighth light. It should be noted, though, that the poise was to be used only until Easter in the following year, and Class IV of Short Cross in the Bainton hoard shows that the average weight quickly returned to 1.41 g.60 As England descended into civil war on the death of King John in 1216, and London, which was the source of much of the bullion that came into the country, fell temporarily under the control of the French prince, Louis, it is not surprising that trade suffered, less bullion was brought by merchants to the mints, and the coinage deteriorated in weight. Civil war threatened again in 1223. These events may have contributed to the lower weight of the hoards listed by Allen which were deposited after c. 1217. Also, as Mayhew concluded, the deficiency in the used Short Cross coinage, which was revealed by the Exchequer assay of 1247, ‘would be entirely consistent with what we know of wear in coinage, and with the evidence of Exchequer combustions of the period’.61 By 1256–8, 242 pence were being struck from each pound of sterling silver.62 Despite temporary tolerances of weight below the standard (which in any case became inevitable through wear because of the long intervals between recoinages), it was obviously considered important that the silver content of the coinage should be trustworthy, since coins could easily be weighed when they were exchanged, but not so easily assayed, unless their quantity made it worthwhile and there were expert moneyers on hand to do it. It is clear from Brand’s work that whereas the silver content of the Cross-and-Crosslets coinage was very variable, as appears from the combustion rates recorded on the Pipe Rolls, that of the Short Cross coinage was remarkably even in quality, and generally within the normal tolerance rate of 6d., until the progressive wear of the coinage made itself felt.63 In fact, as Dr Lyon points out, this aspect of the new coinage appears to have been so well known to the townspeople of Exeter that although they were required by charter to make a payment of £25 blanch, or assayed, they claimed it was unnecessary after the introduction of the new coinage to make the traditional extra payment of 12s. 6d. tale to satisfy the requirement of blanching.64 It also appears from the Memoranda Roll of 1230–1 that even royal officials were by then content to receive smaller sums in cash without an assay.65 This new insistence on a consistent standard of fineness from 1180 accords with a policy of making sterling coins exchangeable at a fixed rate with Angevin coins on the continent. For this to be possible foreigners had to be able to trust completely in their standard of fineness.

60 Rogers Ruding, Annals of the Coinage of Great Britain and Its Dependencies (London: John Hearne, 1840), 178; Allen 2005, 229. 61 Mayhew, “From Regional to Central Minting, 1158–1464”, 108. 62 Allen, “The Weight-Standard of the English Coinage, 1158–1279”, 229, 227. 63 Brand, The English Coinage, 1180–1247, 60–2. 64 Round, The Commune of London and Other Studies, 87, cited by Harvey, “Royal Revenue and Domesday Terminology”, 227. 65 Brand, The English Coinage, 1180–1247, 61.

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III What major changes in this system were made by the Edwardian recoinages? As Dr Lyon points out, Pegolotti’s statement, c. 1320, indicates that bullion was then bought and exchanged for coin not by troy, but by tower weight, which was aligned with that of the Cologne mark of 233 g.66 This shows that tower weight still remained what it had been in 1158, when Henry II introduced the new weight of 1.46 g for the sterling penny. By 1170 the Cologne mint had responded to that change by adopting for its Magna Marca the same weight as the tower mark. It could do this because its coins were of above sterling fineness.67 The dates, though, show that it was copying the English weight standard, and not vice versa.68 German merchants bringing Cologne coins to the English mints in the early fourteenth century would, therefore, have experienced no change in procedures. They continued to expect, like English merchants who were exchanging old sterlings for new ones, to have them weighed by tower weight, and to pay the seigniorage and minting charges in the same way. Did this mean that when Flemish and French merchants, too, had to exchange their coin by tower weight that Dr Lyon is correct in stating that troy weight ‘was not employed in any way in the English coinage in Pegolotti’s time’? To answer this question one must first investigate when and for what reason tower weight replaced troy for exchanging all foreign bullion at the mint. The period between 1180–1279 is striking for the continuity exhibited by the charges for minting, and seigniorage. English and foreign merchants alike paid 6d. in the pound in seigniorage to the crown and sixpence to the moneyers throughout that period.69 This fixed charge was maintained even when the number of pence struck from the pound had increased to 242 by 1259, and it seems clear from this fact that the charges were paid not by tale, but by weight in the way first established in 1158, by using the difference between the troy and tower pounds.70 The motivation to change this system seems to have been the determination of Edward I, as recorded by the Treatise on the New Money, to obtain more profit from the mint. In 1279 the crown’s seigniorage was raised to ninepence in a tower pound, from which

66 Lyon, “Silver Weight and Minted Weight”, 230; Alan Evans, Francesco Balducci Pegolotti: La Pratica della Mercatura (Cambridge, MA: Medieval Academy Books 24, 1936), 255. 67 Nightingale, “The Evolution of Weight Standards and the Creation of New Monetary and Commercial Links in Northern Europe from the Tenth Century to the Twelfth Century”, 207. 68 There is no evidence to support the contention of Allen D. Simpson and Robert D. Connor, “The Mass of the English Troy Pound in the Eighteenth Century”, Annals of Science, 61 (2004): 328, that the formal introduction of troy weight in England occurred in the late fourteenth century. The fact that the Bruges silver ounce matched the weight of the English troy ounce by 1166 shows that the strong commercial pressures which they claim caused the introduction of troy weight into the mint long antedated the fourteenth century, as, indeed, the history of the wool trade shows. By the late fourteenth century the wool trade was actually declining. 69 Mayhew, “From Regional to Central Minting, 1158–1464”, 132. 70 Ibid., 132–3.

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243 pence were now struck.71 This meant that in 1279 the customers of the mint had to pay total charges of 19 pence for English silver and 17 pence for foreign silver. Later, though, these charges were reduced and varied as a means of attracting silver to the mint.72 The effect of these changes was to overturn the stable system which had led the Flemings to create their petit marc de 10 shillings sterling in the twelfth century when they first aligned their troy bullion pound with the sterling value of the tower pound. The new royal policy of varying charges made such arrangements obsolete. Instead, changes in seigniorage could be most easily executed by using the tower weight as the bullion weight and by levying the charges by tale. This was done in 1279 when the merchants were repaid in sterlings counted out at the rate of 240 pence to the pound, even though they were now struck to a standard of 243 to the pound. The king kept the additional 3d. for himself. This innovation indicates a clear break with the past, and a policy that was dictated more by royal profit than by the political and commercial benefits of fixed exchange rates.73 In one important aspect of minting policy, though, there was continuity. The mint continued to maintain the traditional sterling standard of fineness, and it is clear that it was determined by troy weight. This is not surprising since England’s main trading partners still used weights related to the troy system, and the Bruges silver ounce continued to match the English troy ounce exactly.74 Troy also remained the weight used by the goldsmiths for assaying bullion. Its use in the mint for this purpose is made plain by the document which describes how the Abbot of Bury St Edmund’s was instructed in 1280 to make the king’s new coins by Gregory de Rokesley.75 Besides being Warden of the Exchange and Mint, Rokesley was an experienced merchant and goldsmith. The first part of his reply, which is recorded, no doubt as he spoke it, in French, dealt with the weight of the actual coins. 243 pence had to be struck from the (tower) pound, of which no more than six heavy and six light coins were acceptable. They were to be no more than a grain and a half heavier or lighter than the standard. The second part, in Latin, then describes the standard of fineness of the coins which was calculated in troy weight: ‘The ounce weighs twenty dwt. The penny weighs 24 grains. A heavy penny weighs 25½ grains. A light penny weighs 22½ grains’.76 Although medieval clerks used the words sterlingum and denarius interchangeably to describe either the pennyweight or the minted penny, the weight system referred to in this Latin passage is clearly that of the 24 grain pennyweight and pound of 5,760 grains which Pegolotti reported c. 1320 was also the bullion weight

71 Charles Johnson, The De Moneta of Nicholas Oresme and English Mint Documents (London: Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1956), 68. 72 Ibid., 133–5. 73 Mayhew, “From Regional to Central Minting, 1158–1464”, 133. 74 Simpson and Connor, “The Mass of the English Troy Pound in the Eighteenth Century”, 329. The English troy ounce, beside matching the Bruges silver ounce, had a ratio of 16:15 with the English tower ounce, which itself matched the Cologne ounce. 75 Johnson, The De Moneta of Nicholas Oresme and English Mint Documents, 86–7. 76 Ibid., 87.

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of the goldsmiths. He described it as di sterlini 20 per 1 oncia e d’once 8 per 1 marco.77 The Latin text relating to Rokesley’s speech therefore refers not to the actual weight of sterling pennies, which was 22½ gr., but to the troy pennyweight of 24 gr., which the documents record was the weight used by the mint both for assaying coin and for determining how much alloy should be added to silver to achieve the sterling standard of fineness.78 The careful definition of the weight of heavy and light pennies was added because the changer used both light and heavy coins in the trial of the pyx, and because the assayer, as Brand showed, needed to know any permitted variation of weight from the standard since it would have an immediate effect on the result of the combustion.79 These documents therefore indicate, as Charles Johnson, their editor, noted, that in 1280 two weight standards continued to be used in the mint for different purposes: tower to establish the weight of sterling pence, and troy to create and test its fineness, and also to establish the fineness of foreign bullion.80 Dr Lyon, though, argues that because the Latin text refers to light and heavy coins, it is not describing the pennyweight of 24 gr., but minted pence of that standard, and since the actual coins demonstrate that the standard was, in fact 22½ gr., he thinks this shows they were not troy grains, but grains of lighter weight. He therefore concludes that the tower pound, like the troy pound, had 5,760 grains, and that all the references in the mint documents which describe a 24-grain pennyweight are describing tower and not troy weight. As evidence he cites a document, published by Ruding, from a collection on mint affairs compiled by the antiquary Sir Robert Cotton about a hundred years after the abolition of tower weight. Ruding relies on this document as the only evidence for his assertion in his Annals of the Coinage that the tower pennyweight had 24 grains and the tower pound 5,760 grains.81 However, the Cottonian table as Ruding reproduced it contains mistakes in calculating the tower equivalent of troy weight for the pennyweight, ounce, and hundredweight. It appears from Dr Lyon’s researches that Ruding was responsible for these mistakes in transcribing the original document, which he obviously found confusing. Ruding’s errors, though, do not make the original Cottonian analysis of the grain division of the tower pound any more satisfactory as an historical source, and although Ruding’s Annals have long been a well-known source on mint affairs in general, his claim that the tower pound contained 5,760 grains has not been accepted by Grierson, Connor, Zupko, or any other modern authority on medieval weight standards.82 Ruding, though, rightly identified the tower grain

77 78 79 80 81 82

Evans, Francesco Balducci Pegolotti: La Pratica della Mercatura, 255. Ibid., 67, 92: Brand, The English Coinage, 1180–1247, 60–2. Johnson, The De Moneta of Nicholas Oresme and English Mint Documents, 92. Ibid., 70, n.1. Ruding, Annals of the Coinage, I, 7. Grierson, Numismatics, 178; Connor, The Weights and Measures of England, 110, 125; Simpson and Connor, “The Mass of the English Troy Pound in the Eighteenth Century”, 349; Ronald Edward Zupko, British Weights and Measures: A History from Antiquity to the Seventeenth Century (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978), 28.

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of the Cottonian manuscript as the wheat grain, citing as his authority one of the several thirteenth-century sources which say that the sterling ‘shall weigh thirtytwo grains of wheat dry in the midst of the ear’.83 These sources demonstrate that the pound was then still divided into the French wheat grains which, as I have previously argued, replaced the older English barley grain in 1158. They describe a thirteenth century pound which contained 240 × 32 = 7,680 wheat grains. All the authorities referred to above accept that these are the equivalent of 5,760 barley or troy grains.84 The royal proclamation of 1526 which abolished tower weight declared that the tower pound weighed ¾ of a troy ounce less than the troy pound.85 From this it can be seen that the tower pound must have contained either 7,200 wheat grains, or 5,400 barley or troy grains. The Cottonian manuscript, though, led Ruding to make the mistake, which he corrected in a later reference, of drawing up a table which made the 32 wheat grains of the pennyweight the equivalent of the 22½ troy grains of the sterling penny, and, as a result, he concluded, erroneously, that there were 5,760 grains in the tower pound.86 However, Ruding also printed in extenso in his Annals another Cottonian document, again signed by Sir Robert himself, which is closely related in subject matter to the first and uses the same technical term of a ‘journey’ of 30 troy lbs of bullion as equalling 32 tower lbs of sterling coin. Since it has particular relevance to this enquiry about whether and how troy weight was used in the medieval mints it is worth quoting: ‘There is a weight which hath been used in England from the beginning, in the king’s mints, till of late years, and derived from the Troy weights; for by the Troy weight of 12 ounces the merchant bought his gold and silver abroad, and by the same delivered it in to the king’s mint, receiving in counterpoise by Tower weight, which was the prince’s prerogative, who gained thereby ¾ of an ounce in the exchange of each pound weight converted into money, beside the gain of coining, which did rise to a great revenue, making for every 30 lb Troy, being a journey of coined money, 32 lb Tower’.87 This information, of course, agrees with the proclamation of 1526, which abolished tower weight on the difference between the tower and troy pounds.88 The phrase ‘beside the gain of the coining’ probably relates to the additional gain the crown could make from the profits of the shear and the foundry, since it obviously could not mean that the crown profited from minting charges paid by tale, as well

83 Ruding, Annals of the Coinage, I, 7; Connor, The Weights and Measures of England, Appendix A, 320. 84 Connor, The Weights and Measures of England, 124. 85 Paul L. Hughes and James Larkin, Tudor Royal Proclamations (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1964), 112, 160. 86 Ruding, Annals of the Coinage, I, 295, refers to the statute of 12 Henry VII which described the sterling as containing 32 wheat corns he wrote ‘it is evident that the sterlings in that statute are pennyweights, and not the coins of that name’. 87 Ruding, Annals of the Coinage, I, 92. 88 Hughes and Larkin, Tudor Royal Proclamations, n.112, 160.

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as from the difference in weight between the two pounds.89 Since this document has clear links with the first Cottonian manuscript which Dr Lyon relies on for his evidence, it should be accorded the same degree of authority. If the first manuscript can be used to justify an argument for a novel granular division of the tower pound, then the second strengthens my case that from the reign of Henry II up to 1279 the mint exchanged bullion delivered to it by troy weight for sterling coin of tower weight, with the difference covering the seigniorage and minting costs. This evidence for the continued use of troy weight in the mint finds support, also, in the proclamation of 1526, which referred to the Duke of Burgundy’s old coin lacking ‘in their fineness of the sterling 20d in a pound weight troy’ as a description of what was happening before 1526. It thereby indicates that the troy pound continued to be the weight used for the assay when coin was exchanged.90 Despite the traditional description of the pennyweight as 32 wheat grains continuing in some later official documents, including a statute of 12 Henry VII, c. 5, the pennyweight is described by 1280 as containing 24 grains.91 The Treatise on the New Money, of c. 1286–7, also records that the weight system then used for the assay and the composition of sterling alloy was the troy system of a 24 gr. pennyweight.92 Dr Challis has shown how the assayer’s pound, and the ready-reckoner, which are also recorded in these documents, enabled the mint to produce silver of sterling standard with a sliding scale of charges related to the quality of the bullion brought to it.93 The assayer’s pound weighed half a troy ounce and contained as many grains (10 dwt × 24 gr. = 240 gr.) as a full troy pound does pennyweights (12 oz × 20 dwt).94 This meant that for every grain of difference at the assay there was one pennyweight of difference in the full troy pound, and it thereby allowed the results of assaying a small amount of metal to be read off easily in terms of the latter.95 Although the use of an assay predated Domesday Book, the Dialogue of the Exchequer, written in the late 1170s, describes an Exchequer assay which used a full pound weight of coin, rather than half a troy ounce. This was also true of the Exchequer assay recorded in 1248.96 This may indicate that the assayer’s pound was not then in use, and it may not, therefore, much pre-date 1280. Its introduction certainly made an assay less wasteful of silver. One might, therefore, link its introduction with the mint reform of 1262 whose importance has been stressed by Nicholas Mayhew. By this reform the profits of the foundry, which had formerly

89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96

Ruding, Annals of the Coinage, I, 88, 91–2. Ibid. Johnson, The De Moneta of Nicholas Oresme and English Mint Documents, 67, 87. Ibid., 67. This is the date for the composition of The Treatise given by Mayhew, instead of its editor’s choice of c. 1280: Mayhew, “From Regional to Central Minting, 1158–1464”, 123. Challis, “Assays and Assaying in the Reigns of Henry III and Edward I”, 76–86. Ibid. Ibid.; Johnson, The De Moneta of Nicholas Oresme and English Mint Documents, 67. Johnson, The De Moneta of Nicholas Oresme and English Mint Documents, 54.

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accrued to the moneyers, were now paid to the Crown. Generally the profits from the assay amounted to about one-third of the profits of the exchange, and in normal times they were a significant sum.97 However the accounts for the foundry and Exchange were only merged by 1279.98 Again, this seems to emphasise Edward I’s keen interest in making all aspects of the mint’s work as profitable to him as possible, and indicates his readiness to make major changes in the system to achieve that end. What changes were made in the mint’s use of tower and troy weight standards after 1279 once all bullion and plate were weighed by tower weight? If one collates the information contained in the Treatise on the New Money, written c. 1286–7, with that in its revised version of 1290–1300, then it appears that the procedure when a merchant brought bullion to the exchange was as follows: firstly the exchanger weighed it by tower weight, and then valued it according to how much more or less alloy it contained than the sterling standard of 18½ troy pennyweights to the troy pound.99 If it equalled the sterling standard, then 14½ tower pennyweights were separated from it to pay the king’s seigniorage of 9d. and the minting costs of 5½d. This would normally be done from 1279 by tower weight, except on the rare occasion of that recoinage when payments were made by tale.100 For silver of a quality which was assessed as inferior to the sterling standard, the exchanger removed by weight the number of pennyweights per pound by which he estimated it fell short. But this time the weight used was that of the troy pennyweight.101 The amount deducted was called the tally. A bill was written and given to the merchant specifying the weight of what remained of the bullion, after the deductions, and giving the date when it was received. The separated silver of the tally was then taken to the Master of the Mint who added it to the rest of the molten bullion in the crucible to bring it up to the sterling standard. Repayment to the merchant was made after minting by the same tower weight of sterling as that specified in the bill, namely the weight of bullion he had brought, less the deductions for the tally and for the seigniorage and minting charges.102 In this way bullion was bought and exchanged by tower weight, but its fineness was determined by troy weight.103 Sterling pennies, of course, continued to be struck to tower weight. The system used in the mint to carry out these operations from 1279–80 therefore continued to use both troy and tower weight standards. It worked well because they were linked by their common grain of troy weight. However, by the time that Pegolotti was writing c. 1320, it appears from his evidence that the English troy grain had increased in weight to 0.0648 g. Professor

97 98 99 100 101 102 103

Mayhew, “From Regional to Central Minting, 1158–1464”, 118–20. Ibid., 119. Johnson, The De Moneta of Nicholas Oresme and English Mint Documents, 68. Ibid., 68. Ibid., 72–3. Ibid., 95. Ibid., 70, n.1.

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Miskimin has shown how such an increase would explain the ratio that Pegolotti reported between the gold and silver Flemish marks of 21:16, instead of the 20:15 to be expected from the number of ounces in each mark. He explained this unusual ratio by the grain of the Flemish silver mark changing to match a new, slightly heavier English grain, when the pound was redivided into 5,760 gr., while that of the Flemish gold mark remained that of the French system.104 If Miskimin is right, this would mean that before 1320 the English troy pound had assumed its modern weight of 373.48 g and its division into 5,760 gr. Why should this happen and when? The most likely reason would be to accommodate a slightly different weight for the sterling penny. The first recorded occasion when 243d. were struck from the tower pound was in 1279–80, and it is obvious that the intention was to make this arrangement permanent to accommodate higher charges.105 If, as seems likely, the mint up to 1279 was still using a tower pound of 7,200 wheat grains, then its re-division into 243 pence presented the moneyers with a penny which, from their point of view, had an impossible weight to manufacture with any consistency, namely one of 29.63 gr. instead of 30 gr. This is most likely the reason why the wheat grain was replaced by the barley, or troy, grain, the other generally accepted unit of weight in northern Europe. By this substitution each sterling penny struck at 243 to the tower pound would be allotted a more manageable 22¼ gr. A new technique which was introduced in 1279 also made it much easier to work with a weight that incorporated a quarter grain. It appears that instead of the coins being cut individually from square flans, droplets of silver were poured on to a plate, and then flattened. This process made it much easier to produce coins of a weight accurate to a quarter grain.106 The disadvantage was, though, that a tower pound composed in this way of 243 pence would have weighed 5406¾ troy grains. This was not only an awkward pound weight for bullion, but if these had been the old, lighter barley grains of 0.0637 g, then they would have produced a tower pound of only 344.4 g instead of 350 g. Rather than reduce the weight of the pound, it appears that the decision was taken to increase the weight of the troy grain from 0.0637 g to 0.0648 g, an increase that was sufficient to maintain the traditional weight of the tower pound at 350 g.107 Since it was important to maintain the link between the tower and troy weights, which was effected by the use of the same grain, they also increased the English troy pound to its modern weight of 373.48 g. The Flemish mints found it convenient for their silver mark to follow this change in the English weight standard, in the same way that they had followed it for two hundred years, because of the strong commercial links between the two countries created by the wool trade. They preserved, though, the French weight of

104 105 106 107

Miskimin, “Assays and Assaying in the Reigns of Henry III and Edward I”, 41–2. Mayhew, “From Regional to Central Minting, 1158–1464”, 134, Table 3. Ibid., 127. Simpson and Connor, “The Mass of the English Troy Pound in the Eighteenth Century”, 349.

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their gold grain, thereby creating the unusual ratio between their two marks. By contrast, when the English mint began striking a gold coinage in 1344 it made sure that the weight of its gold grain was related to that of the troy grain of the silver coinage, so that the value of the gold and silver coins could be linked by a uniform weight standard. Accordingly, the grain of gold was fixed at a weight which was the same as 60 silver grains of troy weight, or 2½ troy pennyweights.108 This consistent attachment to troy weight standards explains how sterling coins maintained a fixed exchange rate with several coinages in north-west Europe throughout most of the thirteenth century, and even beyond. For example 20 shillings sterling was worth 80 shillings in Tournois coins for most of this period.109 Other coinages show similarly by the round sums in which they valued the English pound (as 20s. in Cologne in 1208; as 70s. in Artois in 1265; as 65s. in Flanders, and 60s. in Brabant in 1270–5) that despite the debasement of many of them, there continued to be an easy and well-understood exchange rate with sterling, based on accepted standards of troy weight and fineness. This is confirmed by the finding of many French-made weights of about the year 1300 in the River Seine, near the Pont du Change in Paris, which weighed divisions of the English mark calculated at 24 pennyweights to the ounce, the troy weight. To emphasise this point, some were even labelled Apothecary’s.110 In summary, this paper has argued that troy weight, based on the French troy pound, was restored to the English monetary system by Henry II from 1158 after a period when the Danish and Norman conquerors had used weight systems related to the Roman or Byzantine pound. Henry II made the change as an essential part of his design to unify the weight standards of his territories and to relate their varied coinages one to another. It also seems likely that at the same time Henry introduced the French wheat grain in place of the old English barley grain. He thereby created an English troy pound containing 7,680 gr., which many English sources attest was the standard in the thirteenth-century. However, it seems from the evidence of French weight standards that the troy grain used by the English mints in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was lighter than it subsequently became. This meant that the English troy pound, which Henry had introduced as the bullion pound, weighed c. 366 g and its 7,680 wheat grains each weighed c. 0.0476 g. The difference in weight between this pound and the tower pound of 240 pence, which weighed 240 × 1.46 g = 350 g, allowed the king to levy 12d. in seigniorage and minting charges by means of which a fixed exchange rate could be maintained with the coinages of his other Angevin territories. This system survived the break-up of the Angevin empire until Edward I’s determination to profit more from his mints led to the replacement of the wheat

108 Johnson, The De Moneta of Nicholas Oresme and English Mint Documents, 83. 109 Peter Spufford, Handbook of Medieval Exchange, Royal Historical Society Guides and Handbooks, No. 13. (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 1986), 209–10. 110 Adolphe Dieudonne, Manuel des Poids Monetaires (Paris, 1925), 10–11.

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by the barley, or troy grain, in the re-coinage of 1279–80. At the same time the mint increased the weight of the troy grain slightly so that both the sterling penny, and the bullion weight, or troy pound, should be divisible into a relatively easy number of grains, or half grains, that the moneyers could cope with in their work, and which would allow the crown to increase and vary its charges. Despite these changes in the weight of the grain there can be no doubt that the English penny and its pennyweight remained throughout this period related to troy standards of weight. Because of this the sterling coinage maintained its connections with the other coinages of western Europe, and directly influenced the weight standards used for the silver coinages of Flanders and Cologne.

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5 FINANCE ON THE FRONTIER Money and credit in Northumberland, Westmorland and Cumberland, in the later middle ages

Nicholas Mayhew’s work has made a major contribution to the debates about the expansion and decline of the medieval English economy by claiming for money the significance which for too long was denied it. In doing this he has had to counter some of M.M. Postan’s arguments which his followers still repeat today.1 One of them is that if money was such an important influence on prices, wages and credit then ‘fluctuations in the money supply should have resulted in broad uniformity rather than diversity’; wages should have shown ‘broadly similar patterns of rise and decline’, and credit, too, ‘should have dried up everywhere in line with the decline in the money supply’.2 These arguments interpret the role of money in the economy in terms only of major changes in its volume and ignore where, and by what means, it was distributed. They assume that when imports of bullion increased significantly, coin must have flowed like a tidal wave from the mints to the provinces, uniformly affecting prices, wages and credit in every region and locality. If the evidence shows persistent regional and local diversity, this is seen as proof that the money supply cannot have been a major agent of economic change. This interpretation ignores the fact, acknowledged by Richard Britnell, that differences of geography and resources ensured that some regions had more opportunities than others to accumulate coin through trade or industry, and that these variations affected local prices and wages, as they still do today.3 Differing degrees of enterprise could also cause wide divergences in the local demand for credit, just as any local circumstances that made repayment more doubtful would

1 Nicholas J. Mayhew, “Prices in England, 1170–1790”, Past and Present, 199 (May 2013): 3–39, 6–20. 2 Hatcher and Bailey, Modelling the Middle Ages, 61; Jack R. Langdon, Survival and Discord in Medieval Society: Essays in Honour of Christopher Dyer (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010), 123; Jim Bolton, Money in the Medieval English Economy, 973–1489 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012), 307. 3 Richard Hugh Britnell, “Uses of Money in Medieval Britain”, in Diana Wood (ed.), Medieval Money Matters (Oxford: Oxbow, 2004), 20–1.

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persuade potential creditors not to risk their money.4 The crucial question remains whether changes in the money supply itself could independently affect local levels of credit and debt, and whether their impact could compare with that of repeated onslaughts of plague or warfare. The protracted experience that Northumberland, Westmorland and Cumberland had of Scottish raids in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries means that they present an apt subject for examining these issues. Their mountainous terrain and border with Scotland always distinguished these counties from the rest of England, while the Scottish raids, which were almost annual from 1296 to 1346, and then intermittent up to 1603, posed a constant threat to their economy. Historians differ about the effect. Whereas Jean Scammell described ‘the wholesale catastrophes’ which warfare brought to Northumberland, Richard Lomas concluded that ‘the border zone coped well with war; or perhaps it would be better to say that war was never on a scale to interrupt, other than temporarily and marginally, demographic and economic change’.5 Others have questioned Lomas’s interpretation and stressed the effect of warfare on rents and tithes, and on the commercial and urban economies of the border counties. McNamee judged that the devastation and ‘tremendous financial strain’ caused by the raids was a ‘real watershed in the history of the north’, while Tuck stressed the region’s resulting psychological insecurity.6 This divergence of views arises partly from the variable economic evidence that survives for the region in the Middle Ages. Much of it relates to Durham cathedral priory’s estates, but, as Lomas has argued, since the bishop of Durham was mostly able to buy off the Scots when they invaded, the palatinate suffered less physical damage than its neighbours did from Edward II’s failure to defend them. The Durham evidence may therefore not be typical of the region.7 The losses claimed by the three counties won them exemption from six lay subsidies between 1313 and 1327, and consequently there is no tax evidence from which to assess their impoverishment in these years. Even their earlier and later contributions to the subsidies give an incomplete, and probably misleading, picture of lay wealth in the region because after 1296 the local assessors unofficially excluded wool, coin and credit from the valuations and increasingly fixed them at artificially low figures. Briggs has shown

4 Nightingale, “Money and Credit in the Economy of Late Medieval England”, 57–66. 5 Jean Scammell, “Robert I and the North of England in the Middle Ages”, English Historical Review, 73 (1958): 390; Richard Arthur Lomas, North-East England in the Middle Ages (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1992), 63. 6 J. Anthony Tuck, “War and Society in the Medieval North”, Northern History, 21 (1985): 41–2; Colm McNamee, “Buying off Robert Bruce: An Account of Monies Paid to the Scots by Cumberland Communities in 1313–14”, Transactions of the Cumberland and Westmorland Antiquarian and Archaeological Society, 92 (1992): 77–8, 83; Ben Dodds, Peasants and Production in the Medieval Northeast: The Evidence from Tithes, 1270–1536 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2007), 56–61. 7 Lomas, North-East England in the Middle Ages, 56; Dodds, Peasants and Production in the Medieval Northeast, 31.

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how later subsidies have similar distortions.8 Evidence is particularly lacking for Newcastle-on-Tyne, because most of its medieval records have been lost.9 Although the customs accounts record Newcastle’s overseas trade, there is only patchy evidence of its commercial relations within its region and of the dynamics of its own economy. It is in this context that the records of credit created by the statutes of Acton Burnell and Merchants of 1283–5, and the statute of the staple of 1353, can add significant information, since they allowed anyone, and not just merchants, to record their transactions in official registries in leading towns. The exception was in the period 1311 to 1322 (in some cases to 1330), when only merchants could use them. Although the certificates record only those debts which were unpaid, analysis of the few surviving original rolls of varying dates shows that they represent consistently about one-fifth of the total recorded even though their economic circumstances differed greatly.10 This consistency appears to reflect the creditors’ decisions to refuse credit when they feared that their debtors might fail to repay it. The value of these certificates to historians is that they provide a sample of credit of higher value in every English county, which can throw a comparative light on their economic activity and finances, decade by decade.

The economies of the border counties before 1296 The remoteness of the border counties from London did not mean that money was less important to them. The Dialogue of the Exchequer asserts that although they had no mints under Henry I, they still paid taxes in coin.11 Subsequently, the silver mines near Carlisle produced enough bullion to allow a mint to open there in 1123/4, until the mines’ diminishing output led to the mint’s closure in 1207.12 By then, though, the region was contributing to imports of bullion through its exports of wool, hides and cloth. Merchants carried coin back to its inland towns and rural areas to make advance payments for more exports, and they also sold cloth, wine and other imports on credit. Until 1296 the lands on either side of the border formed a relatively prosperous economic and social unit in which their

8 Constance Mary Fraser, Ancient Petitions Relating to Northumberland (Durham: Surtees Society, 1966), 138–50; Pamela Nightingale, “The Lay Subsidies and the Distribution of Wealth in Medieval England”, Economic History Review, 57 (2004): 18–29, reprinted in Nightingale, Trade, Money, and Power in Medieval England, Variorum Collected Studies Series, 2007, & 2018; Chris Briggs, “Taxation, Warfare, and the Early Fourteenth Century ‘Crisis’ in the North: Cumberland Lay Subsidies, 1332–1348”, Economic History Review, 58 (2005): 647–68. 9 John Frank Wade, “The Overseas Trade of Newcastle upon Tyne in the Late Middle Ages”, Northern History, 30 (1994): 31–48. 10 Pamela Nightingale, ‘A Crisis of Credit in the Fifteenth Century, or of Historical Interpretation?”, British Numismatic Journal, 83 (2013): 154–9. 11 Johnson, Dialogus de Scaccario, by Richard, Son of Nigel, 9, 43. 12 Allen, Mints and Money in Medieval England, 239–41.

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inhabitants freely traded with each other.13 Scottish and Irish coins mixed with English ones in the thirteenth-century hoards of Cumberland and Westmorland.14 Carlisle, Penrith, Cockermouth, Egremont and Kendal had textile industries by the early fourteenth century. Carlisle, though, was important chiefly as a centre of royal and episcopal administration, and despite its position on the Roman road to Newcastle, its merchants did not dominate the export of Cumberland’s wool. Although Holm Cultram abbey sent its wool along this route in 1292, the abbey had a house at Boston, and it is likely that much of its wool went to Boston to be sold to Italians.15 The fact that Cumberland’s wool, which fetched up to £6 a sack in 1286, was of lesser value than Westmorland’s, which fetched up to £8, could explain why Appleby, and not Carlisle, was given a Statute Merchant registry in 1285.16 It is likely, though, that Appleby was the more important collecting centre for wool exports. Its position in the valley of the river Eden, which flows through Carlisle to the Cumberland coast, also gave it access by a road across Stainmore to Boroughbridge and York, and, by way of the Ouse, to Hull. Italians were responsible in 1275–6 for exporting over 52 per cent of Hull’s wool, and for 40 per cent still in 1291–2.17 Their readiness to give advance payments in cash explains why the route through York was able to attract much of the wool from the western march. Appleby’s merchants became a key link in the chain of suppliers. Their advances of cash to farmers and landowners for consignments of wool resulted in certificates of unpaid debts worth £384 in the ten years 1285–94. At least five members from two generations of the Goldington family of Appleby were creditors in 40 of these transactions, and it seems that their commercial dominance reduced the opportunities for Cumberland’s merchants to profit from this route to York. This could explain why, although Appleby’s certificates record 18 debtors from Cumberland, none exist for the county’s creditors in this period, even though, at twice the size of Westmorland, Cumberland had more wealth in sheep and cattle. Undoubtedly, many Cumberland wool producers preferred to accept a modest profit from William de Goldington, who could advance £70 for ten sacks in one transaction, rather than bear the risks and costs of further carriage to York or Hull.18 Some Cumberland wool merchants like Robert de Johnby and his brother, as well as Robert de Dereham, came to Appleby also to buy cloth from

13 Lomas, North-East England in the Middle Ages, 41–2: Henry Summerson, Medieval Carlisle: The City and the Borders from the Late Eleventh to the Mid-Sixteenth Century (Kendal: Cumberland and Westmorland Antiquarian and Archaeological Society, Extra Series, XX, 1993), 76–8, 113, 141. 14 Allen, Mints and Money in Medieval England, 470–85. 15 Lloyd, The English Wool Trade in the Middle Ages, 71–2; Summerson, Medieval Carlisle, 138–9. 16 C. 241/7/75; 9/191. 17 Lloyd, The English Wool Trade in the Middle Ages, 64–5. 18 C. 241/6/111.

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the Goldingtons on credit.19 The fact that the leading Newcastle merchant, Henry le Scott, went to Appleby in 1289, and again in 1290, to sell woad on credit to a local dyer and to Albert the Mercer shows that cloth was made and dyed there.20 In turn Appleby’s merchants relied on exporters to give them advance payments for wool. One certificate shows a man from Appleby at Boston fair in 1287, while another records William de Goldington registering credit in London in 1290 to a Yorkshire knight.21 Mostly, though, they relied on York’s merchants to supply them with cash in advance for their wool. Peter de Appleby was their habitual trading partner in York, and by 1284 he was the biggest creditor in York’s certificates.22 He acquired houses in Hull for his export business and between 1284 and 1292 issued 14 certificates against debtors from Westmorland, and 2 against debtors from Cumberland. Some knights and landowners transported their wool independently to York, where more competition promised a better price. Although most of Cumbria consisted of large baronial estates, the lowland areas were sub-infeudated to resident gentry. Wool was their cash crop, and, like gentry elsewhere, they sold that of neighbouring peasants as well as their own.23 When Sir William de Strickland recorded at Appleby the 33 marks he had received as an advance for 90 stones of wool, he did so in partnership with Robert, the son of Richard the Reeve, and three other villagers.24 In 1284 Sir William also received 60 marks in advance from Peter de Appleby in York for five sacks of wool, and £24 for three sacks in 1287.25 The prominent Cumberland knight John de Greystoke, whose estate was near Penrith, was similarly indebted to Peter de Appleby for £21 8s. 10d.26 Gentry also dealt directly with exporters in London. In 1289 John de Wigton, a knight of Carlisle, recorded a debt of £19 4s. 1d. in London to the Riccardi of Lucca. He and another knight, John Wake, lord of Liddel, obtained sums amounting to almost £590 in London in 1291–3 from the Riccardi and the Spini of Florence.27 Robert de Johnby also recorded a debt of eight marks in London in 1286 to a city merchant.28 Northumberland’s knights did likewise. Sir Walter

19 20 21 22

23

24 25 26 27 28

C. 241/7/74, 188, 248, 294; 8/151, 154; 9/285; 11/62, 13/155; 15/48. C. 241/22/63;64. C. 241/18/68; 18/139. Pamela Nightingale, “The Rise and Decline of Medieval York: A Re-Assessment”, Past and Present, 206 (2010): 3–42; Edward Miller, “Rulers of Thirteenth-Century Towns: The Cases of York and Newcastle upon Tyne”, in eds. P. Coss and S. Lloyd, Thirteenth-Century England, Vol, 1, 135. Miller, “Rulers of Thirteenth-Century Towns”, 133–5; Pamela Nightingale, “Knights and Merchants: Trade, Politics and the Gentry in Late Medieval England”, Past and Present, 169 (2000): 36–62, re-printed in Pamela Nightingale, Trade, Money and Power in Medieval England, XII, Variorum Collected Studies Series (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Ltd., 2007, & Routledge, 2018). C. 241/7/145. C. 241/6/111; 7/147. C. 241/40/55. C. 241/2/81, 82; 24/41, 82, 87. C. 241/7/247.

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de Huntercombe registered debts to Newcastle merchants in 1284–6, but he also recorded a debt of £86 13s. 4d to the Riccardi in London.29 Another knight, Ralph Fitz Roger, received four marks in London from a clerk in 1290, while a third, William Basset, was indebted there to Florentine merchants for £10.30 If most of these sums were advances for wool, they would explain how commercial leadership by local gentry helped to bring coin northwards from the London mint. The certificates indicate, though, that Cumberland’s and Westmorland’s commercial links with Northumberland were more limited. Neither county produced a creditor in the Newcastle certificates of the 1280s and 90s. The few issued for their debtors were principally for woad bought from the merchants of Amiens who were based in Newcastle, but since they were also its leading wool exporters in the 1280s and 90s, it is likely that some Cumberland merchants were selling them wool. Although a major Newcastle exporter, Hugh Gerardon, who married a local heiress, was from Lucca, Italian merchants generally preferred to export from Hull, and their exports from Newcastle were modest in size.31 The total value of the eight Italian certificates from Newcastle in 1285–94 was only £85.56, £35 of which was lent to their compatriots. While wool exports from Hull more than doubled between 1280 and 1289, those from Newcastle barely altered, and fell severely between 1290 and 1292 when friction between England and Flanders reduced demand.32 Newcastle was, though, the biggest exporter of hides. Northumberland raised 25 per cent more coin in taxes than Cumberland and Westmorland combined in 1290, and 172 sacks of wool for the prise of 1297, compared with Cumberland’s 81 sacks and Westmorland’s 34.33 Wool exporters came from a wide area, while small ports like Newbiggin, Blyth, Holy Island and Tynemouth, and rising towns such as Corbridge, Alnwick, Alnmouth, Bamburgh, Warkworth and Morpeth, helped commercial expansion.34 Imports of foreign silver coins contributed to the output of £20,948 that Newcastle’s mint struck in the recoinage of 1300–2.35 The hoard of c. 1305–10 found near the Cistercian abbey

29 C. 241/6/40, 41,132A; 9/10. 30 C. 241/7/247. 31 James Conway Davies, “The Wool Customs Accounts for Newcastle-upon-Tyne for the Reign of Edward I”, Archaeologia Aeliana, 32 (1954): 226–30, 243–8. 32 Eleanor Carus-Wilson and Olive Coleman (eds.), England’s Export Trade, 1275–1547 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), 36–9; Lloyd, The English Wool Trade in the Middle Ages, 68. 33 Lloyd, The English Wool Trade in the Middle Ages, 91, Table 11. Stuart Jenks, “The Lay Subsidies and the State of the English Economy, 1275–1334”, Vierteljahrschrift fur Sozial-und Wirtschaf sgeschichte, 85 (1998), Appendix II, 31. 34 Davies, “The Wool Customs Accounts for Newcastle-upon-Tyne for the Reign of Edward I”, 252–3; Jennifer Kermode, “Northern Towns”, in David Palliser (ed.), Cambridge Urban History of Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 671; Dodds, Peasants and Production in the Medieval Northeast, 46–54. 35 Allen, Mints and Money in the Medieval Economy, Table C. 2.

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of Newminster indicates how direct sales of wool by monasteries increased the supply of coin in the countryside.36 The mercantile oligarchy of Newcastle made their wealth chiefly from exporting wool and hides, and from dealing in cloth. Twenty-six exporting merchants dominated the taxpayers who were responsible for Newcastle’s high lay subsidy assessment of over £948 in 1296.37 However, in 1281 Newcastle’s citizens credited the town’s higher revenues to the tolls they received from its coal trade. Coal was mostly used to burn lime for building, and for smelting iron, and Newcastle merchants shipped it regularly to Europe, and to other English ports.38 Although mining increased local employment and helped Newcastle’s population to produce nearly 300 taxpayers in 1296, coal could not compare with wool in value and was often used as ballast. Like other cargoes carried in coastal trade, coal was not, therefore, likely to generate debts recorded under Statute Merchant, but it did give Newcastle vital trading links, particularly with London’s merchants. Similarly, Newcastle’s strategic importance as a base for supplying the king’s army in the wars against Scotland enriched some of its merchants. Supplies accumulated by them for the campaigns of 1296 probably contributed to their high subsidy assessment of that year.

The beginnings of border warfare, 1296–1305 Edward I’s intervention in the succession to the Scottish throne led dissident Scots to ally with France and attack Carlisle in March 1296. They were repulsed, but only after they had burnt much of the city.39 Edward’s victory in April provoked William Wallace to invade Northumberland, where he spent 30 days pillaging in the north Tyne valley and in settlements round Bamburgh and Holy Island before raiding Cumberland. Even Wallace’s defeat at Falkirk in 1298 did not stop further incursions into the border region, which involved burning, plundering, seizing cattle and robbing merchants. The combined certificates of the border counties show that the amounts advanced by creditors of Northumberland and Westmorland fell by nearly two-thirds, from £445.4 in 1290–4 to £138.66 in 1295–9. The certificates for Cumberland’s debtors fell in the same years from £480 to £80.26; Westmorland’s from £312 to £118; and Northumberland’s from £190 to £71.66. Even more significant is the fact that Appleby’s Statute Merchant registry ceased to function. Its last certificate had a date for repayment of April 1299.40

36 Ibid., 483, no. 293. 37 Davies, “The Wool Customs Accounts for Newcastle-upon-Tyne for the Reign of Edward I”, 250–64; Miller, “Rulers of Thirteenth-Century Towns”, 133–5; Constance Fraser (ed.), The Northumberland Lay Subsidy Roll of 1296 (Newcastle upon Tyne: Exchequer, 1968), xiv, 39–46. 38 John Blake, “The Medieval Coal-Trade of North-East England: Some Fourteenth-Century Evidence”, Northern History II (1967): 1–16. 39 Summerson, Medieval Carlisle, 191. 40 C. 241/35/55.

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The Scottish raids, though, were not the sole cause of the region’s plunging credit and debt, since the certificates record a similar fall nationally of just over 40 per cent in the years 1295–9. The maltolt, the higher tax imposed on wool exports in 1294, was mainly responsible for this. Merchants sought to recoup the cost by paying less to the growers, but the latter refused the lower prices, and wool remained unsold. This caused Carlisle’s revenues from tolls to slump from £32 5s. 11d. in 1294 to £23 in 1295.41 It also explains why the certificates for debtors in all three counties diminished strikingly in 1295–6. Newcastle issued none for 1295, and few ships paid customs on wool there from July 1294 until the tax was abolished in November 1297.42 Although this blow to their wool exports deprived Newcastle’s merchants of their normal profits, Scottish attacks magnified their difficulties. As well as paying higher taxes to finance the king’s armies, the region suffered at the hands of royal purveyors. Edward I’s war against France also took a heavy toll on Newcastle’s overseas trade as ships were attacked by freebooters. In 1297–1304 Newcastle accounted for only 1.9 per cent of England’s wool exports, whereas Hull had 15.5 per cent.43 Wallace invaded Cumberland again in 1303.44 Only one certificate relates to the county in the years 1300–4, and that was for a debt of £25 recorded at York by a Cumberland knight, William de Mulcaster, to a London wool exporter in June 1303.45 Three knights of Westmorland also recorded in York debts to local merchants totalling £52 6s. 8d., which most likely were advance payments for wool.46 Nonetheless, Westmorland’s debts in the certificates of 1300–4 dropped by a third from their existing low total for 1295–9. It seems likely, as the closure of Appleby’s registry indicates, that few, apart from knights with armed servants, felt confident enough to transport wool to York and to carry cash back in return. There are no certificates for either Cumberland or Westmorland creditors in those years. By contrast, the truce with France encouraged Newcastle’s wool exports to double in volume in 1303–4, and they increased by a further 40 per cent in 1304–5. Moreover, 80 per cent of the wool was now carried by English merchants. Consequently, both Northumberland’s credit and debts in the certificates rose higher by 63 per cent in 1300–4 than the totals of the previous five years.

Recovery, 1305–11 The capture and execution of Wallace in 1305 temporarily ended Scottish invasions. Peace brought some economic recovery to the border counties, helped by a flood of new silver from Kutna Hora in Bohemia. This was absorbed into

41 Ibid., 192. 42 Davies, “The Wool Customs Accounts for Newcastle-upon-Tyne for the Reign of Edward I”, 230–2. 43 Lloyd, The English Wool Trade in the Middle Ages, 123, Table 12. 44 Summerson, Medieval Carlisle, 195–6. 45 C. 241/45/8. 46 C. 241/35/138; 45/257; 104/133.

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European currencies and was carried to England to buy exports of wool. In the course of the decade the English currency expanded to between 1.5 and 1.9 million pounds, and prices rose accordingly. The certificates doubled in value nationally in 1305 and continued to increase every year to a peak in 1310 of over £24,000, as the increased money supply allowed credit to expand in 31 counties. Although Scottish raids from 1307 again threatened Cumberland’s links with the eastern ports, its certificates of debt increased from £25 in 1300–4 to £171 in 1305–9, and Carlisle’s tolls almost doubled between 1307 and 1308.47 The Cumberland knight William de Mulcaster ventured to London where he obtained credit of £25 from a wool exporter, while another Cumberland debtor raised £10 there.48 Westmorland produced one certificate for a loan, given by Andrew Harclay worth £200, and 14 for the county’s debtors. Five of them were knights, who all owed money or sacks of wool to York merchants. Westmorland’s debts in the certificates rose from £75 in 1300–4 to £271.33 in 1305–9. Eight of them were registered at York, but continuing uncertainties explain why three certificates were accompanied by penal bonds to encourage prompt repayment.49 Northumberland exhibited most growth in credit and debt in 1305–9, as the improved supply of bullion encouraged local merchants to increase their exports of wool, fells and hides. They now drew them from a wider area, which included Cumberland and Westmorland.50 One hundred and twenty-two merchants exported wool, fells and hides from Newcastle in 1308, three of whom exported more than 55 sacks; Richard Embleton alone exported 133 sacks.51 The value of the Northumberland creditors’ certificates rose from £187.16 in 1300–4 to £581 in 1305–9, while the certificates for the county’s debtors rose even more strikingly from £197 to £770.3. London creditors were responsible for only £45 of this total.52 York capital still featured in the loan made there in 1305 of £233 19s. 6d by its Dean, William de Hambleton, one of the biggest moneylenders in the kingdom, to the son of a Northumberland landowner. Two knights of the county also raised loans in York in these years amounting to £56.66.53 Newcastle’s merchants began exploiting reduced alien competition to buy their wool from local landowners on credit. Four of Newcastle’s merchants owed £168.66. One of these, Gilbert le Fleming, owed £100 to a landowner, probably for

47 Ibid., 21; Colm McNamee, The Wars of the Bruces, Scotland, England and Ireland, 1306–1328 (East Linton, East Lothian: Tuckwell Press, 1997), 46–7. 48 C. 241/45/8: 48/6. 49 C. 241/43/192; 49/22; 56/55. 50 Davies, “The Wool Customs Accounts for Newcastle-upon-Tyne for the Reign of Edward I”, 220– 308, 238–9. 51 Constance Fraser, “The Pattern of Internal Trade in the North-East of England, 1265–1350”, Northern History, 4 (1969): 56. 52 C. 241/55/184; 63/281; 80/32. 53 C. 241/46/67; 65/25; 67/49.

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wool, like the 35 marks owed to the lady of Willington in County Durham.54 With less need to make advance payments, only three Newcastle merchants, Richard de Embleton, Gilbert Hawkin and John le Scott, feature as creditors for modest sums in this decade’s certificates. By contrast, the increased circulation of coin explains how John Pudding of the small coal-port of Newbiggin could advance £100. Clerics also invested money, such as Hugh de Harle, who lent £200 in 1309.55 Certificates record a total of £290 owed by Northumberland debtors during the first seven months of 1311, before renewed Scottish invasions again shook the confidence of creditors.

Renewed warfare, famine and recession, 1311–27 Robert Bruce invaded with large armies, first Cumberland and then Northumberland in 1311, burning and destroying whatever lay in their path. The inhabitants’ only defence was to buy temporary truces which denuded their savings of coin. The western march alone paid £1,466 in 1313–14.56 Nonetheless, the raids continued. The army which Edward II raised to counter them met with disaster at Bannockburn in 1314. This victory enabled the Scots to plunder at will as far south as the Vale of York, wasting the countryside round about. Two separate forces invaded Cumberland in 1322, sacked the monastery of Holm Cultram and plundered as far south as Preston in Lancashire before pillaging up the Eden Valley on their return.57 In addition, torrential rainfall between 1315 and 1318 destroyed crops and brought famine to most parts of the kingdom.58 It was accompanied by an epidemic of disease among the sheep flocks between 1313–17, and by the murrain that killed large numbers of cattle and oxen. Tenants often had no alternative but to flee their lands, contributing through lost rents to the impoverishment of their landlords.59 The economy of the western march lapsed into one in which survival became the main aim.60 The effect of these combined disasters on Statute Merchant credit is masked between 1311 and c. 1330 by the Ordainers’ legislation which restricted the registries only to merchants. This restriction alone, though, cannot explain why there are no certificates for mercantile creditors or debtors of Cumberland and Westmorland between those dates, or why Newcastle’s merchants issued so few. Between 1311 and 1330 they issued only five certificates for credit totalling £69.61

54 C. 241/70/127, 82/135, 101/42C, 105/68, 118/264. 55 C. 241/70/135. 56 C. McNamee, Buying Off Robert Bruce: An Account of Monies Paid to the Scots by Cumberland Communities in 1313–14 (Carlisle, Cumbria: Transactions of the Cumberland and Westmorland Antiquarian and Archaeological Society, 1992), 92, 77–89. 57 Summerson, Medieval Carlisle, 229–30. 58 Ben Dodds, Peasants, Landlords and Production between the Tyne and the Tees, 1349–1450, 62–3. 59 Colm McNamee, “Buying off Robert Bruce”, 72–122. 60 Summerson, Medieval Carlisle, 256–9. 61 Dodds, Peasants and Production in the Medieval North-East, 62–3; C. 241/77/1; 93/34; 97/121; 106/94,221.

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A Newcastle petition of 1317 explained how the Scottish campaigns had impoverished the town by the destruction of its hinterland, and by the diversion of the citizens’ energies and money to its defence.62 However, another cause was that whereas Newcastle’s wool exports had soared in 1311–13, they subsequently dropped abruptly because renewed conflict with Flanders led the government to set up a wool staple at St Omer in 1313 where all exported English wool had to be taken. This benefited London because of its proximity to St Omer, but handicapped Newcastle’s poorer wool which needed cheaper markets elsewhere. At the same time, less bullion came to England because French and Flemish mints set out to attract it by offering more favourable exchange rates. The output of the English mints fell by about two-thirds in the 1320s, and wool exports with it, contributing to a commercial depression which spread from London into all parts of the kingdom.63 In 1322 the sheriff stated there were no wool merchants in Northumberland outside the liberty of Newcastle, and by 1325–6 only 56 denizens were exporting wool from the port, compared with 122 in 1308. Not until the temporary abolition of all staples in 1328 did Newcastle’s wool exports recover.64

Partial recovery, 1330–48 Although the mints were still producing only limited amounts of silver coin in the 1330s, credit in the certificates recovered to within 17 per cent of its total in 1300–9.65 It seems it was financed by merchants bringing foreign gold coins into the kingdom to buy wool. Florins had circulated unofficially in the 1320s among wool merchants, and appear in the Newcastle customs accounts in 1326–7.66 The four London merchants who made advance payments of nearly £150 to Northumberland men in London in the 1330s would have found it far easier to pay them in 900 florins than in 36,000 silver pence.67 Although gold coins were too valuable to use in the retail trade, they did serve to release silver from savings, and thus helped to improve the total circulation of coin. Reviving wool exports from 1328–9 also earned coin which assisted a partial recovery in Northumberland’s economy in the 1330s, despite renewed Scottish

62 McNamee, The Wars of the Bruces: Scotland, England and Ireland, 1306–1328 (East Linton, East Lothian: Tuckwell Press, 1997), 225–7. 63 Pamela Nightingale, A Medieval Mercantile Community: The Grocers’ Company and the Politics and Trade of London, 1000–1485 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995), 138–40; Allen, Mints and Money in the Medieval Economy, 311, Table 9.11. 64 Carus-Wilson and Coleman (eds.), England’s Export Trade, 1275–1547, 41–6; Lloyd, The English Wool Trade in the Middle Ages, 123, Table 12, 120, 136, C. McNamee, The Wars of the Bruces, 225–7. 65 Pamela Nightingale, “Gold, Credit and Mortality: Distinguishing Deflationary Pressures on the Late Medieval English Economy”, Economic History Review, (2010): 1–24. 66 Ibid., 5–7. 67 C. 241/101/88; 103/2; 104/200.

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raids. Corn and wool tithes increased in the parishes of Norham, Holy Island and Ellingham, and rents were normally fully paid.68 Even Carlisle saw a tentative recovery of its industry and trade, and paid its full fee farm in 1330.69 Since nonmercantile creditors were again allowed to use the registries in the 1330s, one can only judge the real extent of the recovery by comparing the certificates for Newcastle merchants in that decade with their earlier ones. In 1300–9 they recorded credit worth £93.4; in 1320–9 the total fell to £55.66, but in 1330–9 it rose to £282. Similarly, their debts in the certificates, which had amounted in 1300–9 to £162, slumped in 1320–9 to £21.6, but recovered in 1330–9 to £250. The number of wool exporters from Newcastle also rose from 44 in 1326 to 83 in 1334, and the amount of wool they exported rose accordingly.70 Additionally, Richard de Embleton, Gilbert Hawkin and John de Denton led the city’s merchants in supplying the royal armies in Scotland.71 The supplies they assembled for the Scottish campaigns of 1335–6 no doubt contributed to the city’s acquiring the fourth highest urban tax assessment in 1336 even though it had only 3 to 5 per cent of England’s overseas trade.72 There is no evidence that gold coins found their way into Westmorland or Cumberland at this time, although both counties contributed to six lay subsidies in the 1330s. Whereas Briggs has shown how evasion and under-assessment means that these subsidies do not necessarily illustrate the extent of the losses the counties suffered from further Scottish raids in the 1330s and 1340s, they cannot have escaped damage, while murrains killed cattle and sheep. Carlisle could not pay its fee-farm in 1343 for lack of coin, and the garrison was often unpaid.73 Nonetheless, the 1340s saw men from Cumberland and Westmorland again register debts to merchants in York. In 1342 one from Keswick recorded a debt there of ten marks, and another of £4. Despite the destructiveness of the Scottish campaign in 1345, which included pillaging down the Eden Valley, Thomas del Spicere of Penrith recorded a debt in York of £20 in 1348, and John Burgh of Penrith, in partnership with three local merchants, owed £30 in 1349 to York merchants.74 Even though the Scots used Northumberland as their invasion route in the 1330s Newcastle’s denizen wool exports were high throughout most of that decade.

68 69 70 71 72

Lomas, North-East England in the Middle Ages, 59–61. Summerson, Medieval Carlisle, 260–1. Fraser, “The Pattern of Internal Trade in the North-East of England, 1265–1350”, 56. Ibid., 62. Edward Miller and John Hatcher, Medieval England: Towns, Commerce and Crafts (London, Routledge, 1995), 214, 250–1. 73 Constance Fraser (ed.), Northern Petitions, Illustrative of Life in Berwick, Cumbria and Durham in the fourteenth century (Durham: Surtees Society, 1981), 106, 109, 145–6; Summerson, Medieval Carlisle, 265–75; Briggs, “Taxation, Warfare, and the Early Fourteenth-Century ‘Crisis’ in the North: Cumberland Lay Subsidies, 1332–48”, Economic History Review, 58 (2005): 647–68. 74 C. 241/115/208:118/259:128/85:160/62.

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However, its exports slumped when Scottish raids down the north-east coast culminated in David Bruce’s failed attack on Newcastle in 1342.75 The customs were farmed from 1343 to 1350, and so left no official record of exports. When the figures re-appear in 1351, Northumberland’s wool exports had recovered to their level of 1339–40. The introduction of the first English gold coinage in 1344, and its use for wool purchases, helped credit to expand generally in the 1340s. That recorded for Northumberland in the certificates rose by over a fifth to a total of £932.25, and the county’s debts rose by 65 per cent to £1,184. The growth was led by Newcastle’s merchants, who contributed 28 per cent of the county’s credit. William de Acton alone registered five transactions with a merchant of Newbiggin in which he gave credit for sales of wine, cloth, wool and corn totalling £137.76 They also contributed 45 per cent of Northumberland’s debts in the 1340s, mainly by using their commercial strength to oblige landowners like Henry de Percy, lord of Alnwick, various other knights, and the Prior of Tynemouth, to sell them wool and hides on credit.77

Plague and prosperity, 1349–60 Northumberland, like the rest of England, experienced a fall of nearly one-half in the number of its certificates in the decade after the Black Death struck in 1349, reflecting the likely halving of the population. However, as the total value of the currency remained at about £1 million, survivors gained a proportionate rise in wealth per head.78 At the same time the output of the mints soared as wool exports boomed. This combination of events caused the totals of credit and debt in Northumberland’s certificates to rise to a peak respectively of £1,653 and £1,434 in the 1350s, matching a proportionate rise in the average value of the certificates nationally.79 Wages also rose, while peasants benefited from surplus land and rising prices to maintain their arable output almost at its level before the plague, and wool exports added to their prosperity, and that of the landowners.80 Between 1352 and 1357 denizen merchants were forbidden to export wool, but Newcastle benefited from its appointment as one of the staples in which all wool destined for export had to be sold to aliens.81 Newcastle’s merchants profited from acting as middlemen between the alien exporters and the wool growers. They were helped by their continued ability to buy large amounts of wool from landowners

75 76 77 78 79 80

Carus-Wilson and Coleman, England’s Export Trade, 1275–1547, 44–6. C. 241/121/184, 185, 186, 187, 188. C. 241/122/11: 123/155, 178, 180. Allen, “The Volume of the English Currency, 1158–1470”, 606. Nightingale, “The Rise and Decline of Medieval York’”, Figure 4, 10. Lloyd, The English Wool Trade, 215; Dodds, “Managing Tithes in the Late Middle Ages”, 175; Peasants and Production in the Medieval Northeast, 73–81. 81 Lloyd, The English Wool Trade, 208.

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on credit.82 Newcastle’s strengthened defences also attracted refugees when the Scots again invaded Northumberland in 1355, until the Treaty of Berwick in 1357 gave 20 years of relative peace on the border. Although Cumberland and Westmorland produced little evidence of growth in this period, they both renewed tenuous links with York in the 1350s. The Bishop of Carlisle, who was a considerable wool producer, gave credit of over £60 to a York wool merchant, Thomas Gra, in 1351.83 The Rickerby and Beaumont hoards of silver coins of the 1350s and 60s, and the six gold coins found at Calder Abbey, hint that more coin was available in Cumberland in this period.84 Westmorland, though, produced no certificates for creditors in the 1350s, and only two for debtors. One recorded a debt of £20 registered at York in 1356 by four men of Great Ormside in the Eden Valley, to the parson of Escrick, south of York85 If this hints at a possible revival in Westmorland’s wool trade, it was one which did not continue.

Declining wool exports and credit, 1360–9 The 1360s saw Northumberland’s certificates fall abruptly in value, with those for debts falling by nearly 60 per cent to £593, and those for credit falling by 40 per cent in value to £978.33. This was a much greater reduction of credit than the national average of 10 per cent. Although plague both in 1362–3 and in 1369 could explain the absence of any certificates for Newcastle in 1363, and in 1369–70, the creation of a compulsory overseas wool staple at Calais in 1363 contributed most to Northumberland’s falling credit. Like its predecessors, the Calais staple was detrimental to the interests of northern merchants who could no longer carry their poorer wool directly to markets in Brabant. Newcastle’s wool exports dropped by 55 per cent between 1362–3 and 1364–5, while London’s rose.86 Another longterm factor was falling supplies of silver bullion from the 1360s, which caused the debasement of the Scottish currency in 1367. Northumberland creditors were soon specifying repayment in English coin.87

Wool exports from Berwick Why, despite these adverse events, should the 1370s see certificates for Northumberland’s debtors almost treble in value to a total of £1,526, and Cumberland’s debts grow from nothing to £382? Leading Newcastle merchants were still prominent as creditors for large sums, and Newcastle’s own share of the county’s credit

82 83 84 85 86 87

C. 241/136/168:140/79,83. C. 241/135/64. Allen, Mints and Money in the Medieval Economy, 492–4. C. 241/136/84. Carus-Wilson and Coleman, England’s Export Trade, 1275–1547, 48–50. C. 241/157/88,100; 158/9/18; 159/61.

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in the certificates continued to rise in the 1370s, when, at £876.4, it accounted for 60 per cent of the total for Northumberland as a whole. The Fenwick hoard of 224 gold coins of c. 1380, and that of Brinkburn Priory, suggest the county’s considerable wealth in coin.88 Unpaid rents also diminished in the 1370s.89 Although Newcastle petitioned parliament in 1379, complaining that northern merchants were taking their wool to Berwick to benefit from its lower export duties, it seems likely that many Newcastle merchants were themselves taking advantage of a lull in Scottish attacks before 1378 to export through Berwick for that very reason, in the same way that Cumberland men had been doing from the late 1340s. The fact that in 1362 Richard de Stanhope had advanced payments of £120 to a merchant of the small town of Detchant on the road to Berwick shows that Newcastle merchants had well-established connections with the area.90 Northumberland’s merchants were also, no doubt, using royal licenses which since 1371 had allowed them to avoid the overseas staple.91 It is also likely that they were investing more in cloth. John de Shaldeforth, a Newcastle draper, owed two York citizens £116 in 1375, and a chapman of Newcastle owed John More, a prominent London mercer, £60 in London in 1376.92 Another Northumberland man owed a London draper £24.93 These connections help to explain why Londoners supplied almost 30 per cent of Newcastle’s credit in the 1370s. In the same years Cumberland men recorded two debts totalling £34 at the Westminster staple; another registered a debt of £47.7 at Newcastle, and another a debt of £300 at York. These transactions indicate that the reduction of the Scottish threat had allowed some recovery in trade.94 The lull in the 1370s had even encouraged two creditors in Cumberland to lend £150 to debtors respectively in Lancashire and Wiltshire.95

Commercial slump, 1380–99 The Scots renewed their assaults on Cumberland in 1380 and 1383 when they sacked Penrith, attacked Carlisle, and caused great destruction again in 1388.96 These attacks help to explain the absence of recorded credit or debts in the western march in the 1380s, as well as the precautionary burying of the Fenwick and Brinkburn Priory hoards in Northumberland. Civil war in Flanders, though, contributed most to the slump in Northumberland’s credit to £416 in the certificates of

88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96

Allen, Mints and Money in the Medieval Economy, 496–7, 402, 406. Dodds, “Managing Tithes in the Late Middle Ages”, 187. C. 241/155/63. Lloyd, The English Wool Trade, 227–8; Summerson, Medieval Carlisle, 279. C. 241/158/86,111. C. 241/164/22. C. 241/153/8:157/102:162/31; 170/115. C. 241/157/86; 162/19. Summerson, Medieval Carlisle, 310–25.

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the 1380s, and to the drop of 52 per cent in its debts to £729, as wool exports fell because of reduced demand. It proved to be the last decade in which the county’s recorded credit outweighed its debts. Less bullion came to the mints, and more of it was gold, as silver became scarce throughout Europe. Parliament legislated in 1379 to force merchants to import silver, but the output of the Durham mint was declining from the 1380s and closed for lack of bullion between 1394 and 1412. The supply of silver diminished further in the 1390s with recessionary effects on the retail trade, and on mercantile credit. Prices for Newcastle’s coal were falling rapidly in London by 1394.97 These general economic trends explain why, despite eight years of peace after the truce with the Scots in 1390, Cumberland and Westmorland produced no certificates of either credit or debt in that decade. By 1393 Scottish coins were so debased that they were no longer current in England, and thereby deprived the border counties of a supply of coin which had previously circulated at parity with sterling.98 Cash was in short supply in Carlisle, and false money circulated.99 Rents in Northumberland became exceptionally difficult to collect in the 1390s and profits plunged.100 However, the reduction of customs on northern wool, and its new statutory freedom to avoid the staple, increased the volume of Newcastle’s wool exports in the 1390s.101 Nonetheless, the rise in Northumberland’s credit in the decade’s certificates to £681.33 did not match that of its debts, which rose by 25 per cent to £975. London merchants filled the gap by contributing credit of £154 to this total.

The fifteenth century Henry IV’s campaign in Scotland in 1400 provoked new Scottish raids which culminated in a major attack on the north-east. Although it was defeated in 1402, the raids did not end. They contributed to the dramatic fall in Northumberland’s credit in the certificates in 1400–9 from £681 in the previous decade to only £14.66, and in its debts from £975.33 to £167.73. However, they were not the only reason for this fall. In response to Carlisle’s petition for help, Henry IV granted the town a Statute Merchant registry in 1401.102 The fact that it recorded credit of 100 marks in 1406, and a Westmorland debtor was able to borrow £30, suggests

97 Nightingale, “The Rise and Decline of Medieval York”, 11–13; Allen, Mints and Money in the Medieval Economy, 267–71. 98 Elizabeth Gemmill and Nicholas Mayhew, Changing Values in Medieval Scotland: A Study of Prices, Money and Weights and Measures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 112–17. 99 Summerson, Medieval Carlisle, 337. 100 Lomas, North-East England in the Middle Ages, 62; Dodds, “Managing Tithes in the Late Middle Ages”, 187. 101 Summerson, Medieval Carlisle, 341. 102 Ibid., 402.

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that after 1402 the border counties considered that the Scottish threat had diminished.103 Newcastle’s merchants, though, must have known from their contacts with London that the mint’s output of gold and silver coin was falling in value by 70 per cent in this decade as Europe’s supplies of bullion, especially of silver, proved inadequate to finance trade and credit.104 Only one Newcastle merchant and two knights of Northumberland appear as debtors in the certificates for a total of £167.7. To expand the currency the government ordered a recoinage in 1411 with a reduced weight standard, but apart from what look like six penal bonds for sums totalling £2,215, all recorded between 6 and 11 April 1412, between Thomas Gray, keeper of the castle of Wark, and his associates, the only debt recorded this decade was for £50 owed by a knight to two Londoners.105 Some relief came in the 1420s when the revived Calais mint provided wool merchants with new supplies of silver and gold English coin.106 Even Carlisle, which had so far issued only one certificate, produced another for a debt of £100 owed in 1422 by two Cumberland men to a Lancashire creditor. This, though, proved to be Carlisle’s last.107 At least twelve Carlisle citizens joined Coventry’s Trinity Guild in the first half of the fifteenth century, which implies some expansion of their cloth trade.108 Northumberland debtors were responsible for seven certificates in the 1420s, totalling £170.28. Five of these were registered at Westminster, and two of the debts, totalling £64, were due to a London draper, shearman and haberdasher.109 These also suggest links with London’s cloth exporters. However, the legislation initiated by the Calais staplers in 1429 to restrict credit led to a general fall in wool exports and contributed to the mid-century bullion famine. From 1430 until the end of the century Newcastle issued no more certificates, but the Westminster staple issued eight for Northumberland debtors, and York issued another. Newcastle’s rich elite of merchants disappeared, leaving their diminished trade to be spread among a greater number of men of modest means.110 The county gentry could only obtain loans of any size from London ironmongers, skinners and drapers. None refer to sales of wool. These commercial trends, and the greater concentration of trade and credit in London, rather than Scottish attacks, determined the infrequent use of enrolled credit for the border region in the second half of the fifteenth century. Rather than

103 C. 241/158/86, 111. 104 Peter Spufford, How Rarely Did Medieval Merchants Use Coin? (Utrecht: Geldmuseum, 1998), 343–62. 105 C. 241/206/31. 106 Allen, Mints and Money in the Medieval Economy, 272; Anthony James Pollard, North-Eastern England during the Wars of the Roses (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 49. 107 C. 241/217/45. 108 Summerson, Medieval Carlisle, 342. 109 C. 241/220/14; 219/73. 110 Wade, “The Overseas Trade of Newcastle upon Tyne in the Late Middle Ages”, 31–48.

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earning bullion, Newcastle’s limited exports of wool and hides paid for imports of wine and other consumables. Its cloth exports were few, while its coal exports failed to match those of the previous century.111 Landed revenues fell, and shortage of coin meant that rents were frequently paid in kind.112 Although small suppliers distributed imports inland, it appears that the credit they gave was too modest to be worth recording in the Newcastle registry.113 It is a picture which fits in with that of decades of falling or uncollected rents in the second half of the fifteenth century in the Newcastle properties bequeathed to University College, Oxford.114 Nonetheless, the total of £119.66 for Northumberland’s debts in the certificates of the second half of the fifteenth-century outnumbered Cumberland’s total of £37.66, while Westmorland recorded none. This difference may partially be explained by renewed Scottish invasions of Cumberland in 1448–9, when much of the county was laid waste. They were repeated in 1461, and in 1481, with numerous raids in between.115

1500–30 Credit began to revive nationally from the 1480s, helped by reduced mint charges which attracted new supplies of silver from Europe into England. Newcastle’s exports of low-quality wool, coal, lead and iron notably increased by 1500 and financed a growing import and distributive trade.116 Although local creditors were few, gentry from the three border counties appear from 1500 as debtors for substantial sums owed to Londoners.117 In the first decade they totalled £567.82, in the second, £496.66, and in the third, £807.85. Cumberland and Westmorland issued no certificates for creditors in these decades, and after a long interval from 1429, Northumberland creditors only produced two certificates in the 1520s, one of which was recorded in Westminster.118 Agrarian revenues in the north-east had to wait until the 1530s at the earliest to revive. Whereas the pattern shows no clear link with mortality, it does indicate one in which a slowly improving money supply aided the recovery of credit and the market economy, at least in Northumberland.119

111 Ibid., 3–9. 112 Tuck, “War and Society in the Medieval North”, 42–4; Pollard, North-Eastern England during the Wars of the Roses, 51–2, 77–9. 113 Threlfall-Holmes, “Newcastle Trade and Durham Priory, 1460–1520”, 142–52. 114 Andrew F. Butcher, “Rent, Population and Economic Change in Late-Medieval Newcastle”, Northern History, 14 (1978): 67–77. 115 Summerson, Medieval Carlisle, 435–63. 116 Ian Blanchard, “Commercial Crisis and Economic Change: Trade and the Industrial Economy of the North-East, 1509–1532”, Northern History, 8 (1973): 64–85; Wade, “The Overseas Trade of Newcastle upon Tyne”, 33, 39–48. 117 C. 241/254/4; 275/53, 80, 75 197: C. 131/112/4. 118 C. 241/281/94; 283/69. 119 Ben Dodds, Peasants and Production in the Medieval Northeast, 101–2.

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Conclusions This study of finance and trade in the three border counties shows that differences of geography and exposure to Scottish raids meant that they combined strong elements of diversity in their economies with monetary trends which they shared with the rest of the kingdom. Even before the Scottish raids began in 1296 their Statute Merchant certificates reflect the superior advantage that Northumberland’s ports and overseas trade gave its inhabitants in accumulating mercantile capital. This encouraged greater enterprise in the county and increased their demand for credit, as well as providing the resources to supply it. The same advantages enabled them to mount a superior defence against the Scottish raids and gave them the means to repair the losses they had suffered. Cumberland’s merchants, by contrast, found themselves excluded by distance, poor communications and their competitors in Westmorland from most of the Italian credit which could have allowed them to increase their own enterprise. The economies of both western counties were also much more vulnerable to Scottish raids because these threatened, and at times severed, their commercial links with York, Hull and London, thereby reducing their access to coin and credit. The disruption of these links meant that they were less able to repair their losses. Overlying these structural differences was the pattern created by changes in the national money supply. Although the wool trade was the chief engine of English monetary growth, exports depended on continental customers having adequate supplies of bullion to pay for them, and these relied on the output of foreign silver and gold mines. When they were exhausted, falling production heightened competition between English and European mints for bullion, which exacerbated the shortages of silver coin. The introduction of gold could not provide the liquidity necessary for the retail trade. Consequently, sales fell, and credit likewise, until new supplies of silver allowed trade to revive at the end of the fifteenth century. Even though Northumberland’s credit in the certificates dominated that of its neighbours it still reflected these monetary changes. Westmorland and Cumberland were also subject to them, although their poorer communications made it even more difficult for their trade and credit to recover from the repeated Scottish attacks. Similarly, although the volumes of debt in the three counties differed greatly, they reveal a pattern of contraction and expansion which is close to the national one. Edward I’s war against France, and his consequent taxation of the wool trade, led to the conspicuous fall of credit in the 1290s, but it rose again in 1305–9 as new supplies of silver caused the output of the mints to soar. Despite further Scottish attacks, the 1330s was another period of recovery, most likely because of imports of foreign gold coin which allowed merchants to economise in their use of silver. Even more notable was the expansion of debt in the 1340s and 1350s, after the introduction of the English gold coinage, despite the loss of possibly half the population to plague. The subsequent minor peaks, but mainly deeper troughs, in the pattern of debt were common also to all three. They reflected the slumps in

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the output of silver coin from the 1390s to c. 1420, and again in the mid-fifteenth century. In these ways the effect of a changing money supply proved a more consistent influence on credit and debt in this region than plague, or even fear of the Scots. Finance on the frontier was therefore influenced by much the same forces that affected finance elsewhere in England, and its pattern shows how diversity of geography, resources and political conditions could modify, but not fundamentally change the effects of broad monetary trends on credit.

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6 THE INTERVENTION OF THE CROWN AND THE EFFECTIVENESS OF THE SHERIFF IN THE EXECUTION OF JUDICIAL WRITS, C. 1355–1530

This article uses statistics compiled from returns to Chancery writs to examine the effectiveness of the sheriffs in enforcing the re-payment of debts recorded under Statute Staple procedures between 1355 and 1530. It concludes that sheriffs improved on their performance under Edward III, despite the subsequent delegation of judicial authority to the landed classes, in periods when the crown was strong, such as the reign of Henry V. This was possible because of the supervisory powers the Chancellor acquired over the sheriffs from 1346, and through Chancery’s use of the sub-pena writ. By contrast, the appointment of sheriffs from the royal household, and from the royal affinity, under Richard II and Henry VI, made little difference to the standards achieved in executing writs since royal nominees were just as likely as county gentry to become embroiled in local power struggles. The statistics show that Edward IV began a sustained recovery of royal authority, while earlier additions to the Chancellor’s powers, and the development of higher professional standards in Chancery allowed Henry VII, aided by his ruthless use of financial penalties, to achieve a highly effective degree of control over the sheriffs. Henry’s harsh and grasping rule was tolerated by his subjects because social and economic changes meant that more people, particularly the powerful mercantile class of London, needed the more effective judicial system that Henry gave them.

I In the eyes of medieval Englishmen, the first duty of their king was to dispense justice to his people, and throughout the middle ages, the responsibility for administering and executing it locally lay with the crown’s agent, the sheriff, even though, from the middle of the fourteenth century, his powers were eroded by those of the justices of the peace.1 In his judicial, as in his wider administrative

1 Robert C. Palmer, The County Courts of Medieval England, 1150–1350 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), 28.

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duties, the sheriff appears as the villain in the popular literature of the time, and he was also the object of repeated complaints in parliament and before commissions of enquiry for his corruption and rapacity. It is therefore not surprising that historians traditionally saw the sheriff’s office as ‘probably the most critical weakness in the administration of justice’,2 and the failings of sheriffs as examples of a judicial system that became more corrupt and socially divisive in the last two centuries of the middle ages when the crown delegated judicial authority in the localities to the nobility and landed gentry through the commissions of the peace and through the creation of special commissions of oyer and terminer.3 W.M. Ormrod described this delegation of judicial authority as an ‘abnegation’ of royal responsibility and cited it as the chief grievance of the rebels in 1381 because it restricted ‘the rights of ordinary people to deal directly with the crown and its professional agents over matters of local administration and justice’. He placed the crucial period for the weakening of royal authority in this sphere as beginning after the death of Edward III, because while he was alive the crown continued to assert its right to assume superior jurisdiction over areas which normally claimed immunity from royal justice, and townsmen, in particular, ‘naturally looked to the crown, its courts, and its professional agents for protection and advancement. Their later reliance on the magnates was merely a reflection of the decline of royal authority that set in after Edward’s demise’.4 J.R. Lander concluded that in the fifteenth century the crown lost the battle for the local control of justice.5 Inspired by the late K.B. McFarlane’s studies of the role of the nobility, several historians have offered analyses of how county society and the local administration of justice worked in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. They have interpreted afresh what was perceived as the ‘corrupt’ conduct of sheriffs and other local officials as merely a reflection of political realities in late medieval England in which power and patronage were based on the ownership of land, and conflicts involving the political class essentially reflected territorial disputes.6 Since the crown lacked its own standing army, police force or extensive administration, it could maintain peace and order in the localities only by delegating the administration of justice to the local nobility and gentry who alone had the power to enforce it.7 These studies echoed Michael Clanchy’s earlier judgement that good order stemmed not from the

2 Margaret Hastings, The Court of Common Pleas in Fifteenth Century England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1947), 226. 3 Richard W. Kaeuper, “Law and Order in Fourteenth-Century England: The Evidence of Special Commissions of Oyer and Terminer”, Speculum, 54 (1979): 782–4. 4 W. Mark Ormrod, “The Peasants’ Revolt and the Government of England”, Journal of British Studies, 29 (1990): 17. 5 Jack R. Lander, Limitations of English Monarchy in the Later Middle Ages (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989), 28–9. 6 Edward Powell, Kingship, Law and Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 90. 7 Gerald L. Harriss, “Political Society and the Growth of Government in Late Medieval England”, Past and Present, 138 (1993): 32–3.

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conduct or character of individual kings, but from the attitudes of local communities. Attempts by kings to interfere in local government and the administration of justice were more likely to be arbitrary and oppressive, and to contribute to disorder and increased litigiousness rather than to peace and justice.8 Once sheriffs were appointed exclusively from the local county landowners, and the same class gained additional powers in the peace commissions after 1349, dominant power groups, as Edward Powell has argued, controlled the local judicial machinery for their own ‘territorial and economic security and to promote the interests of their families and associates’. Abstract notions of justice and of the common good counted for little besides the more pressing claims of family, lordship and clients.9 In furthering these interests, John Watts concluded, it was normal to bribe, or intimidate, juries, sheriffs and their officials, and at best it could be hoped that strong kings would create the conditions in which resort to law led to conciliation and the private resolution of disputes.10 Those conditions rested on the crown’s achieving a local balance of power between dominant families which the appointment of sheriffs, juries and justices of the peace had to reflect.11 What might appear to modern eyes as the corrupt infiltration of crown offices by the nobility and gentry was in the late middle ages ‘fundamental to the operation of royal justice in both practice and theory’, and Watts has argued against the idea that the Lancastrian kings tried to emulate Richard II’s failed attempt to exercise direct royal authority in the shires.12 Other historians, though, emphasise that the interests of the higher nobility and the gentry did not always coincide in local government, and that attempts by nobles, even noblemen as rich and powerful as Richard, Earl of Arundel (c. 1313–76), to control local justice and the sheriffs, could run into strong resistance from the gentry.13 As Peter Coss has said, ‘Running counter to the higher nobility’s traditional practice of vertical territorial control based on personal dependence was the principle of local office dominated by local men looking to the crown’.14 It is the vital part that the crown continued to play in the local administration of justice in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries that Anthony Musson and W.M. Ormrod stress in their book The Evolution of English Justice.15 They assert that the royal

8 Michael Clanchy, “Law, Government, and Locality in Medieval England”, History, 59 (1975): 77–8. 9 Powell, Kingship, Law and Society, 110. 10 John Watts, Henry VI and the Politics of Kingship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 246. 11 Ibid., 96–8. 12 Ibid., 97, 94–5. 13 Chris Given-Wilson, The English Nobility in the Late Middle Ages: The Fourteenth-Century Political Community (New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987), 174. 14 Peter Coss, The Origins of the English Gentry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 252. 15 Anthony Musson and William M. Ormrod, The Evolution of English Justice: Politics and Society in the Fourteenth Century (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999).

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government retained its ability to direct the course of English justice and was able to restore order after such serious uprisings as the Lollard Revolt of 1414 and Cade’s Rebellion of 1450 by acting not through local justices of the peace but through extraordinary general commissions of oyer and terminer and the central court of King’s Bench. The changes made in the administration of justice were more beneficial than otherwise and served not just the landed elites but ‘a remarkably wide spectrum of society’ including the peasantry, who could be the beneficiaries, as much as the victims, of the system. By establishing for the first time a permanent judicial presence in the localities, the crown created an integrated system linking them with the centre. It was more representative of the people it served; it made justice more accessible at the local level and dealt with economic and social issues which ranged beyond the landowners’ principal concerns with land, crime and disorder.16 Inevitably these opposing interpretations of the extent to which the crown retained its power to direct the local administration of justice affect the ways in which historians judge the process and methods by which medieval kingship was transformed into the powerful, interventionist monarchy of the early Tudors. In Christine Carpenter’s judgement, Henry VII made a fundamental break with the medieval tradition of government and created a new centralised regime founded on coercion and terror. She has argued that this was made possible from the 1470s by a shift in the balance of local power between the king, the magnates and the gentry through the expansion of the royal estates and affinity, which allowed the crown more direct influence over the shires.17 She has criticised Henry VII’s interventionist policy as fundamentally ‘not a type of kingship appropriate to late medieval England’.18 Henry’s mistrust of the nobility and gentry made him unwilling to work through local power structures. This meant, in her view, that probably ‘where it mattered, at the point of impact, his rule did not work’.19 The extension of royal authority over the shires may conceivably have brought less abuse of power by local men but this was almost certainly seen as inadequate compensation for the ‘quite terrifying powers of destruction by the law on the part of the king’.20 S.B. Chrimes similarly found little evidence that Henry VII’s government achieved any marked success in enforcing law and order, or that it showed any real will to do so, except when it was to its financial advantage.21

16 Ibid., 101, 113–14, 191. 17 Christine Carpenter, Locality and Polity: A Study of Warwickshire Landed Society, 1401–1499 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 633–4. 18 Christine Carpenter, “Henry VII and the English Polity”, in Benjamin Thompson (ed.), The Reign of Henry VII (Paul Watkins, Stamford: Harlaxton Medieval Studies, v, 1995), 22. 19 Ibid., 24–5. 20 Christine Carpenter, “Law, Justice and Landowners in Late Medieval England”, Law and History Review, 1 (1983): 235. 21 Stanley B. Chrimes, Henry VII (London: Methuen, 1972), 185–7.

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John Watts, by contrast, has argued that instead of Henry VII enforcing his will on a resentful people, men were inclined to co-operate with his autocratic methods because of their conviction that the public interest would benefit from his centralisation of power.22 This view was most fully expressed by Gerald Harriss when he argued that pressure for a more extensive development of late medieval government came from a widening and more diversified political community which included the middling social groups of landowners such as the parish gentry, yeomen and husbandmen, as well as urban merchants, lawyers and officials. The demands of this society for a more effective government and judicial system meant that it needed the monarchy more, not less. The consequence was that the Crown was able to extend its authority much more into the localities. By implication, he indicates that this was done more by consent, than by terror.23 Law and justice were essential not only for the repression of crime, violence and disorder but also to protect rights which affected men’s livelihoods. Although they accept that claims to land account for over 90 per cent of lawsuits among the upper classes, Musson and Ormrod point out that the latter were far from being the only or main clients of the legal system. Middle ranking gentry and upwardly mobile peasants account for half of the cases dealt with by special commissions of oyer and terminer c. 1300, and villagers were responsible for an average of 81 per cent of Lincolnshire cases brought before King’s Bench between 1291 and 1339.24 Townsmen and merchants, also, were responsible for a quarter of special commissions c. 1300.25 Half of the defendants in King’s Bench between 1422 and 1442 surveyed by Philippa Maddern were yeomen or husbandmen.26 Moreover, all classes, whether as plaintiffs or defendants, were affected by the way in which the king’s courts enforced the repayment of debts. Credit was indispensable to the working of the medieval economy, and accordingly debt was a part of everyday life, not just for merchants, but for peasants and the upper classes.27 The Common Plea rolls doubled in size during the course of the fourteenth century largely because of the huge expansion of debt cases.28 But as long as the enforcement of debt, and the effective administration of the law generally, depended on sheriffs, justices of the peace, coroners and bailiffs, who were likely to put the interests of their fellow gentry and the magnates whom they served

22 John Watts, “‘A New Fundacion of Is Crowne’: Monarchy in the Age of Henry VII”, in ed. Benjamin Thompson, The Reign of Henry VII, 35–6. 23 Harriss, “Political Society”, 31–57. 24 Musson and Ormrod, Evolution of English Justice, 128–31. 25 Ibid., 128. 26 Philippa C. Maddern, Violence and Social Order: East Anglia, 1422–1442 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 40, Table 2.5. 27 Nightingale, “Money and Credit in Late Medieval England”, 51–71. 28 Musson and Ormrod, Evolution of English Justice, 118.

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before the public interest, then important sections of the population felt their interests went unprotected.29 The office of sheriff was crucial to the legal system since it served as the main link between the centre and the localities through the sheriff’s responsibility for executing writs sent to him by the central courts. The debatable questions are whether in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the sheriffs’ execution of writs declined significantly as a result of the devolution of judicial powers to local landowners, or whether strong rulers, by their force of personality, and the attention they gave to law and order, could deploy the powers which Edward III and his predecessors bequeathed to make the sheriffs’ execution of writs serve the interests of the wider community and not just of local power groups. Did the ineptitude of Henry VI mean that if the power of the Crown was to be rebuilt and the legal system made effective in the localities, Henry VII had to create afresh new, despotic powers at the centre, or was he, like Edward IV, responding to long-term changes in society and using methods and government machinery which had gradually evolved from the fourteenth century? Some of the issues raised are those of the ‘New Monarchy’ debate, although they are focused here on local government.30 Most available evidence points to the deteriorating conduct of the sheriffs in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Despite the numerous complaints of the commons in parliament, the introduction of yet more legal remedies appears to illustrate the continuance of the need for them, rather than the success of legislation.31 A statute of 1444 was not alone in referring to the ‘perjury, extortion and oppression’ practised by sheriffs and their staff, and of bailiffs, and stewards of franchises, against the people.32 The difficulty for historians is that they have no means of measuring the scale of the problem, or of assessing how much it varied from reign to reign, while Musson and Ormrod have rightly warned against taking all complaints against the judicial system at face value.33 The general picture historians draw in fact relies considerably on anecdotal evidence which may reflect particular local circumstances, such as the violence and disorder of the Pastons’ Norfolk, rather than necessarily the character of shrieval administration

29 Margaret M. Condon, “A Wiltshire Sheriff’s Notebook, 1464–5”, in Roy F. Hunnisett and John B. Post (eds.), Medieval Legal Records Edited in Memory of C. A.F. Meekings (London: H.M.S.O., 1978), 414–16. 30 For this debate, see Anthony Goodman, The New Monarchy: England, 1471–1534 (Oxford: Historical Association, 1988) and Rosemary Horrox, “England, Kingship and the Political Community, 1377-c. 1500”, in Steve Rigby (ed.), A Companion to Britain in the Later Middle Ages (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2003), 224–41. 31 Richard Gorski, The Fourteenth Century Sheriff: English Local Administration in the Late Middle Ages (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2003), 117–25; Nigel Saul, Knights and Esquires, The Gloucestershire Gentry in the Fourteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), 106–11; John G. Bellamy, Bastard Feudalism and the Law (London: Routledge, 1989), 7. 32 Statutes of the Realm, ii. 334 (23 Henry VI. c. 9). 33 Musson and Ormrod, Evolution of English Justice, 189–90.

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as a whole.34 Also, evidence may be partial. The misdeeds of sheriffs were not prominent in Edward III’s great enquiry into administrative corruption in 1341 because a mere handful of venal sheriffs were discovered among the 200 or so investigated. On the other hand, if Lincolnshire provides an accurate sample of those indicted who had previously served as sheriff, then possibly more than 50 per cent of the shrieval class stood accused of malpractice.35 Official records, such as the plea rolls, are of limited value as they do not give any hint of what went on outside the court, such as the practice of ‘labouring’, or bribing, the sheriff and his officials in favour of one side or the other. For these reasons, Richard Gorski concluded in his book on the fourteenth-century sheriff that the degree of corruption, and therefore the standard attained by the sheriff in the conduct of his office, is ‘ultimately unquantifiable’.36 These uncertainties mean that historians can do little more than guess at the degree to which there were conspicuous variations in the local administration of justice. To do more they require a reliable source which enables them to sample the performance of sheriffs over a lengthy period from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries, and which allows them to distinguish between the sheriffs’ personal conduct and the many external factors that could influence his work. The sheriffs’ judicial duties were numerous and varied. Besides convening and presiding over the county court, and his twice-yearly ‘tourn’, or exercise of petty criminal jurisdiction in each royal hundred, his most responsible, and also most burdensome, duty was that of executing writs sent to him by Common Pleas, King’s Bench, the Exchequer and Chancery. W.A. Morris ascribed the sheriff’s ‘pivotal position’ in the execution of writs as ‘a vital part of the English scheme of justice’.37 Each sheriff had to deal with a large number of them, illustrated by the 2,000 or so that the sheriff of Bedfordshire received in a period of eighteen months in 1333–4.38 They were required to endorse the writs with the record of their actions, which included the arrest and imprisonment of felons and the holding of inquisitions.39 The evidence available so far indicates that sheriffs failed to reach an acceptable standard in these duties. The plea rolls are full of the occasions when cases had to be adjourned because sheriffs had not returned writs, and a sample taken in Edward IV’s reign indicates the proportion then was as high as 20 per cent.40 It is also known that sheriffs might demand bribes to serve writs, or they returned them endorsed with excuses, often false, for failing to execute them. There is also much

34 35 36 37

Bellamy, Bastard Feudalism, 5–6. Charles Ross, Edward IV (London: Eyre Methuen, 1974), 404. Gorski, Fourteenth Century Sheriff, 121–2. Ibid., 103, 107, 109; Bellamy, Bastard Feudalism, 4–6. William A. Morris, “The Sheriff”, in William A. Morris and Joseph R. Strayer (eds.), The English Government at Work, Vol. 2 (Cambridge, MA: Medieval Academy of America, 1947), 63. 38 Ibid., 65. 39 Ibid., 64–5; James Conway Davies, “Common Law Writs and Returns”, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 26 (1953): 141–3. 40 Hastings, Court of Common Pleas, 228.

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incidental evidence of their involvement in the corruption of juries, in allowing prisoners to escape, and in failing, sometimes for years on end, to produce prisoners at Westminster for trial.41 The importance of endorsed writs to legal history was recognised long ago, but the process of listing the huge number of them in the National Archives is not yet complete.42 Moreover their bulk means that one can only sample the sheriffs’ record in the execution of writs over any length of time by using a series which is not impossibly large. One such is Class C131, which contains writs returned by the sheriffs to Chancery under the Statute Staple legislation on the enforcement of debt.43 Debt accounted for a high proportion of all the writs sent to sheriffs to enforce, not only from Chancery but also from Common Pleas and King’s Bench. The sheriff of Wiltshire’s notebook in 1464–5 shows that 60 per cent of the writs he received were related to debt, and most of these were mercantile debts.44 Statute staple writs are therefore not untypical in dealing with this type of case. Furthermore, their endorsements provide evidence which is susceptible to statistical analysis, thereby allowing the objective sampling and assessment of the sheriffs’ execution of writs over a lengthy period. The Statute Staple of 1353 improved upon two earlier statutes, that of Acton Burnell (1283) and Statute Merchant (1285), and, like them, it allowed creditors to register their loans as recognisances of debt in London and the larger provincial towns.45 The advantage of using recognisances was that they by-passed the need for a court hearing if the debtor did not repay the loan, because they served as a judgment of default. The creditor had merely to obtain from the registry where he had recorded the debt a certificate giving its details. If the debtor did not pay under threat of prosecution, the creditor would send the certificate to Chancery, where it was filed, and the details recorded in writs sent to the sheriffs of the counties where the debtor held property. The writ ordered the sheriff to arrest the debtor and to hold an inquisition by summoning a local jury to value the debtor’s property in the county. The sheriff endorsed the writ, reporting whether he had done this or giving the reason why he had failed to do so. He was required to return the writ by the due date accompanied by the jurors’ extent of the debtor’s property.

41 Ibid., 224–30; Bellamy, Bastard Feudalism, 13–14; Marjorie Blatcher, “Distress Infinite and the Contumacious Sheriff”, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 13 (1936): 146–50; Helen Cam, “Shire Officials: Coroners, Constables, and Bailiffs”, in eds. James Willard, William Morris, and William Dunham, The English Government at Work, 1327–1336, iii, 179–80. 42 Listing of the main series of Common Plea files (CP 52) has been completed from the reign of Edward I to the end of Edward III’s reign. 43 The class also contains writs returned to Chancery for the enforcement of debts recorded on the dorse of the Close Rolls. 44 Condon, “A Wiltshire Sheriff’s Notebook”, 417. 45 Christopher McNall, “The Business of Statutory Debt Registries, 1283–1307”, in Phillipp R. Schofield and Nicholas J. Mayhew (eds.), Credit and Debt in Medieval England, c. 1180–c. 1350 (Oxford: Oxbow, 2002), 68–88.

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Statute Staple did not replace Statute Merchant for recording and enforcing debts. Instead it supplemented it by a cheaper, and more efficient, system made available through Staple courts set up in the largest towns. Where they were established alongside an existing Statute Merchant registry, the Staple courts attracted the bulk of the latter’s business of recording debts. This is particularly obvious in London, where the Staple court at Westminster attracted much of the business away from the city’s Statute Merchant court. Overall, 7,801 Statute Staple certificates were issued between 1353 and 1530, compared with 4,520 Statute Merchant certificates. One of the attractions of the Statute Staple procedure was that the sheriff, who remained responsible for arranging inquisitions to value the defaulting debtor’s property, returned the writs to Chancery instead of to Common Pleas or King’s Bench. His success or failure in enforcing Statute Staple writs therefore fell under the scrutiny of the chancellor, who was instrumental in appointing sheriffs, and, from 1346, was responsible for hearing all manner of complaints against them and escheators.46 Moreover, through his appellate jurisdiction and supervision over Staple towns, the chancellor was particularly concerned with the way that sheriffs executed Statute Staple writs.47 The sheriffs were therefore likely to pay particular attention to the execution of these writs, and this greater degree of central supervision may well explain why so few of them were returned unendorsed. There are no more than a dozen of this kind, whereas the device of returning a writ per album breve, meaning, white, or unendorsed, was not uncommon when they were returned to Common Pleas. This was despite legislation, frequently enforced, that allowed sheriffs to be fined the sizable sum of six marks for deficient returns of writs.48 Presumably sheriffs found in such cases that the bribe they received outweighed the fine. Because only the Statute Staple writs, and not the Statute Merchant writs, were returned to Chancery, this analysis of the sheriffs’ returns perforce begins in 1355 (Table 6.1). What is immediately obvious from a study of the endorsements of the 2,668 Statute Staple writs which were sent to English counties between 1355 and 1399 is their generally low level of execution.49 It was not necessarily the sheriffs’ fault that most debtors disappeared before they could be arrested, but sheriffs bore considerable responsibility for the fact that no inquisition was held in response to an average of 49.4 per cent of the writs in this period. Although the courts might be

46 Statutes of the Realm, i. 305 (20 Edward III, c. 6). 47 Bertie Wilkinson, The Chancery Under Edward III (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1929), 34–6; Nicholas Pronay, “The Chancellor, the Chancery, and the Council at the End of the Fifteenth Century”, in Harry Hearder and Henry R. Loyn (eds.), British Government and Administration: Studies Presented to S.B. Chrimes (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1974), 96. 48 Hastings, Court of Common Pleas, 228; Morris, “The Sheriff”, in The English Government at Work, ii, 63–5. 49 The palatine counties of Cheshire and Durham were not excluded from the operation of Statute Staple but the relative poverty of their inhabitants meant that they recorded few debts, and those were under Statute Merchant procedure.

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Table 6.1 The sheriffs’ returns to Statute Staple writs, 1355–1529 Date

A

B

C

D

E

F

G

Total Percent Debtors Percent of Percent of Percent of Percent of no. of of debtors with no deceased inactive writs ‘too inquisitions writs imprisoned property debtors liberties late’ 1355–9 1360–4 1365–9 1370–4 1375–9 1380–4 1385–9 1390–4 1395–9 1400–04 1405–09 1410–14 1415–19 1420–4 1425–9 1430–4 1435–9 1440–4 1445–9 1450–4 1455–9 1460–4 1465–9 1470–4 1475–9 1480–4 1485–9 1490–4 1495–9 1500–04 1505–09 1510–14 1515–19 1520–4 1525–9

176 244 283 301 254 278 437 364 331 214 203 118 64 60 49 61 36 58 47 89 80 81 76 61 63 70 77 62 70 148 189 215 128 222 161

10.2 6.5 5.6 9.3 9.0 10.8 7.8 8.6 9.3 6.1 9.8 8.4 7.8 13.5 16.3 9.8 0.0 12.0 8.5 21.3 27.5 22.2 13.1 19.6 20.6 18.5 24.7 8.0 11.4 17.5 6.8 6.5 4.7 1.8 2.6

7.9 7.4 2.8 7.3 12.9 15.4 7.1 7.9 5.4 10.7 9.3 3.3 6.2 15.2 2.0 8.2 8.3 17.2 19.1 27.0 13.7 7.4 3.9 4.9 16.0 18.5 2.8 3.2 4.3 3.4 2.6 5.5 0.7 1.8 1.6

1.7 4.9 3.2 2.3 3.2 3.6 2.0 2.2 0.9 1.9 2.0 0.0 1.6 1.7 4.0 4.9 2.7 1.7 4.2 2.2 0.0 0.0 7.9 6.6 3.2 8.6 6.5 1.6 4.3 2.0 1.0 0.5 0.8 0.5 0.0

9.0 10.7 8.4 7.3 7.0 6.1 11.4 10.3 6.3 10.8 7.8 6.7 12.5 6.7 2.0 14.7 8.3 3.4 2.1 5.6 2.5 1.2 1.3 0.0 0.0 2.8 1.3 1.6 2.8 0.7 2.6 0.0 0.7 1.3 0.0

27.8 27.9 30.4 30.5 26.2 31.2 30.4 21.2 35.9 29.0 25.1 32.7 20.3 35.6 28.6 21.3 13.9 18.9 8.5 22.5 37.5 34.5 23.6 18.0 20.0 8.5 25.9 9.7 8.6 12.2 5.3 2.3 3.9 0.9 0.0

48.8 55.1 49.4 49.1 50.5 50.7 43.5 50.2 47.1 50.0 50.7 52.1 65.6 40.6 61.2 59.0 66.6 53.4 61.7 57.3 48.7 49.3 64.5 62.7 46.0 70.0 60.0 85.5 81.4 83.1 88.3 89.3 93.7 94.1 96.8

open to all litigants, if less than half of their judgments were enforced, then only the most optimistic, or influential, petitioners could have real confidence in royal justice. Frustrated creditors either had to abandon the hope of repayment or apply to Chancery for a new writ in the hope of a better result. The returned writs are in two separate series: one of original files (C131/1–162) and one of duplicate or ancillary writs relating to them (C131/171–333). A comparison of the two series 123

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according to the year when the debt was first recorded, and also with the separate series of Statute Staple certificates, shows similar trends, which suggests that there has been no significant loss of records which could affect the analysis. Some of the reasons which the sheriffs gave in their endorsements for not holding an inquisition were, of course, likely to be false, invented to conceal bribery or to disguise inefficiency. But some of the reasons they gave were less easy to fabricate than others, and these allow one to deduce whether sheriffs failed because of factors largely outside their control, or because of their own, or their officials’, perversion of justice. The four chief excuses they gave were firstly, that the debtors held no property within their jurisdiction; secondly, the debtor named as defendant had died; thirdly, their property was in a liberty, and the bailiff of the liberty had taken no action; and, fourthly, the writ had arrived too late for the sheriff to act and to return it to Chancery by the date set. These were also the main excuses given by sheriffs when they returned unexecuted writs to Common Pleas.50 The debtor’s lack of any property in the sheriff’s bailiwick was given for an average of 8.2 per cent of the writs in the period 1355–99. Where debtors had held property in several counties, and creditors were uncertain in which to pursue them, it could well have been true that they no longer owned property in a particular county. Moreover, there were certain years when poverty might explain the rising proportion of debtors without property. In 1375–9, it was 12.9 per cent, and in 1380–4, it was 15.4 per cent. These years were conspicuous for their high war-time taxation. They included the three poll taxes of 1377, 1379 and 1380 that inspired the peasants’ revolt, while fifteenths and tenths were also collected in 1378, 1380 and 1382–4.51 It is therefore likely that these years did see an increase in poverty and of debtors left without any property to their name. The same could be said of the period 1440–59, which saw the sheriffs record an average of 19.3 per cent of debtors without property. These decades saw acute economic recession caused by a shortage of silver coin, a contraction of credit and falling overseas trade, accompanied by political disintegration at home.52 It is noticeable, also, that from 1450 to 1489 a much higher average proportion of debtors was imprisoned. Since the years 1475–84 were also years of a high proportion of debtors without property, it looks as though imprisonment was used to bring pressure on debtors’ families to repay their debts for them. By contrast, as the output of the mint began to recover from the 1490s and generated more credit, as well as a higher proportion of inquisitions, so the proportion of imprisoned debtors declined. Probably this happened because creditors were more confident of reclaiming their money without having to imprison their debtors. Economic

50 Nellie Neilson, ‘The Court of Common Pleas’, the English Government at Work, 1327–1336 (Cambridge, MA: The Medieval Academy of America, 1950), III, 265. 51 Maureen Jurkowski, Carrie L. Smith, and David Crook, Lay Taxes in England and Wales, 1188– 1688 (London: Public Record Office Handbook, 1998), xxxi, 56–64. 52 Nightingale, “England and the European Depression of the Mid-Fifteenth Century”, 631–56.

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conditions may, therefore, have justified the sheriffs’ failure to execute many of the writs where the debtor was said to hold no property in his county. The low average of 8.3 per cent of writs which carried this endorsement throughout the whole period 1355–1529 would seem to support the comment of Musson and Ormrod about the ‘remarkable resilience of the system’ in the face of the serious economic depressions which afflicted it.53 On the other hand, one has to remember that the creditors protected their own interests in such crises by drastically reducing the amount they lent. It was their own financial caution, reflected in steep falls in the number of certificates, and writs, rather than the merits of the judicial system, that allowed it to survive. High mortality presented another challenge to the system. When the sheriffs gave as a reason for not holding an inquisition the fact that the debtor had died, it was hardly an excuse they could invent. In an era of unprecedented epidemic disease, it would not be surprising if mortality intervened repeatedly to affect the sheriffs’ execution of writs, because if a creditor named as defendant someone he later learnt had died, he had to purchase a fresh writ naming the executors as defendants. High mortality could also prevent a jury from answering the sheriff’s summons, as in 1349 when the sheriff of Devon unsuccessfully summoned a jury five times, or when only half a jury appeared in Bampton, Oxfordshire, in 1390.54 But in fact mortality made little overall contribution to the low rate of execution. Between 1355 and 1459, the average number of writs which did not procure an inquisition because the debtor had died was only 2.4 per cent. In a few cases, it appears that the death occurred between the creditor’s purchase of the writ and the sheriff’s attempt to execute it, but there were many more cases where the debt had been incurred several years previously, and the creditor, who may have lived at some distance, had no idea whether his debtor was alive or dead. This was not surprising if the creditor lived in London and the debtors in distant counties. The growing dominance of London as the main centre of credit meant that this hazard became more common. The third major reason why sheriffs could not secure inquisitions in the period 1355–1459 was when the bailiffs of liberties refused to act and failed to give the sheriff a reason. Whereas the sheriff relied on the bailiff of each hundred to carry out the practical work of executing writs by arresting debtors, and arranging for inquisitions, he could not command the officials of liberties to do the same.55 The defining characteristic of a liberty was that the sheriff, and other royal officers, were normally excluded from it.56 The largest liberties were ecclesiastical ones usually attached to great abbeys such as Bury St Edmunds, St Albans and

53 54 55 56

Musson and Ormrod, Evolution of English Justice, 158. C. 131/194/40; C. 131/207/26. Cam, “Shire Officials”, 174–8. Michael T. Clanchy, “The Franchise of Return of Writs”, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th series, 17 (1967): 59–79.

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Durham. The abbot of Bury exercised the authority of a sheriff over eight and a half hundreds and Ely over five and a half hundreds. Many great secular lords and the marcher lords of the Welsh borderlands had similar powers. Lesser lords holding only one private hundred and boroughs which had obtained charters giving their own officials the right to execute royal writs could also exclude the sheriff.57 Since the bailiffs of boroughs tended to be more closely tied to their inhabitants by common interests, and particularly by trade, they were more likely than the bailiffs of feudal liberties to help their friends to defy the sheriff. For example, William Topclive features prominently in the 1380s as an uncooperative bailiff of Canterbury, and bailiffs of other towns are prominent among the high number who were inactive in the 1380s and 1390s. Since the sheriff had to return the original writ to Chancery by a set date, all he could do, if no reply came from a bailiff, was to record that fact on the dorse.58 If a bailiff continued to be uncooperative, the sheriff could obtain from Chancery a writ non omittas, which permitted him to enter a franchise and to execute the writ himself, but few of these records show the sheriff doing this. Bailiffs of franchises were responsible for failing to hold an inquisition in response to 7.6 per cent of Statute Staple writs from 1355 to 1459, but the problem was greater before 1440 than afterwards. It was as high as 12.5 per cent between 1415 and 1419, and was 14.7 per cent between 1430 and 1434, before dropping to an average of 3.4 per cent between 1440 and 1459. This fall, though, cannot be explained straightforwardly by an improvement in the efficiency of the bailiffs of the liberties in that period. It is much more closely related to a fall in the number of debtors who lived in them. In the 1360s, for example, when towns were enjoying a new prosperity after the Black Death, liberties accounted for 23 per cent of the writs sent out, but by the 1430s the figure was down to 13 per cent, and in the 1440s it had dropped strikingly to 2.9 per cent. It recovered somewhat to 8.3 per cent in the 1450s before dropping thereafter. It seems likely that the fall in the number of debtors who lived in liberties in the 1440s was related to the economic depression that began in that decade and particularly affected the provincial towns. As their economies declined the credit available to their inhabitants contracted. Accordingly, they feature less in the certificates of debt and in the writs sent out to enforce them. A contributory cause, however, was the growth in the number of towns that acquired their own sheriffs. London, of course, had its own sheriffs from the twelfth century, and it was joined by Bristol from 1373, York from 1396 and Newcastle, Norwich and Lincoln by 1410. Between 1440 and 1485 Hull, Southampton, Nottingham, Coventry, Canterbury and Gloucester joined them.59

57 Helen Cam, The Hundred and the Hundred Rolls (London: Methuen Press, 1930), 54–7. 58 Ibid., 75. 59 List of Sheriffs for England and Wales from the Earliest Times to A.D.1831 Compiled from Documents in the Public Record Office (London: Public Record Office List and Indexes, 1898), ix. Public Record Office, Britain (No individual author is given).

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This meant that as their own sheriffs took over the return of writs, so there was a decline in the bailiffs’ responsibility for failed inquisitions. Accordingly, the fall is more likely to reflect the drop in the number of writs bailiffs received than success in making them more efficient or conscientious in the performance of their duties. Violent resistance to the sheriffs’ authority features rarely in their returns. Occasionally, though, it could defeat the execution of writs. In 1424, a crowd ten strong rescued a debtor, who was a husbandman, in West Smithfield, London, and they killed the sheriff’s officer who was pursuing him.60 In November 1441, a tanner was released from gaol in Bury St Edmunds by two butchers armed with cleavers, accompanied by an anonymous crowd of ‘malefactors’.61 In 1521, four yeomen knifed to death the bailiff of Brixton who was attempting to arrest one of them.62 Bailiffs were often attacked when they tried to distrain, and the sheriff for Bedfordshire and Buckinghamshire said in 1452–3 that he had to pay his undersheriff the inflated wage of £40 to compensate him for the dangers of the office.63 These dangers undoubtedly increased at times of political upheaval and social protest, such as the Peasants’ Revolt and Cade’s Rebellion, and it could be that on some occasions the sheriff concealed a reasonable discretion behind the excuse that a writ had arrived too late to execute. This brief survey of the reasons given by sheriffs for their failure to hold inquisitions for Statute Staple debts in the period 1355 to 1459 shows that an average of 10.2 per cent of the endorsements claimed that the debtor had no property in the sheriff’s bailiwick, 7.6 per cent blamed the failure of liberties to co-operate and 2.4 per cent stated the debtors had died. Together they account for a failure to arrange inquisitions in response to 20.2 per cent of the writs. This leaves an average of another 27.8 per cent of the writs unexecuted in this period mainly because the sheriff claimed that they had arrived too late to be dealt with and returned on the due date. This reason was obviously more open to abuse than the others. The Chancery clerks’ careful timing of the interval they set for the return of the writ, which took into account the distance of the county from Westminster, does cast doubt on the large number of writs which the sheriffs reported had arrived too late, particularly as from 1355 to 1429 the percentage is fairly uniform from decade to decade. This hints strongly that sheriffs had come to expect that the royal government would tolerate their failure to execute over one-quarter of the writs. By a statute of 1285, the sheriffs were obliged to provide upon request bills of receipt that showed the specific day on which they had received writs, but it seems that this safeguard was ineffective in preventing fraud.64 In one or two

60 61 62 63

C. 131/227/13. C. 131/232/1. C. 131/105/1. Robin M. Jeffs, “The Later Medieval Sheriff and the Royal Household: A Study in Administrative Change and Political Control, 1437–1547” (Univ. of Oxford D.Phil. thesis, Oxford, 1960), 39; Ross, Edward IV, 389. 64 Palmer, County Courts of Medieval England, 44; 13 Edward I, c. 39.

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cases, the sheriff noted down the date when the writ arrived in his office to justify his return that it was too late to execute it. The sheriff of Hampshire claimed that he had received at midday on 21 November a writ which was dated in Chancery on 3 November 1373 and due to be returned on 25 November.65 Another, dated 20 February 1383, was said by the sheriff of Oxfordshire to have arrived on 7 July 1383 although its return date was the following day.66 That there are so few detailed endorsements of this kind suggests, however, that in the great majority of cases sheriffs could find no reason to justify their inaction. It is possible that some writs were delayed because Chancery clerks sought to economise in the use of messengers and so waited until they had several writs to send out to a particular county. But the messenger service was well organised and professional, and in 1350–4 numbered as many as twenty-one permanent messengers and about forty couriers.67 Moreover there is no obvious pattern which might suggest that the service was adversely affected by periods of abnormal disorder, or by the crown’s shortage of money in the fifteenth century. The percentage of writs said to arrive too late was not much higher between 1455 and 1459, at 37.5 per cent, than between 1420 and 1424, at 35.6 per cent, or under Edward III between 1365 and 1369 at 30.4 per cent. It looks as though the sheriffs thought it necessary to justify their failure to execute writs returnable to Chancery by using the excuse of their late arrival, instead of sending them back unendorsed, or not returning them at all, as they were more likely to do with writs returnable to the other central courts.68 If the preceding discussion raises the possibility that up to 28 per cent of the Statute Staple writs sent to the sheriffs might have been corruptly, or carelessly, denied execution between 1355 and 1459, one must ask whether there were any signs in this period that the special attention given to the administration of justice by certain kings made any difference to the proportion of writs executed. Despite Edward III’s success in rebuilding and maintaining the authority of the crown after the political crisis of 1341, the sheriffs had only an indifferent record of enforcing Statute Staple writs between 1355 and 1379, when they executed an average of only 50.6 per cent of them. The one period when they achieved a higher proportion was between 1360 and 1364, when the figure rose to 55.1 per cent. The coincidence that these were years of uninterrupted peace indicates that one reason for Edward’s failure to improve the administration of justice was the diversion of his attention and his energy to overseas warfare. These figures appear to support the fourteenth-century belief that warfare outside the kingdom bred disorder within it.69 Nigel Saul has identified 1371 as a year which marked ‘the turning point in the history of the shrievalty’ because of the government’s acceptance then of a

65 66 67 68 69

C. 131/191/25. C. 131/199/39. Mary C. Hill, The King’s Messengers (London: E. Arnold, 1961), 5–6, 18–19. Neilson, “The Court of Common Pleas”, 265–6. Musson and Ormrod, Evolution of English Justice, 78–80.

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long-standing demand by the Commons that the sheriff should be a substantial landowner in his county, and that he should serve for only one year. A statute limiting his tenure to one year had been passed in 1340 but remained a dead letter. From 1371, however, sheriffs were changed annually.70 Some historians believe that parliament pressed for this statute to prevent the crown’s creating a permanent body of local officials, and to reduce rather than increase the king’s power to enforce his law in the localities.71 Christine Carpenter has argued that this was a step in the direction of ‘the virtual cessation of all forms of central supervision of the shire’.72 An alternative interpretation of the statute of 1371 is that since the king accepted it, he can hardly have done so to limit his own powers: it was intended rather to reduce the sheriff’s capacity for oppression, as well as relieving individuals of the financial burdens of prolonged service in the office.73 What the analysis of the sheriffs’ long-term record in holding Statute Staple inquisitions makes clear is that even after 1371 they did still respond to the strength or weakness of the royal government. When the latter was weak, it seems either that the sheriffs found their power to execute writs undermined, or that they resorted more to bribery and corruption which they covered by the excuse that the writs had arrived too late. Table 6.1 shows such trends in the minority of Richard II, particularly in the years from 1386 when the king’s uncle, the Duke of Gloucester, and his baronial faction, the Appellants, seized control of the government. There was a period of disorder which those charged with peace-keeping duties did little to suppress until Richard deprived the Appellants of their power in the spring of 1389.74 It is not surprising that these years saw the proportion of inquisitions held by the sheriffs fall as low as 43.5 per cent. But Richard’s subsequent swift action to restore royal authority by sending out judicial commissions into disorderly counties, by issuing new commissions of the peace which excluded the magnates and by personally choosing the sheriffs saw the proportion of inquisitions recover in 1390–4 to 50.2 per cent, while the number of writs claimed to arrive too late fell to 21.2 per cent.75 These figures appear to confirm Musson and

70 Saul, Knights and Esquires, 108–11. 71 Roger Virgoe, “The Crown and Local Government: East Anglia Under Richard II”, in Francis R.H. du Boulay and Caroline M. Barron (eds.), The Reign of Richard II: Essays in Honour of May McKisack (London: Athlone, 1971), 218–22; Lander, Limitations of English Monarchy, 28–9; Carpenter, “Law, Justice and Landowners”, 228. 72 Carpenter, “Law, Justice and Landowners”, 228. 73 Saul, Knights and Esquires, 108–9; Virgoe, “Crown and Local Government”, 221. Virgoe’s argument that the petitioners’ opposition to the reappointment of escheators as well as sheriffs proved that their hostility was directed against the creation of a local bureaucracy is not convincing: escheators were considered to be as oppressive as sheriffs. See e.g. Statutes of the Realm, ii. 252–3 (8 Henry VI, c. 16). 74 Robin L. Storey, “Liveries and Commissions of the Peace, 1388–90”, in eds. F. Robin H. du Boulay and Caroline M. Barron, The Reign of Richard II, 132–5. 75 Ibid., 135–49; Nigel Saul, Richard II (Newhaven and London: Yale University Press, 1997), 262–3.

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Ormrod’s assertion of ‘the continued ability of the central government to direct the course of English justice’ in this period.76 Yet in the last five years of the century, Richard II’s own arbitrary and erratic behaviour caused increasing discontent. His fears of renewed rebellion led him to appoint eleven members of his own household, as well as retainers of his magnate supporters, as sheriffs in the period of his ‘tyranny’ from 1397 to 1399. Since their chief object was to use the sheriff’s command of the shire levies to provide military support for the king, it is unlikely they were much concerned to improve the execution of judicial writs.77 Moreover the move aroused deep resentment in the counties. This is indicated by the pronounced rise in the average number of writs declared too late for execution from 21.2 per cent in 1390–4 to 35.9 per cent in 1395–9, while the proportion of inquisitions fell. When Henry IV seized the throne in 1399, he likewise installed many of his own personal supporters as sheriffs. His chief object was also to strengthen his political control of the shires, and although there was a marginal increase in the proportion of Statute Staple writs executed in his reign, it was not pronounced.78 The record reflects his own precarious position and explains why his subjects made repeated demands for better government.79 The figures for Henry V’s reign, though, show what a strong and able monarch could achieve. The king had to grapple with the widespread breakdown in law and order which had become evident in his father’s reign, and did so effectively through a policy of centralising law enforcement.80 He paid particular attention to the sheriffs’ failure to return writs and his council issued new strict instructions on the subject.81 He also chose as sheriffs for the lawless county of Devon men who were his personal retainers, and had no local interests to influence them.82 Otherwise he made no attempt to intrude his own men into local offices, and instead used the superior eyre of King’s Bench as a means of restoring order in the counties.83 Although Edward Powell has identified the weaknesses of this campaign, and the continued vulnerability of the legal system to corruption and intimidation, it is clear that it did succeed in bringing pressure on the sheriffs to improve their execution

76 Musson and Ormrod, Evolution of English Justice, 101. 77 Virgoe, “The Crown and Local Government”, 222; Saul, Knights and Esquires, 112–13, and Richard II, 383–4. 78 Doug Biggs, “Sheriffs and Justices of the Peace: The Patterns of Lancastrian Governance, 1399– 1401”, Nottingham Medieval Studies, 40 (1996): 149–60. 79 Alfred L. Brown, “The Reign of Henry IV”, in Stanley B. Chrimes, Charles D. Ross, and Ralph A. Griffiths (eds.), Fifteenth-Century England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1972), 23–5. 80 Edward Powell, “The Restoration of Law and Order”, in Gerald L. Harriss (ed.), Henry V: The Practice of Kingship (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 53–74. 81 Powell, Kingship, Law and Society, 136. 82 Christopher Allmand, Henry V (1992, republished, New Haven: University of California, 1997), 324. 83 Powell, Kingship, Law and Society, 177, 271.

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of judicial writs.84 One means of doing this was the Statute of Riots of 1414. This gave the chancellor the power to appoint commissioners to enquire into sheriffs and justices of the peace who failed to act vigorously against riots, maintenance and similar offences, and it authorised the chancellor to subpoena them to appear before him personally.85 Henry V’s powerful chancellor from 1413 to 1417 was his uncle, Bishop Beaufort. Despite the king’s absence in France, and his constant attention to warfare after 1417, as well as very difficult economic conditions at home, these measures clearly affected the behaviour of sheriffs. In the five years 1415–19, the average number of Statute Staple writs that secured an inquisition rose from just over 50 to 65.6 per cent, and the percentage declared to be too late fell by a similar proportion. But the temporary nature of the improvement is emphasised by the subsequent drastic fall of the inquisitions in 1420–4 to an average of 40.6 per cent and a corresponding rise in the proportion of writs declared to be too late. In Powell’s view, Henry’s death caused an immediate slackening of central judicial authority, illustrating that the personal authority of a king was alone not enough to make up for the lack of institutional controls necessary to maintain the efficient administration of justice if he was long absent or if he was succeeded by a minor.86 It may therefore appear surprising that, despite individual bad years in 1425, 1428 and 1432 (which were associated with Gloucester’s conflict with Beaufort on the royal council, and the rise of violent disorder in the kingdom, followed by the serious Lollard rising of 1431), the sheriffs appear to have responded positively in the minority of Henry VI to pressures from the centre which included a parliamentary campaign from 1433 to fight the abuse of the judicial system.87 Between 1425 and 1439, the sheriffs achieved an average of 62 per cent of inquisitions, mainly because of the fall in the number of writs they declared had arrived too late. This trend might also account for the increase in the number of litigants who resorted to King’s Bench in the years 1422–42.88 Undoubtedly an important factor was the appointment for the third time of Bishop Beaufort as chancellor from 1424 to 1426, and his continued service thereafter on the council until his death in 1443. More than anyone else, he was responsible for the avoidance of factional conflict between the magnates and for the consolidation of conciliar authority during the minority of Henry VI.89 Although as chancellor he had a decisive voice in the selection of sheriffs and JPs, and had close contacts with many of them in the southern shires, it does not appear that he used his position to intrude his own associates into these offices.90 But his experience as Henry V’s chancellor,

84 85 86 87

Ibid., 204–5, 251. Statutes of the Realm, ii. 184–6 (2 Henry V, c. 8). Powell, Kingship, Law and Society, 266–7. Griffiths, Reign of Henry VI, 138–40, 144–8. See the action against the sheriff of Hereford for extortion in 1430–1: Statutes of the Realm, ii, 266–7 (9 Henry VI, c. 7). 88 Maddern, Violence and Social Order, 35. 89 Gerald L. Harriss, Cardinal Beaufort (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 121, 128, 133, 391. 90 Ibid., 73–6; cf., Griffiths, Reign of Henry VI, 71.

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and the use he made then of sub-pena writs to enforce the law, obviously prepared the way for the subsequent ‘explosion’ in Chancery’s use of sub-pena writs in the 1430s in response to private petitions.91 The sub-pena was ‘one of the most powerful instruments of royal justice in late medieval England’, and was particularly associated with the judicial authority exercised by the chancellor and the council. Developed by 1353 (the year when Statute Staple was introduced) and used particularly to summon recalcitrant debtors before the chancellor, it did not suffer from the restrictions of common law writs, and was addressed to, and directly delivered to, the defendant, thus avoiding the delaying tactics of sheriffs and the immunities claimed by bailiffs. Its particular force lay in the money penalty, often £100, which was attached to it and levied in case of default.92 It was certainly one of the powerful sanctions that attracted suitors to Chancery in preference to the other central courts, and the fact that its use greatly expanded in the 1430s indicates that Chancery was by then prepared to use the sub-pena to advance its own authority and popularity as a court.93 This process was aided by the chancellorship of John Stafford from 1432 to 1443.94 His long tenure gave Chancery continuity of direction and enabled it to develop its powers as a central court with specialised interests in the field of equity and mercantile law. Its growth in power and prestige could only increase the chancellor’s authority when it came to supervising the sheriffs and justices of the peace. But as Henry VI reached adulthood, he began from 1436 to undermine the chancellor’s authority over the sheriffs by acceding to requests from favoured household servants, led by the steward, Suffolk, for the appointment of their own nominees to the office.95 It proved to be no temporary measure. Between 1437 and 1444, at least one-third of the sheriffs had household connections and almost 21 per cent over the longer period 1437–60.96 There is no evidence, though, that this was a deliberate policy to assert royal power. The household itself was riven by faction, and those appointed were usually serving more than one master, and had their own local interests in the shires to which they were appointed.97 This might explain the drop between 1440 and 1444 in the percentage of Statute Staple

91 Statutes of the Realm, ii. 296–7 (15 Henry VI, c. 4); Penny Tucker, “The Early History of the Court of Chancery: A Comparative Study”, The English History Review, 115 (2000): 799. 92 W. Mark Ormrod, “The Origins of the Sub Pena Writ”, Historical Research, 61 (1988): 11–12, 14–15; C. Palmer, “England: Law, Society and the State”, 252. 93 Tucker, “Court of Chancery”, 801–2, 808. 94 Pronay, “The Chancellor, the Chancery, and the Council”, 89. 95 Griffiths, Reign of King Henry VI, 233, 333–4. 96 Ibid., 336; Jeffs, “The Later Medieval Sheriff”, 165, n 1. 97 Griffiths, Reign of King Henry VI, 334–6; Bertrum P. Wolffe, “The Personal Rule of Henry VI”, in Stanley B Chrimes, Charles D. Ross, and Ralph A. Griffiths (eds.), Fifteenth-Century England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1972), 37; Watts, Henry VI and the Politics of Kingship, 172–6, 217, 220–1.

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inquisitions and in the corresponding rise in the percentage of writs the sheriffs claimed had arrived too late.98 Since the intrusion of household men continued up to the end of the reign, it is likely, however, that their appointment also helped inadvertently to disrupt the established networks of power and influence run by the county gentry. A household man such as John Noreys was appointed as sheriff no fewer than six times to different counties, and, with his friend, William Catesby, he was able to build-up an extensive household network in the East Midlands.99 Inevitably new factions formed round these appointments and helped to expose, and arouse protests against, the corrupt practices of rivals in office. The crown’s response in 1440 was to empower justices of the peace to investigate whether sheriffs accepted bribes in appointing panels of juries and arrays.100 Fears of prosecution on these counts may well explain the higher percentage of inquisitions held by sheriffs between 1445 and 1449, and the sharp fall in the proportion of writs they declared too late. It is not surprising, though, that as the weakness and ineptitude of Henry VI’s government became more apparent, and the unfolding disasters in France, followed by Cade’s Rebellion in 1450, undermined what remained of royal prestige, so the sheriffs found their own authority weakened, while at the same time they undoubtedly felt they had less to fear from the royal government. Between 1450 and 1459, the proportion of writs they declared too late rose to an average of 30 per cent while the average number of inquisitions fell steadily from over 60 per cent down to 49 per cent. That it was as high in this period of political disintegration as it had been under Edward III says something probably for the continuing control exercised by Chancery. It may also say something for the minimum standards of responsibility demanded by county society, which were expressed in 1450 when the commons in parliament protested about the corrupt appointment of sheriffs.101 Credit, in particular, met a universal need, and if repayments were not enforced then creditors would cease to lend, and landowners knew they would not escape the consequences. Accordingly, even the most corrupt sheriffs had to accept that there were limits beyond which they could not go without incurring the censure of their fellow gentry, among whom they had to live when their year of office ceased to protect them.102 Edward IV had to cope with a huge inherited problem of lawlessness, but he was able to restore the authority of the crown largely by his determination to use the extensive powers still vested in it, without making any new legal claims for

98 Watts, Henry VI and the Politics of Kingship, 100; Jeffs, “The Later Medieval Sheriff”, 213; Griffiths, Reign of Henry VI, 335, 337. 99 Ibid., 340–1. 100 Statutes of the Realm, ii. 311, 336–7 (18 Henry VI, c. 14). The government sought and acquired detailed knowledge of those it considered appointing as sheriffs and JPs: Jack R. Lander, English Justices of the Peace 1461–1509 (Gloucester: Sutton, 1989), 41–2. 101 Rolls of Parliament, v. 181. 102 Carpenter, “Law, Justice and Landowners”, 225.

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the royal prerogative.103 He showed in his first parliament that he intended to build on the existing precedents for reforming the local administration of justice by increasing the powers of the justices of the peace over those of the sheriffs. In a statute which handed over to the former all process for indictments made in the sheriff’s tourn, he made it illegal for any sheriff to attach, arrest or fine anyone indicted before him and so deprived them of one ready means of extortion.104 Although the sheriffs and the justices of the peace belonged to the same social group of landed gentry, and shared the same interests, as well as often serving (although not simultaneously) in both offices, any measure which reduced the sheriff’s individual power to profit from his year in office could only help to concentrate his energies on his official responsibilities.105 This was encouraged by the king’s introduction of official payments from the sheriffs’ own revenues to compensate them for their large annual expenses.106 Accordingly the sheriff did not have to make a priority the use of corrupt or extortionate means to cover his expenses. The king’s success in re-establishing royal authority is illustrated between 1465 and 1469 by the decline to 23.6 per cent in the number of writs the sheriffs declared too late, while the proportion of inquisitions they achieved rose significantly to 64.5 per cent. Although Edward IV passed no important legislation on law and order, he did use commissions of oyer and terminer staffed by powerful men, often his councillors, or members of his household, to deal with major lawlessness. Similarly, in 1471, on recovering the throne, he immediately forced all the sheriffs except four to resign, replacing them with members of his household.107 Also he employed a personal network of retainers to administer his estates, and sometimes to act as sheriffs or justices of the peace, who kept him in touch with the localities.108 It is not clear, though, that he had a consistent policy of increasing the royal estates and their revenues as a means of extending royal authority, because he presented to others much of what he gained.109 It is not convincing, therefore, to ascribe to his territorial acquisitions, or to the growth of the royal affinity in the 1470s, the improvement in the sheriffs’ performance.110 He did, though, have a remarkable knowledge of county society and applied much stricter supervision over local offices.111 This is no doubt the main

103 Ross, Edward IV, 299, 301–2, 396–402; Robin L. Storey, The Reign of Henry VII (London: Blandford Press, 1968), 140–1. 104 Statutes of the Realm, ii, 389 (1 Edward IV, c. 2). 105 Storey, Reign of Henry VII, 144. 106 Ibid. 107 Jeffs, “The Later Medieval Sheriff”, 236; Ross, Edward IV, 398–9. 108 Ross, Edward IV, 330; David A.L. Morgan, “The King’s Affinity in the Polity of Yorkist England”, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th series, 23 (1973): 20–1. 109 Charles Ross, “The Reign of Edward IV”, in eds. Stanley B. Chrimes, Charles Ross, and Ralph Griffiths, Fifteenth-Century England, 55–7. 110 Watts, Henry VI and the Politics of Kingship, 94–5. 111 Jack R. Lander, Crown and Nobility, 1450–1509 (Montreal and Kingston, Canada: McGillQueen’s University Press, 1976), 167–9.

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reason why the sheriffs maintained a level of 62.7 per cent of inquisitions between 1470 and 1474. A contributory factor was that after 1470, uncooperative liberties ceased to be responsible for more than the occasional unanswered writ. But between 1475 and 1479, there was an interval in which there occurred a marked fall in the proportion of Statute Staple inquisitions to 46 per cent of the writs without a corresponding rise in the proportion of writs claimed to have arrived too late. The fall, it appears, was not for any political reasons, but because of an increase to 16 per cent of the number of debtors found to have no property, and also because of a marked increase in the number of debtors who had died. Closer examination, though, shows that the majority of the debts of the deceased debtors were old ones, with seven dating back to 1440–70, compared with only three of them thereafter. By contrast, all but one of the debtors found to have no property had entered into the debt in the 1470s. This unusual pattern suggests that there was in the late 1470s a concerted attempt by worried creditors to call in old debts, even if they were so old that they did not know if the debtor was still alive, while at the same time creditors were demanding swift repayment by men who had suddenly found themselves in financial difficulties. In the early 1470s, the crown had made heavy financial demands on taxpayers as it planned for a war with France. It levied in the years 1472–5 more than the total taxation in all the previous years of the reign. Only Henry V had raised more taxes in so short a time.112 In addition, it seems there was a financial crisis among the mercantile community, almost certainly caused by a sudden stoppage of wool exports to Calais from January 1477 when the French invaded the duchy of Burgundy.113 Wool exports plunged in 1477–8, particularly from London, and there was a corresponding fall in the amount of silver brought to the London mint.114 Because the network of credit throughout the kingdom depended so much on London merchants, and on the production of silver coin for the retail trade, these events would be sufficient for creditors to take immediate action to call in loans, with the consequence that many debtors, like a wool merchant in 1478, and the Calais stapler left destitute in 1479, must have found themselves bankrupted.115 This interval illustrates that the economy still had a part to play in the difficulties faced by sheriffs in enforcing Statute Staple inquisitions. These five years, though, proved to be but a temporary setback in what was otherwise a pattern of consistent improvement in the proportion of Statute Staple writs successfully executed by the sheriffs under the Yorkist kings. This is important to note in view of the scepticism expressed by Charles Ross whether

112 Ross, Edward IV, 214–18. 113 Lloyd, The English Wool Trade in the Middle Ages, 281. 114 Eleanor M. Carus-Wilson, England’s Export Trade 1275–1547 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), 67; Challis (ed.), A New History of the Royal Mint, Appendix. 115 Compare, Nightingale, “Money and Credit”, 59–62; C. 131/244/19; C. 131/245/3.

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Edward IV actually made the administration of justice more efficient.116 For the first time since the introduction of Statute Staple, the proportion of inquisitions rose to 70 per cent in 1480–4, although, in the political uncertainties of the five years following Henry VII’s seizure of the throne in 1485, the figure fell again to 60 per cent. The most significant factor in explaining the rise in the proportion of inquisitions was the fall in the number of writs the sheriffs declared had arrived too late. They were down to a mere 8.5 per cent in 1480–4 but rose to 25.9 per cent in 1485–9. This again illustrates how political insecurity either weakened the sheriffs’ own authority or encouraged them to think they were less subject to central supervision. Another factor in the greater effectiveness of the sheriffs was the continued growth in the powers of the chancellor and his court which, in turn, were stimulated by the needs of the mercantile community. While the chancellor’s special jurisdiction over staple towns had provided a substantial part of his cases throughout the fifteenth century, by the 1480s Chancery had become the forum for general mercantile disputes, principally about debt. The number of its judicial cases doubled in the Yorkist period, and approached that of King’s Bench, largely because of commercial suits coming from towns.117 These mainly took the form of appeals from lower courts, which meant that the chancellor came to supervise and control the workings of local courts in a way that was new.118 Moreover in 1472, John Morton was the first civil lawyer to be appointed Master of the Rolls, and increasingly Chancery clerks were recruited from university-trained lawyers. Their sense of professionalism, allied to the businessman’s perspective (and the lucrative fees) they gained from their many mercantile clients, can only have made them doubly impatient with corrupt or inefficient sheriffs who hindered their work. Like his predecessors, Henry VII appointed councillors and household men as sheriffs in times of crisis, particularly in 1485 and in the aftermath of the Cornish rebellion.119 His methods, though, show a departure from those of Yorkist rule in his resort to new legislation to control the local agents of the crown, and by a greater emphasis on central direction by the chancellor.120 In 1495, there is evidence that pressure was placed on the escheators by Chancery to be more vigorous in executing their offices, while they were increasingly subjected to the supervision of royal councillors.121 The king also introduced a new statute in 1495

116 Ross, Edward IV, 388. 117 Pronay, “The Chancellor, the Chancery, and the Council”, 89–96. 118 Ibid., 92–5; Mark Beilby, “The Profits of Expertise: The Rise of the Civil Medieval Lawyers and Chancery Equity”, in Michael A. Hicks (ed.), Profit, Piety and the Professions in Later Medieval England (Gloucester: Sutton Pub. Ltd., 1990), 78–83. 119 Margaret M. Condon, “Ruling Elites in the Reign of Henry VII”, in C. Ross (ed.), Patronage, Pedigree and Power (Gloucester: A. Sutton Pub. Ltd., 1979), 125–6. 120 Statutes of the Realm, ii. 580 (11 Henry VII, c. 15). 121 Dominic Luckett, “Henry VII and the South-Western Escheators”, in Benjamin Thompson (ed.), The Reign of Henry VII (Stamford: Paul Watkins, 1995), 54–64, 58–61.

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attacking the extortion practised by sheriffs and their staff. Justices of the peace were given the power, on the receipt of a complaint, to examine sheriffs, their staff and their accounts, for evidence of extortion and deceit and to fine them on conviction without further enquiry.122 But even before these moves, it is clear that Henry had greater success than Edward IV in his campaign to make the sheriffs more effective servants of justice. The proportion of Statute Staple writs they successfully executed rose notably to over 80 per cent from 1490 (10 per cent higher than the best result under Edward), and this trend continued in Henry VIII’s reign under the chancellorship of Wolsey. From 1515 to 1529, the figure reached an average of 95 per cent, even though the number of writs almost doubled between 1510 and 1519 compared with the previous decade. The success was achieved primarily by the reduction in those claimed to arrive too late and to a lesser degree by falls in the number of deceased debtors and of those without property. The writs claimed to be too late declined to under 10 per cent in 1490–4, to under 5 per cent in 1505–19 and became negligible between 1520 and 1529. Chancery, it seems, had finally brought the sheriffs to heel. Thus, Henry VII was able to enforce Statute Staple recognisances to a degree never achieved before, and despite his son’s apparent repudiation of his father’s methods of ruling, seen most strikingly in the execution of Empson and Dudley, the efficiency of the system continued. No longer, it seems, did it depend on the individual personality of the king or on his ability to terrorise his subjects. Instead, its effectiveness had been institutionalised. This is an important correction to the revisionist interpretation that portrays Henry VII as an ineffectual king and his reign in Lander’s words as one in which ‘local forces had perhaps become so dominant as to produce something like stalemate in government’.123 Undoubtedly local disorders continued in his reign as they did in the reign of Edward IV, but there is no reason for thinking that the cause was Henry VII’s failure to understand how English government worked, or his particular mistrust of the local power structures on which its effectiveness ultimately depended.124 Peers, in fact, are recorded in increasing numbers as active on the peace commissions in the second part of his reign, and in Rosemary Horrox’s view, Henry ‘continued to look to the nobility as his chief representatives in local affairs’ and ‘made no sustained attempt to undermine their authority as the natural leaders of local society’.125 But local elites were now aware of more central supervision and were also aware that they could pay heavily for failing to meet the minimum standards expected in administering royal justice.

122 Statutes of the Realm, ii. 580 (11 Henry VII, c. 15). 123 Lander, Limitations of English Monarchy, 52. See also Thompson in ed. Thompson, The Reign of Henry VII, 8–9. 124 Ross, Edward IV, 404–13; Carpenter, “Henry VII and the English Polity”, 18, 22–4. 125 Condon, “Ruling Elites”, 121; Rosemary Horrox, “Yorkist and Early Tudor England”, in Christopher Allmand (ed.), The New Cambridge Medieval History, Vol. 7 (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1998), 494–5.

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How was this progress in the enforcement of judicial writs achieved? Clearly it was not all the work of Henry VII. Apart from acute periods of disruption such as 1420–4, and the steady deterioration in the 1450s, the fifteenth century saw the sheriffs increasing the proportion of Statute Staple writs that they executed. The limitation of their office to one year almost certainly helped to reduce sheriffs’ opportunities for corruption, but it by no means indicated the end of royal supervision of county government. Compared with the effectiveness of legislation to ensure the closer supervision of sheriffs by the chancellor and by the local justices of the peace, the appointment of household servants as sheriffs and the extension of crown lands and of the royal affinity seem to have played little part in improving the sheriffs’ performance. The standards they achieved in 1415–19, and in the minority of Henry VI, shows what was possible both with, and without, a strong king, provided there was an effective chancellor willing to use his powers, including the sub-pena writ, to enforce justice from the centre. The growth in Chancery’s popularity as a court shows clearly how welcome this development was to a wide class of people, particularly urban merchants, who needed royal justice to protect their livelihoods. The same need is visible in the clients of the Court of Common Pleas, where in 1465 over 80 per cent of the defendants, and probably the same proportion of plaintiffs, were below the rank of gentry, with husbandmen and craftsmen accounting for nearly one-third of them.126 Henry VII built on Edward IV’s work to achieve even greater success in making the sheriffs execute writs sent to them by Chancery. One of the methods he used to enforce his will was the use of recognisances to bind the nobility and other landowners to obey him and to keep the peace on pain of huge sums of money paid to the crown.127 Recognisances were not particularly novel as they had long been used to constrain both greater and lesser subjects, whether aristocratic miscreants or debtors to the duchy of Cornwall, and, in the form of peace bonds, they were commonly used in fifteenth-century Cheshire to curb strife and disorder.128 Similarly, Statute Merchant and Staple recognisances involving huge sums of money had been used for two centuries as penalties to guarantee family settlements, or to resolve territorial disputes, and the sheriffs were accustomed to give recognisances to the Exchequer on taking office.129 The sub-pena writ was powerful precisely because of the financial penalties it had used since 1353, and Edward IV employed these writs not only as political tools, but to keep the

126 Palmer, “England: Law, Society and the State”, 257, Table 13.3. 127 Lander, Limitations of English Monarchy, 122–3, 267–300. 128 James F. Baldwin, The King’s Council in England during the Middle Ages (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1913), 304–5; Alan Harding, The Law Courts of Medieval England (London: Allen & Unwin, 1973), 105–6; Dorothy J. Clayton, “Peace Bonds and the Maintenance of Law and Order in Late Medieval England: The Example of Cheshire”, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 58 (1985): 133–48; Mark R. Horwitz, “Richard Empson, Minister of Henry VII”, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 55 (1982): 41. 129 National Archives, E 199/53/6, 7, 8, 9; Condon, “Ruling Elites”, 126 and n 86–7, 133.

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peace, to enforce judgments or to compel attendance in Chancery, and before the council. The penalties involved in them and in penal bonds were often large and in one case amounted to £410,667.130 Henry VII merely adopted and used more extensively, and more ruthlessly, an existing system of financial coercion. No more novel was his use of informants, often the crown’s own financial and local estate officials, who by-passed the usual channels and reported on royal officials directly to the king’s council.131 Edward IV had also used such methods to keep in touch with developments in the counties.132 Henry, though, made it clear publicly that the royal government would welcome local information and complaints about the administration of justice, and sheriffs were prosecuted for taking bribes and forfeited their recognisances for failing in their duties.133 Even the powerful Stanleys in the distant north-west found their control of local offices curbed and their holders made to serve the crown and not their own pockets.134 The council, with its subcommittees, was Henry’s main weapon in the fight to impose law and order. It was now dominated by lawyers, who exploited to the full the king’s judicial and coercive powers to control disobedient subjects.135 The chancellor, though, continued to be the key figure in ensuring the effective operation of the law by the sheriffs and justices of the peace. In legislation of 1487–9, Henry VII consolidated and systematised what had been a piece-meal development of the chancellor’s powers, while John Morton’s occupation of the chancellor’s office from 1486 until his death in 1500 imparted continuity and a sense of permanence to his supervision of the administration of justice.136 The results are indicated by the increased use of Statute Staple procedures by creditors in preference to the Statute Merchant system. The Staple certificates rose in the 1460s to over 90 per cent of the total, and to almost 100 per cent by 1500. Possibly this reflects the economic troubles of the smaller provincial towns which had Statute Merchant courts, but since the trend continued as credit increased from the 1490s, it suggests that creditors were consciously favouring the Statute Staple system because of its effective supervision by Chancery. By then the sheriffs were holding inquisitions for 95 per cent of the staple writs sent to them for execution, and the soaring number of Statute Staple certificates in the 1520s can be compared with the apparent slump in business experienced then by the courts of King’s

130 Patricia M. Barnes, “The Chancery Corpus Cum Causa File, 10–11 Edward IV”, in eds. Roy F. Hunnisett and John B. Post, Medieval Legal Records, 434–40. 131 Luckett, “Henry VII and the South-Western Escheators”, 58–60; Condon, “Ruling Elites”, 132. 132 Ross, Edward IV, 301–2, 396–402. 133 Condon, “Ruling Elites”, 125–6. 134 Sean Cunningham, “Henry VII, Sir Thomas Butler, and the Stanley Family: Regional Politics and the Assertion of Royal Influence in North-Western England, 1471–1521”, in Tim Thornton (ed.), Social Attitudes and Political Structures in the Fifteenth Century (Stroud: Sutton, 2000), 7, 228–9. 135 Condon, “Ruling Elites”, 131–4. 136 Pronay, “The Chancellor, the Chancery, and the Council”, 98–9; Christopher Harper-Bill, “Morton, John (d.1500)”, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 39 (2004): 421–5.

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Bench and Common Pleas to which the Statute Merchant writs were returned.137 The benches’ profits had fallen during the first year of Wolsey’s chancellorship, and there can be little doubt that his masterful hand, and his ruthless exploitation of Chancery’s powers, not least in supervising the sheriffs, helps to explain the popularity and success of the Statute Staple system.138 Historians differ in their definition of ‘the middle class’ according to the period they study, and whereas its ‘rise’ has been used to explain all kinds of historical movements, it has recently become more fashionable to declare the term meaningless, or the middle class non-existent in this period.139 But it would be perverse not to recognise the multitude of merchants, craftsmen, lawyers, lesser gentry, yeomen and husbandmen who formed the bulk of the creditors and debtors recorded in the Statute Staple certificates, and who were responsible for the expanding legal business of Chancery, as people who by status and income belonged to the middling groups of late medieval and early Tudor society. In 1415–39, 73.3 per cent of the debtors belonged to the social classes below the richer gentry. It is important to remember their interests, how they differed from those of the large landowners, and to realise that even peasants’ voices were increasingly heard in peaceful county elections as well as in political protests.140 Although the quarrels of the magnates and county gentry over land and patronage might be served better by their own local systems of arbitration than by the king’s courts, this was unlikely to be true for their social inferiors, who eagerly turned to the courts to ratify their rights.141 As creditors, they did not want to incur the exorbitant costs which Gilbert Maghfeld, a London merchant, experienced in 1394 when he pursued two Essex customers for a registered debt of £120. It cost him £40 to succeed, much of which most likely was spent on ‘labouring’ the sheriff.142 As debtors, these people of middling status and means also needed to secure honest valuations of their property without the need to bribe the sheriff and his staff. Although the proportion of people below the rank of the greater gentry who used the Statute Staple system remained much the same throughout the fifteenth century, at about 73 per cent, the growing proportion of Londoners, both as creditors and debtors, was responsible for a significant change in their social composition. Londoners accounted for 40 per cent of the creditors in the certificates of 1430–39, for 67.2 per cent in 1460–69, for 74.5 per cent in 1480–89 and by 1500–09 for 82.6 per cent. Since the city was then the financial centre for the

137 Marjorie Blatcher, The Court of King’s Bench, 1450–1550: A Study in Self-Help (London: Athlone Press, 1978), 18–21, 25–8. 138 Ibid., 27–8; Stephen J. Gunn, Early Tudor Government (London: Palgrave, 1995), 100. 139 Goodman, The New Monarchy, 55–7; Carpenter, “Henry VII and the English Polity”, 16. 140 Simon J. Payling, “The Widening Franchise: Parliamentary Elections in Lancastrian Nottinghamshire”, in D. Williams (ed.), England in the Fifteenth Century: Proceedings of the 1986 Harlaxton Symposium (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1987), 185. 141 Maddern, Violence and Social Order, 137. 142 Nightingale, “Money and Credit”, 58, 63.

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whole kingdom, its merchants’ far-flung business operations meant they depended more than ever on the reliability and efficiency of provincial sheriffs to recover their debts. By the 1510s, Londoners were also accounting for more than half of the debtors in the certificates. This indicates the growth of the city’s economy as a whole, which first becomes visible in the certificates of the 1460s as it was soon to become visible in the rising population of London’s suburbs and in the economic growth of its surrounding region.143 London’s expanding wealth and, therefore, growing political influence help to explain Edward IV’s closeness to the London merchants who had helped him gain his throne and continued to finance him.144 No ruler, least of all usurpers like Edward and Henry VII, could afford to ignore a city whose financial support, and pool of manpower, was vital for the security of their thrones. The Londoners’ business needs could only strengthen the king’s own political requirement to make the sheriffs loyal and efficient enforcers of royal writs. This raises the question whether the growing domination of the Londoners explains the sheriffs’ greater success in executing Statute Staple writs under Edward IV and Henry VII. If fewer debtors in that period came from the county landowning class then the sheriffs’ actions would have been less influenced by class loyalties. In 1415–39, 11.3 per cent of the debtors were knights, 22.3 per cent esquires and 18.9 per cent gentlemen. The only notable change in the next hundred years was in the growing proportion of gentlemen, many of them Londoners, who were either rich merchants, lawyers or officials. By 1515–29, 13.5 per cent of the debtors were knights, 19.5 per cent were esquires and 34.3 per cent gentlemen. These figures do not suggest that sheriffs might have found it easier to execute writs in the late fifteenth century because they were proceeding against rising numbers of men who were their social inferiors. In fact, the analysis of the debtors by social class suggests that class loyalties did not conspicuously influence the ways in which sheriffs executed the writs. Whereas between 1415 and 1439, knights, esquires and gentlemen could have Table 6.2 Social class of debtors in the Statute Staple writs, 1415–1529 Date

Total Knight writs

Esquire

Gent

Yeoman

Husbandman Others

1415–39 1440–64 1465–89 1490–1514 1515–29

239 355 335 696 379

53 (22.2%) 85 (23.9) 51 (15.2%) 132 (19%) 74 (19.5%)

45 (18.8%) 86 (24.2) 146 (43.6%) 249 (35.8%) 130 (34.3%)

3 (1.3%) 16 (4.5) 18 (5.7%) 50 (7.2) 27 (7.1%)

14 (5.9%) 10 (2.8) 18 (5.4%) 10 (1.4%) 5 (1.3%)

27 (11.3%) 42 (11.8) 28 (8.3%) 84 (12.1%) 51 (13.5%)

97 (40.6%) 116 (32.7%) 74 (22.0%) 171 (24.6%) 92 (24.3%)

143 Richard Britnell, “The English Economy and the Government”, in John L. Watts (ed.), The End of the Middle Ages? (Stroud: Sutton Publishing Ltd., 1998), 95–7. 144 Nightingale, A Medieval Mercantile Community, 513–18; Ross, Edward IV, 351–70.

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profited, as debtors, slightly more than other groups from writs declared to have arrived too late, between 1440 and 1489 they did so less, and much the same thereafter.145 The one exception is the extent to which they were imprisoned. Before 1465, it seems that insolvent knights escaped imprisonment, and that esquires and gentlemen were imprisoned to a lesser degree than the other groups. By 1490– 1514, however, when the proportion of inquisitions had risen conspicuously for all the groups except husbandmen, there is no evidence that any one group was favoured by the sheriffs. One could argue that this was not necessarily evidence of the sheriffs’ impartiality. If they were motivated more by money than by social connection, then London creditors were in a better financial position to bribe them than were impoverished debtors of their own landed class. There must be doubts, though, about how easy it was for London creditors to bribe distant sheriffs, and whether bribes could outweigh for sheriffs the disapproval of county society and the more serious threats of a summons before the king’s council and of losing their recognisances. Henry VII, a financier to his fingertips, understood the coercive power of money. His own accumulation of cash illustrates that he probably attached to it as much importance in maintaining his rule as the extension of the crown lands and the royal affinity. The long tradition of complaints about dishonest sheriffs also made him aware that by making the sheriffs efficient and obedient servants of the crown he could win the support of a wider group of people, and thereby establish his throne on more secure foundations. What the Statute Staple writs show is that, harsh though Henry’s methods undoubtedly were, in his reign the sheriffs did execute them more effectively. To what degree there was similar success in the case of writs returned to the other central courts must await more research. The fall in the business of King’s Bench and Common Pleas in the 1520s suggests that when the chancellor’s eye was not directly on them, the sheriffs may have been much slower to reform. Chancery’s success, though, rested not just on royal support, but on the popularity it had gained with the mercantile community because of the effective and speedy justice it could provide. A widening social class came for similar reasons to support Henry’s conciliar courts, which promised them the peace, order and justice they needed for their affairs to prosper. The consequence was that law enforcement ceased to depend so heavily on the personality of individual kings since it could survive Henry VIII’s exchanging his father’s detailed attention to government for wasteful adventures abroad. In summary, it can be said that the returns of Statute Staple writs indicate that the delegation of judicial authority to the landed classes from the mid-fourteenth century did not result in deteriorating execution of writs by sheriffs except in those

145 The figures are 1415–39: knights, esquires and gentlemen had 25.7 per cent of writs naming them as debtors pronounced too late, compared with 23.5 per cent for their social inferiors; the relevant figures for 1440–64 are 17 per cent and 32.8 per cent; for 1465–89, 21.2 per cent and 23.6 per cent; for 1490–514, 3.44 per cent and 2.3 per cent; for 1515–29, 0.91 per cent and 0.27 per cent.

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periods when the authority of the crown was weakened, or when economic crises made their execution more difficult. Sheriffs actually improved on their record under Edward III, probably because of the supervisory powers which the chancellor acquired over them from 1346, and because the sub-pena writ gave Chancery a powerful means of increasing its own authority. But the contrast between what Richard II, faced by the Appellants, and Henry V achieved (if only for a short period) illustrates how much still depended on the abilities, policies and commitment of individual monarchs. Yet the minority government of Henry VI shows that chancellors had by then acquired statutory powers that were sufficient to allow them to improve the quality of shrieval administration in the localities, even in the absence of a strong monarch. A weak and easily-led king such as Henry VI still had the power to undo all the progress achieved in making the sheriffs more accountable. But the appointment of sheriffs from the royal household, and the expansion of the royal affinity in the counties, seems to have made little difference to the standards achieved in the local administration of Statute Staple writs. Since men appointed in this way had to work closely with the local gentry, and often belonged to their ranks, they were just as likely, if unsupervised from the centre, to become embroiled in local power struggles. Edward IV clearly began a sustained recovery of royal authority, which was slowed only by economic and political crises, while earlier legislative additions to the chancellor’s powers laid the foundations that Henry VII ‘proceeded to systematize and complete’.146 Henry’s success was achieved primarily through his ruthless use of financial penalties as an effective means of coercing offenders and officials alike. This was made possible by the greater availability of coin and was encouraged by his own keenness to accumulate it. But success was also due to the higher professional standards that had developed in Chancery, resulting in the more effective supervision of sheriffs and other local officials, regardless of the interest of individual monarchs. This development, and the willingness of Henry VII’s subjects to tolerate his harsh and grasping rule, owed much to the legal needs of merchants, professional men, smaller landowners and richer peasants, who made up most of the middling social class in status and wealth. Their use of credit was increasing as the money supply began to recover at the very end of the fifteenth century, by which time London was the undisputed financial centre of the kingdom. The vital economic and political importance of the Londoners to the usurpers Edward IV and Henry VII made these monarchs keener to meet their need for an efficient and impartially administered system for recovering debts speedily and cheaply. Accordingly, as in most of English history, changes in local government can be studied and explained only by linking them with developments at the centre. Both seem to fit more the evolutionary model of English justice proposed by Musson and Ormrod (although the process was far from complete in the fourteenth

146 Pronay, “The Chancellor, the Chancery, and the Council”, 98.

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century) than they fit the ideas of a surrender of royal control over local government from the middle of the fourteenth century until its restoration by the ‘new monarchy’. Most of the powers which Henry VII used to make royal authority effective had been available to Edward III and were never surrendered. In the words of Musson and Ormrod, ‘The king and council retained the initiative in shaping the judicial system and could at any time alter it to suit the needs of the state’.147 Thus, despite the delegation of local government to the county gentry in the fourteenth century, and the king’s reliance on them and the nobility to maintain order, people of all social classes looked to the king’s courts for the resolution of matters which affected their ordinary lives, including the recovery of the debts that allowed the economy to function adequately. Even if the larger landowners could help to solve their own disputes by private arbitration, for the great majority of the king’s subjects the question of how well the sheriffs executed royal writs was one of vital importance, as the litany of complaints about sheriffs in parliament and in popular risings shows. Only the crown could bring pressure on them to make them more honest and effective in their duties, while intelligent kings, particularly if they were usurpers, realised that by doing so they could strengthen their own position as rulers. As London increasingly dominated the English economy, so it became more important to win and keep the support of its mercantile class for whom the ease of recovering debts could make the difference between survival and bankruptcy. By identifying his interests with these forces of social change, as well as by utilising fully the powers of the crown which he inherited, and those which had gradually developed through the work of Chancery, and through his own statutes, it seems that Henry VII achieved some real improvement in the administration of local justice in ways that people wanted, that is by making the sheriffs better servants of the people as well as of the crown.

147 Musson and Ormrod, Evolution of English Justice, 114.

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7 THE RISE AND DECLINE OF MEDIEVAL YORK A reassessment

In 1377 York could justify its claim to be the capital of the north with a tax-paying population that was second in size only to London’s, but by 1525 it had fallen to eleventh place in urban assessments.1 If one town could serve as a case study for two important themes of late medieval English economic history, namely, urban decline and the emergence of a north–south divide, York was surely it. The contrast between its earlier success and its decline in the fifteenth century is particularly worthy of analysis because York enjoyed advantages that normally guaranteed prosperity for medieval towns: it served as a seat of royal government in the early fourteenth century, as the ecclesiastical capital of the north, as a centre for the wool trade, and as the distributor of imports and its own products throughout a wide region.2 Furthermore, from the mid-fourteenth century it developed a thriving cloth industry which diversified its export trade.3 These varied sources of its prosperity meant that York had features in common with many other English towns which shared some of its early success, and with many, too, which shared its decline. Existing scholarship has indicated that the reasons for its decline included warfare, mortality crises, the failure of the urban cloth industry to compete with rural production, the international politics that shut out English manufactures from the North German and Baltic markets, and the consequent funnelling of trade through London. Most recently Jenny Kermode has also stressed York’s reduced sources of credit during the bullion famine of the mid-fifteenth century and the spread of London’s financial and commercial tentacles northwards.4 Did these contrasting fortunes of York and London reflect

1 Alan Dyer, “Ranking Lists of English Medieval Towns”, in David M. Palliser (ed.), The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, i, 600–1540 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 765. 2 Richard Britnell, “The Economy of British Towns, 1300–1540”, in ed. Palliser, Cambridge Urban History of Britain, i, 313–14. 3 Jennifer Kermode, “Northern Towns”, in ed. Palliser, Cambridge Urban History of Britain, i, 678–9. 4 Jenny Kermode, Medieval Merchants: York, Beverley and Hull in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 264, 273–5, 308–10, 314; Jennifer I. Kermode, “Merchants, Overseas Trade, and Urban Decline: York, Beverley, and Hull, c. 1380–1500”, Northern Hist., 23

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the emergence in the fifteenth century of a fundamental economic divide between northern and southern England, or are Barrie Dobson’s observations on towns in this period more apposite to York’s case? As Dobson remarked, ‘The more intensive the research conducted on individual late medieval towns . . . the more apparent seems the singularity of each urban place’, and the more they reveal ‘continuous and even alarming short-term volatility’ and a ‘more or less “crisisridden” urban scene’.5 These features are certainly evident in fifteenth-century York – but do they also illuminate significant strands in English urban history in this period that make York a representative, rather than a singular, case?

I To view York’s decline in perspective requires a proper understanding of its previous rise to prosperity. What modern studies have in common is that, following the pioneering work of Neville Bartlett and Edward Miller, they assume that York was at its most prosperous in the late fourteenth century, when its cloth industry increased its population and diversified its trade.6 Although Sarah Rees Jones and Jeremy Goldberg have criticized Bartlett’s emphasis on the overriding importance of the cloth industry to York’s economy, only Mark Ormrod has questioned what has become the generally accepted chronology of York’s rise and decline in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.7 He has pointed out that, judging by the comparative financial evidence, it is in the early fourteenth century, and not in its latter half, that York appears in the records of royal taxation as second only to London.8 In 1304 York paid in tallage 32 per cent of London’s total, but by 1334

5 6

7

8

(1987): 62–73; Jennifer I. Kermode, “Money and Credit in the Fifteenth Century: Some Lessons from Yorkshire”, Business Hist. Rev., 65 (1991); Peter P. Goldberg, Women, Work, and Life Cycle in a Medieval Economy: Women in York and Yorkshire, c. 1300–1520 (Oxford: Clarendon Press,1992), 71–81; Anthony J. Pollard, North-Eastern England during the Wars of the Roses: Lay Society, War and Politics, 1450–1500 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 71–4; David M. Palliser, “A Crisis in English Towns? The Case of York, 1460–1640”, Northern Hist., 14 (1978), 113. Barrie Dobson, “General Survey, 1300–1540”, in ed. Palliser, Cambridge Urban History of Britain, i, 273–4. Edward Miller, “Medieval York: The 12th and 13th Centuries”, in Peter M. Tillot (ed.), A History of Yorkshire: The City of York (Oxford: Victoria County Histories, 1961); James N. Bartlett, “The Expansion and Decline of York in the Later Middle Ages”, Econ. Hist. Rev., 2nd ser., 12 (1959); James N. Bartlett, “Some Aspects of the Economy of York in the Later Middle Ages, 1300–1550” (University of London Ph.D. thesis, 1958). Sarah Rees Jones, “Property, Tenure and Rents: Some Aspects of the Topography and Economy of Medieval York” (University of York Ph.D. thesis, 1987), 15; Goldberg, Women, Work, and Life Cycle in a Medieval Economy, 23; W. Mark Ormrod, “York and the Crown under the First Three Edwards”, in Sarah Rees Jones (ed.), The Government of Medieval York: Essays in Commemoration of the 1396 Royal Charter (York: Borthwick Studies in History, 1997), iii. Ormrod, “York and the Crown under the First Three Edwards”, 15, 29–31; Dyer, “Ranking Lists of English Medieval Towns”, 765.

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the lay subsidy indicates that it had fallen in wealth to third place, and paid only 22 per cent of London’s tax quota.9 Financial recovery could be indicated by the large contribution its merchants made from the late 1330s to fund Edward III’s campaigns in France, but after 1347 York contributed virtually nothing to the crown until the 1370s – by which time it had fallen a long way behind Bristol and, of course, London.10 These comparisons would seem to indicate that the decline of York’s wealth began early in the fourteenth century and was not necessarily reversed by the later development of its cloth industry. Although York’s own records in the Middle Ages are abundant, it is well known that they can give rise to misleading impressions about its economic development. The lists of men admitted to the franchise cannot be treated as reliable guides to the growth and decline of its population.11 Tax returns can also mislead because of changing policies on exemptions, and because of the perennial temptation to falsify returns. Rentals and valuations of property were also affected by changing administrative policies and by religious endowments, as well as by inflation, and do not necessarily reflect the increase of the urban population.12 The size of the population, moreover, is not necessarily an indicator of the city’s wealth. On the other hand, records of credit can provide a chronology for, and measurement of, economic change by indicating rising or falling levels of economic activity.13 The present article uses the Statute Merchant and Staple certificates of debt in order to supplement the extensive body of published work on the city. These certificates, now in the National Archives, were instituted by the Statute Merchant of 1285, which was supplemented by the Statute Staple of 1353. The statutes set up a system for recording debts in local registries in the principal towns, of which York was one, and, although the certificates reveal only those debts that were unpaid, detailed analysis indicates that these provide a consistent sample of the whole; moreover, they were

9 John F. Hadwin, “The Last Royal Tallages”, Eng. Hist. Rev., 96 (1981): 358; Ormrod, “York and the Crown under the First Three Edwards”, 29–31. The 1334 lay subsidy may not have accurately depicted York’s wealth: see Pamela Nightingale, “The Lay Subsidies and the Distribution of Wealth in Medieval England, 1275–1334”, Econ. Hist. Rev., 2nd ser., 57 (2004): 26–7, repr. in Pamela Nightingale, Trade, Money and Power in Medieval England (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Ltd., 2007). 10 W. Mark Ormrod, “Competing Capitals? York and London in the Fourteenth Century”, in Sarah Rees Jones, Richard Marks, and Alastair J. Minnis (eds.), Courts and Regions in Medieval Europe (York: York Medieval Press, 2000), 97. 11 See the discussion by Goldberg in his Women, Work, and Life Cycle in a Medieval Economy, 40–63, of the poll tax records and those of admissions to the franchise. Also R. Barrie Dobson, “Admissions to the Freedom of the City of York in the Later Middle Ages”, Econ. Hist. Rev., 2nd ser., 26 (1973): 1–22; Christian D. Liddy, War, Politics and Finance in Late Medieval English Towns: Bristol, York and the Crown, 1350–1400 (Woodbridge: Royal Historical Society, Boydell Press, 2005), 83–4. 12 Rees Jones, “Property, Tenure and Rents”, 181–269, 302. 13 Nightingale, “Lay Subsidies and the Distribution of Wealth in Medieval England”.

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York Creditors and Debtors 1285−1529

£ 12,000.00 10,000.00 8,000.00

Value of Credit

6,000.00

Value of Debts

4,000.00 2,000.00

1520–29

1490–99

1460–69

1430–39

1400–09

1370–79

1340–49

1310–19

1285–89

0.00

Figure 7.1 York creditors and debtors, 1285–1529 Source: National Archives, London, Public Record Office (since removed to Kew), C. 241, Certificates of Statute Merchant and Statute Staple.

less open than tax records to falsification because both debtors and creditors had an interest in recording accurately what was owed.14 Consequently, the certificates of debt provide important evidence of economic and social change which allows York’s fortunes to be analysed afresh within a national context (see Figure 7.1). In the first ten years of the Statute Merchant system (1285–94), the certificates demonstrate that York creditors recorded more transactions than those of any other provincial town. They show unpaid credit registered by its inhabitants in those years totalling £9,438, which was 78 per cent of that registered in the same period by denizen inhabitants of London. We cannot therefore rely on the relative scarcity of men recorded as entering the freedom of York in these years to conclude, as Bartlett did, that its population was then smaller than at any subsequent time in the Middle Ages.15 There is, in fact, no direct evidence from which to gauge the size of York’s population before the Black Death.16 And if the suggestion that the number of different occupations in a town bears some relationship to its population is valid, then it may be significant that over a hundred are recorded in York in the first half of the fourteenth century, almost as many as in London, and not

14 For a full discussion of the Statute Merchant and Staple certificates (Class C. 241) in the National Archives, see Pamela Nightingale, “Monetary Contraction and Mercantile Credit in Later Medieval England”, Econ. Hist. Rev., 2nd ser., 43 (1990), repr. in Nightingale, Trade, Money and Power. 15 Bartlett, “Some Aspects of the Economy of York”, 184; Miller, “Medieval York”, 84. 16 Goldberg, Women, Work, and Life Cycle in a Medieval Economy, 77.

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so many less than the 126 listed in York’s poll tax return for 1381, when the cloth industry had expanded.17 It appears from the certificates that York’s prosperity at the end of the thirteenth century was based mainly on its position as a collecting centre for the wool of north-west England, a function which helped to secure an extensive market for its distributive trade.18 The credit in over a hundred certificates between 1284 and 1294 was given specifically by York men for the purchase of wool. The city’s merchants were obviously contributing substantially, as middlemen, to Hull’s exports, and most of the coin that supported York’s credit and enterprise came through the overseas earnings of the wool trade, which in this period was dominated by alien, mainly Italian, exporters. They financed their northern purchases of wool by selling their imports for sterling in London or at Boston and the other international fairs. By transferring these payments to Hull, or directly to York, they carried coin northwards from the London mint, thereby enriching the wool-growing counties.19 Although only one minor York merchant appears as an exporter in the Hull wool customs accounts for 1290–1, at least sixty-two individual York merchants registered credit dealings during the period 1284–94; but of these only Peter de Appleby, who was the creditor in 193 certificates, and John de Grantham, the creditor in eighty-seven, stood out. The wide area from which York merchants drew their purchases of wool also gave them an extensive market for the distribution of York’s manufactures and imports, including cloth, leather, metal and glass, and wine bought from Gascon importers. They also supplied the city’s residents, including its numerous religious houses and its often-large transient population, with fish and corn. Although many of these transactions were for small sums, their combined value in this period illustrates how much wealth a town could acquire, even if its merchants were middlemen rather than exporters, provided that its hinterland was extensive and productive enough, and the circulation of coin was sufficient to allow the population to buy urban products. York merchants enjoyed another advantage in the rich supply of trading capital made available by the city’s wealthy clergy. From the archbishop and the canons of the minster downwards, clergy contributed between one-third and one-half of the credit recorded by York residents in the certificates each year. Some of their wealth was derived from the rents of the minster’s estates and from demesne

17 Miller and Hatcher, Medieval England, 325. On the relationship between occupational diversity and the size of urban populations, see Derek Keene, “Continuity and Development in Urban Trades: Problems of Concepts and the Evidence”, in Penelope J. Corfield and Derek Keene (eds.), Work in Towns, 850–1850 (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1990), 7; Goldberg, Women, Work, and Life Cycle in a Medieval Economy, 24. 18 Bell, Brooks, and Dryburgh, The English Wool Market, c. 1230–1327, 54–5. 19 Terrence H. Lloyd, The English Wool Trade in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 65 (table 3). For Italian purchases in York, see National Archives, London, Public Record Office (now The National Archives or TNA in Kew), C. 241/9, 232, 281, 299, 300, 302–3; 17/23.

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agriculture, as well as from their activities as moneylenders.20 The significance of the clergy as creditors is that in this period they were able to lend much larger sums, an average of £23 14s., compared with the average mercantile credit of £9 16s. Some clergy also invested in the wool trade for personal profit. Dean Scarborough was one of these,21 as were Canon Robert Gra22 and Canon Nicholas Ellerker.23 In fact the pattern of clerical investment followed that of mercantile investment. Both fairly closely reflected the fortunes of the wool trade, because wool exports earned most of the coin on which the volume of credit depended.24 York’s prosperity in this period was first threatened by Edward I’s decision to invade France in 1294. Heavy taxation, and the export of coin to pay the king’s allies and his army on the Continent, temporarily reduced the amount of coin in general circulation, as well as the volume of credit. The effect is visible in the certificates for York’s creditors. Their value sank in 1295 to one-third of the total for the previous year and improved little over the next six years. The crown’s interference in the trade halved the quantity of wool exported from England in the next three years and reduced its price.25 It also diverted more of the trade to London in order to escape the attacks of pirates in the North Sea.26 Exports of wool from Hull fell between 1296 and 1299 from a half to a third of London’s.27 Alien merchants virtually disappear from the certificates as creditors of York merchants between 1295 and 1304, and never returned to York in the numbers recorded between 1285 and 1294.28 Edward I’s wars, though, brought some compensations. York’s merchants had more capital to withstand economic pressures than those from Westmorland, whose debts were recorded in the Appleby wool staple. Business virtually ceased there in 1299 and moved to York. The wars with Scotland also brought the royal government to make its home in York between 1298 and 1304, the first of five such removals up to 1338 which together lasted for nearly eighteen years. Government spending benefited residents who provided lodgings, food, and drink

20 R. Barrie Dobson, “Cathedral Chapters and Cathedral Cities: York, Durham and Carlisle in the Fifteenth Century”, Northern Hist., 19 (1983): 35. 21 C. 241/84/103. 22 C. 241/8/75; 15/62; 17/80; 22/151; 25/193; 25/278, 285, 289. 23 C. 241/8/165, 166, 324, 325. See also Heather Swanson, Medieval Artisans: An Urban Class in Late Medieval England (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 139. 24 Nightingale, “Money and Credit in the Economy of Late Medieval England”, passim. 25 Lloyd, English Wool Trade, 74–98. 26 Ibid., 126. On the damaging effects of warfare, which included piracy, on European trade in general from the 1290s, see John H. Munro, “The “Industrial Crisis” of the English Textile Towns, c. 1290–c. 1330”, in Michael Prestwich, Richard Britnell, and Robin Frame (eds.), Thirteenth Century England VII: Proceedings of the Durham Conference, 1997 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1999), 135–8. 27 Carus-Wilson and Coleman, England’s Export Trade, 1275–1547, 39–40. 28 There are forty-one certificates for alien creditors of York men between 1285 and 1294, and only six between 1295 and 1304.

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for courtiers, as well as armaments and uniforms for soldiers.29 The move also increased the city’s supply of commercial capital by bringing chancery clerks who had long experience of moneylending in London. This was particularly true of those who had Yorkshire origins and connections and were canons of the minster. The most important were William de Hambleton and John de Markingfield.30 The archbishop, Thomas de Corbridge, was also a prominent moneylender.31 Warfare meant that it was not until 1305 that wool exports again surged from Hull, while their rising price also contributed to the large amounts of foreign silver that augmented the money supply.32 Only then did the credit given by York’s citizens begin to recover from its earlier steep fall. Their indebtedness also more than doubled between 1304 and 1309, signifying growth in their economic activity. This was the result of their new enterprise as exporters, which gave them higher profits than those available to middlemen and also brought more coin to the city. Between 1298 and 1305 York provided fifty-six exporters.33 This development was promoted by the disappearance of the Italians from York, by the new capital provided by chancery clerks, and by profits from sales to the court. The credit relations of York merchants intensified throughout the county as they expanded their purchases of wool and imported more goods for distribution. The total of sixty-one places which can be identified as the homes of their debtors in the years 1295–9 increased to 137 between 1304 and 1309. They were fairly evenly distributed, with slightly more in the West Riding, whence also came the greatest number of York’s freemen in the period 1311–31.34 The city’s rising commercial prosperity encouraged the reclamation of land and a building boom, which increased its population in this period.35 Growth and prosperity, though, soon stalled in the face of the natural, economic, and political disasters of the next two decades. They are partly masked in the certificates of debt by the fact that from 1311 to 1330 the system was restricted to merchants. But, since merchants had previously provided half the recorded credit, that restriction cannot by itself explain the huge fall by two-thirds in the

29 Miller, “Medieval York”, 87, 100; Ormrod, “York and the Crown under the First Three Edwards”, 22–3; Sarah Rees Jones, “Women’s Influence on the Design of Urban Homes”, in Mary C. Erler and Maryanne Kowaleski (eds.), Gendering the Master Narrative: Women and Power in the Middle Ages (New York: Cornell University Press, 2003), 205–11. 30 David R. Carr, “The Loans and Lands of William Hamilton, Dean of York and Edward I’s Last Chancellor (d. 1307)”, Northern Hist., 40 (2003): 219–36. 31 For an example of Archbishop Corbridge’s loans to York men, see C. 241/13/92. 32 Mate, “High Prices in Early Fourteenth-Century England”, 1–6. 33 Lloyd, English Wool Trade, 129. 34 Bartlett, “Some Aspects of the Economy of York”, 210 (table 1). 35 Rees Jones, “Property, Tenure and Rents”, 77–8. There is no direct evidence about the size of York’s population in the fourteenth century until the poll tax return of 1377, but since it is possible that Winchester had a population c. 1300 of ten to twelve thousand (Derek Keene, Survey of Medieval Winchester, 2 vols. (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1985), i, 367–8), and York was undoubtedly larger, it would appear that its population then may have been higher than the 12,000 or so calculated for it from the poll tax.

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value of the York creditors’ certificates in 1310–19, and, compared with the previous decade, the even greater fall to a mere £430 for the years 1320–9. The heavy rains that ruined the crops in 1315–17 brought famine prices to most parts of the kingdom and were accompanied by disease and high mortality of both men and beasts.36 Sheep scab also reduced wool exports.37 It was political events, though, which explain why Hull’s wool exports declined more markedly than those from other ports. The outbreak of war between France and Flanders, followed by a Flemish civil war, led the English to create a compulsory overseas staple at St Omer in 1313, where they sold all their wool. This encouraged more wool exports to be directed through the port of London.38 Whereas in the first decade of the century Hull’s wool exports had approached half the level of London’s, in the 1320s they were little more than a quarter. Only seven York merchants appear in the Hull customs records for 1324–5 exporting wool sacks in double figures.39 No coin was struck at York after 1300 until the archbishop’s mint reopened in 1331.40 York’s dependence for its currency in these years on whatever was brought to it from the London mint is shown by three large Yorkshire hoards which were buried about the year 1328: they reveal that only 2.61 per cent of the coins were struck at York.41 The political strife of Edward II’s reign affected the inland trade that transferred coin northwards, and it undermined the confidence that creditors needed to lend. There are no certificates showing Londoners lending to Yorkshire men in this decade. Whereas the credit recorded nationally by merchants during the combined decades 1310–29 fell 42 per cent below that of 1300–9, that recorded in York fell by a crushing 67 per cent. The difference, it would seem, can be accounted for by the invasion of Yorkshire by the Scots.

II Regular, almost annual, raids by the Scots into northern England began in 1311. They first penetrated into Yorkshire in 1314 and continued to do so until 1323.42

36 Ian Kershaw, “The Great Famine and Agrarian Crisis in England, 1315–1322”, Past and Present, 59 (May 1973): 3–5. 37 Emilia Jamroziak, “Rievaulx Abbey as a Wool Producer in the Late Thirteenth Century: Cistercians, Sheep, and Debts”, Northern Hist., 40 (2003): 208–13. 38 Lloyd, English Wool Trade, 123 (table 12). For the recession in Hull in this period, see Rosemary Horrox (ed.), Selected Rentals and Accounts of Medieval Hull, 1293–1528 (Yorks. Archaeol. Soc., Record ser., cxli, Leeds, 1983), 5–8. 39 Bartlett, “Some Aspects of the Economy of York”, 352 (table 1). 40 Martin Allen, “The Archbishop of York’s Mint after the Norman Conquest”, Northern Hist., 41 (2004): 30. 41 George C. Brooke, “A Find of Edward Pennies”, Numis. Chron., 4 (1924): 325–6; Reginald H.M. Dolley and Ian H. Stewart, “The 1953 Bootham Treasure Trove”, Brit. Numis. J., 3rd ser., 27 (1952–1954); Reginald H.M. Dolley and Hugh E. Pagan, “An Early Nineteenth-Century Discovery of Edward Pennies at Knaresborough Priory”, Brit. Numis. Jl, 3rd ser., 32 (1963). 42 Tuck, “War and Society in the Medieval North”, 36.

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The devastating effects are visible in the heavy reductions made in the valuation of churches as far south as the Wolds in 1318. Ryedale and Bulmer deaneries, home to some of the best wool, saw reductions of almost a half, while the Vale of York, as far south as the city, was badly hit.43 Considerable sums were also paid to the Scots as protection money, which helped to drain coin from the region.44 The credit recorded in the certificates given by York merchants dwindled rapidly after 1312 to negligible amounts and disappeared altogether in 1317 – as it did also in 1320–2, after a makeshift army of York tradesmen, led by their mayor, were defeated by the Scots with heavy mortality. Even after 1323 the fear of repeated raids helped to undermine investment and credit until the next decade.45 There can be no doubt that, in Ormrod’s words, Edward II’s ‘blatant betrayal of the whole of the north of England’ brought the city’s fortunes to their lowest ebb in the 1320s, and explains the failure of its merchants in this period to build up their commercial strength and their political influence.46 Between 1322 and 1363 the mayoralty was dominated not by merchants but by Nicholas and John de Langton, whose wealth came from landed and city property, while the dean and canons of the minster, and York’s numerous religious communities, continued to play an important part in its economy and government.47 The lay subsidy of 1334 shows that York could not compare with London in the number and individual wealth of its taxpayers.48 Few of York’s leading taxpayers were merchants, and in 1334 only two of them were wool exporters.49 This striking fall from its fiftysix wool exporters of 1298–1305 is a measure of the disasters that had befallen York and its region in the interval. The city had reverted to its former position as a collecting centre for wool, but the prosperity that York’s merchants had enjoyed as intermediaries for alien exporters was increasingly denied them from the late 1320s when the Hanseatic merchants they had supplied ceded control of the bulk of Yorkshire’s exports to merchants of Hull.50

43 David Robinson, “Beneficed Clergy in Cleveland and the East Riding, 1306–1340”, Borthwick Papers, no. 37 (York: St Anthony’s Press, 1969), 3–4, 41–2; Ian Kershaw, “A Note on the Scots in the West Riding, 1318–1319”, Northern Hist., 17 (1981), 231–9. 44 Michael Prestwich, “Currency and the Economy of Early Fourteenth-Century England”, in Nicholas J. Mayhew (ed.), Edwardian Monetary Affairs (1279–1344): A Symposium Held in Oxford, August 1976 (Oxford: Brit. Archaeol. Rpts, Brit. ser., xxxvi, 1977), 46. 45 Tuck, “War and Society in the Medieval North”, 41–2. 46 Ormrod, “Competing Capitals?”, 94. 47 Christian D. Liddy, “Urban Conflict in Late Fourteenth-Century England: The Case of York in 1380–1”, Eng. Hist. Rev., 118 (2003): 4–5; Rees Jones, “Property, Tenure and Rents”, 56–67, 99–177. 48 Margaret Curtis, “The London Lay Subsidy of 1332”, in George Unwin (ed.), Finance and Trade under Edward III (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1918), 36–7. 49 But see Nightingale, “Lay Subsidies and the Distribution of Wealth in Medieval England”, 5–9, on the exclusion of wool and debts from the assessments. 50 Lloyd, English Wool Trade, 128, 141–3.

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Hull’s rise to commercial pre-eminence owed much to royal influence. Its leading merchant, William de la Pole, had profited from supplying the English armies in Scotland, and he became a rich and influential wool exporter, connected through loans, and other business, with the royal government.51 Hence, what York lost from the Scottish wars was Hull’s, and particularly Pole’s, gains.52 Merchants of Lincolnshire and Nottinghamshire, as well as Yorkshire, owed large sums to Pole – far greater than any individual York merchant could advance at this time. Pole’s capital, and ruthless drive, explain why, as Hull’s wool exports rose in the 1330s, much of the North and East Ridings slipped out of the sphere of York’s wool merchants and into that of Hull’s.53 The trend was already visible in 1330–4, when York’s debtors in the certificates came from fifteen named places in the West Riding but from only two each in the North and East Ridings. Even though York’s mercantile and clerical credit was recovering in the late 1330s, a similar pattern is visible. Debtors came from nineteen places in the West Riding, from eleven in the North Riding, and from only five in the East Riding. It was the East Riding, though, that produced the heaviest fleeces and finest wool, and its greater wealth became visible in this period in building work on churches in Hull, Holderness, Howden, and Beverley.54 This contraction in York’s commercial sphere of influence was matched by a change in the character of its mercantile creditors. Merchants of large capital became more distinct in the certificates and fewer in number. This happened in York as much as elsewhere, undoubtedly because of the part that wool exporters were required to play in financing the king’s continental war. Only eighteen York merchants appear as creditors in the certificates of 1335–9, and although Archbishop William de Melton was the biggest single creditor and accounted still, with other clerics, for one-third of the value of York’s credit recorded in the certificates, wool exporters dominated the rest. The change is apparent in the certificates for most parts of the kingdom and appears to reflect what happened within the English merchant class when it was able, firstly, to seize a dominant part in the export of wool from the aliens in the 1320s, and then, under the leadership of William de la Pole, to become the chief financiers of Edward III in his war against France.55 It may also reflect the recessionary effects of a growing shortage of silver coin which began to affect prices and the retail trade in this period.56 Merchants like

51 Edmund B. Fryde, William de la Pole: Merchant and King’s Banker (London: Hambledon Press, 1988), 9–28. 52 Miller, “Medieval York”, 54–6, 100–1; Horrox (ed.), Selected Rentals and Accounts of Medieval Hull, 9–12. 53 For Pole’s purchases in the North Riding, see Edmund B. Fryde, “The Wool Accounts of William de la Pole”, in his Studies in Medieval Trade and Finance (London: Hambledon Press, 1983), 9. 54 Bruce M.S. Campbell, English Seigniorial Agriculture, 1250–1450 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 156, 161; Robinson, “Beneficed Clergy in Cleveland and the East Riding”, 4. 55 Lloyd, English Wool Trade, ch. 4. 56 Nicholas J. Mayhew, “Numismatic Evidence and Falling Prices in the Fourteenth Century”, Econ. Hist. Rev., 2nd ser., 27 (1974): 1–15.

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Pole, by contrast, were able to use imported foreign gold coins of high value in their businesses, and thereby deepened the gulf in wealth between retailers and the richer exporting class.57 However, the concentration of credit in the hands of merchants, and increasingly in the city of London, was the result more of political than economic influences, and owed more to Edward III and William de la Pole than to any other individuals. Fryde’s researches have shown how York merchants took a prominent part in the scheme to monopolize wool exports in 1337 and to lend the proceeds of their sales overseas to the king to finance his military spending. They provided about 30 per cent of the sum lent by English merchants, under Pole’s direction, to Edward III in the Netherlands between 1338 and 1340, and they also dominated the contracts for the wool levy of 1341.58 The schemes relied on participating merchants using their own credit to obtain the wool from the growers. Obviously only the richer merchants could do this, while the year-long embargo on exports in 1337, coupled with the delay before they received payment for their wool, helped to drive smaller men out of the trade.59 Also, by depriving the kingdom of its normal inflow of silver coin from exports, these policies were responsible for the general commercial depression that ensued. It showed itself in York by the sudden steep decline in rents between 1337 and 1342 that undoubtedly reflected the failure of many small tradesmen.60 The richer York merchants who took part in Pole’s schemes did not immediately profit from financing the king. Nineteen of them had wool commandeered by Edward at Dordrecht for which they could obtain no compensation for some years, whereas by obtaining a grant of all the English customs, Pole more than recouped his losses.61 His credit and unrivalled business acumen undoubtedly explain most of the rise in Hull’s wool exports, which took them to 63 per cent of London’s in 1340–3.62 More importantly, Pole drew York merchants into London’s financial and commercial orbit to the detriment of northern interests. Before 1340 there are only eight certificates involving York merchants either as creditors or debtors of Londoners, and these were for modest sums. From 1343 that picture changed radically. Henry Goldbeter and Walter Kelstern joined Pole’s syndicate to manage the customs in 1343. In 1347–9 nine other York merchants, led by John Goldbeter, lent at least £20,000 to Walter Chiriton and Company of London, who were the

57 Fryde, William de la Pole, 15. 58 Ibid., 183. See also Fryde, “Wool Accounts of William de la Pole”; Edmund B. Fryde, “Some Business Transactions of York Merchants”, and “The English Farmers of the Customs, 1343–51”, both in Fryde, Studies in Medieval Trade and Finance. 59 Kermode, Medieval Merchants, 164–5. 60 Fryde, William de la Pole, 55–6; Lloyd, English Wool Trade, 144–7; Rees Jones, “Property, Tenure and Rents”, 208; Nightingale, A Medieval Mercantile Community, 168–71. 61 Miller, “Medieval York”, 101; Fryde, William de la Pole, 98–9. 62 Lloyd, English Wool Trade, 198; Fryde, “Wool Accounts of William de la Pole”, 9.

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king’s bankers at the siege of Calais.63 Some of these York merchants registered debts to Londoners in the capital for large sums of up to £200. They were most likely incurred as advance payments for supplying wool.64 Similar connections ensured that two local merchants could undertake in York in 1348 to repay a debt in 1,412 gold French écus.65 Although the smaller York merchants suffered from their exclusion from these wool cartels, the chief victims appear to have been the landowners who supplied much of the wool to the merchants on credit. Eight certificates show unpaid debts totalling almost £1,000 owed by York merchants to Yorkshire knights between 1339 and 1348.66 Much of what appears to be an expansion of York’s mercantile credit in this decade really relied on credit given by the wool growers. Yorkshire knights were also important creditors of merchants from Beverley, Hull, Bartonon-Humber, and Doncaster in the 1340s.67 Unpaid debts of this kind helped to undermine the financial stability of the large wool growers and alienated them from the exporters. The consequent hostility of landowners contributed to the temporary exclusion between 1352 and 1357 of English merchants from the export trade.68 Rivalries and enmity also marked relations between the merchants of Hull, York, and London who took part in these schemes. They led on one occasion to assaults on York merchants, and to Pole’s betraying his former friends to the king.69 Hull merchants continued to restrict York’s trading connections in the East Riding, with the result that York’s debtors in this decade still came overwhelmingly from the West Riding (from eighty-seven clearly identifiable places compared with only thirty-seven in the East and twenty-eight in the North Ridings). But the king’s wool schemes had also encouraged men from the West Riding to send their wool by road to London, exploiting the advantage they enjoyed of the shortest and most direct route to the capital. This enabled them to bypass York and to deal directly with London merchants.70 Yorkshire’s debts to Londoners rose to a new peak in the 1340s and remained high for the next two decades.71 London’s greater supply of coin and, therefore, of credit became more important to York merchants as the currency diminished in size. When in 1351 there was a national recoinage, it is estimated that the circulation of silver coin, which

63 64 65 66 67 68

Ibid., 8–10. C. 241/117/28; 118/222; 119/25, 28, 215; 121/27; 128/126; 130/58. C. 241/126/40. C. 241/112/99; 115/92; 118/44; 118/223; 121/3; 128/78; 128/158; 135/163. C. 241/115/120; 117/352; 118/111, 234; 121/232, 265; 126/94, 212, 226; 129/179. W. Mark Ormrod, The Reign of Edward III: Crown and Political Society in England, 1327–1377 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 188–94. 69 Fryde, William de la Pole, 158–60. 70 C. 241/115/224, 299; 117/146; 118/231. 71 There are thirty certificates of debt to Londoners worth £1,811 for the 1340s, thirteen worth £1,101. 13s. 4d. for the 1350s and eight worth £900 for the 1360s.

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was vital to the retail trade and to urban life, was only half the size it had been twenty years earlier, while the amount struck in York remained little more than 2.5 per cent of the total.72 Although the north undoubtedly suffered severe mortality from the Black Death in 1349 the figures for the recoinage do not suggest that it thereby gained a greater supply of coin per head of population comparable with that in the south. This deduction, combined with the fall in transactions which inevitably followed the high death rate, helps to explain the plunging value of York’s credit in the certificates of the 1350s. It fell by nearly 40 per cent from the previous decade, compared with a fall of 35 per cent nationally.73 It is therefore not surprising that York men were not in a position to lend money to the crown in this period.74 Between 1352 and 1357 the monopoly of wool exports granted to aliens further threatened the prosperity of York’s merchants. They responded by founding in 1357 the fraternity that developed into the York Mercers’ Guild, later the Merchant Adventurers, to protect their interests. Its foundation also probably marks the point at which, because they were temporarily unable to export wool, they had begun to take a serious interest in the export of the city’s cloth.

III The growth of York’s cloth industry from the mid-fourteenth century has offered an obvious explanation for the recovery of the city’s population from the devastating assault of the Black Death to become second in size to London in the 1370s. Houses emptied by the plague created new opportunities for outsiders, particularly women, to move to York, bringing with them skills already acquired in spinning and weaving. But did the industry, through its export trade, help the city to recover its fortunes and to prosper, as other cloth-manufacturing towns did in this period?75 The sudden increase of Hull’s denizen cloth exports in 1355 confirms that York’s industry was stimulated by the crown’s ban on English wool exports between 1352 and 1357.76 The ban particularly injured the merchants of Hull, who had no cloth industry of their own, and it allowed York men, unhindered by their former rivals, to buy the better-quality wools of the Wolds and North Lincolnshire.77 This explains the noticeable eastward shift in the pattern of York’s debtors in the 1350s as they invested in wool from the East Riding for their own cloth industry and, after 1357, for export. Debtors in the certificates from identifiable places in

72 Challis (ed.), A New History of the Royal Mint, Appendix, 680; Allen, “The Volume of the English Currency, 1158–1470”, 606–7. For a more detailed discussion of the importance of silver coin in the currency, see Nightingale, “Gold, Credit, and Mortality”, 1081–104. 73 Lloyd, English Wool Trade, 205–8. 74 Ormrod, “York and the Crown under the First Three Edwards”, 30. 75 See Britnell, “Economy of British Towns”, 316–17. 76 Carus-Wilson and Coleman, England’s Export Trade, 75–6. 77 Kermode, Medieval Merchants, 68, 267–9.

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the East Riding, and from York itself, now outnumbered by more than three times those from the West and North Ridings. Immigrants into the city from the West Riding beyond the Ainsty also declined while those with East Riding surnames increased.78 These changes reflect the simultaneous expansion of employment in the West Riding caused by the growth of its own cloth industry. Like York’s, this was also undoubtedly encouraged by the ban on denizen exports of wool. Leeds acquired two new dye vats in 1357, and an extra fulling mill between 1361 and 1374.79 Merchants of Pontefract and Wakefield owed a York spicer large debts in the 1360s, most likely for dyes and mordants for their local cloth industry.80 Although York was still acting as a distributor of these imports, the sums of money involved indicate that in the 1360s Pontefract and Wakefield men had considerable trading capital at their disposal. In that decade, three men from the West Riding, one of whom was from Wakefield, recorded in London large sums of credit to a London mercer and a grocer, almost certainly for their cloth.81 West Riding merchants, it appears, were strengthening their own commercial links with London and were bypassing the merchants of York.82 That long predates the period when historians traditionally date the beginning of this trend, which they more commonly ascribe to the late fifteenth century.83 These links were encouraged by the crown’s suspension from 1351 of London’s commercial privileges, which had restricted the city’s retail and distributive trade to its enfranchised citizens. Now its trade was opened fully to alien and provincial merchants alike. For the next twenty-six years, Yorkshire merchants were free to sell their cloth and wool in London and could obtain there the raw materials and the coin they needed for their cloth industry to flourish. This was particularly important while the ban on English wool exports meant that York merchants could import much less themselves. The number of weavers, dyers, fullers, and shearers who attained the freedom of York rose from 69 in the 1350s to 117 in the following decade. There was also a marked increase in the number of drapers, although vacancies created by the plague of 1361–2 explain some of the increase. The demand for housing for a growing labour force in York most likely explains the rising rents paid to the Vicars Choral.84 Yet many of the latter’s new tenants, particularly women, were poor, like most other tenants in the expanding outer areas of York.85 Despite this

78 79 80 81 82 83 84

Rees Jones, “Property, Tenure and Rents”, 248. Britnell, Britain and Ireland, 1050–1530, 352. C. 241/143/103; 145/9. C. 241/149/39; 147/128; 178/56. Kermode, Medieval Merchants, 203. Goldberg, Women, Work, and Life Cycle in a Medieval Economy, 75–6. Bartlett, “Some Aspects of the Economy of York”, 189; Rees Jones, “Property, Tenure and Rents”, 210. 85 Rees Jones, “Property, Tenure and Rents”, 245–6, 250–3; Rees Jones, “Women’s Influence on the Design of Urban Homes”, 204–9.

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evidence of the recovery of York’s population, the number of Statute Merchant certificates for York men, and their total value, fell steadily from the 1350s to the point that in the next decade they were worth less than half their value in the 1340s. The fall mirrored that in the number and value of the certificates nationally. Partly this can be explained by fewer transactions because of the severe loss of population in the plague epidemics of 1349 and 1361–2. But it was also affected by the fall in the size of the currency.86 The huge loss of manpower from the plague had also caused wages to rise and squeeze agricultural profits. This had the effect of reducing the amount of credit given by the landed class, as well as their demand for York’s products. The important contribution that York clergy had made to the city’s mercantile capital declined significantly in the 1350s, probably because the rents and profits from their prebendal estates had shrunk. By the 1370s they were giving credit only intermittently. Also, knights all but disappeared both as creditors and debtors for the same reasons. Whereas there are fifteen certificates for Yorkshire knights dealing with York merchants in the 1350s, the number fell to five in the 1360s, and thereafter to the odd one or two. This fall was not restricted to their dealings with York men. Knights were responsible for sixty-one certificates for credit registered at York in the 1340s, but the number fell to fourteen in the next decade, to five in the 1380s, and then to one in the 1390s, reflecting almost certainly their diminished involvement in the wool trade.87 The diminution of the landed and clerical investment that had formerly supported York’s trade left the city dependent for capital and credit on the success of its manufacturers and merchants. Although these changes allowed merchants to take control of the city’s government in the 1360s, their commercial capital was left much more exposed to the varying fortunes of the export trade and to financial crises caused by fluctuating supplies of coin.88 The exposure was the greater because the mediocre quality of York’s cloth exports meant their value could not compare with that of wool.89 When cloth exports through Hull were at their peak in the late fourteenth century, they were worth only a quarter of its wool exports.90 This meant that cloth exports generated only a limited growth of capital, compared with the average profits of c. 20 per cent that wool exports could earn, even at the end of the fifteenth century.91 Limited profits are reflected both in the falling number of certificates for York’s credit

86 Allen, “Volume of the English Currency”, 607 (table 2). 87 These calculations do not take account of the credit of Sir William de la Pole, who, though knighted, was primarily a merchant. 88 Liddy, War, Politics and Finance in Late Medieval English Towns, 120–23; Kermode, Medieval Merchants, 54. 89 Bartlett, “Some Aspects of the Economy of York”, 81–6. 90 Ibid., 132–3. 91 Alison Hanham, “Profits on English Wool Exports, 1472–1544”, Bull. Inst. Hist. Research, 55 (1982): 146–7.

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and in the lower proportion of exporters with cargoes worth over £100 a year.92 Evidently, the expansion of York’s cloth industry was not making its merchants wealthier. Moreover, merchants did not remit the proceeds of their cloth exports in coin to the extent that wool exporters did from Calais. Since much Yorkshire cloth went to Gascony, exporters were more likely to invest the proceeds in return cargoes of dyes, alum, and wine in order to earn the profits of a double trade. Less coin was therefore brought back to York to finance mercantile credit and to provide cash for the retail trade. This mattered because the cloth industry itself required coin, and it also needed credit.93 Its many different, and largely independent, stages of production involved men and women of different crafts who were linked by chains of credit. The average value of debts in the York industry was almost certainly closer to those recorded in the borough courts of Colchester and Exeter, two other cloth-making towns, than to the Statute Merchant and Staple debts. The average recorded in Exeter’s local courts in the 1380s was less than 13s., compared with its Statute Staple average of £69.94 The difference reflected the domestic units of cloth production and the slender capital and modest earnings of the workers, compared with the large capital investment of the wool trade. The relative poverty of cloth workers meant that they needed a steady flow of coin and credit to maintain their production. They looked to wool merchants to supply them with wool, dyes, and alum on credit, and also wages in cash with which to pay their rents, taxes, food, drink, and fuel.95 In Coventry journeymen who did not receive payment in money for their cloth from their masters were entitled to go on strike. This could well have been true of other manufacturing towns.96

IV It is likely that an increased demand for silver coin for wages helps to account for the revival of the archbishop’s mint in York in 1357 after several years when it was closed.97 Its revival meant that York’s wool exporters could import silver that they had acquired from their wool sales overseas and change it into English coin locally without losing time and money in sailing to London and waiting days there for their bullion to be re-coined. From 1363 they were also able to use the

92 Kermode, Medieval Merchants, 259–61, 266 (table 8.3). 93 Swanson, Medieval Artisans, 141; Kermode, Medieval Merchants, 204. 94 Maryanne Kowaleski, Local Markets and Regional Trade in Medieval Exeter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 206, 214. 95 Weavers received 2s. 8d. for producing 16 ells of cloth, and shearmen paid their servants 2d. a day plus their food and drink: Maud Sellers (ed.), The York Memorandum Book: Part I (1376–1419) (Durham: Surtees Soc., cxx, 1912), xxviii, xxxiii. 96 Charles Phythian-Adams, Desolation of a City: Coventry and the Urban Crisis of the Late Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 106. 97 Allen, “Archbishop of York’s Mint after the Norman Conquest”, 30–2.

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new royal mint established at Calais to bring back English coin to Yorkshire. By this means they could inject cash earned from their wool exports directly into their local economy. It may not, therefore, be a coincidence that cloth exports from Hull boomed shortly after the mint at Calais was established.98 This advantage, however, was limited after 1365 when the Calais mint began issuing only gold coins and struck no silver until 1422.99 As cloth exports from Hull rose steadily from the 1360s, and spectacularly so in the 1380s, the certificates indicate that York’s demand for credit was beginning to outpace its local supply, and some York merchants turned to Londoners for assistance. A debt registered in London in 1359 by a York merchant for £44 to two London pepperers shows the extra demand that the cloth industry created for credit, since pepperers specialized in supplying dyes and alum.100 The position became critical in the 1380s when, for the first time, York’s debts in the certificates reached a greater value than its credit. While the total value of both decreased, that of credit slumped most, falling from £2,630 in the 1370s to £820 in the 1380s. What caused this extraordinary slump? The fifteen years 1375–89 saw the wool sacks exported from Hull dwindle to their lowest number since 1315–29. The worst of the fall was occasioned by the revolt of the Flemish weavers, followed by the invasion of Flanders by the French. These events cut the demand for English wool, its price, and the profits of the export trade, and therefore reduced the amount of coin and credit that wool exporters could supply to their local economies. The output of the Calais mint dramatically reflected this crisis in the wool trade. Whereas it had struck £129,422 in gold coin between 1371 and 1381, for the remainder of the 1380s it struck only £36,627, and between 1384 and 1387 it produced no coin at all.101 This was the more serious because the growing shortage of bullion throughout north-west Europe had already occasioned a drop of two-thirds in the value of the coin struck by the London mint in the 1370s. The greatest fall, caused by a more attractive price for silver offered in Flanders, was in the amount of silver coin.102 Moreover, the renewal of the French war in 1369 had increased taxation and had led the crown to demand large loans which drained cash from York.103 The war also increased the costs of York’s seaborne trade as pirates attacked its shipping.104 Wool merchants found themselves short of cash to pay the growers, while townsmen found it harder to finance their industry and trade. Weavers earned from £5 to £6 a year, and dyers and shearmen considerably more.105 Silver coin was

98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105

Carus-Wilson and Coleman, England’s Export Trade, 77–8. Challis (ed.), A New History of the Royal Mint, Appendix, 680–2. C. 141/238; Nightingale, Medieval Mercantile Community, 208–11. Challis (ed.), A New History of the Royal Mint, Appendix, 681. Ibid. Liddy, “Urban Conflict in Late Fourteenth-Century England”, 7–12. Calendar of Close Rolls, 1377–81, 314–15; 1381–85, 366. Swanson, Medieval Artisans, 34.

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normally the only money they handled, since the smallest gold coin was worth two to three days’ wages for a skilled craftsman. Urban craftsmen were prominent in the risings in York, Beverley, and Scarborough in 1380–1. Their grievances were as much about taxation, which appeared the more oppressive because coin was in short supply, as about the oligarchic nature of each town’s government.106 One reason for the unpopularity of York’s mayor, John de Gisburn, a prominent wool exporter, was the accusation that he had profiteered from illegally employing Scottish moneyers in York’s mint to re-coin £10,000 of good English coin into new Scottish coins. Since these circulated at parity with English coins until 1373, although they weighed about 15 per cent less, Gisburn netted a profit of about £1,750. His enterprise had the merit of increasing York’s money supply from 1369, and it is notable that he was prosecuted only when the coins ceased to be exchangeable with sterling, leaving their holders the poorer.107 It appears that York’s exporters strove to increase the amount of silver they brought to the archbishop’s mint in the 1380s.108 But this was not enough to ease the tightness of credit. The certificates for that decade are worth only 23 per cent of their value for the previous decade. This fall reflects, besides declining exports, the reversal of credit in the wool trade that was caused by the merchants’ lack of coin. They now became debtors instead of creditors of the growers.109 The latter, desperate to sell their wool, had to allow merchants to acquire it on credit. Brian de Stapleton, knight, was the unpaid creditor of the rich York wool merchant Thomas Gra in 1383 for the large sum of £291 7s. 8d.110 Between 1383 and 1389 not even London merchants appear as creditors of York men in the certificates.

V Since wool generally accounted for about one-third of the cost of a broadcloth, its new low price encouraged clothiers to increase their production and, with the demand for wool in Flanders much reduced, it was inevitable that more exporters should include cloth in their cargoes. This largely explains the quadrupling of cloth exports from Hull in the 1380s. As a consequence, there was a need for more dyes and mordants, and the Hull customs record ships arriving in 1383–4 laden

106 R. Barrie Dobson, “The Risings in York, Beverley and Scarborough, 1380–1381”, in Rodney H. Hilton and Trevor H. Aston (eds.), The English Rising of 1381 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 120–1, 123–4, 130, 136–7, 140. 107 Liddy, “Urban Conflict in Late Fourteenth-Century England”, 20–1. John de Gisburn exported wool worth over £1,000 in 1378–9: Bartlett, “Some Aspects of the Economy of York”, 353 (appendix C, table 2); Liddy, War, Politics and Finance in Late Medieval English Towns, 180; Alexander Grant, Independence and Nationhood, 1306–1469 (London: Edward Arnold, 1984), 80–1, 240. 108 Allen, “Archbishop of York’s Mint after the Norman Conquest”, 37. 109 Nightingale, “Monetary Contraction and Mercantile Credit”, 570. 110 C. 241/173/123. For Gra, see Kermode, Medieval Merchants, 50–1.

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with madder, alum, woad, and soap from the Low Countries. York merchants were shipping half the wool and cloth exports, and importing one-third of the miscellaneous imports through Hull.111 Wine imports from Gascony provided a convenient return cargo for York’s cloth exports, but by 1398–9 the former were worth more than the latter.112 Inevitably, mercantile capital became less liquid as imports increasingly took the place of the bullion and the coin which was necessary to maintain the regional money supply and mercantile credit.113 Wine imports, though, climbed even more in the first two decades of the fifteenth century, as they did also in the impoverished 1440s. It would appear that in both periods, merchants were importing wine principally as a means of earning coin from York’s more prosperous classes and from any inland consumers who might still have the cash the merchants needed.114 The cloth industry’s need for coin meant that the cash-flow problems of York’s drapers and mercers inevitably grew in the 1380s as cloth exports boomed.115 This explains why the certificates of York’s debtors climbed for the first time in the 1380s to a higher value than those of its creditors. Clothiers, too, turned to the domestic market to obtain the cash they needed. Chapmen specializing in the inland trade became more numerous in the Freemen’s Register in the late 1370s. Large debts record their presence in Coventry, Lincoln, Bristol, Hull, and London, where, in 1382, Adam Misterton of York recorded a huge debt of £253 8s. 10d. to a London draper.116 It seems probable that the York men promised to deliver cloth in return for advance payment in coin or in raw materials. Difficulties of this kind encouraged York merchants to look outside the city for cheaper sources of cloth that they could buy on credit. The poll tax returns in 1381 show that there were then about seventy-five weavers resident in York who were probably making about half of the three thousand or so cloths exported each year from Hull.117 The number of weavers attaining the freedom of York fell, however, from fifty-one in the 1370s to thirty-seven in the 1380s, even though the plague of 1379 should have stimulated new recruitment, and despite the greatly increased demand for cloth overseas. From 1389 rents remained stationary in the city, indicating that there was no subsequent growth in employment and immigration.118

111 112 113 114 115

Bartlett, “Some Aspects of the Economy of York”, 147–8. Ibid., 106–8, 125–6, 149 (table 9). Lloyd, English Wool Trade, 309–12. Kermode, Medieval Merchants, 177–80, 183–4, 186. Compare the effects of industrialization in Wiltshire: John Hare, “Regional Prosperity in Fifteenth-Century England: Some Evidence from Wessex”, in Michael Hicks (ed.), Revolution and Consumption in Late Medieval England (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2001), 123–4. 116 C. 241/173/96; 173/22; 170/60; 178/123; 190/13. 117 Neville Bartlett (ed.), The Lay Poll Tax Returns for the City of York in 1381 (London: A. Brown & Son, 1953), 13; Swanson, Medieval Artisans, 36; Bartlett, “Some Aspects of the Economy of York”, 71–82. 118 Rees Jones, “Property, Tenure and Rents”, 245–6.

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Moreover, the 1377 poll tax shows that of the total number who paid it in York, only 14.9 per cent were engaged in the textile industry. This was a significantly smaller proportion than the 21.2 per cent of Rotherham’s population and 21.1 per cent of Wakefield’s. It suggests that the growth of the industry was already more marked in the West Riding than in York.119 There was, though, a slight increase of dyers and fullers attaining the freedom in the 1380s, while new shearmen, whose work added most to the quality and profitability of cloth, grew from six in the 1370s to seventeen in the 1380s.120 These figures suggest that York drapers and mercers may already have been finding it more economical to buy cheap, unfinished, rural cloth for the skilled shearmen and dyers of York to finish.121 By about 1400 the four main cloth-making crafts in York were recording only fifty weavers but thirty fullers and fifty-nine dyers.122 These craftsmen also appear prominently in the Statute Staple certificates. In 1395 a York fuller was a creditor for £40.123 But the most outstanding artisan was a shearman, John de Buckland of York, who was the creditor of a York merchant for £160 in 1396.124 The specialist skills of dyers and shearmen meant that they were able to demand higher payments to cover the costs of urban living. However, this had implications for the cost of York’s cloth compared with that of the West Riding, and by then shortage of coin meant that customers were seeking cheaper products in preference to those of higher quality. Wool exports from Hull made a temporary recovery in the 1390s and helped to generate an improved output of coin from the Calais mint. Merchants seem to have invested much of this in cloth production, because Hull maintained a high level of exports.125 However, the strain of this double investment in wool and cloth on mercantile finances is apparent in the certificates. Although York’s credit showed some recovery, one-third of that recorded in the certificates was provided by the dean of York and by the abbot of St Mary’s, and mercantile credit was obviously becoming more difficult to obtain.126 As a result, between 1390 and 1402 the debts of York men contracted to a total of £662, while more than half of this sum was recorded at the Westminster staple and was owed to London merchants. One York merchant, Thomas Maples, had even taken out London citizenship before he recorded a debt of £60 to a prominent London grocer.127 It seems that the falling money supply left Londoners as York’s main source of large-scale mercantile

119 Goldberg, Women, Work, and Life Cycle in a Medieval Economy, 46 (table 2.2). 120 Register of the Freemen of the City of York from the City Records, i, 1272–1558, ed. Francis Collins (Durham: Surtees Soc., xcvi, 1897), 67–89. 121 Bartlett, “Some Aspects of the Economy of York”, 167–8. 122 York Memorandum Book, ed. Sellers, xxx, xxxiii, 70–1, 112, 238–9. 123 C. 241/177/113; 194/31; 188/43. 124 C. 241/188/112. 125 Carus-Wilson and Coleman, England’s Export Trade, 53–4, 84–7. 126 C. 241/194/59; 190/97. 127 C. 241/180/122; 182/8; 181/27; 186/8; 189/21; 193/90; 190/106; 192/106; 193/108; 186/30.

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credit. This was also true for the Suffolk cloth industry.128 Hanseatic merchants had renewed their exports of cloth from London and were soon followed by Italians.129 They brought coin to the capital and increased its demand for provincial cloth. But even this supply of credit diminished after 1395 when London, too, found its economy shrinking sharply in the face of the European-wide scarcity of silver coin.130 Between 1396 and 1399, some Londoners, including one grocer who owed £200, were unable to pay their debts to Yorkshiremen.131 With even London credit failing, York merchants had to rely more than ever on the coin they themselves could obtain from the Calais mint. Its significance to York’s economy is illustrated by the close connection between Calais’s output and the figures for wool and cloth exports from Hull. Between October 1397, and September 1399, the Calais mint struck only £363 in gold coin.132 There are no York certificates of credit for 1397, and Hull’s wool exports dropped by a thousand sacks in 1398–9, with no real recovery before 1403. In the two years 1398–1400 Hull’s cloth exports also plunged to only 40 and 60 per cent respectively of the total they had reached in the two previous years.133 They rallied briefly between 1400 and 1402, after the Calais mint renewed its output strongly in the two years 1399–1401, but sank again when the mint’s production diminished from September 1401 until it ceased striking altogether in March 1404. Hull’s cloth exports did not show any real recovery from that point until the Calais mint reopened in July 1422. The effect on York’s industry was quickly evident. By 1399 the York Weavers’ Guild was in arrears with its farm, even though that decade saw more cloth workers recruited to the freedom than any previous one. Since sixty-five of them were weavers, it is likely that this increase was due to workers from outside the city acquiring the freedom so that they could sell their cloth within it. In 1400 the Weavers’ Guild imposed restrictions on the employment of women, another indication that employment in their craft was shrinking.134 The Vicars Choral struggled in the 1390s to find tenants for their property, and in 1399 they excused three women their rent because of poverty. Others of their female tenants were driven to support themselves by prostitution.135 The number of cloth workers who

128 Richard Britnell, “The Woollen Textile Industry of Suffolk in the Later Middle Ages”, Ricardian, 13 (2003): 88. 129 Carus-Wilson and Coleman, England’s Export Trade, 84–9; Edmund B. Fryde, “Italian Maritime Trade with Medieval England (c. 1270–c. 1530)”, in ed. Fryde, Studies in Medieval Trade and Finance. 130 Nightingale, “Money and Credit in the Economy of Late Medieval England”, 60–2. 131 C. 241/188/114. 132 Challis (ed.), A New History of the Royal Mint, Appendix, 682. 133 Carus-Wilson and Coleman, England’s Export Trade, 86–7. 134 Herbert Heaton, The Yorkshire Woollen and Worsted Industries from the Earliest Times Up to the Industrial Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1920), 33. Winchester experienced the same problems: Keene, Survey of Medieval Winchester, i, 301–2. 135 Rees Jones, “Women’s Influence on the Design of Urban Homes”, 208.

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became freemen fell from 149 in the 1390s to a mere 67 in the following decade. This fall affected every specialized skill, while the number of drapers admitted fell from thirty to six.136 There can be little doubt that in this period of acute monetary shortage the cloth industry of York was finding it difficult to finance production for lack of customers, lack of credit to buy raw materials, and lack of coin to pay the wages of workers. York was not alone among cloth-making towns in experiencing these difficulties. Exeter’s mercantile credit also diminished, and even the debts of low value recorded in Colchester’s court followed the same pattern of contraction from the end of the fourteenth century.137 In Somerset and Wiltshire, the pre-eminent cloth-manufacturing counties, the industry was moving out of the towns into the countryside in the 1390s.138 Similarly, the York Weavers’ Guild claimed that rural weavers and dyers, particularly in Wakefield and Ripon in the West Riding, were competing with them illegally.139 It seems that rural weavers worked at the craft only when farm work was slack, and in contrast with urban workers, they enjoyed cheap housing and the chance to grow their own food. They were also free of the taxes and cash payments required of York’s weavers. Accordingly, they had less need for cash, found it easier to use barter, and were able to withstand much better the shortage of silver coin that had dogged the York industry since the 1380s. They also had easier access to London, where the Hanse had doubled their cloth exports from 1399 while maintaining unchanged the low number they exported from Hull.140 As warfare and piracy in the North Sea increased in the fifteenth century, the land route along the Roman road to London became attractive to more merchants.141 Three certificates show that at Westminster between 1396 and 1398 a West Riding man and two others from Yorkshire recorded credit of over £273, which they advanced to London merchants – most likely for sales of cloth.142 The response of York’s merchants shows that, when faced with a monetary crisis, they chose to invest in wool exports at the expense of cloth in order to earn as much coin as possible. While merchants could delay paying for their wool, urban textile workers could not afford to wait for their wages. It seems clear from comparing the pattern of Hull’s denizen wool and cloth exports with that of London in this period that this preference for wool exports was a deliberate choice by York’s

136 Bartlett, “Some Aspects of the Economy of York”, 57 (table 1). 137 Kowaleski, Local Markets and Regional Trade in Medieval Exeter, 213; Richard H. Britnell, Growth and Decline in Colchester, 1300–1525 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 206–7. 138 Hare, “Regional Prosperity in Fifteenth-Century England”, 108–9. 139 Calendar of Inquisitions Miscellaneous, 1392–9, 242–9. 140 Carus-Wilson and Coleman, England’s Export Trade, 87 ff.; Terrence H. Lloyd, England and the German Hanse, 1157–1611: A Study of Their Trade and Commercial Diplomacy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 169. 141 Kermode, Medieval Merchants, 215–20. 142 C. 241/188/114; 190/72; 195/42.

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merchants. Whereas for most of the second half of the fourteenth century Hull exported no more than one-third of the wool sacks shipped from London, after 1385 that proportion began to increase until between 1395 and 1399 it reached 72 per cent. Between 1405 and 1409 the proportion climbed to 85 per cent and stayed high until the mid-fifteenth century. In 1391 a large body of eighty merchants was still engaged in exporting wool from Hull and several of them acquired property in Calais.143 By contrast, Hull’s denizen cloth exports, which had been over 50 per cent of London’s in the 1360s and 1370s, slumped to a mere 23 per cent in 1400–4, and then to 13 per cent between 1405 and 1409.144

VI York’s reliance on wool exports, however, made it vulnerable to the fortunes of the Calais mint. When it closed down in 1404, London struck only meagre amounts of silver coin until that supply dried up altogether in 1407–8. The amount of silver in circulation had now shrunk to between one and two shillings a head, only about one-fifth of what it had been in the mid-fourteenth century.145 Credit might be stretched, as it was in the first decade of the fifteenth century, when the total value of York’s debts in the certificates outstripped that of its credit by 25 per cent, but it could not expand indefinitely without the coin to support it, and once repayments became difficult, it was likely to dry up altogether.146 In 1405, before leading a rebellion involving York merchants and tradesmen, Archbishop Scrope lamented in a sermon in the minster ‘the grete poverte of the marchauntis in whom was wont to be the substaunce of the riches of alle the land’.147 During the period 1404–11 there are no certificates showing credit dealings between London and Yorkshire. There was an attempt to ease the monetary crisis by a recoinage between 1412 and 1414 at a lower weight standard in order to create more coins out of the same amount of metal. This produced an influx of gold to the royal mint, but little silver.148 It looks as though merchants did their best to feed the archbishop’s mint in York with silver from their wool exports because it contributed an annual output of a few thousand pounds’ worth of pennies in the latter part of Henry V’s reign.149 But it was not enough to revive the economy sufficiently to encourage York’s merchants to expand their credit. The certificates indicate that credit continued to fall, while their debts contracted spectacularly to only 15 per cent of their value in the previous decade. Coin was becoming so scarce in the region that from the

143 144 145 146 147

Lloyd, English Wool Trade, 252–5; Kermode, Medieval Merchants, 169–70. The London figures for cloth exports are incomplete between 1377 and 1401. Allen, “Volume of the English Currency”, 607. Lloyd, English Wool Trade, 246–7. John Silvester Davies (ed.), An English Chronicle of the Reigns of Richard II, Henry IV, Henry V and Henry VI, Written before the Year 1471 (London: Camden Soc., lxiv, 1856), 31. 148 Allen, “Volume of the English Currency”, 607. 149 Allen, “Archbishop of York’s Mint after the Norman Conquest”, 33–4.

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1420s some agricultural rents in the north-east were paid in kind.150 The loans made to the crown in the 1420s reveal that York had fallen in wealth to fifth place among English towns, conspicuously behind London and Bristol, with Norwich and Salisbury in third and fourth places.151 However, in 1422 the mint in Calais reopened, and soon afterwards the duke of Burgundy pursued a new monetary policy that made it attractive for his subjects to take gold to his mints and silver to Calais. The consequence was that between February 1424 and January 1428 the Calais mint struck £35,590 in gold and £101,618 in silver.152 Yorkshire’s merchants responded by increasing their wool exports to Calais to the point that in the 1420s Hull’s reached 92 per cent of London’s.153 At the same time it appears they again began to invest the coin they brought back to York in cloth production because from 1422–3 cloth exports from Hull began to rise and by 1428–9 reached the unprecedented peak of over 6,500, a figure equal to that of London’s denizen exports for that year.154 But the certificates reveal no corresponding increase in York’s credit. Instead they fell markedly in value in this decade. It would seem that merchants were using much of the silver coin earned by wool exports to finance the wages and raw materials that were needed by clothiers to expand York’s cloth production, and that the credit they gave them individually was too small to be worth registering under Statute Staple procedures. It is also likely that the large-scale credit they had usually advanced to, or received from, wool producers, and registered under this system, was also diminishing because the Yorkshire wool trade was undergoing a major change. A shift from demesne to peasant farming is first indicated by the disappearance of knights from York’s certificates in the late fourteenth century. It may have been hastened by the lack of coin in the 1380s, which obliged landowners to sell their wool on extended credit.155 A shortage of the skilled labour needed for the careful breeding and maintenance of flocks, and its higher costs, must also have encouraged many landowners to sell their demesne flocks and let their sheep runs to peasants. This change probably accounts for the declining quality and value of much Yorkshire wool from this period.156 Whereas the Cistercians’ best wool from Rievaulx had sold for 18 marks a sack in the late thirteenth century, by the 1470s the Celys did not consider any Yorkshire wool worth exporting.157 Peasant producers saw no

150 Pollard, North-Eastern England during the Wars of the Roses, 77–9. 151 Anthony Steel, The Receipt of the Exchequer, 1377–1485 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1954), 196. 152 Lloyd, English Wool Trade, 259. 153 Carus-Wilson and Coleman, England’s Export Trade, 92–4. 154 Ibid., 93. Alien exports through London, though, amounted to another 11,000 cloths. 155 See at n. 110 above. 156 John H. Munro, Textiles, Towns and Trade: Essays in the Economic History of Late-Medieval England and the Low Countries (Aldershot: Variorum, 1994), 211–19. 157 Alison Hanham, The Celys and Their World: An English Merchant Family of the Fifteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 111–12.

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advantage in travelling to York to register small amounts of credit. Undoubtedly they used instead the services of dealers who begin to appear in growing numbers as ‘woolmen’ from 1412 in York’s freemen’s rolls, a fact which, with the appearance also of woolpackers, suggests a significant change in the nature of the city’s wool trade.158 This meant that York’s merchants could no longer buy wool on extended credit from rich landowners. Wool dealers, like cloth manufacturers, wanted speedy payment in coin. By contrast the prosperous cloth industry of the south-west was still able to use fine wool produced by demesne flocks and could, no doubt, still rely on extensive credit.159 The increasing difficulty that the Calais staplers experienced in procuring enough coin to pay their suppliers led them in 1429 to press for the legislation that forced purchasers of wool to pay for it entirely in cash instead of with credit.160 It proved to be a disastrous move that reduced continental demand, caused a large fall in wool exports, and resulted in a war with Burgundy from 1436 to 1439. The consequent disruption led to the permanent decline of the trade.161 In May 1454 York’s wool exporters suffered what proved to be a mortal blow when the Calais garrison seized and then sold all the wool in the town, worth over £26,000, to recover its unpaid wages. Yorkshire’s merchants were probably the hardest hit because it appears that they had exported a large amount of wool to Calais before the seizure, whereas Londoners, possibly forewarned, had exported relatively little.162 So precarious had become the balance of cash and credit in the financing of York’s trade that this loss undoubtedly explains why from 1455 wool exports from Hull plunged precipitately and never recovered.163

VII Why, historians have asked, did York’s merchants fail to compensate for their falling wool exports by investing in more cloth exports? Heather Swanson has suggested that it was because merchants exploited the politically subordinate craftsmen in their own class interests and thereby inhibited their entrepreneurial activities, while merchants’ preference for short-term commercial profits caused them to invest in lead instead of supporting the cloth industry.164 It is clear, though, from what happened in the 1390s and 1420s, that when York’s merchants did invest the coin they had earned from wool exports in the cloth industry their wool trade suffered and

158 There are four woolmen recorded in the Register of Freemen between 1380 and 1411; twenty between 1412 and 1447; and then a long gap until there are four in 1467 and one in 1469. 159 Hare, “Regional Prosperity in Fifteenth-Century England”, 116–18. 160 Lloyd, English Wool Trade, 261. 161 Ibid., 262–8. 162 Carus-Wilson and Coleman, England’s Export Trade, 63. 163 See, for example, Hanham, Celys and Their World, ch. 15. 164 Swanson, Medieval Artisans, 130–1, 141–2, 149. See the criticisms of this thesis in Kermode, Medieval Merchants, 314–17.

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they had insufficient capital and credit to sustain both. Their cloth exports did not provide either enough profit or the amount of coin that the industry needed. York’s merchants showed by their preference for wool exports that they understood this perfectly well, and it was only when the Calais mint was providing them with sufficient coin that they invested in more cloth production and increased their exports. Even so, it does not appear that they could increase cloth production enough to satisfy the demands of both denizen and alien exporters. In the 1420s the growth of denizen exports was at the expense of Hanseatic trade. The Hansards responded by moving to Ipswich to take advantage of Suffolk cloth production. From the late fourteenth century this had the advantage of being financed partly by Londoners who supplied raw materials in exchange for finished cloth.165 Since the renewed flow of silver from Calais in the 1420s had such a stimulating effect there can be little doubt that the second bullion famine that afflicted Europe in the 1440s depressed both York’s industry and trade.166 In fact York creditors and debtors entirely disappear from the certificates between 1439 and 1452. Two Londoners tried to exploit the lack of local capital by travelling to York in 1444 where they sold dyes on credit to local merchants and dyers, but Hull’s cloth exports declined from 1448 and did not recover.167 Similarly the Suffolk cloth industry, which was supplying a growing demand by the Hansards until 1447, became thereafter more dependent on sales through London.168 As exports of wool fell, mercantile capital diminished, and from the middle of the century far fewer mercantile wills reveal large cash estates.169 Deprived of the profits of the wool trade, and of the coin that it had earned, it is hardly surprising that York’s merchants could neither support the city’s own cloth industry nor compete with West Riding merchants in buying rural cloth to sell in London. Edward IV tried to tackle the shortage of coin by a devaluation in 1464, which produced 20 per cent more coins from the same metal by lowering the weight standard. The only surviving figures for York show its mint striking 88 lbs of gold and 1,312 lbs of silver in 1469–70.170 The shortage of gold is not surprising considering that after 1450 merchants were generally importing cargoes through Hull that were worth more than their exports.171 But the greater availability of

165 Carus-Wilson and Coleman, England’s Export Trade, 92–5; Britnell, “Woollen Textile Industry of Suffolk”, 88–9. 166 Spufford, Money and Its Use in Medieval Europe, 355–62; John Day, The Medieval Market Economy (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1987), 59; Nightingale, “England and the European Depression of the Mid-Fifteenth Century”, 635–44, repr. in Nightingale, Trade, Money and Power. 167 Kermode, “Money and Credit in the Fifteenth Century”, 497. 168 Carus-Wilson and Coleman, England’s Export Trade, 95–7; Britnell, “Woollen Textile Industry of Suffolk”, 89–91. 169 Spufford, Money and Its Use in Medieval Europe, 301. 170 Challis (ed.), A New History of the Royal Mint, 191–5, 197 (Table 11). 171 Kermode, “Merchants, Overseas Trade, and Urban Decline”, 57–8; Kermode, Medieval Merchants, 265.

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silver indicates that they now funded their export trade by the profits they made from selling their imports to local customers. The latter must have paid for them largely with silver coin that they obtained through trade, directly or indirectly, with London. This indicates that the clothiers of the West Riding, and the chapmen who carried its cloth to the capital, had already assumed from York’s exporters the chief responsibility for bringing coin into the region.172 When cloth and wool exports from London began to rise from the late 1460s, aided by the devaluation of the coinage and also by Hanseatic purchases, those from Hull did not follow.173 Although a considerable amount of cloth was still sold in York in the 1470s, much was brought in from the surrounding area, while, between them, Halifax and Ripon were selling more than York.174 In the years of declining mint output in the 1480s, Hull’s remaining wool exports dwindled away, while York was so impoverished that its fee farm was cut.175 It retained a few wealthy merchants, but they were a tiny proportion of its inhabitants and, compared with Londoners, were relatively poor.176 Accordingly, when a greatly increased production of silver coin began in the late 1490s London’s merchants were in an unrivalled position to command a huge and prolonged expansion of cloth exports.177 Hull, by contrast, could only recover to fourth place as a clothexporting port, after Bristol and Exeter, while the tailors of York by 1485 were stocking cloth chiefly made in the West Riding and Cumberland.178

VIII This analysis of York’s Statute Merchant and Staple certificates has proposed an interpretation of the city’s economic history in the late Middle Ages that differs substantially from the standard one.179 The certificates of debt reinforce Ormrod’s deduction that York was more securely ranked in wealth as the second city of the realm at the beginning of the fourteenth century, when its merchants were still mainly middlemen selling wool to aliens, than it was at the end of the century when they had become exporters and had established their cloth industry. Its earlier wealth was financed by the abundant flow of coin which alien merchants brought to the north, and which York’s merchants employed to purchase wool from the landowning and peasant producers throughout the county.

172 173 174 175 176 177 178 179

Nightingale, Medieval Mercantile Community, 439–40. Carus-Wilson and Coleman, England’s Export Trade, 125, 129, 141, 147. Kermode, Medieval Merchants, 176. Palliser, “Crisis in English Towns?”, 115–18; Bartlett, “Some Aspects of the Economy of York”, 178–80. Bartlett, “Some Aspects of the Economy of York”, 257. Challis (ed.), A New History of the Royal Mint, Appendix, 684–5. Palliser, “Crisis in English Towns?”, 115; Pollard, North-Eastern England during the Wars of the Roses, 78–80. Bartlett, “Expansion and Decline of York”, 21–33.

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This expanded the circulation of coin in the region and thereby increased local demand for York’s own products and distributive trade. Three other social groups assisted this commercial growth. They were the richer clergy of York, local landowners, and resident chancery clerks. Although they might appear as exploiters of the local economy through their usury, and the rents, tithes, and taxes they exacted, they also enriched it, not only as consumers but also through their major contributions as creditors and as investors in its trade.180 These allowed York’s merchants to build up their capital sufficiently to become exporters. Although war can stimulate economic development – York’s economy gained initially from the presence of the royal government and its army during the campaigns against Scotland – this was inadequate compensation for the longterm damage it suffered from them. By destroying animals and crops, and by robbing coin from the region, Scottish raids reduced local investment and credit, and undermined the confidence needed for their speedy recovery. These events halted and then reversed for two decades the development of York’s own class of wool exporters. The heavy taxation and dislocation of the wool trade that York experienced through Edward I’s war against France were repeated under his descendants in the campaigns of the Hundred Years War. Although all English merchants suffered from their effects, they proved more serious for the north. Naval warfare led to piracy and insecurity in the North Sea, which discouraged alien merchants from visiting northern ports and directed more exports through London. The continental campaigns also drew government spending southwards, made London into the kingdom’s permanent capital, and led to the compulsory direction of the wool trade through foreign staples, of which Calais proved to be the most enduring. The latter move strengthened the advantages which London’s merchants already enjoyed over northerners by virtue of their greater proximity to the continental markets which provided England with its supplies of bullion. Hull was the one northern town that gained from the Scottish wars, but it did so at York’s expense. The profits which William de la Pole made from these campaigns enabled him to dominate the wool trade of the East Riding and to exclude York’s merchants from it. Pole’s success as a financier also gave him influence over the royal government and enabled him to draw York’s merchants into the wool cartels, which entangled them unprofitably in the dealings of Londoners and caused the wool producers of Yorkshire to suffer financial loss. These events emphasize how important a town’s hinterland and its connections with a port were to its economy. Whereas York’s earlier financial strength had enabled it to draw Westmorland’s trade into its orbit, royal policies in the first half of the fourteenth century were responsible for its own loss of commercial influence over an extensive part of its hinterland, with the consequence that it lost trade, not only to Hull but also to London.

180 See Britnell, “Economy of British Towns”, 313–14.

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In the second half of the century York’s history was dominated less by politics and more by the economic trends that affected most other English towns for the rest of the Middle Ages. Initially these offered hopes of urban growth and prosperity through industrial development. This was despite the fact that York suffered, with the whole kingdom, from repeated onslaughts of plague. High mortality is commonly blamed for urban decline, but York’s example, and that of other clothmaking towns like Colchester, showed that this was not inevitable. Legacies of cash made possible higher living standards for survivors, which increased demand for many urban products. Legacies could also provide the capital needed to start new businesses, while empty houses encouraged migration to towns. The revival of York’s cloth industry certainly helped to repopulate the city and, while it could offer good wages, it had little difficulty in attracting migrants. This was despite the fact that, as early as the 1350s, the growth of the West Riding’s own cloth industry was discouraging migration to York from that area. Rural depopulation, though, reduced the size of York’s market and undermined the financial and commercial support its merchants had previously gained from local landowners. This was because the rising cost of labour cut the profits of sheep farming and led landowners to lease their sheep runs to peasants. Consequently, York lost an important local source of credit because peasants could not afford to wait for payment for their wool. Neither could they afford the specialized breeding programmes and careful cleaning and packing that had maintained the value of Yorkshire wool.181 As the latter declined, so did the profit from its export and the amount of coin earned from its sale overseas. The growth of York’s own cloth production did not compensate adequately for the difficulties of its wool trade because the mediocre quality of its cloth exports meant they could never earn similar amounts of coin. Even at their height, the value of York’s cloth exports was worth less than a quarter of that of its wool. Moreover, the industry increased the amount of coin that the city needed to pay wages and to support a larger population of poor people. This mattered more as the national currency began to contract from the 1360s, bringing increased volatility and periodic deep recessions to industry and trade. Cloth manufacturing also increased the shortage of coin because it required raw materials which were imported at the expense of bullion. It also required a chain of credit to finance the different processes involved in its production. Credit, however, was dependent on an adequate supply of coin, and when wool exports slumped in the 1380s because of the troubles in Flanders, and Western Europe began to run out of silver bullion in the 1390s, York found both its supply of coin and credit inadequate for its needs. The export figures suggest that York merchants responded to these difficulties by concentrating in the fifteenth century on wool exports in preference to cloth. This was not a result of mercantile short-sightedness nor of class exploitation of

181 Jamroziak, “Rievaulx Abbey as a Wool Producer”, 202; Hanham, Celys and Their World, 113–22; Bell, Brooks and Dryburgh, English Wool Market, 50–1.

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artisans. Rather it was a rational commercial decision taken to earn the higher profits and the silver coin that wool exports could bring to support the urban economy. This preference for wool exports bore fruit in the 1420s when the Calais mint produced a large output of silver and gold coin. It enabled York merchants to expand their credit and to invest in more cloth production, but in the long term this proved to be at the expense of their investment in wool exports. When the flow of coin diminished, it led to the bullion and partition acts of 1429, which restricted credit at Calais and inspired the political conflicts of the next decade, as both wool and cloth exports collapsed nationally. There was then no possibility that cloth could take the place of wool in maintaining York’s economy.182 Competition from London always features prominently in analyses of provincial urban decline. It was not, however, as it is often presented, a new development of the fifteenth century; nor did it necessarily represent one-way exploitation. The certificates show that in the 1280s Londoners were already creditors in all except three counties, and their relations with Yorkshire merchants variously waxed and waned in succeeding decades for political as well as economic reasons. Moreover, York’s own relations with Londoners were more complex than is generally acknowledged. York merchants sought to exploit London’s loss of its trading privileges between 1351 and 1376, in pursuit of the business and coin they hoped to obtain there from Italian and other foreign merchants. But their chances of supplying London with rural Yorkshire cloth were undermined from an early period because the West Riding developed its own cloth industry soon after York’s, and West Riding merchants were trading with Londoners from at least the 1360s. They thereby acquired independent sources of credit, coin, and raw materials, which enabled them to bypass York. As the shortage of coin worsened, and York’s industry contracted, it was possible for the West Riding, like Suffolk, to expand its rural cloth industry with the aid of London credit, because their cloth workers could live more easily in the countryside with less coin than in towns.183 Access to coin, credit, and overseas markets was at the root of all the conflicts between York and London. Inevitably, these were sharpened and embittered by the international shortage of bullion, which, beginning in the 1390s, restricted credit, reduced demand, and inflicted a long depression on the fifteenth-century English economy. Other towns shared this experience because, whether they had built their prosperity on industry, trade, or governmental or ecclesiastical spending, they all needed a steady supply of coin and credit to thrive. York’s wealth in 1304 had reflected not only the size and productivity of its region but also the high volume of silver coin that then circulated in it and which financed its abundant credit. In the recurrent periods when, for various reasons, including warfare,

182 Carus-Wilson and Coleman, England’s Export Trade, 129, 146. 183 For a discussion of the other relative advantages of the urban and rural industries, see Munro, “‘Industrial Crisis’ of the English Textile Towns”, 127–8, 140–2; Britnell, Growth and Decline in Colchester, 266–8.

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natural disasters, and interruptions of trade, that circulation diminished, so too did the credit it generated. York experienced such a contraction in the second and third decades of the fourteenth century, but it recovered when the money supply did, and when its merchants could again trade unhindered from Hull and use the coin they earned for their own benefit and not the king’s. The importance of coin to York’s economy is illustrated by the effect that the supply of silver from the Calais mint had on its exports. Although the bullion famines of the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries made credit contract throughout the kingdom, the effect on the north was more serious because its greater distance from the London and Calais mints made it vulnerable to any of the events, including urban competition, that disrupted the flow of coin northwards. Difficulties in maintaining the supply of coin and credit that was the lifeblood of trade explains much of the short-term volatility evident in urban fortunes elsewhere. During bullion famines volatility deepened into recessions that created Dobson’s ‘crisis-ridden urban scene’. London survived so much better than the provincial towns because it was able to go on attracting bullion through even the most difficult periods. It was always a magnet for alien merchants because it was the nearest rich market for their imports, and it provided aliens and denizens with the shortest, and therefore the safest, Channel crossing for their exports. The bullion that merchants brought to its mint gave Londoners unrivalled liquidity, which enabled them to go on offering credit when it was disappearing in the provinces. Even a town like Colchester, which had expanded with its cloth industry, suffered a severe shortage of credit in the fifteenth century and became more dependent on trade through London.184 It is significant that the only northern town to rise in the fifteenth century was Newcastle, which did so by supplying London with its coal by sea. York merchants often saw Londoners as ruthless competitors, exploiting their financial difficulties, but to young northerners in the late fifteenth century London offered the best hope of the employment that lack of coin and credit had drained away from their region. York merchants had struggled intelligently to maintain the economic independence of their city and their region, but at the end of the fifteenth century they could no longer resist the conjunction of forces that had undermined the fortunes of so many other towns and which had also created a long-lasting north–south divide.

184 Britnell, Growth and Decline in Colchester, 176–8, 207–8.

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8 THE RISE OF LONDON AS A FINANCIAL CAPITAL IN LATE MEDIEVAL ENGLAND

The rise of international financial centres made a crucial contribution to the development of the late medieval economy by stimulating the integration of markets and the growth of professional credit and financial services. Antwerp’s conspicuous growth at the end of the fifteenth century was also a crucial period for London’s development into the financial, as well as the commercial, capital of England. Historians traditionally explained this by the success of London’s merchants in capturing most of England’s cloth exports in the fifteenth century and funnelling them to Antwerp, thereby earning the wealth which financed the expansion of London’s trade into all the English regions.1 More recently, John Oldland has also identified the years from c. 1470 to 1520 as the period when the spectacular expansion of the city’s foreign trade initiated the revival of its economy, making it the ‘engine for the recovery’ of the whole kingdom.2 However, other recent interpretations have placed more emphasis on the part which London’s greater access to capital played in drawing provincial merchants to the city to obtain the trade credit which the monetary-led recession of the 1440s had made much harder to find in the provinces. Jennifer Kermode considered that the problems in the provincial economy had begun in the fifty years in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, which was the ‘critical period in the transformation of England’s economy’ when London emerged as the central place in an expanding hierarchy of towns, ‘drawing to itself a number of key functions including that of financial capital’.3 She saw ‘the growing scale of London’s involvement in the main Yorkshire towns’ and ‘the deeper penetration of the north by London investors’ as evidence of ‘the entrepreneurial failure’ of northern

1 Frederick J. Fisher, “Commercial Trends and Policy in Sixteenth-Century England”. Reprinted in Penelope J. Corfield and Negley B. Harte (eds.), London and the English Economy, 1500–1700 (London: Hambledon Press, 1990), 81–103. 2 John Oldland, “The Expansion of London’s Overseas Trade from 1475–1520”, in Caroline Barron and Anne F. Sutton (eds.), The Medieval Merchant (Donington: Shaun Tyas, 2014), 55–92. 3 Jennifer I. Kermode, “Medieval Indebtedness: The Regions Versus London”, in Nicholas Rogers (ed.), England in the Fifteenth Century: Proceedings of the 1992 Harlaxton Symposium (Stamford: Paul Watkins, 1994), 72–88.

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merchants which allowed the region to be ‘taken over by the alternative financial strength offered by Londoners due to their greater access to finance and credit’.4 The problem with this interpretation, as Dr Kermode subsequently acknowledged when she investigated the subject further, is that the Statute Staple and Merchant certificates of credit and debt, which she uses as her principal source, and which cover the whole of England in this period, do not show the dominant presence of Londoners as creditors in provincial registries and towns, even in the fifteenth century.5 Most recently Richard Goddard has also concluded from his study of the Staple certificates for the period 1353–1532 that London’s rise to become the financial capital can be explained by the central place theory which has been popularised by geographers.6 This theory asserts that merchants gravitated towards towns which supplied ‘high order’ financial and legal services precisely because of the concentration of wealth that existed there. In contrast with regional financial centres where he believes merchants’ willingness to lend depended chiefly on local commercial conditions, he concluded that London rose to be the financial capital because its commercial wealth, and larger pool of potential lenders and borrowers, made provincial merchants confident that they could always be sure of raising trade credit there. Similarly, people seeking a profitable investment for their money came to believe that the debts they registered in London would be paid back, and so they increased the amounts of capital they injected into the city, making more available for loans and credit.7 He speculated that this process ‘must have reached a critical mass at some point in the fourteenth century, after which it became an unstoppable force’.8 He singled out as the dominant cause of its development into England’s financial capital ‘its evolution into the principal centre to obtain trade finance in England’, whereby ‘financial services . . . became progressively centred upon the capital’.9 As the fifteenth-century recessions made it harder to obtain credit at reasonable rates in the provinces, he considered it likely that merchants decided that ‘the most secure business option was to abandon their home Staples and instead obtain trade finance in London’, and that it is likely that some of them also used ‘the available and cheap credit’ obtained there to transact business back in their home markets. Consequently, he speculated that London’s greater, and more liquid, money supply persuaded merchants to move south to obtain the trade credit they needed, and that ‘many of them reacted by re-organising their commercial activities to centre

4 Jennifer I. Kermode, “Money and Credit in the Fifteenth Century: Some Lessons from Yorkshire”, Business History Review 65 (1991): 476, 496–7, 499–501. 5 Kermode, “Medieval Indebtedness”, 72–88. 6 Richard Goddard, Credit and Trade in Later Medieval England, 1353–1532 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 186, 189, 191, 236. 7 Ibid., 205, 241. 8 Ibid., 241. 9 Ibid., 234–6, 247.

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upon London’.10 In this interpretation, the availability of capital, and the credit it financed, determined the course, volume, and direction of trade, rather than developments in trade creating the demand for credit, as well as the means to finance it. The question remains how and when Londoners acquired such a concentration of wealth to become the kingdom’s dominant creditors since they were not originally the leaders of the major export trades of wool and cloth which enriched England from Anglo-Saxon times. By the end of the thirteenth century wool was responsible for nearly all the kingdom’s export earnings, but since London was far from the best wool-producing areas of Yorkshire, Lincolnshire, and the Welsh Marches, and it was not as convenient a port as Boston for the Flemish merchants who had originally been its principal customers, it is not surprising that it only overtook Boston as the chief wool port of the kingdom after 1300. Similarly, Bristol’s cloth exports far outnumbered London’s until c. 1370, while Southampton also emerged then as a rival base for Italian imports. In view of these differing interpretations with conflicting dates, can we say with any greater certainty when London became the financial capital of England, and how and why it came about? Was it only decided when the recessions of the fifteenth century caused provincial finance to shrink to the extent that London’s merchants were left to dominate the credit market of the entire kingdom, or, as this present article suggests, was the process of establishing London as the financial capital of England more protracted, and also more complex, than the search for trade credit would suggest, and was it determined finally, not by that, but by developments in England’s overseas trade?11

The Statute Merchant and Staple certificates of debt One source for comparing relative changes in the wealth and credit of the capital and the provinces is the huge collection of Statute Merchant and Staple certificates in the National Archives, which both Kermode and Goddard have used as their principal evidence. The certificates were created by Edward I’s statutes of Acton Burnell (1283) and Merchants (1285).12 Additionally, the Statute Staple of 1353 created separate Staple registries, some of which were established in towns which already operated Statute Merchant registries, so that by 1400 there were 23 active registries in all. Nineteen of these were still functioning in the 1510s, giving creditors and debtors from most parts of the kingdom relatively easy access to at least one of them throughout this period. The certificates accordingly offer a wideranging sample, year by year, of changing levels of commercial and financial activity involving credit of mostly high value throughout all the English regions. Although they record only those debts which were not repaid, the evidence of

10 Ibid., 205, 241–2. 11 Ibid., 201, 203–7, 241. 12 National Archives, Classes C. 241, C. 152/65, C. 131.

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original registers compiled in London and Coventry in different periods suggests that the certificates represent a fairly consistent proportion of c. 20 per cent of those originally recorded, and they can therefore serve as a good sample of trends in mercantile credit across the kingdom. The certificates, though, have to be dated and analysed with care, and the numerous duplicates excluded, along with those which record credit for over 1,000 marks, since those are likely to be financial penalties which could be levied for non-payment, rather than debts incurred in transactions. Debts recorded in later C. 131 certificates which have no matching C. 241 record must also be added to the total since they survive singly because the creditor was allowed to take away the original C. 241 record of the debt. It is understandable that, deterred by these complications, and the huge bulk of the certificates, historians have hitherto relied mostly on counting their number and not on the sums of money they record. Such a method, though, does not do justice to significant changes in their values, or to the much higher averages of debt usually recorded in London. This article, by contrast, uses the individual sums of credit which are recorded in the documents to calculate London’s percentage of the national total in each of the decades from 1290 to 1530, as this is likely to give a clearer indication of when, and by what steps, the city increased its financial strength to the point where it could be said to operate as the financial capital dominating the credit of the whole kingdom. Most historians would argue that London was always destined for that role for the same reasons that led the Romans to choose its site for the headquarters of their newly conquered province. Its position on the Thames commanded an extensive hinterland, while its estuary, facing that of the Rhine across the North Sea, gave London’s merchants access to a direct route across Europe to the Mediterranean, as well as a short sea-journey to the markets of Flanders and France. The Rhine route certainly enhanced London’s financial importance from the second half of the tenth century when German merchants brought to the city newly discovered silver from the Harz mountains which enabled London’s mint to strike consistently 25 per cent or more of the kingdom’s coinage throughout the late tenth and eleventh centuries.13 In the last quarter of the twelfth century, Henry II further advanced the city’s financial status when he moved the Exchequer from Winchester to Westminster, and obliged the sheriffs to transport there the coin they collected in dues and taxes throughout the kingdom.

London’s financial status in 1290–99 Despite these early advantages, London’s rise to be the kingdom’s financial capital was far from certain. In 1285, Edward I ended its self-government for thirteen years, while he also suspended the citizens’ monopoly of London’s retail and

13 D. Michael Metcalf, “Continuity and Change in English Monetary History c. 973–1086”, Part I. British Numismatic Journal, 50 (1980): 29–49.

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distributive trade. As late as 1285–94, even before the royal government had temporarily moved its headquarters to York to fight the Scots, the certificates indicate that York’s residents were able to advance credit worth 78 per cent of that recorded by denizen Londoners.14 The certificates for transactions registered in the 1290s show that although London was undoubtedly the single most important financial and commercial centre, it could not claim to be the financial capital because its citizens did not dominate the kingdom’s credit, even though provincial creditors visited it in those years from all but five English counties, because they were trading either with London citizens or with visiting alien merchants. Londoners, and resident alien merchants, were pursuing debtors in London’s registry in 1290–99 for the repayment of loans, or credit, totalling just over £15,000, which was 27.1 per cent of the total value of the credit recorded in that decade’s certificates. Prominent among the London creditors using the city’s registry in the 1290s, besides merchants, were Chancery clerks, who, from the Chancellor downwards, had made money either in royal service or from investing in the wool trade. However, most of the credit given by Londoners appears to have been confined to its neighbouring counties, particularly Essex and Kent, which suggests that much of it may have been given for food, or for the other essential supplies and services that London’s population needed to sustain their urban life, rather than as investments in the city’s trade. The city’s financial relationships with other counties in the 1290s were sparse and meagre. This was because the towns in the best woolproducing areas such as Shrewsbury, York, and Lincoln, as well as the provincial fairs, served not just as collecting centres for wool, but were also sufficiently enriched by the wool trade to become regional financial centres, while Londoners conducted most of their transactions in their own city. Of the seven certificates they did issue from provincial registries, five concerned credit they gave in Lincoln, one in Winchester, and one in Shrewsbury, where presumably they were buying wool. However, these record London credit totalling only £158. The English economy, it appears, was still predominantly a localised one in the 1290s, and the provinces were not conspicuously dependent on London’s trade and finance.

Alien merchants and London’s credit Before Edward I’s dispute with Flanders between 1270–5 caused him to expel all the Flemings from England, they had been the leading exporters of English wool. They financed their purchases by selling their cloth at the regional fairs, which they reached from the eastern ports, notably from Boston, rather than from London. Their expulsion opened the wool trade more fully to the competition of Italian merchants who had made their headquarters in London because the city provided the best market for their luxurious imports from the Mediterranean. Sales of these, though, were insufficient to pay for their wool-purchases, which meant that they

14 Nightingale, “The Rise and Decline of Medieval York”, 6.

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had to import bullion to finance the advance contracts they made with English monasteries to secure future supplies.15 It seems likely that London’s denizen merchants had copied them to the extent of using similar forward contracts to increase their own wool exports, which would explain why the certificates of this period record Londoners suing so many provincial debtors for large sums of money. The concentration of alien merchants in London, and the Italians’ ability to borrow from bankers in the Champagne fairs, gave London’s economy more financial liquidity than was generally available in the provinces, even though Edward I and his grandson also expected the Italians to help finance their wars. Edward I’s declaration of war against France in 1294 was a major blow to the Italian merchants because it severed their links with the Champagne fairs at a time when their financial strength in Europe was already weakened by the debasement of Europe’s coinages.16 The war also dislocated the wool trade and strained its finances, because the king used it, both directly and also through higher export taxes, to fund his campaigns. It proved of some lasting benefit, though, to the city by inducing more merchants to take their wool to London for the benefit of a shorter, and therefore safer, crossing to Flanders for their ships. The subsequent failure of the fairs to recover their pre-war prosperity also encouraged more provincial merchants to sell their wool in London, where they now relied on English merchants to export it in place of the Italians, whose trade was declining as increasing shortages of silver on the continent caused monetary instability which affected their profits. In 1294 Italian merchants recorded an average of only 5 per cent of the total credit in the certificates, although this recovered to c. 13 per cent from 1300. The re-coinage of 1300–01, and greatly increased exports of wool after the peace, then brought new supplies of silver to the London and Canterbury mints, which so expanded the money supply that the certificates issued by London’s registry rose in value from £8,158 in 1300–04 to £20,391 in 1305–09.17 These reflected increased sales of wool in the city where, by 1324–5, London was already exporting over half of the national total as the decline of the provincial fairs affected Boston’s wool exports in the difficult trading conditions of that decade. The cloth, linens, and luxury goods that had been sold at the fairs were increasingly taken over by London’s mercers to sell to the court, aristocracy, and the city’s richer customers.18 By contrast, the eight provincial registries which issued a mere fifteen certificates for London creditors in 1300–09 recorded transactions totalling only £387.1, as more merchants found that London offered them the best market for their sales. However, when re-struck into sterling coin, the new supplies of silver circulated throughout the kingdom and caused provincial credit as a whole to expand. This

15 16 17 18

Bell, Brooks, and Dryburgh, The English Wool Market. c. 1230–1327, 11–14, 21, 250. Nightingale, “Alien Finance and the Development of the English Economy, 1285–1311”, 486–9. Ibid., 482–90; Allen, Mints and Money in Medieval England, Table C. 2. Sutton, The Mercery of London, 40.

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meant that although Londoners’ credit grew, so too did that of provincial merchants, which thereby restricted London’s share to 21.5 per cent of the national total. It only increased when the provincial economy suffered a series of disasters. These included months of continuous rains which ruined the crops in the successive years, 1315–17, bringing famine to large areas of the kingdom, while diminishing supplies of silver coin reduced trade. Epidemics of sheep and cattle disease also cut wool exports, while the most northerly counties also suffered from repeated Scottish raids which laid waste parts of Yorkshire in 1311 and 1323, and reduced York’s credit in the certificates by the 1330s to only 15 per cent of London’s total.19

The Crown’s influence on London’s credit These early fluctuations in London’s share of the kingdom’s trade and credit reflect the extent to which its economy was affected by the Crown’s policies. These could have an impact not only on the citizens’ own overseas trade, but also on London’s ability to attract alien merchants, whose imports and demand for exports also drew provincial merchants to its port. Since the Crown relied on aliens for loans, Edward I concurred with their view that London’s privileges were an impediment to their trade, and in 1285 he annulled the city’s protectionist liberties for thirteen years, while his Carta Mercatoria of 1303 allowed alien and provincial merchants to trade in London directly with non-citizens.20 Although these measures aroused Londoners’ hostility, they undoubtedly increased the city’s inland trade and its significance as an international port. However, the more frequent presence of the court at Westminster also involved the citizens in political conflicts which had the potential to damage their economy. Such were those between Edward II and his rebellious barons, known as the Ordainers, in which the violence of the London mob contributed to the king’s deposition and deterred alien merchants from visiting the city where they were liable to be attacked and looted. When the Ordainers were in power from 1311 to 1322, they restricted the Statute Merchant registries to merchants, a restriction which continued in some of them until c. 1330 and explains most of the steep fall in the number of certificates in these years. When these restrictions ended, and rising demand for wool in Flanders again increased exports in the 1330s, Londoners sought out greater supplies inland by visiting more provincial centres of the trade. Their certificates in the 1330s included credit totalling £1,423.66 which they had recorded in eight provincial registries, namely York, Lincoln, Norwich, Oxford, Northampton, Canterbury, Southampton, and Hereford. These, though, accounted for less than 5 per cent of the Londoners’ total credit in the decade’s certificates. The rest they registered in the city itself, where the certificates record £26,490

19 Nightingale, “The Rise and Decline of Medieval York”, 7, 11–14. 20 Lloyd, Alien Merchants in England in the High Middle Ages, 27–9.

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which they had advanced to provincial customers. Most likely it was handed over in cash as advance payments for future supplies of wool, which the debtors then failed to deliver. This sum increased to 27.5 per cent London’s share of the total credit recorded in the certificates of the 1330s. Under Edward III, the government’s policies continued to influence the city’s trade as well as the credit which it generated. When he declared war on France in 1337, Edward again used the wool trade to finance his continental campaigns at the expense of supplying bullion to the London mint. The certificates record the total of £31,223 owed to Londoners by provincial debtors in this decade which brought London’s share of credit in the certificates of the 1340s up to 31 per cent of the national total. This was achieved at the cost of credit falling since 1310 in the certificates of twenty-two counties, the most notable being those of Yorkshire and Lincolnshire. Their falls almost certainly reflect the diversion of much mercantile credit in these counties to the king’s wool schemes to finance his military and diplomatic expenditure on the continent. Between 1343 and the end of the decade, they involved syndicates of wool merchants which were originally led by northerners, until their need for additional finance allowed the Londoners Walter Chiriton and Thomas Swanland to assume their leadership by borrowing from fellow-citizens and also by using their own credit to buy wool.21 Additionally, the Hull wool merchant and royal adviser, William de la Pole, persuaded ten York wool-merchants to move into London’s financial orbit, by making loans worth at least £20,000 to Walter Chiriton’s company, which was financing the siege of Calais in 1347. These loans were not repaid, but since the wool had been supplied to the merchants on credit, it was the wool-growers who bore most of the losses. Londoners also increased their own investment in wool exports by visiting nine provincial registries in the 1340s, which resulted in their issuing 53 certificates for loans or credit they had registered in them to the value of £3,130. These loans contributed to the total of £148,560 recorded in the certificates of the 1340s which was the highest amount for any decade in the entire period, even though the alien share of London’s credit was much reduced. Although there are no figures for wool exports in this decade, it would seem from the establishment of new registries in Gloucester and Lostwithiel in 1341, and in Coventry in 1346, as well as from the rising number of certificates generally, that despite the diversion of wool exports to finance the war, these were also years of general economic growth before the arrival of plague in 1348. Partly this can be explained by the decision of the royal government in 1344 to issue an English gold coinage, and in 1346 to reduce the weight of its silver coins to increase the number in circulation.22 The high value of gold coins meant that they were of most use to London’s exporters, but they also served to release silver from savings and so made more coin of lesser value available for domestic trade.

21 Lloyd, The English Wool Trade in the Middle Ages, 194–201. 22 Allen, Mints and Money in Medieval England, Table C. 2.

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Table 8.1 National and London Credit in the Statute Merchant and Staple Registries, 1290–1529, with London’s total calculated as a percentage of the national one Years

National

London

1290–99 1300–09 1310–19 1320–29 1330–39 1340–49 1350–59 1360–69 1370–79 1380–89 1390–99 1400–09 1410–19 1420–29 1430–39 1440–49 1450–59 1460–69 1470–79 1480–89 1490–99 1500–09 1510–19 1520–29

55,800 128,102 39,186 16,687 94,369 148,561 93,444 90,651 83,980 96,529 64,814 45,452 21,859 21,978 18,904 18,540 21,742 24,576 21,422 23,700 25,338 38,336 54,401 104,338

15,123 (27.1%) 25,805 (27.1%) 9,812 (25.03%) 4,920 (29.5%) 31,148 (33.03%) 46,300 (31.16%) 35,681 (38.18%) 38,578 (42.55%) 35,956 (42.81%) 38,193 (39.67%) 34,342 (52.98%) 25,285 (55.63%) 13,070 (59.7%) 11,217 (51.0%) 10,778 (57.0%) 9,771 (52.7%) 12,35 (56.8%) 17,762 (72.2%) 16,155 (75.4%) 14,178 (75.4%) 18,600 (73.4%) 31,914 (83.2%) 41,338 (75.9%) 86,996 (83.37%)

Falling Italian competition in the 1340s also gave English credit more scope to expand. This was conspicuous in the case of Cornwall’s tin-trade, for which the new registry at Lostwithiel was established in 1341. Italian finance had helped the output of tin to expand hugely in the 1330s, but when the Italians retreated, London mercers seized the opportunity to replace their contribution by their own loans to the Cornish gentry and merchants who owned the mines.23 Between 1341 and 1347 these London investments in Cornwall produced twenty-nine certificates recording credit totalling £2,657. Otherwise, Londoners’ credit was still confined mainly to its neighbouring counties, chiefly Kent, Essex, Buckinghamshire, and Surrey, and its largest share was given to fellow-Londoners. The only distant counties which received significant amounts of London credit in this decade were Yorkshire and Somerset, which was almost certainly given for wool. Moreover, like the Cornish ones, the great majority of these transactions were

23 John Hatcher, English Tin Production and Trade before 1550 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), 156 & Appendix A.

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registered in London, suggesting that the initiative for them came from enterprising journeys of provincial merchants to the capital to obtain the highest advance payments in cash. The arrival of the Black Death in November 1348 initially deterred many merchants from visiting London, while the density of the city’s population meant that it could not escape a high death-rate. Inevitably national mortality of up to 50 percent caused the number of transactions to plunge, as the fall of 51 per cent in the number of the certificates for that decade indicates. Their value, though, fell by less than 37 per cent, because high mortality increased the amount of coin per head in circulation, and thus inflated prices, as well as earnings and credit, for the survivors. Once the plague had abated, London’s demand for labour, combined with its empty properties and its employers’ ability to pay wages higher than provincial ones, encouraged speedy immigration and almost certainly allowed its population and economy to revive much quicker than in most provincial towns. This is hinted at by the widening gap from 1350 between the high price of wheat in London and the lower one in Exeter, which suggests a growing population in the capital, compared with reduced demand in provincial towns.24 The city’s commercial and financial recovery was further aided by three decisions made by Edward III in the 1350s. The most important was his re-imposition of free trade on the city in 1351, which opened it up again more completely to both alien and provincial enterprise, with only minor interruptions until 1376–7. Secondly, he ordered a full re-coinage at a lower weight standard which expanded purchasing power and credit by increasing the number of coins in circulation, while the decade also saw a substantial increase in England’s supply of gold coins and the establishment of exchanges for foreign coin in the city.25 Thirdly, the Ordinance of the Staple of 1353 extended the system of registering debts to newly created registries in the leading towns which were designated as home wool staples, in which all wool intended for export had to be sold.26 Since these Staple registries were additional to, and not replacements for, the Statute Merchant registries, London kept its existing one in the city, while a new staple court and registry were established at Westminster. This soon became far more popular both with Londoners and with provincial creditors, because it involved Chancery more cheaply and more effectively in enforcing the repayment of loans and credit. Accordingly, it encouraged London’s mercers and grocers to make ever larger advance payments to landowners and provincial merchants for the delivery of wool to sell on to alien exporters in the city.

24 James A. Galloway, “One Market or Many? London and the Grain Trade of England”, in James A. Galloway (ed.), Trade, Urban Hinterlands and Market Integration, c. 1300–1600, Centre for Metropolitan History, Working Papers Series, No. 3 (London: Institute of Historical Research, 2000), 39. 25 Allen, Mints and Money in Medieval England, 214–35. 26 Lloyd, The English Wool Trade in the Middle Ages, 207–8.

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So far, the extension of Londoners’ credit into the provinces could be explained largely, it seems, by the provincial search for new means of increasing their exports. However, when the Ordinance of the Staple banned English wool exports for four years from 1353, probably so that the Crown could benefit from the higher duties that aliens paid, Italian merchants flocked back to London. Since provincial middlemen were now also free to buy and sell in the city, and the aliens had a monopoly of wool exports for four years, the former had an even greater incentive to carry their wool to London to sell it to them. There, Italian demand ensured that half of the kingdom’s wool exports again went through its port, attaining a new peak in 1353–4.27 Provincial merchants were also drawn to London by the greater opportunities they now had of establishing a profitable return trade from the city to their home counties. This became possible through the boom in foreign imports which had accompanied freedom of trade and meant that they could now buy them directly from alien merchants on London’s quayside. Another assured profitable return trade to the provinces was provided by the linen goods which London’s mercers were importing in greater volumes, and whose sale they were in the process of dominating.28 It seems that it was the promise of the higher profits to be obtained from double trades like this in exports and imports, rather than just the greater availability in London of credit and coin in general, that drew more provincial merchants to the city in the 1350s.29 It probably also explains the rise in the decadal value of London’s credit in the certificates to 38.1 per cent of the national total. It rose even higher in the 1360s, to 42.5 per cent of the total, when the value of imported alien goods to London climbed spectacularly from £25,833 in 1360–1 to £46,277 in 1368–9.30 The choice of Calais as the overseas wool staple from 1363 created another strong incentive for provincial merchants to desert their home ports in favour of taking the safer land-route to sell their wool to exporters in London, particularly when the war with France was renewed in 1369. The Calais Staple had reduced the share of alien merchants in the trade because, in addition to paying a higher duty than the English, they had to bear the costs in time and money of unloading their wool at the staple before re-exporting it to their own ports. Hanseatic merchants were particularly affected by this rule, and responded, it seems, by choosing to invest more in exports of English woollen cloth in preference to wool.31 However, the Italians both increased their share of wool exports in the 1360s, as well as the value of the imports they brought to London to pay for them, thereby making the

27 Terrence Lloyd, England and the German Hanse, 1157–1611: A Study of Their Trade and Commercial Diplomacy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 97, Table 3; Oldland, “The Expansion of London’s Overseas Trade from 1475–1520”, 89. 28 Sutton, The Mercery of London, 99. 29 Cp. Goddard, Credit and Trade in Later Medieval England, 1353–1532, 234–6. 30 Lloyd, England and the German Hanse, 1157–1611, 198–9, Table 3. 31 Lloyd, The English Wool Trade in the Middle Ages, 216.

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city into even more of a central hub for the exchange of imports and exports. This development encouraged London merchants to reduce their visits to provincial staples, and the amount of credit they registered in them, which explains why the certificates show a fall in their credit from £2,600 recorded in ten provincial registries in the 1350s to a mere £755 in seven registries in the 1360s.

The city and the cloth trade English cloth manufactures had begun to revive in the second quarter of the fourteenth century, aided by protectionist measures, but only about 4,000 cloths were exported in 1350.32 However, after free trade was imposed on the city in 1351, provincial drapers were able to move there freely, and cloth was brought there for sale from the chief manufacturing areas, namely, the home counties, Suffolk, and the southwestern counties, and especially from Somerset.33 From the 1360s, cloth exports from London began rising rapidly.34 London mercers also contributed in the 1360s to the city’s expanding trade in provincial cloth and worsteds to finance their own increasing imports of linens from the Low Countries, which they directed exclusively to London.35 Registries which came to be associated with the cloth industry in Salisbury, Winchester, Chichester, Coventry, Gloucester, and Northampton became more prominent in the certificates. Clearly some restructuring of the kingdom’s internal trade had begun, but it did so because its overseas trade was focussing more on London, not primarily because credit was more easily available there, but because, as denizen wool exports began to fall, and cloth exports increased, the nature of England’s overseas trade was changing, and the demand for trade credit was changing with it. In the ten years from 1374 London’s cloth exports more than quadrupled and went on to grow even more spectacularly by the first decade of the fifteenth century, when they accounted for 40.4 per cent of the national total.36 To finance their share, alien merchants steadily increased their imports into London, while the city’s share of credit in the certificates of the 1370s rose to 42.8 per cent. The Londoners’ search for more cloth and wool to pay for their imports undoubtedly explains why they appeared in thirteen provincial registries in the 1380s, where the certificates record twenty-two of their transactions totalling £2,523. Several of these registries, such as Exeter, Bristol, Coventry, Salisbury, Chichester, Norwich, and Winchester, served new cloth manufacturing areas, whose western locations had been inspired originally by Gascony’s demand for Bristol’s cloth exports.37

32 John Oldland, “Making and Marketing Woollen Cloth in Late-Medieval London”, The London Journal, 36 (2011): 89, 93. 33 Oldland, “Making and Marketing Woollen Cloth in Late-Medieval London”, 89–90, 95. 34 Carus-Wilson and Coleman, England’s Export Trade, 1275–1547, 140. 35 Sutton, The Mercery of London, 129, 150, 157. 36 Oldland, “Making and Marketing Woollen Cloth in Late-Medieval London”, 89, 96. 37 Carus-Wilson and Coleman, England’s Export Trade, 1275–1547, 84.

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Clothiers now went to London, rather than to their nearest provincial ports, not primarily for the higher amounts of credit they hoped that Londoners would offer them, but because they expected to meet there the alien merchants who would, they hoped, offer them better prices for their cloth and also supply them with the imported raw materials, including dyes, oils, and alum, which they could sell on their return to their local cloth industry. The fact that these might be paid for in London by exchanges with finished cloth was an additional incentive to travel there because it promised the advantage that less coin might be needed to finance the transactions. This was even more desirable in view of the growing problem of diminishing supplies of bullion.38

Falling coin and credit The falling production of Europe’s silver mines began affecting the output of the London mint in the 1390s, as it also affected mints throughout Europe.39 Shrinking liquidity, and consequently declining confidence in credit, influenced a fall of 30 per cent in the value of the certificates in the first decade of the new century to a total of £45,452, which established a new lower scale of values for them. When lack of bullion caused the Calais mint to close down in 1404 for twenty years, provincial merchants were the chief sufferers because they had used it to make their customers pay for wool in English gold nobles instead of the sellers suffering losses on the exchange rate. The English also benefited from being able to carry the coin they earned directly back to their home ports, without having to call at London, and wait there for the mint to strike them into English coins. This direct transfer of cash from Calais was important for maintaining financial liquidity in the provinces and the credit that depended on it. However, the contracting money supply reduced by over 26 per cent the value of the credit they recorded in the Westminster Staple certificates which they issued in the first decade of the new century. Its greater fall in the provinces, though, meant that London’s share of the national total then rose temporarily to 55 per cent, only to fall back in the next decade when the continuing shortage of coin forced parliament to agree to a partial recoinage with lower weight standards to increase the amount in circulation.40 London’s share of the credit in the certificates then settled between c. 1420 and c. 1460 at between 50 and 57 per cent of the national total, a majority share, it could be said, which finally gave the city some rights to claim the title of financial capital. Its closer links with the provinces which sustained this relative prosperity were maintained not so much by London’s own citizens as by increasing numbers of

38 Oldland, “The Expansion of London’s Overseas Trade from 1475–1520”, 100. 39 John Day, “The Great Bullion Famine of the Fifteenth Century”. Reprinted in John Day (ed.), The Medieval Market Economy (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), 1–54. 40 Allen, Mints and Money in Medieval England, 336.

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provincial chapmen whose small-scale investments and low overheads reduced their costs. In 1384 only 16 per cent of the customers whom the mercers prosecuted for debt were chapmen, but in 1424 50 per cent were. That same year they prosecuted debtors in thirty English counties, from small and large towns alike, and particularly in the main cloth-manufacturing areas of Suffolk, Somerset, Yorkshire, and Norfolk, for not repaying their debts.41 So important had chapmen become to London’s trade that the Mercers’ and Grocers’ companies began enforcing rules designed to keep them travelling to the city instead of selling their goods at the provincial fairs. These had revived as shortages of silver coin had reduced the retail trade of towns, while the number of active provincial registries fell to sixteen. Some registries, like Shrewsbury, Hereford, and Winchester, which had been prominent in the wool trade, ceased to issue certificates altogether. Conflicts with the new ruler of Brabant in the 1430s over the English demand for full payment in coin for their wool at Calais produced retaliatory bans on sales of English cloth in Antwerp, further depressing the supply of bullion to the mint, particularly silver, and thereby inhibiting any expansion of credit. As the output of both the London and Calais mints fell in the 1440s, Londoners’ credit in the certificates fell to its lowest value in the century.42 Whereas they had issued certificates against debtors in twenty-two transactions recorded in provincial registries in the 1360s, which involved debts of £2,300, and in twentythree transactions involving debts totalling £2,420 in the 1380s, the number dropped to sixteen transactions in 1400–09, with debts totalling £752. At the same time the counties which failed to record a London creditor increased from four in the 1390s, to eight in the 1410s, to ten in the 1420s, and then to twelve in the 1430s and 1440s. Far from Londoners using their superior resources of credit to exploit the declining economies of northern counties, many of those counties, particularly Northumberland, Yorkshire, Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire, Lincolnshire, Shropshire, and Staffordshire, saw their financial links with Londoners diminish from the 1420s at the same time that their local credit was falling. Consequently, although London’s share of the diminishing total of credit in the certificates rose to 52.7 per cent in the 1440s and increased to 62 per cent in the 1450s, this was largely because provincial credit had been falling since 1390 more rapidly than the capital’s share. However, a temporary increase in London’s wool exports in the 1450s helped to increase the London mint’s output of silver coin and encouraged a slight rise of Londoners’ credit in the certificates to 56.8 per cent in this decade. Did this mean that the city really was now attracting more provincial merchants because it could offer more abundant and cheaper credit than any other financial centre, or did it signify a further change in the character of its overseas trade? London’s wool exports, like those of provincial ports, had been falling steadily from the 1360s as the whole trade contracted under the impact of declining

41 Sutton, The Mercery of London, 214, 217. 42 Allen, Mints and Money in Medieval England, Table C.

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demand due to civil war in Flanders, and its invasion by the French, combined with the effect that the Calais staple had in deterring alien wool exporters and the new regulations which had been imposed on the trade to import more bullion.43 Despite a slight recovery in the 1420s, London’s wool exports plunged again in the 1430s, and oscillated thereafter, while always remaining below the level they had attained in the 1380s. They were accompanied by similar declines in wool exports from the provincial ports. It became apparent from the 1430s that exports of English cloth might overtake those of wool, since their volumes continued to be fairly similar up to the 1450s. However, the loss of Gascony, and conflicts with the Hanse, caused both to decline, thereby perpetuating the shortage of silver coin. Edward IV tackled this problem by a radical re-coinage which he began in 1464, using a lower weight-standard.44 The consequent devaluation had a major impact on England’s foreign trade and, therefore, also on trade credit. By cheapening the price of England’s cloth exports to Europe by 25 per cent, and thus increasing their sales, the measure earned additional supplies of bullion for the London mint, which, in turn, financed a major expansion of linen imports, as well as an increasing variety of goods from Antwerp.45 In Oldland’s view the greatest impact of London’s trade expansion was felt from the 1470s, when cloth exports surged 53 per cent ahead of wool, but its effects were probably most conspicuous in the city’s distributive trade.46 It was certainly this which most increased London’s importance as a centre of credit for the whole kingdom, because the chapmen who supplied many of London’s exports also obtained on credit their purchases of London’s goods to sell in the provinces. In this way the growth of London’s export, import, and distributive trades integrated the economy of the capital more closely with that of the provinces, and in the process increased trade credit, while also expanding the size and wealth of London’s merchant class.47 From 1475 the economy faltered again when a mint price which favoured gold reduced imports of silver and contributed to a fall in provincial credit. A full recovery only began when the Portuguese moved their spice trade from Bruges to Antwerp in the 1490s, and thereby enlarged the market for English cloth exports, which caused London’s share of credit in the certificates to rise to 73.4 per cent in that decade.48 It increased further to 83.2 per cent in the first decade of the sixteenth century. However, it took another twenty years of rising cloth exports, aided by Henry VII’s improved mint price for bullion in 1489, and again in 1526, as well as a further reduction in the weight of silver coins in 1522–3, before the circulation

43 Lloyd, The English Wool Trade in the Middle Ages, 225, 239–42. 44 Bonney, “The English Medieval Wool and Cloth Trade”, 25–6. 45 Christopher Challis, “Lord Hastings to the Great Silver Recoinage, 1464 1699”, in A New History of the Royal Mint (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 192–5, Tables 8–9. 46 Oldland, “The Expansion of London’s Overseas Trade from 1475–1520”, 63, 67. 47 Oldland, “Making and Marketing Woollen Cloth in Late-Medieval London”, 67–70. 48 Ibid., 62.

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of coin throughout England recovered sufficiently to finance a general expansion of credit in the provinces. By that time, the long depression in the provincial economy, and the combination of events which had channelled England’s cloth exports and related imports more narrowly through London, had secured the city’s position as the kingdom’s financial and commercial capital to the extent that its certificates recorded debtors in every county except Northumberland and Rutland. Yorkshire’s credit had recovered to be second only to London’s, but the old pattern by which Essex and Kent gained most from their proximity to London remained, with Essex providing the third highest credit and Kent the fourth. Thirteen provincial registries were still functioning which recorded credit that was now mainly related to the cloth industry, and to cloth exports from Bristol, Exeter, Poole, and Southampton. However, the transactions which local creditors recorded in their certificates were few and insignificant compared with those registered in the Westminster staple as London’s cloth exports boomed and reached 82.3 per cent of the national total in 1529–30. This proportion was reflected in London’s share of 87.6 per cent of the credit recorded in the certificates of that year.

Conclusions London’s rise to be England’s financial capital was the result of several complex factors, not just financial ones, and it extended over a longer period than the last thirty years of the fifteenth century, which is usually singled out as the crucial period for its rise. The city’s geographical position always favoured its development as a chief entrepot for England’s trade with the continent, but although its mint from Anglo-Saxon times was the most prolific in the kingdom, its population by 1300 was responsible for little more than 20 per cent of the credit of high value recorded in the Statute Merchant certificates. This was largely because wool exports to Flanders earned most of the bullion which produced England’s coinage, and they enriched other ports, particularly those on the east coast, as well as inland towns which served as collecting and financial centres for provincial wool merchants. The dominance which London eventually won over the wool trade, and the subsequent replacement of wool by cloth exports as the major contributor to England’s favourable balance of trade, was strongly influenced by war and royal policy. The wars against France, and the dangers these posed to shipping, contributed to the decline of the provincial fairs and encouraged merchants to divert their trade away from the east-coast ports to the land routes to London to use the shorter and, therefore, safer Channel crossing. They also made Edward I more eager to woo the Italian merchants based in London whose wealth he needed to finance his military activities. Because the Italians opposed the protectionist privileges of the city as an impediment to their trade, and the king wanted to establish royal authority more firmly over its government, he suspended its liberties for fifteen years from 1285 to 1298. These included the citizens’ monopoly of their retail and distributive trades. He thereby opened London’s economy more fully to the 191

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enterprise of alien and provincial merchants, thus expanding its trade and wealth. Whereas for more than a century Flemish, and then Italian, merchants had profited most from exporting England’s wool to Flanders, the monetary instability which increased in Europe from the beginning of the fourteenth century, as its supplies of bullion diminished, caused alien merchants to lose ground, and English merchants accordingly took over more of the export trade. However, in 1351 Edward III reimposed free trade on the city, which this time lasted for twenty-six years. Despite the Londoners’ protests, it increased the city’s wealth through the immigration of both provincial and alien merchants and encouraged the revival of London’s cloth industry. From 1363, when the overseas wool staple and mint were established at Calais, London became its nearest English port and so attracted more provincial merchants to use it as their principal gateway to the European market. Royal monetary policy also contributed to London’s rise to become England’s financial capital. It assisted the city’s relatively speedy recovery after the plague by the introduction in 1344 of gold coins into the currency whose high value made them of particular benefit to the city’s export and distributive trade, while they also served to release from savings the silver coin which was essential for its distributive and retail trade. The re-coinage of 1351, using lower weight standards, further expanded the volume of the silver coinage, and so helped to increase the money-supply sufficiently for credit to expand. Even more important was Edward IV’s later re-coinage, which he began in 1464, to combat another serious shortage of silver coin. By reducing weight standards by 25 per cent, this measure caused a devaluation of sterling which cheapened the price of English exports to Europe, greatly increasing their sales, thereby earning new supplies of silver bullion from Antwerp. Royal policy also influenced, albeit inadvertently, the recovery of the English cloth industry when the king banned the English from exporting wool between 1353 and 1357, and so diverted more of it into cloth-manufacturing. At the same time, London’s new freedom of trade encouraged provincial drapers to move there to revive its own cloth industry and to buy from provincial suppliers the cloths that were now being produced in greater volumes in several areas of the kingdom. The expansion of the industry increased London’s demand for the dyes, oils, and alum which it needed as raw materials, and which the Italians had been importing into the city in increasing quantities from the 1350s to finance their cloth exports. The free trade which was imposed on London in 1351 had given them the freedom to sell these imports directly to provincial merchants in the city and thus created an expanding two-way trade between London and the provincial cloth-making areas. This was assisted by the establishment of the city’s new central cloth market in Blackwell Hall where provincial cloth was sold to meet both domestic and international demand. Wool exports also continued to support London’s dominant position as the centre of the kingdom’s overseas trade. It had been strengthened by the Crown’s choice of neighbouring Calais as the overseas wool staple in 1363, and by the renewal of the war against France in 1369, which encouraged the concentration of 192

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the export and import trades in London by obliging ships to sail in armed convoys by the shortest Channel crossing. As a consequence of these changes, the value of the city’s credit in the certificates first rose to over 40 per cent of the national total in the 1360s and then to over 50 per cent in the 1390s when the provincial economy sank into depression as the first bullion famine reduced the circulation of coin and inhibited credit generally. Although the bullion they earned from wool exports enriched some individuals, and also fed the London mint, it did not necessarily secure for merchants a direct return cargo to the port of London, from which they could make a second profit. This only happened as cloth increasingly took over from wool as the chief export from the mid-fifteenth century, in a change which began to re-shape the economy. By exporting English cloth to Antwerp, and buying there, in return, linens and the raw materials needed by the cloth industry, as well as by selling in London the many luxurious and multifarious products that Antwerp now provided, London’s merchant class grew larger and richer, and thus increased both its capital and its credit. Since these imports offered an assured second profit to the provincial clothiers and chapmen who bought them to sell in their home markets, they were also a powerful inducement to them to sell their cloth in London. It appears that London suffered less than the provincial towns from the two bullion famines of the early and mid-fifteenth century. This was not because provincial merchants were less enterprising than Londoners, since they were travelling long distances to sell their cloth at Blackwell Hall. Nor was it because in searching for credit or loans they consciously decided to abandon their home staples, because both credit and loans were more easily obtained from wealthier Londoners. Although merchants certainly needed credit to finance their trade, and this could be more difficult to find in some years, and in some regions, than in others, their principal motivation was their search for the maximum profits to be gained from their capital investment. These had also to be sufficient to cover the costs, and to compensate for the hardships of, the long, expensive, and possibly dangerous journeys they had to undertake to sell their goods in the most profitable marketplace. They therefore sought trades which could double their earnings by combining one profit on the outward journey with another made on the return journey home. The decline in wool exports, and the rising value of cloth exports, had reduced the earlier dominance of the eastern ports that had supplied the Flemish cloth industry, while the cloth made in Bristol, Exeter, and the western counties for export to Gascony and Iberia had expanded. The effect was to re-balance the economy westwards. However, London’s position, at the hub of the kingdom’s road and sea connexions, maintained the city’s ability to serve all of these markets, while its relative closeness to Antwerp and Calais helped to protect it from the worst threats of intermittent piracy and naval warfare which could so damage overseas trade. When the devaluation of the coinage in 1464 increased cloth exports to Antwerp, and thereby financed expanding imports of Antwerp’s linens and new multifarious manufactures, London’s share of the credit recorded 193

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in the certificates of the 1460s rose by another substantial jump to 76 per cent of the total. Apart from the 1480s, when missing certificates prevent an accurate assessment, London’s share of the value of the credit in the certificates continued to increase up to 83 per cent of the total in the first decade of the sixteenth century, in company with the rising value of London’s cloth exports. Although in this way the expansion of trade and the money-supply jointly underpinned the last and most spectacular stage of London’s rise to the status of a financial capital, it was also the long-drawn-out depressions in provincial trade and credit, illustrated in Table 8.1, firstly after the plague, and then in a long, sagging decline, from the 1390s to the 1460s, which included the two monetary-led contractions of the early and mid-fifteenth century, that had assisted the process. When the money supply recovered generally, provincial credit also began to recover, to the extent that thirteen provincial registries were active in the 1520s, although ten counties still did not record any creditors of their own. By the late fifteenth century Londoners’ superior wealth enabled them to dominate the credit of the entire kingdom, but it was also the earlier decisions made by them, and particularly by the royal government, as well as the events that inspired them, which had over a much longer period concentrated wealth in their city and also created through its expanding trade a greater demand for its credit. Londoners were not merely the fortunate beneficiaries of better access to capital and credit; they also took an active part in creating it by responding promptly to changes in the patterns of international and domestic trade in ways which increased their own share. They thereby stimulated the city’s rise into the unquestioned financial capital that it had become by the end of the fifteenth century.

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9 GOLD, CREDIT, AND MORTALITY Distinguishing deflationary pressures on the late medieval English economy1

In an article published in 1978, Mate made the startling claim that the introduction of an official English gold currency ‘had just as much impact on the English economy as the outbreak of the Black Death’. By this she meant that the gold coinage introduced in 1344 so compensated for the lack of silver coin in circulation that it helped also to counteract the deflationary effects of the demographic disaster which, by reducing demand, would otherwise have driven down prices and kept them low.2 This view challenged Postan’s then dominant interpretation of the medieval economy as one determined primarily by the rise and fall of the population.3 For him the Black Death, and subsequent high mortality, was the prime mover of economic and social change in the late middle ages, and the principal cause of the long period of falling prices in the fifteenth century. Since then the greater emphasis on the commercialization of the economy has involved more discussion of the case that changes in the supply of bullion also influenced prices and credit. However, despite the exposition by monetary historians of the problems caused by a dearth of silver coin, no one has investigated further the contribution that the gold coinage made to deflation, and the subject does not even feature in a recent survey of the historiography.4 After half a century of debate, money and population are still generally discussed as opposing interpretations, instead of being considered as separate, but inter-related, factors that combined to exert extraordinary deflationary pressures on the fifteenth-century economy. This neglect of the gold coinage is less understandable since it is now clear how revolutionary was the change that gold made in the fifteenth-century English

1 I am grateful to the Leverhulme Trustees, and to the Economic and Social Research Council (Award no. 000271010) for financing my calendaring of the Statute Merchant and Staple certificates and the Extents on debt in the National Archives. 2 Mavis Mate, “The Role of Gold Coinage in the English Economy, 1338–1400”, Numismatic Chronicle, 7th ser., 18 (1978): 126, 41. 3 For a summary and critique of the views of M.M. Postan and his followers, see Hatcher and Bailey, Modelling the Middle Ages. It does not, though, discuss the gold coinage in its survey of the role of money. 4 See, for example, Spufford, Money and Its Use in Medieval Europe, 344–8. For a guide to the historiography of the medieval economy, see Hatcher and Bailey, Modelling the Middle Ages.

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currency. In 1351 gold accounted for only about 15–20 per cent of the currency’s total value, whereas by 1422 the proportion had risen to about 80 per cent.5 Not since the seventh century had England known a currency so heavily weighted with gold. Mayhew has compared it in modern terms with a circulation in which £50 notes are readily available but pound coins are very scarce.6 Mate confined her discussion to gold’s inflationary effects in the fourteenth century, but once gold coins dominated the currency from c. 1400, they had potentially the opposite influence on the economy. Since most trade, production, rents, and wages were financed by silver coins of relatively low value, their replacement by gold coins of much higher value and lower velocity could, theoretically, have had as deflationary an effect on prices as that produced by mass mortality.7 This was particularly true in England, where no debased coins were struck to serve as small change.8 Hitherto, the lack of quantitative evidence has inhibited any informed discussion of the relative effects of the gold coinage and mortality on the economy.9 This article approaches the task of distinguishing them by using as its principal evidence the Statute Merchant and Staple certificates of debt.10 Originating in legislation of 1284, these certificates record debts from all regions of the kingdom, which, on default, were sent to Chancery for enforcement by local sheriffs.11 They provide

5 Allen, “The Volume of the English Currency, 1158–1470”, 607, Table 2. 6 Mayhew, “The Circulation and Imitation of Sterlings in the Low Countries”, 33; Spufford, Money and Its Use, 340. 7 On the much lower velocity of gold coin see John H. Munro, “The Monetary Origins of the Price Revolution: Before the Influx of Spanish-American Treasure: The South German Silver-Copper Trades, Merchant-Banking, and Venetian Commerce, 1470–1540”, in Dennis Flynn, Arturo Giráldez, and Richard van Glahn (eds.), Global Connections and Monetary History, 1470–1800 (Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 2003), 24; Spufford, Money and Its Use, 323, maintains that ‘most men in the fifteenth century never handled gold coins at all’. 8 Spufford, Money and its Use, 331–2. 9 Ibid., 343–8. 10 There are 36,591 Statute Merchant and Staple certificates in the National Archives (Classes C. 241 and C. 152, covering the years 1284–1529 and associated with them are 6,537 Extents on Debt (Class C. 131). 11 For a fuller discussion of these certificates, see Pamela Nightingale, “Monetary Contraction and Mercantile Credit in Later Medieval England”, Econ. Hist. Rev., 2nd ser., 43 (1990), repr. in Nightingale, Trade, Money and Power, 565–7; eadem, Nightingale, “Money and Credit in the Economy of Late Medieval England”, 63–6. By comparing the relevant certificates with original recognisance rolls from London and Coventry which reflect differing economic circumstances, the following rates of default emerge: London Statute Merchant Rolls, 1291–2: 19.3%; 1293–4: 18.8%; 1295–6: 20.1%; 1298–9: 22%; 1309–10: 22%; 1310–11: 22.9%; 1315–17: 20.8%; 1313– 15: 20.3% (Corporation of London Record Office, Recognisance Rolls, II–IX). Roll I, for 1285, has a lower rate of 15% because it was compiled under the Acton Burnell legislation which produced fewer certificates of default because mayors could sell the debtor’s goods and property in his absence, whereas under the Statute Merchant, if the debtor was not present (and few were), the mayor had to send a certificate to Chancery. The rate of default for the Coventry rolls was 21.7% for 1392–9, and 19.3% for 1400–9 (Alice Beardwood, The Statute Merchant Roll of Coventry, 1392–1416, Vol. 17 (Warwickshire: Dugdale Society, 1939).

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Figure 9.1 Credit and population as decadal percentages of 1300–1309 totals Sources: Clark, ‘Long march of history’, p. 120, tab. 9; TNA, PRO C. 241, C. 152, and C. 131 certificates.

a large national sample of debts which can be analysed year by year to reveal changes in the volume and geographical pattern of high-value credit transactions in medieval England. Changing levels of credit reveal fluctuations in economic activity, and they can also indicate the principal factors that influenced them. These included, besides monetary and demographic pressures, the effects of warfare, heavy taxation, interruptions of trade, and the political and institutional developments that could encourage or inhibit the registration and enforcement of debts.12 The certificates also contain information which has permitted the construction of annual mortality rates for the creditors.13 They allow a comparison, from the same documentary evidence, of the annual death-rates of those lending money, with changes in the number of their transactions and in the quantity of the money they lent.14 This makes it possible to discriminate more precisely between monetary and demographic influences on credit, and, therefore, on the level of economic activity that the credit was financing. Allen’s work on the volume of the currency, and on the coin hoards, has added to our knowledge of the wider monetary factors involved, while Clark has provided a new analysis of prices and

12 Nightingale, “Money and Credit”, 67–8. 13 For a full discussion of this evidence see above, Pamela Nightingale, “Some New Evidence of Crises and Trends of Mortality in Late Medieval England”, Past and Present, 187, 1 (2005): 33–68. Mortality rates for the creditors were calculated from the percentages whose deaths are recorded in the certificates within seven years of their registering their credit; see Nightingale, “Trends of Mortality”, 36–40. 14 The C. 131 Class contains the sheriffs’ responses to Statute Staple writs from 1353. Where these exist, but there is no matching C. 241 writ, the value of the debts referred to have been added to the totals.

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farm-workers’ wages to add to existing data, from which he has also made fresh decadal estimates of the population.15 Their trends are compared in Figure 9.1 with those of the credit recorded in the certificates. Work on manorial records and analyses of the national pardons of outlawry for debt, which reflect credit of much lower value, and statistics of litigation, mostly for debt, in the courts of King’s Bench and Common Pleas, enable one to test the trends exhibited by the Statute Merchant and Staple certificates.16

I Although Allen’s new estimates are generally higher than those they replace, they do little to diminish the large gap between the size of the currency and the work required of it to finance the transactions of the population.17 If the English population in 1310 was, as is generally assumed, c. 5 million, and the currency, entirely silver, was worth £1.5–2 million, then c. 1310 it had a value that corresponded, at most, with only c. 50 per cent of a national income from goods and services that has been roughly estimated at c. £4–5 million.18 Since credit, with barter and other non-monetary forms of payment, had to be substantial to fund this gap, did it matter to creditors whether the coin available to them was predominantly gold or silver? Clearly it did if even the smallest gold coin, the quarter noble, had too high a value to fund normal household purchases and the bulk of the retail trade. Worth 20 pence, the quarter noble was the equivalent of five days’ wages for a labourer.19 This meant that the majority of the population was unlikely to use gold in their daily transactions. Accordingly, its circulation was far more restricted than that of silver coins. Gold could be useful, even to villagers, as a store of savings, if it came their way from sales of land or harvest produce, but it would undoubtedly have inhibited the ordinary run of business, especially in the urban retail trade, and by reducing the number of transactions, would thereby reduce the volume of credit.20

15 Allen, “The Volume of the English Currency”; idem, “English Coin Hoards, 1158–1544”, British Numismatic Journal, 72 (2002): 24–84, passim; Gregory Clark, “The Long March of History: Farm Laborers’ Wages in England 1208–1850”, The Economic History Review, 60 (2006): especially tab. 1, 99–100, tab. 5, 108–9, and tab. 9, 120. 16 On the trends exhibited by the pardons of outlawry for debt see Nightingale, “England and the European Depression of the Mid-Fifteenth Century”, 640. For levels of litigation in King’s Bench and Common Pleas from 1358 see Marjorie Blatcher, The Court of King’s Bench, 1450–1550: A Study in Self-Help (London: Athlone Press, 1978), Appendix, 167–70. 17 Allen, “The Volume of the English Currency”. In this article Allen discusses all previous estimates of the currency at 22 different dates from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries, which he gives in tabular form on p. 607, tab. 2. 18 Mayhew, “Modelling Medieval Monetisation”, c. 58, Table 4.1; Bruce Campbell, “The Agrarian Problem in the Early Fourteenth Century”, Past and Present, 188 (2005): 16. 19 Richard Britnell, “Uses of Money in Medieval Britain”, in Diana Wood (ed.), Medieval Money Matters (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2004), 25; Spufford, Money and Its Use, 321–3, 334–45. 20 Spufford, Money and Its Use, 335; Campbell, “Agrarian Problem”, 17.

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If gold, though, was merely supplementing silver coin in the currency, by becoming the principal coin for savings it could make more silver available for everyday use. This was particularly true of the large amounts of silver that the rich were accustomed to hold as cash reserves.21 Since the Statute Staple and Merchant certificates record debts that were of a size most conveniently settled by gold coins, theoretically they should have been unaffected by a diminishing proportion of silver, and they should only have risen or fallen in number and value in proportion to the size of the population and the total value of the currency. As the certificates cover the transition from an all-silver currency to one heavily dominated by gold, and also the periods before and after the Black Death, they offer significant evidence of what happened to credit and economic activity as a result both of high mortality and the changing composition of the currency. In assessing these trends, one has also to take into account the other factors, such as wars, trade embargoes, and institutional changes, that could also affect the level of debts recorded.

II Although England only adopted a permanent gold coinage in 1344, foreign gold coins had been accumulating in the kingdom from the 1320s, as gold commanded a higher price in England than in France.22 The Genoese financier Pessagno imported 50,000 florins in 1314, and rich men like the younger Despenser were using large numbers of gold coins in the 1320s.23 A debt owed by the bishop of Exeter to the Crown was paid in 2,197 florins in 1326–7, and one by a Devon knight in 600 florins.24 Although wool exports revived in that decade, the fact that they earned so little foreign silver for the mints suggests that they brought instead French or Italian gold coins into the country on a considerable scale.25 These did not pass through the mints and so were not recorded, but Newcastle’s customs records show aliens

21 Britnell, “Uses of Money”, 27–8. See also the gold and silver coin accumulated by the Earl of Arundel which at his death in 1376 amounted to £60,240: Chris Given-Wilson, “Wealth and Credit: The Earls of Arundel, 1306–1397”, English Historical Review, 106 (1991): 1. 22 Prestwich, “Early Fourteenth-Century Exchange Rates”, 475–6; Allen, “The Volume of the English Currency, 1158–1470”, 603; Barrie Cook, “Foreign Coins in Medieval England”, in Lucia Travaini (ed.), Local Coins, Foreign Coins: Italy and Europe, 11th–15th Centuries (Milan: Societa Numismatica Italiana. 1999), 255–60; John H. Munro, “Nominal Wage-Stickiness, Monetary Changes, and Real Incomes in Late-Medieval England and the Low Countries, 1300–1450: Did Money Really Matter?”, Research in Economic History, 21 (2003): 208–9. 23 Prestwich, “Early Fourteenth-Century Exchange Rates”, 476–7; Edmund B. Fryde, “The Deposits of Hugh Despenser the Younger with Italian Bankers”, Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 3 (1951). Re-printed in Studies in Medieval Trade and Finance, by Edmund Fryde (London: Hambledon Press, 1983), 347–9. 24 Cook, “Foreign Coins”, 255. 25 Terence Lloyd, “Overseas Trade and the English Money Supply in the Fourteenth Century”, in Nicholas Mayhew (ed.), Edwardian Monetary Affairs (1279–1344) (Oxford: British Archaeological Reports, 1977), 105–7.

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importing florins in 1326–7.26 Despite Edward III’s prohibition of their use in 1331, William de la Pole showed in that decade a consistent preference for making large payments in gold coins.27 So common were they that in 1340 Parliament was proposing that florins and ecus should be current alongside sterling in England.28 Their popularity had increased because the mints had been striking a diminishing output of silver from the third decade of the century.29 Allen has estimated that from its peak in 1319 the silver currency had fallen by approximately 20 per cent in 1331 and declined sharply afterwards.30 Although the price of everyday necessities fell in the 1330s, it appears that in the upper reaches of the mercantile economy, in which wool exporters operated, gold coins were contributing to the maintenance of credit at a high volume.31 The evidence for this comes from the Statute Merchant certificates, which represent about one-fifth of the total credit originally enrolled in all the Statute Merchant and Staple registries.32 The value of the 5,667 certificates that exist for the first decade of the century is £128,102.33 If these represent one-fifth of what was originally recorded the total for that decade can be estimated as £640,000. This was the equivalent of c. 40 per cent of the currency in 1310.34 In the following two decades the system was restricted to merchants, and so their figures are not comparable, but the 2,853 certificates of the 1330s are worth £109,107, or 15 per cent less than their value in the first decade. Since falling prices, and parliamentary complaints, emphasize how severe became the shortage of silver coin, it seems that for the level of credit to remain as high as it was in the 1330s, England must have recovered some, at least, of the value of the silver it was losing.35 This supports the deduction that it was replaced in part by foreign gold coins earned by reviving exports of wool.36 It would appear, therefore, that a two-tiered currency was developing unofficially in the 1330s in which foreign gold coins were used to finance large payments, but as these coins were not legal tender they did not release from private

26 TNA, E. 122/93/1, 3; Terence Lloyd, Alien Merchants in England in the High Middle Ages (Sussex: Harvester Press, 1982), 41. 27 Fryde, William de la Pole: Merchant and King’s Banker, 15, 29. 28 Rotuli Parliamentorum, II, 105; Cook, “Foreign Coins”, 256. 29 Mate, “Role of Gold Coinage”, 127; Lloyd, “Overseas Trade and Money Supply”, 107–8. 30 Allen, “Volume of Currency”, 606–7. 31 Mayhew, “Numismatic Evidence and Falling Prices in the Fourteenth Century”, 15; Mayhew, “Money and Prices in England from Henry II to Edward III”, 121–32; Clark, “Long March”, 108, Table 5; Brown and Hopkins, “Seven Centuries of the Prices of Consumables”, 193, Appendix B. 32 See above, n. 11. 33 All the calculations are made after excluding those certificates which duplicate others, and also any transactions worth £1,000 or more, because they appear to represent financial penalties rather than credit. 34 The decadal total is given for comparative purposes only; for the annual average value, which can mask considerable yearly variations, one should, of course, divide the total by ten. 35 Mate, “Role of Gold Coinage”, 127. 36 Allen, “Volume of Currency”, 607; Mate, “Role of Gold Coinage”, 127–8; Challis (ed.), A New History of the Royal Mint, 678–9.

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savings sufficient silver coin to maintain prices.37 It is likely, though, that by funding larger transactions gold coins contributed to the rise in the average value of each Statute Merchant credit transaction from £22.6 in the first decade of the century to £38.24 in the 1330s. At the same time the number of certificates fell by 50 per cent. This fall can be explained partly by the agrarian crisis of the second and third decades which reduced the ability of people to obtain or provide credit of significant value. It was also most likely affected by a decline in the population of about 15 per cent from waves of epidemics.38 Mortality was high, even among rich creditors, in the period 1300–24.39 A later significant factor was the king’s interference in the wool trade from 1336 to finance his continental campaigns. This had the effect of reducing imports of bullion while channelling wool exports into the hands of fewer English merchants, whose credit transactions grew proportionately in value, while they diminished in number.40 Another marked change was the fall from 1330 in the proportion of debts in the certificates that were worth under £10. They had accounted for more than 50 per cent of the total between 1285 and 1299, and between 30 and 50 per cent between 1300 and 1329. By contrast, in the next two decades they fell to little more than 20 per cent and continued to fall thereafter. It is not unreasonable to connect this trend with the marked contraction of the silver coinage, which also explains the fall in craftsmen’s wages in the late 1330s, the only such fall recorded in the middle ages.41 All of these factors contributed to the use of the Statute Merchant system by fewer, but individually richer, people whose ability to give higher amounts of credit was almost certainly increased in the 1330s by their acquisition of gold coins. The certificates indicate, though, that this expansion of credit was restricted initially to the London area where merchants could most easily use coins of high value. Londoners increased their share of credit in the certificates from 21.6 per cent of the total value in the first decade of the century to 31.3 per cent in the 1330s.42 The fact that the mint struck only farthings and halfpennies from the small amounts of silver brought to it in the 1330s shows how desperate the population was for small change.43 The minting in London between 1341 and 1343 of

37 Lloyd, “Overseas Trade and the Money Supply”, 111; Clark, “Long March”, 108, Table 5, calculates that the cost of living for farm labourers fell from an index figure of 15.8 in 1310–19, to 12.7 in 1330–9. 38 Clark, “Long March”, 120, Table 9, estimates the population in 1330–9 at 5.06 million, i.e. 15 per cent lower than in 1310–19. 39 See fig. 1. Clark, “Long March”, 132–3, Table A2, shows a consistent rise in nominal and real wages from the 1320s which indicates a shortage of labour in that decade and in the 1330s. 40 Lloyd, The English Wool Trade in the Middle Ages, 144–206. 41 Brown and Hopkins, “Seven Centuries of Building Wages”, 195–206, Table 1. 42 These statistics count as Londoners the creditors who recorded their debts in London and are not described as living in any other place. They differ from those I published in ‘England and the European Depression’, which give the numbers who are specifically described as Londoners in the documents. 43 Challis (ed.), A New History of the Royal Mint, 144–5, 678–9; Lloyd, Wool Trade, 183–5, 196–7.

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£23,625 worth of halfpennies and farthings encouraged some expansion of credit but, even so, it did not extend much in the certificates beyond Middlesex, Kent, and Norfolk, and also Herefordshire, which was supplying some of the wool that had boosted the mint’s receipts.44

III The first English gold coins, the unsuccessful leopards, were introduced in 1344, but were soon replaced by the gold nobles, each worth 6s. 8d. Because of the initial difficulty in valuing them, and also because of the mint’s high charges, many English merchants still preferred to use the French gold ecus, which remained widely available in the 1340s. The Exchequer made grants in florins in 1339, and between 1338–47 also in ecus or ‘in other money current in England’, suggesting that it accepted ecus as legal tender.45 In York two local merchants recorded in 1348 a debt which they agreed to repay in 1,412 ecus.46 Similar references to large numbers of ecus and florins in 1349–50 illustrate how the total supply of gold coins current in the 1340s was likely to have been much larger than is indicated by the output of the London mint.47 What effect did the new official gold coinage have on credit? Unlike silver, the gold coins were originally allowed to be exported, so that merchants could use them to make payments abroad and save their silver for domestic trade.48 It seems likely, therefore, that gold was in this way financing much of the growth in credit that is visible in the total of £152,090 recorded in the Statute Merchant certificates for the 1340s. This was the highest value of the certificates for any decade in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and it was 39 per cent higher than the total for the 1330s. Many of these certificates reflect credit transactions between the exporters who joined in the mercantile syndicates that controlled the wool trade in that decade.49 Their average value, though, of £43.87, was not greatly above that for the 1330s, and the growth in their total value was achieved mainly by an increase of 18 per cent in the number of transactions. This increase was certainly not financed by a larger output of silver coins from the mint, although counterfeit sterlings were brought into England and entered the circulation.50 Even so, the estimate of the silver currency in 1351 indicates that it

44 Middlesex’s debts rose from £3.23 per square mile in 1335–9 to £9.47 per square mile in 1340–4; Kent’s from £3.97 to £4.21, Norfolk’s from £2.55 to £3.96, and Hereford’s from £2.22 to £3.83 per square mile. These figures are calculated from the total debts of those counties in the C. 241 certificates which had a first date of re-payment due in those years. The totals are then divided by the number of square miles in the county to arrive at an average per square mile for those years. 45 Cook, “Foreign Coins”, 256–7. 46 C. 241/126/40. 47 Cook, “Foreign Coins”, 258. 48 Challis (ed.), A New History of the Royal Mint, 148. 49 Lloyd, Wool Trade, 192–204; Fryde, William de la Pole, 155–60, 183–200. 50 Lloyd, Wool Trade, 197.

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was then less than half the size it had been in 1331, and its decline is reflected in the continued fall in prices in the 1340s. This fall also argues against the expansion of credit reflecting a significant growth in the population.51 It seems, therefore, that the striking expansion of Statute Merchant credit in the 1340s was made possible by English and alien merchants using the new gold coins much more extensively in the provinces. Northerners, exporting wool from Hull, were prominent as creditors, and the two double leopards of 1344 which were dropped in the river in Newcastle-upon-Tyne show the new gold coins reaching the far north.52 Credit, too, was increasing in Nottinghamshire, Shropshire, and Cornwall.53 These counties were noted for their lead, wool, and tin, and it appears that provincial merchants were now using gold coins inland to purchase exports. When the value of the certificates for the 1340s is multiplied by five, to give the approximate value of the total originally recorded in all the registries, it amounts for that decade to £760,450. This was c. 70 per cent of the estimated currency in 1351. Matching an estimate of the currency in one year with a decade’s certificates has obvious drawbacks, but it is a useful, if rough, tool for comparing the size of the currency with the volume of credit. It reveals a striking contrast with the first decade, when the value of the certificates had been the equivalent of only c. 40.5 per cent of the currency in 1310. Credit of high value, it seems, had increased in the interval even though the currency had diminished. Its growth was undoubtedly influenced by the much greater share in wool exports that denizen merchants had won for themselves in the 1330s at the expense of the aliens, and by their ability to pay for their exports in that and in the following decade in foreign gold coins.54 A similar rise in credit is apparent in the cases heard in King’s Bench and Common Pleas.55 In this way gold undoubtedly helped English merchants to increase their share of overseas trade, and to expand their credit in the higher levels of the economy. How, though, did the gold coins affect credit at the level of the village and market town? In the neighbourhood of London and other prosperous towns, it is likely that the use of gold released silver from merchants’ savings, thereby improving liquidity and encouraging the growth of credit in neighbouring villages. The debt cases recorded in Oakington’s manorial court near Cambridge grew in number from the late 1330s, peaked in 1347, and remained high throughout the three

51 Clark, “Long March”, 108, Table 5, shows the cost of living index falling from 12.7 in the 1330s to 12.3 in the 1340s. The index of prices created by Phelps Brown and Hopkins in “Prices of consumables”, Appendix B, 193, shows a fall from an average price of 106.7 in the 1330s to 95.6 in the 1340s. 52 Martin Allen, “English Coin Hoards, 1158–1544”, British Numismatic Journal, 72 (2002): 63, 159. 53 See also Richard Britnell, Growth and Decline in Colchester, 1300–1525 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 20, Table 1.1, which shows the number of debt cases in Colchester rising from 1336, and in the 1340s. 54 Lloyd, Wool Trade, 123, Table 12. 55 Blatcher, Court of King’s Bench, 167.

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decades after the Black Death, despite the massive fall in the population.56 While the greater efficiency of some manorial courts might attract litigants from elsewhere, and thereby boost the number of their debt cases for non-economic reasons, ‘typically most manor court debt litigants were drawn from the manor’s unfree tenant population, rather than from among the free tenants or outsiders’. Since Oakington had 39 unfree holdings and only 12 small freeholdings, this makes it more likely that the trends of debt litigation in its manor court reflect changes in the local economy rather than the choice of its court for non-economic reasons by freeholders or outsiders.57 The efficiency of its court could have encouraged creditors to lend more freely, but they would not have done so unless they had the coin available and they were reasonably confident that they would be repaid. The fact that no uncultivated land was reported in Oakington in the Nonarum Inquisitiones of 1340–1, unlike the position in more impoverished villages, suggests that its soil was fertile, and therefore that demand from the Cambridge market would make its holdings profitable and attractive, even after the Black Death.58 There was a similar peak in debt cases in the 1340s in Halesowen (Worcs.) and Brigstock (Northants), although not in some villages like Great Horwood (Bucks) which may have had less fertile land or were less favourably situated in relation to urban markets. The fall in debt cases in Cuxham (Oxon) in the 1340s most likely reflects the predominant interest of its manorial court in protecting seigniorial interests.59 It is certainly unconvincing to interpret the high level of debt cases in manorial courts in this period as a sign of increasing distress among the peasantry, since it coincides with a period of greater prosperity for those who survived the Black Death and gained inheritances from the deaths of relations.60 The loss of approximately one-half of the population in 1348–9 meant that, despite the fall of the currency to about £1 million in 1351, the amount of coin available per head rose from around 4–7 s. in 1300 to around 5–9 s. in 1351, and most of the latter was still silver.61 The shortage of labour improved the bargaining power of surviving peasants, increased their real wages, and encouraged local creditors to advance them loans to buy stock or land.62 Behind the increased number of manorial prosecutions for debt lay, therefore, not a greater propensity to default because of hardship, but a normal rate of default from a higher number of loans.

56 Briggs, “Manor Court Procedures”, 529, tab. 1; 530–5; 552, tab. 6; Briggs, “Creditors and Debtors”, 134, tab. 6.2. 57 Briggs, “Manor Court Procedures”, 526, n. 21. He considers it unwise to overemphasize the attraction of improved curial machinery at the expense of other factors which increased the number of defaults, among which he includes differing economic circumstances; ibid., 525, 526, n. 21. 58 Ibid., 533–4. 59 Ibid., 532–5. 60 Ibid., 552–3; Clark, “Long March”, 133, Table A2.; Britnell, Colchester, 100–3. 61 Allen, “Volume of Currency”, 606; J. Benedictow Ole, The Black Death 1346–1353: The Complete History (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2018), 382–3. 62 Briggs, “Creditors and Debtors”, 136, 138–41.

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Richer neighbours were encouraged to advance these because increased liquidity, and higher personal incomes, led them to believe that their loans would be repaid. It was also a shrewd way for them to secure labour, or tenants, when both were in short supply.

IV By contrast, the Statute Merchant and Staple certificates fell by approximately half in number, from an annual average of 346 in the 1340s to an annual average of 173 certificates in the 1350s.63 This fall reflected high mortality among the elite who had been wealthy enough to lend credit of an average value of £44.64 Many were entrepreneurs whose businesses, unlike the holdings of peasants, died with them or could not survive in a shrunken market. The increased supply of money per head, though, was reflected in the rise of the average value of the certificates to £57 in the 1350s.65 Silver still circulated in this decade more freely than gold. Although a hoard deposited c. 1355 in Cambridge shows how gold coins could economize in the use of silver, since the seven nobles and two half nobles were worth £2 13s. 4d., the depositor had assembled 1,800 silver pennies to save another £7 10s.66 The relatively few hoards of the 1350s and 1360s containing gold coins include some found buried in pristine condition, with little sign that they had been circulated.67 It seems they were far more likely to have been used in these decades by the few as a store of wealth than circulated among the general population. After the second plague of 1362–3, which produced a death rate that year among the creditors of 12.25 per cent, the number of certificates sank even more, by 30 per cent, to an annual average of 120 in the 10 years from 1362 to 1371. Their average value, though, rose to £70, and despite dropping to £63 in the 1370s, remained close to £70 for the rest of the century. The trend was influenced not just by mortality but by the output of gold coin, which was two-thirds higher in value than that of silver in the 1350s, and over 95 per cent higher in the two following

63 In 1353 the Statute Staple introduced a more efficient system for recording debts in registries which functioned alongside those of the Statute Merchant system and produced certificates of a similar kind. 64 London grocers experienced mortality of c. 34 per cent: Nightingale, A Medieval Mercantile Community, 196–7. 65 Clark, “Long March”, 99, Table 1; 104, Figure 2; 108, Table 5. Whereas on p. 120, Table 9, Clark calculates the population in the 1360s was 30 per cent smaller than in the 1330s the credit recorded in the certificates had only fallen by 17 per cent over the same period. 66 Allen, “English Coin Hoards”, 64, no. 174. 67 This was true of the hoard of nobles found at Henstridge in Somerset, and, also, of the much bigger hoard of 200 nobles buried at East Raynham in Norfolk: Allen, “Coin Hoards”, 63, 166; 66, 191; Harrington E. Manville, “Additions and Corrections to Thompson’s Inventory and Brown and Dolley’s Coin Hoards, Part II”, British Numismatic Journal, 65 (1995): 169–84; George Brooke, “A Find of Nobles at East Raynham, Norfolk”, Numismatic Chronicle, 11 (1911): 291–330.

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decades. Gold coin was still helping to maintain high prices, despite the fall in demand from a diminishing population, but it was also assisting the concentration of capital in fewer hands. Although there still remained sufficient silver in circulation to meet the daily needs of the shrunken population, and to allow a continued rise in the cost of living, in 1363 there is evidence in a parliamentary petition, repeated in 1380, of public concern about the lack of halfpennies and farthings in the currency.68 The largely benign monetary conditions that the gold coinage had helped to create lasted until the 1380s, aided by further falls in the population. The mortality rate of the creditors, and the rise in the nominal wages of labourers, indicate mortality was at least 10 per cent in the 1370s.69 The first sign of deflation was when prices fell by 17.5 per cent in the 1380s.70 Although epidemics in 1384 and 1388 undoubtedly contributed to reduced demand, wages showed no significant rise of the kind normally associated with high mortality.71 Moreover, while it was normal for virulent epidemics to lead to a sudden fall in credit, no such pattern is observable in the 1380s.72 These facts suggest that falling prices were influenced more by a shortage of silver. In April 1379 Parliament had decreed that silver bullion should be imported worth 5 per cent of all goods exported or imported.73 Significantly, of the 10 coin hoards that can be dated to the 1380s, seven included gold coins, and three of these, widely dispersed in Kent, Northumberland, and Lincolnshire, contained between them at least 530 gold coins.74 It seems that gold was entering the circulation on a scale which was new because of the falling supply of silver. In 1389 farm wages fell for the first time since 1352, and they stayed at that lower level for 10 years.75 The trend reflected, in part, the fall in mortality in the 1390s, which is marked in the case of the creditors.76 But since the population had not had time to recover sufficiently from previous epidemics to explain the reduction in wages, undoubtedly monetary factors played a significant part.77 Although

68 Clark, “Long March”, 108, Table 5; Martin Allen, “The Proportions of the Denominations in English Mint Outputs, 1351–1485”, British Numismatic Journal, 77 (2007): 192–3. 69 Clark, “Long March”, 120, Table 9; Supra, Fig. I. 70 Clark, “Long March”, 108, tab. 5; 133, tab. A2. The Phelps Brown and Hopkins index shows a fall in the average price from 130.8 in the 1370s to 107.8 in the 1380s; Phelps Brown and Hopkins, “Seven Centuries of the Prices of Consumables”, 193–4, app. B. 71 Clark, “Long March”, 116. 72 See above, Figure 1.1. The creditors’ average mortality fell from 4.4 per cent in the 1370s to 3.9 per cent in the 1380s. 73 Calendar of Close Rolls, 1377–81, 193. 74 Allen, “Coin Hoards”, 66–7, 196–205. 75 Clark, “Long March”, 116–17, 133, 134, Table A2. The average index figure for nominal wages fell from 3.12 in the 1380s to 3.0 in the 1390s. 76 See above, Figure 1.1. The creditors’ average mortality fell from 3.9 per cent in the 1380s to 2.3 per cent in the 1390s. 77 Clark, “Long March”, 117, finds the decline in wages in the 1390s ‘a little mysterious’ because he found no independent evidence of a drop in the money supply.

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Lloyd has calculated that England still enjoyed a favourable balance of trade, and should have enjoyed a net inflow of bullion, the government made emergency efforts to supply the mints in 1391, in a Bullion Ordinance of 1397, and in another of 1402.78 Silver accounted for only 3.3 per cent by value of the total coinage struck by the London and Calais mints in this decade, as the metal became scarce throughout Europe.79 The value of the certificates fell by 15 per cent in the 1390s and, in the absence of high mortality, it seems that credit was falling because of the reduced output of silver coin. Some London merchants, like Gilbert Maghfield, almost abandoned giving commercial credit in favour of making cash loans at high interest rates to people of standing who could give good security in land, jewels, or plate. Other prominent London merchants suffered bankruptcy, and their failure dragged others down with them.80 Nonetheless Londoners’ share of the credit recorded in the certificates rose in the 1390s to almost 50 per cent of the total as coin became even scarcer in the provinces. The cloth industry in Somerset, Wiltshire, and Yorkshire showed the first signs in this decade of moving out of towns and into the countryside where coin was less needed for wages and workers could be paid in kind.81 Even though manorial courts recorded some debts that were valuable enough to be paid in gold coins, this did not mean that gold circulated readily in villages, or that it was suitable for financing most village transactions.82 Willingham and Oakington, in Cambridgeshire, saw their debt cases, which included a high number of cash loans, fall in number in the 1390s. Shortage of silver coins with which to repay loans, as much as manorial inefficiency, could also explain why plaints were carried over for two or more sessions.83

V The year 1400 marks the point when it appears that the volume of credit in the certificates began to fall faster than the population, and this continued to be the case until the last decade of the fifteenth century. This was despite the fact that 1399–1400 was only the third occasion, after 1348–9, and 1362–3, when mortality was apparently

78 Lloyd, “Overseas Trade and the English Money Supply in the Fourteenth Century”, 121–2; John H. Munro, Wool, Cloth, and Gold: The Struggle for Bullion in Anglo-Burgundian Trade, 1340–1478 (Brussels: University of Toronto Press, 1973), 47–50. 79 Spufford, Money and Its Use, 348–62. 80 Nightingale, “Money and Credit”, 56–9. 81 John H. Hare, “Regional Prosperity in Fifteenth-Century England: Some Evidence from Wessex”, in Michael Hicks (ed.), Revolution and Consumption in Late Medieval England (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2001), 109; Calendar of Inquisitions Miscellaneous, 1392–9, 242–9. 82 Briggs, “The Availability of Credit in the English Countryside, 1400–1480”, 11. 83 Ibid., 9, Table 2; 16, Table 3: Oakington and Willingham combined had an average of 5.45 new debt plaints per court in 1381–90 and an average of 5.24 in 1391–1400, while the percentage of plaints that were not settled in one session rose steadily.

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so severe that it led to a new higher level for agricultural wages.84 Even among the rich creditors, the death rate rose suddenly to over 5 per cent in 1400, and then in 1406–7 to 8.2 per cent.85 The decline of credit, though, was more dramatic. The average number of debt cases per court in Oakington and Willingham fell by 48 per cent in the first decade of the new century.86 In the same period the total value of the certificates plunged by almost 40 per cent, while their average value fell from the £70 that had prevailed since the late 1370s to less than £57 between 1400 and 1409. The severity of this fall in both urban and rural credit, in contrast with the buoyancy of village transactions and increase in the average value of the debts, which had followed the two great epidemics of 1349 and 1362, indicates that monetary factors had by 1400 become more significant than mortality in causing the contraction of credit. The output of silver from the London mint dropped drastically from £6,849 in the 1390s to £1,748 in the first decade of the fifteenth century, and that of gold coin from £207,060 to £60,744, a total fall in value of 70 per cent. So acute was the shortage of silver that from June 1400 the Venetian galleys began to bring to London supplies of their small soldini, which came to be known as ‘galyhalpens’ or galley halfpennies. They were of poorer alloy than English halfpennies, but the desperate need for small change over the next decade and a half explains why they occur as stray finds and even turn up in hoards.87 Heavy mortality was again conspicuous in the second decade of the fifteenth century as the overall rate for the creditors rose to 5.96 per cent between 1415 and 1419.88 Mortality on this scale may explain some of the leap in the average value of the certificates in this decade from £57 to £72, as the survivors benefited from inheritances. Probably as significant, though, was the re-coinage that began in 1413, since this increased the number of coins in circulation by reducing the weight standard.89 Now 360 pence were struck from every pound, instead of the 300 which was the standard from 1351, and there was a similar devaluation of gold coin. Although this devaluation by 16.6 per cent was unprecedented in its severity, and high mortality normally increased the supply of coins per head, the nominal wages of farm labourers rose only slightly in the 1410s, despite poor harvests.90 The shortage of silver coin, which appears to have been depressing wages, is made clear by the mere

84 Clark, “Long March”, 116–17, 134, Table A2. 85 See above, Table 1.1. The average mortality rate for the creditors rose from 2.3 per cent in the 1390s to 3.8 per cent in the first decade of the fifteenth century. 86 Briggs, “Availability of Credit”, 9, Table 2. The average number of new debt cases per surviving court record is 5.24 in the 1390s and 2.71 for the 1400s. 87 Peter Spufford, “Continental Coins in Late Medieval England”, BNJ, 32 (1963): 132–6. 88 See above, Table 1.1. Clark, “Long March”, 120, tab. 9, also estimates a fall of 5 per cent in the population in the 1410s. 89 Challis (ed.), A New History of the Royal Mint, Appendix, 708. 90 The average index figure for nominal wages in the first decade is 3.47, for the second, 3.49, a rise of only 0.5 per cent: Clark, “Long march”, 134, Table A2. Labourers’ living costs rose at the same time by 3.5 per cent, because of poor harvests in 1416–18. Real wages fell from an average index

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£40,000 of silver that was re-coined by the mint between 1411 and 1417, compared with gold worth almost £650,000. The plunge of 40 per cent in the number of the certificates this decade, and the fall in their total value of 25 per cent, went far beyond what mortality alone can explain. The failing circulation of silver may have been made much worse by hoarding, particularly by merchants, in an attempt to preserve liquidity in their businesses.91 Certainly the hoards deposited c. 1400–20 show the presence of more silver coin than either the mint figures or the composition of the currency in 1422 would indicate was representative. Of the 12 that can be dated to the period c. 1400–20, 10 were preponderantly composed of silver, and 6 of them had exceptionally high numbers of silver coins.92 It seems that the shortage of silver was most acute outside the London region, and for this reason provincial merchants had to turn more to Londoners for credit. From this period the records reveal increasing numbers of provincial chapmen owing debts to London merchants which they paid for often by deliveries of cloth.93 These made a significant contribution to the growth of London’s denizen cloth exports.94 However, Parliament was still complaining of ‘scarcity of money’ in 1420.95 Of a total currency worth c. £1 million in 1422, only 20 per cent was in silver. If the population then numbered 2.6 million this meant there were only c. 18 pence of silver coin available per head, compared with c. 96 pence in 1351.96 Outside the chief commercial centres it seems that the halfpennies that peasants, in particular, needed for their exchanges were not easily available.97 Although wages and prices had risen considerably since 1351, even the smallest gold coin was still too valuable to be used for household purchases. This inevitably created a crisis of illiquidity for all payments of modest value and must have contributed substantially to the depression of prices which is apparent in the falling living costs of farm labourers and craftsmen in the 1420s.98

91 92

93 94 95 96 97 98

figure of 107.5 for the decade 1400–09 to 104.2 in 1410–19: Ibid., 108, Table 5; Phelps Brown and Hopkins, “Prices of Consumables”, 194. Spufford, Money and Its Use, 345–7, 374–6. That from Highbury, London (deposited c. 1415–20) was composed of c. 7,000 silver coins, mainly halfpence, with some farthings and Venetian soldini. The one from Attenborough, near Nottingham (deposited c. 1420) had 965 pence out of a total of 1,102 silver coins: Allen, “Coin Hoards”, 68–70, 208–13, 217, 222–6. Nightingale, Medieval Mercantile Community, 364–8; Anne Sutton, The Mercery of London, Trade, Goods and People (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 213–14, 217–20. Carus-Wilson and Coleman (eds.), England’s Export Trade, 1275–1547, 92–3; Sutton, Mercery of London, 150. Rotuli Parliamentorum, IV, 122. Clark, “Long March”, 120, Table 9. Archibald, “Attenborough Hoard”, 58. Clark, “Long March”, 108, Table 5; Phelps Brown and Hopkins, “Prices of Consumables”, 184; David L. Farmer, “Prices and Wages, 1350–1500”, in Edward Miller (ed.), The Agrarian History of England and Wales. III, 1348–1500 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 491, Table 5.11.

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VI Did gold coin, though, offered as security, enable credit to expand sufficiently to take the place of the missing silver? If this happened then it would assuredly have been visible in the Statute Merchant and Staple certificates of high value. Instead, it appears that when silver coin was in short supply, the credit available for the whole economy, including that for transactions of high value, suffered a contraction far greater than appeared to be justified either by the fall in the population or by the decline in the total value of the currency. This is illustrated by the contrast between the figures for Statute Merchant credit in the 1340s and those for the 1410s. The 3,467 certificates of the 1340s had a value of £152,090, compared with a currency in 1351 worth roughly £1 million, 90 per cent of which was silver. In 1422 the currency had much the same value but 80 per cent of it was now gold. For the preceding decade, though, of the 1410s, there are only 475 certificates worth £33,636. In other words, for a currency of roughly the same value, the credit produced by an overwhelmingly silver coinage in the 1340s was four-anda-half times greater in value than that of the predominantly gold coinage of the 1410s. High mortality, of course, can account for some of this difference since the population may have fallen by c. 50 per cent in the intervening period.99 However, other things being equal, this should have reduced the number of certificates in the 1410s to 1,733, instead of 475, and, if they had retained the average value of £44 that they had in the 1340s, this should have produced a total for them of £91,564, instead of £33,636. What this contrast indicates is that credit did not just multiply or diminish automatically in proportion to the total value of the currency or the size of the population. Nor did it rise and fall equally in every region, town, and village. Its regional and local fluctuations have already been alluded to, but the major change from a silver to a predominantly gold coinage concentrated coin in the hands of the more affluent groups in society, particularly Londoners, whose incomes and pattern of expenditure most easily accommodated transactions of high value. For them some decades of the fifteenth century may have been a period of opportunity, but for the mass of the people lower down the social scale, the shortage of silver meant that, though they needed more credit, less was available to them if they could not obtain it through an exchange of goods or services. It is significant, though, that in Writtle, the steady reduction in the number of cash loans recorded throughout the fifteenth century did not produce a compensating growth in the proportion of credit given by other means.100 Similarly, although the continuing growth in Colchester’s cloth industry up to the middle of the fifteenth century offered scope for the bartering of raw materials for finished cloth, it did not prevent the overall number of debt cases recorded in the town’s court from diminishing sharply as creditors grew more cautious because they feared they might not be repaid.

99 Clark, “Long March”, 120, Table 9. 100 Clark, “Debt Litigation”, 254, Table 8.6.

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In neither case is there any evidence to indicate that the falling number of debt cases was caused by the waning popularity or efficiency of the courts.101 It is possible that the diminishing powers of some manorial courts could have encouraged village creditors to use the church courts, despite their lacking powers of enforcement, but the business of ecclesiastical courts also declined from the 1480s.102 It is unconvincing to explain falling cases of credit everywhere by possible institutional changes when Colchester’s borough court, the pardons for outlawry, Common Pleas, and King’s Bench unitedly show the same downward trend in credit exhibited by the Statute Merchant certificates.103 It is most unlikely that these disparate local and national institutions would see their competence over credit cases wither simultaneously unless there were common economic reasons which extended far beyond the decline of seigniorial powers over some manorial courts.104 Instead, the extent to which economic reasons, particularly the changing composition of the currency, could have influenced the common downward trend in credit is illustrated by the contrast between the hoards buried in the period 1351–1412, and those between 1412 and 1464. The 35 gold and silver hoards of the first period have a combined median value of £2 9s. 31/2d., and the median for the 19 silver hoards among them is 10s. 4d. For the period 1412–64 there are 27 hoards.105 The median of their combined value had fallen by 32 per cent to £1 13s. 4d., while that of the 15 silver hoards among them more than halved to 4s. 8d. The median of the nine gold hoards, though, almost doubled to £20, illustrating the preponderance of gold in the currency.106 The change can only have deepened the divisions between those who were rich enough to use and hoard gold, and those who were too poor even to handle it. Since the latter group was the larger, much of the coin that the mint produced went disproportionately into the coffers of the rich and was used by them to purchase land and plate. Less of the currency accordingly was put to productive use, and the gap between rich and poor inevitably widened.107

101 Britnell, Colchester, 206–8. Colchester’s court became more efficient. 102 Brooks, “Litigation and Society in England”, 71. 103 Ibid., 66–71. Brooks has little doubt (75) that the pattern reflects demographic, social, and economic conditions. 104 Briggs, “Availability of Credit”, 18–19, allows that the initial drop in cases could be the result of the severe shortage of coin in the first decade of the fifteenth century with later institutional changes possibly preventing a recovery, although in explaining the failure of credit to rise in Oakingham and Willingham in the 1420s and 1430s he does not discuss the fact that prices did not rise either. 105 Allen, “Coin Hoards”, 41–2, Maps 5–6. There are fewer hoards in the south-west and north-east. 106 Ibid., 36, Table 12. 107 See, for example, the £13,855 invested by Sir John Fastolf in land, the £9,495 he spent on new buildings, the £2,643 he deposited in cash, and £2,456 he invested in plate, and huge sums spent on jewellery: Kenneth B. Mcfarlane, “The investment of Sir John Fastolf’s profits of war.” in Kenneth B. Mcfarlane, England in the Fifteenth Century (London: Hambledon, 1981), IX, 185–91.

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VII The late 1420s and early 1430s stand out as the only period in the fifteenth century in which the minting of silver coin came anywhere near to meeting England’s needs. The Calais mint, re-established in July 1422, produced up to September 1432 sterling silver coin worth £297,362, much of which was brought to England by merchants.108 In addition the silver coin struck by the London and York mints brought the combined total for those years up to £314,717. It was the largest amount of silver struck by English mints since the first decade of the fourteenth century. Then prices had risen in response, and credit had expanded rapidly, as it had done, too, in the years 1341–3, when there had also been a sudden inflow of silver to the mint.109 By contrast, average prices for the 1420s fell to the lowest point since the 1340s.110 Initially this was influenced by mortality which was so severe in 1423–4 that it provoked a crisis of confidence which caused the certificates of debt to fall in value by one-third in 1424. It also drove up the wage rates of farm labourers that year to a higher level.111 By 1426, though, silver coin was flowing abundantly from the Calais mint. The certificates of debt doubled in value that year to £3,367, and peaked again in 1429 at £4,503, remaining high until 1433, a pattern that is mirrored in the debt cases coming before King’s Bench and Common Pleas.112 These peaks, though, were not enough to raise the total value of the certificates in the 1420s, which, because of the earlier deflation, and heavy mortality, fell in both number and value below that for the previous decade. The pardons for outlawry on the Patent Rolls, which record debts of a much lower average value than the Statute Merchant and Staple certificates, show a similar drop of 19 per cent in value in the same decade.113 Even at the village level, the average number of debt cases per court fell in Writtle from 2.28 in the 1410s to 0.99 in the 1420s, and in Oakington and Willingham from 1.96 to 0.9, although those at Swaffham Prior increased in the 1420s and even more in the following decade.114 The high mortality of the early 1420s obviously contributed to this fall, but the failure of prices and credit to rise uniformly in line with the flow of new silver coin is explicable by the extent to which the currency had previously become over-weighted with gold. In 1422 the silver in circulation was equivalent to 1–2s. per head of population. This was the lowest amount in the whole period and has

108 It also had to pay the annual expenses of Calais amounting to £16–17,000 a year: Lloyd, Wool Trade, 258. 109 Supra, note 40. 110 Clark, “Long March”, 108, Table 5. 111 Ibid., 116–17, 134: the creditors’ mortality in 1421 reached 5.26 per cent and in 1423, 6.45 per cent. The nominal wages of farm labourers jumped from an index figure of 3.34 in 1423 to 3.7 in 1424. 112 Blatcher, Court of King’s Bench, 168. 113 Nightingale, “England and the European Depression”, 640. 114 Briggs, “Availability of Credit”, 9, Table 2.

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to be compared with 5–9s. per head in 1351.115 The increase of wages in 1424, and their continued rise in the next decade, soaked up some of the new supply of silver without making any difference to credit or to prices until the 1430s. There were similar decades in the sixteenth century when it seems that the economy was so short of coin that it could absorb a considerable addition without affecting the price level directly.116 It also seems that much of the silver appears to have been taken by the merchants who imported it to those areas that produced goods for export, and it therefore affected some localities and industries more than others. Silver had been particularly scarce in the north. When Henry V set up a royal mint in York between 1423–4 to exchange local coin, it issued over £42,000 in gold, but only £496 in silver coin.117 The Calais mint, though, allowed Yorkshire exporters to receive immediate payment for their wool in silver and to take it back to their home county without waiting for deferred payments in the Low Countries or in London.118 It appears from the expansion of Hull’s wool exports in the 1420s that Yorkshire merchants used this coin to pay growers cash for increased supplies of wool.119 Similarly, it allowed them to pay more cloth workers to expand production for export. By 1428–9 denizen exports from Hull boomed and the number of cloths exported from London and Bristol rose significantly, suggesting that silver coin was also financing the wages of cloth-workers in the West Country.120 There was, too, a marked rise in credit transactions between merchants of towns famous for their cloth production, such as Long Melford, Norwich, Coventry, Salisbury, Exeter, Frome, Bradford-on-Avon, and Wells, with London mercers, drapers, and grocers.121 This decade saw the proportion of mercantile debtors rise from 18 to 46 per cent, while London mercers almost doubled the number of provincial chapmen and mercers they prosecuted for debt, and London drapers were conspicuous as direct purchasers of provincial-made cloth.122 Credit also grew conspicuously in Cornwall, and in the cloth-making counties of Devon, Gloucestershire, and Wiltshire. To inflate the entire national economy, and to change the pessimistic expectations that a long period of deflation had created, would have required much more silver, given over a longer period of time. Instead, it was natural, in a briefer period of recovery, that the creditors who had new supplies of coin to invest should direct it to those manufacturing and industrial areas where there were entrepreneurs who urgently needed it and who would promise them the best

115 116 117 118 119 120 121

Allen, “Volume of Currency”, 607. Wordie, Deflationary Factors in Tudor Price Rise, 65–7. Allen, “Ecclesiastical Mints”, 253; Challis (ed.), A New History of the Royal Mint, 682. Lloyd, Wool Trade, 259. Carus-Wilson and Coleman, England’s Exports, 57–9, 129. Ibid., 92–3, 146: Hare, “Regional Prosperity”, 125. For example, TNA, PRO, C. 241/220/18; 221/26; 222/6, 8, 20, 23, 40; 223/6, 30; 225/14, 19, 22, 27, 36, 63, 94; 226/15, 228/33. 122 Sutton, Mercery of London, 219, Table 8.2; 223.

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returns on their investment. Differing commercial opportunities could explain why credit expanded at Swaffham in the 1420s and 1430s, and in Oakington in the 1430s but not at Willingham. The result was a pronounced growth in cloth exports which lasted until 1444.123 But that growth ended soon after the value of the credit recorded in the certificates had plunged to its lowest level of the entire period. This was also true of the credit recorded in the pardons for outlawry.124 The fall followed the closing of the Calais mint in 1440, four years after London began striking only insignificant amounts of silver.125 The average value of silver coin struck between 1441 and 1445 was by far the lowest of the fifteenth century.126 The deep mid-century economic recession that followed was characterized by low prices, and arrears of rent for the next four decades.127 This was despite the fact that there was a temporary increase in the silver output of the London mint from 1450. Prices and wages then rose, while from 1457 the value of the credit recorded in the certificates began to climb again, bringing the total for that decade back almost to the level achieved in the 1420s.128 The difference was that, whereas in the 1420s only 52 per cent was provided by Londoners, in 1455–9, when most of the growth was taking place, Londoners were responsible for up to 70 per cent.129 The new supply of silver coin in the 1450s was again too limited to stimulate any widespread or permanent recovery of the economy. In recognition of this Edward IV resorted to a re-coinage at a lower weight standard in 1464–5, which created more coins by a 20 per cent devaluation of the silver currency. As a result, the stock of silver per head rose to about 3–5s. in 1470.130 Silver hoards of much greater value were deposited from the 1450s over a wider area and were accompanied by numerous smaller hoards. Although the civil war increased the incentive to bury these hoards, they also indicate how much more available silver coins had become to people of modest means as well as to the wealthy.131 Money-lending

123 Challis (ed.), A New History of the Royal Mint, 683, Appendix 1; Carus-Wilson and Coleman, England’s Exports, 95–6. 124 Nightingale, “European Depression”, 640. 125 Challis (ed.), A New History of the Royal Mint, 683. 126 Munro, “Origins of ‘Price Revolution’”, 22, Table 1.6. 127 Clark, “Long March”, 108, Table 5, 131, Table A2; John Hatcher, “The Great Slump of the Mid-Fifteenth Century”, in Richard Britnell and John Hatcher (eds.), Progress and Problems in Medieval England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 248–62. 128 Clark, “Long March”, 108, Table 5; 131, Table A2: the cost of living for farm labourers rose from an index figure of 12.5 in the 1440s to 12.9 in the 1450s, and nominal wages from an average index figure of 3.66 to 3.85; Nightingale, “European Depression”, 644–7. 129 The cases involving debtors from London and thirteen counties in the Court of Common Pleas for 1424 reveal Londoners as creditors in 49 per cent of them. Their average value, though, at £8.91, was much lower than those registered under Statute Merchant and Staple: Derek Keene, “Debt Cases in the Court of Common Pleas”, in James A. Galloway (ed.), Trade, Urban Hinterlands and Market Integration, c. 1300–1600 (Centre for Metropolitan History Working Papers Series, 3, 2000), 66, Table 4.2. 130 Allen, “Volume of Currency”, 607. 131 Allen, “Coin Hoards”, nos. 245–50, 71–2; 253–4, 72–3; 259–62, 73.

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and references to cash became more numerous at least in the London area, and in Havering’s manor court there was a conspicuous rise in actions by creditors from 14 in 1444–5, to 20 in 1464–5, and then to 67 in 1469–70.132 There was also a temporary increase of the Statute Staple and Merchant certificates from a total value of £12,431 in 1460–4 to £14,092 between 1465–9. It seems that most of the silver that came to London in those years was used by its merchants to finance the city’s increasing domination of the export trades, particularly cloth, thereby also strengthening their hold over the major import trades.133 By 1478–82 London had engrossed 61 per cent of England’s overseas trade.134 As a result it dominated the credit of the whole kingdom. The certificates, though, fell again in number and value from 1470 to 1495, as too did the number of debt cases in King’s Bench and the Common Pleas.135 In some years credit was falling because of political uncertainties and occasional epidemics, but the long deflationary trend was influenced mainly by an English mint price for bullion that favoured gold over silver.136 Despite the fact that new supplies of silver from central Europe and south Germany were by the 1470s allowing the mints of Flanders and Brabant to double their output of silver coin, in 1476–80 no less than 84 per cent of new English coin was gold.137 As a result the certificates fell between 1476 and 1484 to their lowest value since the deep recession of the 1440s. The absence of new labour legislation between 1449 and 1495, and the fall in real wages from 1470, indicate that there was no pressing shortage of labour in that period and there was also a marked decline in the mortality of the creditors from 1470.138 Rising cloth exports, though, did encourage more imports of raw materials, and also more linen from the Flemish marts, instead of the bullion that wool exports had formerly earned from Calais.139 Henry VII tried to improve the flow of bullion to the mint by reducing both his seigniorage and minting charges, with the result that the production of silver coins increased in the 1490s, markedly from 1497.140 The currency, which amounted to c. £0.9 million in 1470, rose strongly from c. 1504 and reached c. £1.4–1.6 million

132 McIntosh, Autonomy and Community, 192, Table 10, 231. 133 Sutton, Mercery of London, 150, 224, 292–3, 297. 134 Maryanne Kowaleski, “Port Towns: England and Wales, 1300–1540”, in David M. Palliser (ed.), The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, I, 600–1540 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 477, Table 19.1. 135 Blatcher, Court of King’s Bench, 168–9. 136 Spufford, Money and Its Use, 370. 137 Munro, “Origins of ‘Price Revolution’”, 7–27. 138 Above fig.1, p.19; Chris Given-Wilson, “Service, Serfdom and English Labour Legislation, 1350–1500”, in Anne Curry and Elizabeth Matthews (eds.), Concepts and Patterns of Service in the Later Middle Ages (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2000), 37, Appendix; Clark, “Long March”, 100, Table 1. 139 Sutton, Mercery of London, 297. 140 Christopher E. Challis, The Tudor Coinage (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1978), 52–5, 58–9, 67–8, 169–70; Challis (ed.), A New History of the Royal Mint, Appendix (2), 684.

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in 1526.141 Moreover, a greater proportion of it was in silver coin. The effects of that change are visible in rising prices from 1500, which became more marked from the 1520s as the population also grew strongly.142 By 1525 the change had been accomplished from an economy dominated by gold coins to one in which silver was abundant.143 This was paralleled by a steady increase in the number and value of the certificates of debt, and by an ever greater proportion of London creditors.144 By 1500–4 the certificates had risen in value to £28,910, while 83 per cent of the creditors that decade were Londoners. Their overwhelming domination of the money market and of the export trade, particularly in cloth, were symbiotic, and the wealth earned by its merchants explains the dazzling array of gold and silver plate in the shops of London goldsmiths that so impressed an Italian visitor.145 Although the slump was over, financial and commercial capital was overwhelmingly concentrated in London, leaving little sign of economic growth in the provinces.146

VIII In summary, this article has shown how the use of gold, first as foreign and then as English coins, enabled credit to expand despite the reduction in the supply of silver from the 1330s, and enabled the economy to remain buoyant for two decades after the demographic disaster of the Black Death. What it adds to Mate’s analysis of the original inflationary effect of gold coins is an explanation of how they became a powerful deflationary force from the 1380s.147 Although the debts recorded in the certificates were of high average value, and were therefore most conveniently repaid in gold, their volume fell beyond what could be explained either by mortality or by the decline in the total value of the currency. Local and national courts saw comparable falls in debt cases. The conclusion from this is that the volume of credit relied on creditors’ perceptions of the degree of liquidity in the whole economy, and this depended fundamentally on the availability of silver coin. Creditors in or near London, or involved in the export trade, may have been aware of the output of the mints, but the great majority can only have judged liquidity by the buoyancy of their local markets, and by the ease or difficulty of

141 142 143 144

Allen, “Coin Hoards”, 36, Table 12, 43; Challis, Tudor Coinage, 236–9. Hatcher, “Great Slump”, 271; Clark, “Long March”, 108, Table 5. Challis, Tudor Coinage, 232, Table 3; 250, 300. The business of the King’s Bench and Common Pleas also reflected this increase: Blatcher, Court of King’s Bench, 169–70. 145 Challis, Tudor Coinage, 156. 146 Richard Britnell, The Closing of the Middle Ages? England, 1471–1529 (Oxford: Wiley, 1997), 236–47. 147 Clark, “Long March”, 120, Table 9, suggests there was a fall of c. 25 per cent in the population between 1350–1420, compared with a drop of c. 70 per cent in the silver currency between 1351 and 1422.

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gathering in rents. The fact that creditors were risking their personal funds, without institutions to support them, made them quick to react to falling liquidity by withdrawing credit. The pattern was not uniform, since those counties that were near London, or were most involved in the export trade, had a greater chance of acquiring coin than the rest. Moreover, when there was insufficient silver to maintain the level of local trade, people resorted to hoarding, causing confidence to fall further and credit to be refused. Gold coin alone could then not stop even the higher reaches of the economy from contracting. The Black Death had opened for all the peasants who survived it the hope of freedom and a rising standard of living. For three decades, though, the contribution that gold coin made to high prices, combined with the coercive powers of the state and manorial lords, enabled demesne agriculture to remain profitable and encouraged lords to maintain serfdom. But as gold came to dominate the coinage it outweighed the rise in the per capita supply of silver coin which high mortality had initially created. The consequence was that the shortage of silver inhibited demand, causing prices to fall from the 1380s, at the same time that high mortality had increased the cost of labour. This combination ended the profitability of demesne agriculture. With the leasing of demesnes, serfdom lost its economic purpose and declined. Some villages might have prospered more than others because of their better access to urban markets, or to mining and industrial employment, or because of more favourable tenures and farming practices. Nonetheless, there remains the question why so many peasants were unable to improve their position, despite the cheapness of land, and the greater personal freedom that allowed them to migrate from remoter areas, poorer soils, and less advantageous tenures. Dyer has estimated that up to one-third of tenants were no better off economically in 1500 than their predecessors two centuries earlier, and he suggested that the low prices they could obtain for their produce were most to blame for their inability to exploit the opportunities that the Black Death had created.148 Probably what blighted their prospects even more than low prices was the reduced availability of credit at all levels, because without credit few peasants could expand and stock their holdings.149 Since credit was generally given by relations or neighbours, uncertainty about its availability beyond the village was a real deterrent to migration.150 As this article has argued, the reduction both in prices and in credit was strongly influenced by the fall in the amount of silver coin per head for most of the fifteenth century. This left those who had prospered sufficiently to acquire gold coin as the

148 Dyer, Making a Living in the Middle Ages, 353–4, 357–8. 149 Briggs, “Availability of Credit”, 23. 150 Briggs, “Creditors and Debtors”, 130–43; Elaine Clark, “Debt Litigation in a Late Medieval Essex Village”, in James A. Raftis (ed.), Pathways to the Medieval Peasant (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1981), 247–79; Phillipp Schofield, “Dearth, Debt, and the Local Land-Market in a Late-Thirteenth Village Community”, Agricultural History Review, 45 (1997): 10–17; Schofield, “Access to Credit”, 114–21.

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chief competitors for the demesne lands that lords now wanted to lease out. The one-eighth of rural householders that Dyer estimated had advanced themselves by 1500 to hold 50 acres or more were part of the fifteenth-century trend that saw successful peasants, merchants, or lesser gentry create large land holdings, often run on capitalist lines, which they frequently converted to sheep runs to profit from rising wool prices.151 The growth of enterprises which produced on a large scale for wholesale or overseas markets was stimulated by the concentration of wealth that was encouraged by the gold coinage, as too was the development of London’s capital market. But the policy that attracted gold bullion to the English mints at the expense of silver prevented a more general recovery of the English economy for some decades after it became evident in Europe. The gold coinage thereby prolonged the long-drawn-out deflation that, for poorer men, blighted the opportunities that high mortality had created. As mortality declined, and the population began to grow again, erratically it seems from the 1460s, but consistently from c. 1500, wages failed to increase in line with prices and rents.152 The latter began rising again, firstly in response to the increased supply of silver in the 1490s, and then as demand rose, from a growing population.153 As a consequence, the children of peasants who had not acquired sufficient land in the interval began their descent once more into a rural proletariat.154 In some areas they found additional employment in a cloth industry that had been driven out into the countryside by lack of silver coin, but increasingly that too became dependent on the capital and credit that was enriching London at the expense of the provinces. In these ways the gold-dominated currency helped to undermine the social levelling that plague had initiated, and it contributed to the capitalist relationships which replaced the old feudal order. These changes would not have occurred without the social and economic transformation initiated by the Black Death and by subsequent years of high mortality, but equally the replacement of a silver by a predominantly gold currency played an important and unjustly neglected part in re-modelling the economy and society of fifteenthcentury England.

151 For example, McIntosh, Autonomy and Community, 223–35; Christopher Dyer, “A Suffolk Farmer in the Fifteenth Century”, Agricultural History Review, 55, 1 (2007): 7–14, 17–22; John S. Lee, “The Trade of Late Fifteenth-Century Cambridge and Its Region”, in Michael A. Hicks (ed.), Revolution and Consumption in Late Medieval England (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2001), 134–9. 152 Clark, “Long March”, 100, Table 1. Clark’s estimates conform with the mortality trend of the creditors in Chart I. 153 Clark, “Long March”, 108, Table 5. 154 Ibid., 131–2: Table A2 shows that the average real wage for agricultural labourers fell from an index figure of 1.21 in the 1490s to 1.09, 1.06, and 93.5 in the next three decades; 120, Table 9.

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10 CREDIT AND THE EFFECT OF THE BLACK DEATH ON REGIONAL COMMERCIAL ECONOMIES, 1350–1369

It was inevitable that the loss of population inflicted by the Black Death would result in a serious fall in business activity and therefore of credit in the 1350s. The Statute Merchant certificates indicate its scale in evidence which can be interpreted as either reinforcing the common interpretation of the plague’s dramatic impact on the economy, or, alternatively, as supporting the revisionist case that many other factors besides mortality combined to create ‘profound structural changes within the economy during the 1350s and 1360s’.1 At first glance the fall of 36 per cent in the value of the credit recorded in the certificates of the 1350s to £97,266 seems to accord with a scale of plague mortality which historians have variously estimated at between one-third and one-half of the population. The certificates show, though, that this overall figure obscures widely differing rates of decline in the credit of individual counties, which indicates varying falls in business activity. They ranged between 2.6 and 82.4 per cent, while nine counties recorded increases of credit of between 12.5 and 95 per cent. These differences indicate that other factors, besides mortality, must have been at work in their local economies to explain why business activity recovered relatively speedily in some and not in others. Of those which markedly increased their credit in the 1350s, the leaders, Cheshire and Lancashire, did so by 95 and 87 per cent, respectively, from previously minimal figures. This leads one to suspect that rather than being spared high mortality, they were benefiting from the new opportunities which accrued to survivors from the much greater availability per head of gold and silver coin after the re-coinage of 1351, and from the profusion of legacies which followed the high death toll, legacies which have every appearance of funding new enterprises. The fact that four of the other seven counties which increased their credit, namely, Northumberland, Suffolk, Sussex, and Dorset, were coastal, also hints that changes in the country’s overseas trade may have played a part in their

1 Mark Bailey, The Myth of the ‘Seigniorial Reaction’ in England after the Black Death (Turnhout: Brepols Publishers, 2015), 166–7, 147–72.

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recovery, while the increased credit of the other three, namely Buckinghamshire, Wiltshire, and Worcestershire, similarly suggests new local developments in their economies.2 This poses the question, why, if these counties experienced growth, did the other twenty-nine, as well as cities like London and Bristol, see their share of credit diminish?

The money supply and credit While the money-supply remained adequate, it was almost inevitable that inflation of prices and wages would follow mass mortality by encouraging the survivors to demand greater financial rewards for their labour. However, the sharp decline from 1345 in the mint’s supply of silver bullion made it increasingly difficult for employers to satisfy demands for higher wages when it was easy for peasants either to escape manorial ties altogether or to bargain successfully for the conversion of their old villain tenures into commercial, money-based ones.3 Apart from resorting to debasement, the only way to increase the supply of coin was by a re-coinage with a lower weight-standard. The government carried this out for both gold and silver in 1351, producing a total silver currency of £500,000–£800,000. Although this was probably only a third of the size of the silver currency in 1319, it was now financing a much smaller population, while the addition of gold coins worth between £100,000 and £150,000 allowed wholesale merchants, and the rich, to economise in their use of silver. A boom in wool exports in 1353–4 also contributed to a greater demand for credit. Combined with the higher output of coin from the mint, these developments promoted a rise of 26 per cent in the total credit recorded in the certificates for that year to £12,056, almost double that for 1350.4 The appearance of rising wealth in the mercantile class, particularly in London, created a general suspicion that it was acquired by profiteering, as prices almost doubled between 1346 and 1352. The parliament, which sat at Westminster in 1351, experienced at first hand the effect on their cost of living in London and concluded that it was the consequence of the city’s franchise, which excluded all but citizens from London’s wholesale, retail, and distributive trade. Parliament’s remedy was to abolish these privileges and to open the city’s trade to unlimited competition. This raised the prospect that provincial wool merchants would once again be able to deal directly with alien importers and exporters in London and compete in the citizens’ lucrative retail and distributive trade. Their estimate of what profits they were likely to lose explains their attempt to bribe the king by offering a loan of 20,000 marks, but it was insufficient to win back their privileges.

2 Stephen Broadberry, et al., Economic Growth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 25–6, Table 1.08; George Brooke, “A Find of Nobles at East Raynham, Norfolk”, Numismatic Chronicle, 11 (1911): 291–330. 3 Bailey, Myth of the ‘Seigniorial Reaction’, 149–56. 4 Allen, Mints and Money in the Medieval Economy, 332; Carus-Wilson and Coleman (eds.), England’s Export Trade, 1275–1547, 47.

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Ban on English exports of wool Worse, though, was to befall English merchants when in September 1352 the government forbade them to export wool. It followed this ban in September 1353 with an ordinance announcing the re-instatement of home staples for wool sales and, most disturbing of all, the grant to alien merchants of a monopoly of wool exports for four years.5 The idea behind the 1353 ordinance ostensibly was to protect the wool trade from Flemish attacks at sea, but it also had the benefit of giving the royal government more of the higher export duties which foreigners paid.6 The ordinance was confirmed by the Commons in 1354 in the Statute of the Staple, which directed all wool destined for export to be taken for sale to one of the designated staple towns of Newcastle, York, Lincoln, Norwich, Winchester, Exeter, and Bristol. By March 1354 Canterbury, Chichester, and Hull were added to this list. London, though, had to suffer the commercial inconvenience of seeing Westminster appointed as its wool staple, with the consequence that the latter increasingly took over the business of the city’s own Statute Merchant registry. A further blow was that the statute re-iterated all the privileges which the Carta Mercatoria had previously granted to alien merchants. This was a signal to the Italians to flock back to London to re-constitute their companies and join the Hansards in profiting from their new monopoly. Accordingly, aliens increased their wool exports from London from 1,223 sacks in 1351–2 to 23,582 in 1353–4. They financed these by flooding the city with their imports, which now included the raw materials needed by the expanding English cloth industry.7 Although some alien merchants provided cover for those English wool exporters who were rich enough to bribe them, it was the Italian companies, especially the Genoese, which dominated wool exports from London in these years. There is little evidence, though, that their transactions matched in size or value those they had acquired in the earlier period of alien dominance, when they obtained most of them through large contracts with monasteries. The certificates of the 1350s show only twelve alien creditors pursued defaulting debtors for large sums totalling £1,400, or less than 1.5 per cent of the total recorded for this decade. One possible explanation for this apparent paucity of alien credit is that inherited wealth had so increased the demand for wine and other luxury imports in England, and also for the imported raw materials needed by the expanding cloth industry, that alien merchants could earn all the sterling coins they needed by selling their imports on the quayside, thus avoiding or reducing their credit transactions. It also seems from the large numbers of both gold and silver coins struck by the mint between

5 Lloyd, The English Wool Trade in the Middle Ages, 205–7, and chapter 2 above. 6 W. Mark Ormrod, “The English Crown and the Customs, 1349–63”, Economic History Review, 40, 1 (1987): 28–9. 7 Carus-Wilson and Coleman, England’s Exports, 47; Lloyd, England and the German Hanse, 1157– 1611, Table 3, 98–9.

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May 1353 and September 1357 that the aliens’ monopoly of wool exports was providing them with ample bullion to pay for all the exports they sought.8 The ban on English wool exports meant that denizens could only profit from supplying the alien exporters with wool in the staple towns. Inevitably this meant that local English merchants lost the most lucrative profits, which they had been accustomed to gain from overseas trade, and they were also deprived of their accustomed inflow of cash when this was particularly needed to help the economy recover from the effects of the Black Death. At the same time, though, it meant that smaller, rural middlemen had a better chance to compete with the urban dealers who had previously dominated the trade by purchasing wool from local producers and by carrying it to the staples for direct sales to the aliens. This new development indicated the possibility that rural commercial enterprise might compensate for falling urban trade.

Counties with increased credit Seven of the eleven counties which recorded growth in their credit in the 1350s, namely Cheshire, Lancashire, Westmorland, Huntingdonshire, Buckinghamshire, Worcestershire, and Dorset, did so from small beginnings. Hitherto they had produced few certificates, and their totals for the decade were still no higher than £760 for Lancashire, £870 for Cheshire, and £887 for Buckinghamshire, sinking to a mere £15 for Westmorland. Cheshire’s increase can largely be accounted for by credit of £600 recorded at Chester by a local merchant to a Londoner ‘for divers merchandise’, which most likely included wool. This suggests how far competition for wool was now causing some Londoners to travel into the provinces for greater supplies. Lancashire’s increased credit, on the other hand, seems to have reflected the extent to which high mortality and the re-coinage had made more money available for individual merchants to invest. Alternatively it may have reflected the extent to which purchasers, under the pressures caused by the alien monopoly of wool exports between 1353 and 1362, were now demanding credit from the growers. Whereas twenty-two certificates had recorded transactions for the county’s creditors in the 1340s, which averaged £27.6, seventeen certificates in the 1350s recorded average sums of £52.18. It is likely that legacies also promoted enterprise on a bolder scale, such as the credit of £400 given by a Lancashire parson in 1351 to a Gloucestershire merchant.9 Certainly increased economic activity in more distant counties is indicated by the new appointment of the mayors of Wigan and Preston as official recorders of credit contracts under the Statute Merchant system. Wigan issued nine certificates and Preston seven in the decade from 1353.10

8 Allen, Mints and Money, Table C. 3. 9 T.N.A. C. 241/132/7. 10 Wigan: T.N.A. 132/7; 141/80, 144; 144/3,102,107; 147/137; 149/8; 153/70. Preston: 143/6; 144/48,49; 146/31; 149/143; 155/37; 157/141.

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Only four counties which normally recorded substantial sums of credit, namely, Sussex, Northumberland, Lincolnshire, and Wiltshire, show increases in this decade. What they had in common was their position on or near to the coast, which suggests that they were benefiting from the new staples which were created for the convenience of alien exporters. Sussex made the largest gain of 89 per cent to reach a total (excluding a large family transfer) of £2,356. This undoubtedly reflected the advantage which local merchants gained from the additional appointment of Chichester as a wool staple from 1354, although it was not far from the one in Winchester, and the county’s main agricultural occupation was cereal-growing.11 It had, though, the advantage of being close to the sheep runs on the Sussex Downs and also to Bosham, a port which attracted the alien merchants who now came to buy up the wool of the area. It was also home to at least one local merchant, Adam Chandler, who had the resources, and local standing, to obtain credit of £80 11s. 5d from a Sussex knight, almost certainly for his wool.12 Another coastal county, Northumberland, also saw its credit increase in this decade, by 43 per cent, to £1,661. That total, though, relies on including, exceptionally, the credit of £1,000 given by a Northumberland knight in 1358, because it was described as specifically for corn and other merchandise.13 This credit was the more surprising because the alliance which the Scots made with the French in 1354 had led to the defeat of an English force the following year at Nesbit, near Wooler, and to the Scots’ capture of Berwick. The subsequent threat of invasion inevitably deterred many mercantile creditors from lending, which explains why, despite Newcastle’s privileged position as a staple town, there are no certificates recording credit given by its citizens before June 1354. Even its most prominent burgess, Nicholas de Roddam, had to rely on the Percy family for large sums of credit in 1355, no doubt for the purchase of wool and other produce from their estates.14 However, the loss of Berwick did have the advantage of driving its former mayor, Richard de Stanhope, to transfer his resources to Newcastle, where he became a burgess in 1357.15 When the treaty of Berwick in October 1357 released the Scottish king from captivity, the inland trade recovered, which may well account for the knight’s credit of £1,000 for corn and other merchandise (probably wool) the following year.16 The reduced threat from the border certainly encouraged Richard de Stanhope to travel from Newcastle to York in 1359 to record credit of £200 to the lord of Bossall in the North Riding. Most likely, this

11 Nigel Saul, Scenes from Provincial Life: Knightly Families in Sussex, 1280–1400 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 111. 12 C. 131/134. 13 C. 241/138/138. 14 C. 241/140/79, 83. 15 C. 241/135/124; 164/82. 16 Richard A. Lomas, North-East England in the Middle Ages (Durham: John Donald Publishers Ltd., 2001), 48.

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transaction, like that involving credit for 1,000 marks which he gave to a Yorkshire knight, was to purchase their wool.17 Wiltshire’s 26 per cent increase of credit in the certificates of this decade came on top of its rise of 68 per cent in the 1340s, when the cloth industry had first developed in Salisbury and in the west of the county, increasing the local demand for credit and also for better means for recording and enforcing it.18 This led to the use of Salisbury’s Mayor’s Court from 1351 as an additional registry under the Statute Merchant system. Its certificates in the 1350s recorded twenty transactions, whereas in the years before 1351 Salisbury’s merchants had recorded the credit and debts arising from their large commercial transactions mainly in Southampton or in London. The ban on denizen wool exports from 1353 inevitably encouraged the diversion of more wool into the local cloth industry, whose growing output is reflected in the huge expansion of cloth exports from Southampton from 175 pieces in 1352–3 to 3,769 in 1356–7.19 The growth of Wiltshire’s credit is thus a symptom of new local enterprise and specialisation in cloth-making, particularly in the north-west of the county, and in smaller market towns like Malmesbury, Trowbridge, Lacock, and Alderton near Chippenham.20 By contrast, the banning of English wool exports, and possibly the toll exacted by plague, explains why the number of Salisbury’s mercantile creditors fell from the twelve who recorded credit worth £1,636 in the certificates of the 1340s, to the five whose certificates of the 1350s record credit totalling only £694.8. Moreover, nearly half of this latter figure was accounted for by £300 for a single consignment, possibly of wool, which Henry Fleming of Salisbury sold to a London merchant in the Westminster staple.21 The rise of Wiltshire’s credit to £3,033 in the decade’s certificates depended mostly on nineteen creditors from outside Salisbury. Although sixteen of them for the most part describe themselves merely as ‘merchant of Wiltshire’, the term included men whose status differed from, and was often far higher, than that of Salisbury’s richest merchants. In fact, it seems likely that several called themselves merchants only because the staple courts used the law merchant and, officially, the registries were only for the use of merchants.22 However, since lords of estates wanted to use them to register their credit transactions when they sold their wool and other valuable produce from their estates, they did not hesitate to style themselves as merchants. Thus, Sir Thomas West, a knight and owner of several manors, described himself as a merchant when he recorded credit of £60 for

17 18 19 20 21 22

C. 241/151/12,30. K. Tiller, Wiltshire (Victoria County History, 2011), 121. Carus-Wilson and Coleman, England’s Exports, 75–6. C. 241/65/90; 128/64; 129/113,171A, 192; 130/95. C. 241/135/172. Pamela Nightingale, “Knights and Merchants: Trade, Politics and the Gentry in Late Medieval England”, Past and Present, 169 (2000): 43–7. Re-printed in Pamela Nightingale, Trade, Money and Power in Medieval England (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Ltd., 2007), XII.

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‘divers merchandise’, which was almost certainly wool from his sheep flocks.23 The Rector of Codford did the same when he registered credit of £50, as, too, did Robert de Lucy, lord of Tollard Royal, as well as two chaplains.24 The creation of the home staples explains why Lincoln was an exception to the pattern of urban decline in favour of rural enterprise in the period of the alien monopoly. Although the county’s credit in the decade’s certificates increased in value by only a modest 12 per cent to £3,506, these years saw Lincoln’s share make a striking recovery of c. 60 per cent from a total of £540 in the 1340s to £1,322 in the 1350s.25 This can only be explained by its appointment as one of the staples in 1353, and by the alien monopoly which had caused a substantial increase of wool exports from Boston between 1353 and 1362. The appointment of Lincoln as the staple town meant that alien merchants were obliged, as in former times, to buy their wool within its bounds, thus giving Lincoln’s merchants an advantage as intermediaries in the trade. For a brief period, this restriction restored Lincoln to its former commercial and financial dominance in the county while the credit of Boston’s merchants fell in the certificates of the 1350s to a mere £119.33 from their total of £658.75 in the previous decade. The staple regulations had a similar depressing effect on the trade and credit of the other Lincolnshire towns, with only Barton-on-Humber and Grantham recording modest totals of credit of £32 and £30, respectively. Nonetheless, Lincoln’s new status did not restore its merchants to their former level of individual wealth. This was partly because the plague had made substantial inroads into hereditary businesses, but mostly because they lost their previous profits from exporting wool, unless, like the Londoners Fulk Horwood and Thomas Albon, they chose to cheat the system by exporting wool bought in the Lincoln staple under the names of foreign merchants.26 William de Spain was the first merchant to be elected as mayor of the staple in 1356, and it seems from the size of his credit transactions, which included one of £100 and one of £84 to a dyer in the city, that he was by far the most successful of Lincoln’s merchants. This was probably because he had previously conducted most of his trade from Boston, since he was described as ‘of Boston’ on his appointment as mayor of the staple.27 No doubt when the staple, and the ban on English exports, was announced, he judged that if he were to profit at all from the wool trade he had to return to Lincoln to supply the aliens with wool and to buy imports from them in return. The ease of exchanging alien imports in this way for exports of wool could explain why alien merchants issued only two certificates for unpaid credit in the county in this decade.28

23 24 25 26 27 28

C. 241/147/145. C. 241/129/4; 134/102; 139/159; 147/145. Francis Hill, Medieval Lincoln (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1948), 251–2. Nightingale, A Medieval Mercantile Community, 209. C. 131/27/10; C. 131/186/28; C. 241/136/102. C. 241/135/138; C. 241/7/38.

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Despite the swathe cut through Lincoln’s population by the Black Death, the advantage the city enjoyed as the official wool staple enabled its citizens to dominate the county’s credit transactions. Of the ninety-five certificates which its registry issued in the decade, Lincoln’s residents were responsible for thirty-seven, recording credit transactions which averaged £35.7. The names of the creditors, though, reveal a sharp break with the old mercantile oligarchy which had ruled the city before the Black Death. Only Robert de Dalderby, whose father had died c. 1349, and who succeeded William de Spain in 1359 as mayor of the staple, had any real connection with the city’s former rulers.29 This meant that few of the newcomers had the resources to match the capital of the Dean and Chapter, whose credit in the certificates, combined with that of another canon, totalled £492, dominating the city’s total.30 The ban on the city’s merchants exporting wool meant that the chief beneficiaries of the staple were the sheep-rearing landowners and rural middlemen. The forty certificates issued by these men totalled £2,003, or 57 per cent of the county’s total, with an average value of £50. Among the landowners were six knights, whose certificates recorded credit totalling £580.31 This sum, though, was surpassed by that of seven parochial incumbents and a chaplain, who between them recorded £676, or an average of £84.5 each, sums which they could hardly have obtained from their parochial resources. Where their homes are identifiable, these rural entrepreneurs lived in twenty-four villages in sixteen of the county’s wapentakes, seven of them in Lindsey, six in Kesteven, and three in Holland. It is noticeable that most of their villages were situated on what became ‘A’ roads in modern times and were often at junctions, which gave them easy access to more than one town and to the port of Boston. They were thus ideally placed to develop their areas commercially and to disburse the proceeds of their sales in cash throughout the Lincolnshire countryside. The commercial network they created helped Lincolnshire to increase its credit in the 1350s when most other counties saw theirs fall.

Falls in credit London It was inevitable that what happened to London’s economy in the decade after the Black Death both reflected and influenced that of the kingdom as a whole. The credit which Londoners recorded in the certificates of the 1350s totalled £35,603, revealing a fall of 23 per cent below that for the previous decade. This was despite the fact that their share of the national total rose from 31 to 37.35 per cent. Can one

29 Hill, Medieval Lincoln, 250. 30 C. 241/129/13; 134/107,182,212; 135/166. 31 For knights see: C. 241/129/210; 130/148; 131/62,131; 132/4; 136/123.

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account for these changes by the effects of the plague on the city’s population, by the loss of its franchise, or by the royal policies which imposed home staples and the alien monopoly of exports on the wool trade? There can be little doubt that the loss of life in the city from the plague was severe, although archaeologists have hitherto not found burials in the emergency plague cemeteries of a character and scale to justify the highly coloured estimates of chroniclers and of those historians who have relied on their accounts.32 It is likely that at least one-third of the city’s population either died or moved elsewhere. However, the certificates of credit indicate that the city’s economy was reviving in the 1350s, although at a considerably lower level than in the previous decade, due to the fall in its population. Revival was encouraged by high wool exports from its wharves in 1350–1, and the arrival of returning, or new, immigrants to occupy empty houses and shops. There is also evidence that many of the younger generation survived to take over established family businesses.33 The pattern of London’s reviving credit was very similar to the national one in that both exhibited sudden leaps in their totals in 1354 and falls in 1356, followed by a rise to a high point in 1359. Only then did the certificates record as much as half of the totals of credit they had achieved in 1348. The sudden increase in 1354 occurred in the period of the alien monopoly and reflected the fact that wool exports more than doubled that year, and helped the mint greatly to increase its issues of gold coin.34 London was the chief beneficiary of these developments since many of the foreign exporters based themselves in the city, with the result that 52.5 per cent of the kingdom’s wool exports in 1353–4 went from London’s wharves. Their fall in 1355–6 accounts for a similar drop in Londoners’ credit. There is no single explanation, though, for its marked rise in the certificates of 1358–9, although more imports of gold passing through the London mint must have contributed to the expansion of the citizens’ credit. Mercers remained the leading group of creditors. Thirty-seven of them recorded credit in the certificates of the decade worth £4,149.33, or 11.65 per cent of London’s total. This, though, was a fall from their share of 18 per cent in the 1340s, which can be explained mostly by the alien monopoly of wool exports. Since the city’s cloth exports were only beginning to rise, it seems that mercers still made most of their profits from importing and distributing linens from the Low Countries, although they undoubtedly gained, too, from the marked increase in the export of worsteds during the

32 E.g. Richard Britnell, “The Black Death in English Towns”, Urban History, 21 (1994): 198–9, 204–5; Pamela Nightingale, “The Growth of London in the Medieval English Economy”, in Richard Britnell and John Hatcher (eds.), Progress and Problems in Medieval England: Essays in Honour of Edward Miller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Re-printed in Pamela Nightingale, Trade, Money and Power in Medieval England (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Ltd., 2007), XIII, 89–106. 33 Nightingale, Medieval Mercantile Community, 198–200. 34 Carus-Wilson and Coleman, England’s Exports, 47; Allen, Mints and Money, Table C.

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years 1357–60.35 Nineteen pepperers, who increasingly specialised in importing the dyes and other raw materials needed by the cloth industry, recorded the next highest credit of £2,892, or 8.12 per cent of the city’s total. They were followed by seven ropers, most of whom were, or had been, wool exporters, hence their high total of £1,893, while thirty-three fishmongers were responsible for credit of £1,604. The seventeen drapers in the certificates recorded credit totalling £1,557, while the fourteen vintners were responsible for £1,156. However, the most numerous of all the groups with mercantile connexions, who recorded 15.5 per cent of London’s total, were forty-eight denizens and seven aliens who described themselves only as merchants. They were most likely new immigrants into the city who did not belong to any of the established mercantile groups which took their name from the particular import and distributive trade in which they specialised. The suspension of the city’s commercial privileges, and the disruptive effect of the plague had encouraged more of the latter to seek protection for their trade against newcomers and the aliens by organising themselves into disciplined fraternities, or companies, from which they sought to exclude potential new rivals who wanted to invest in its wool trade. Twenty-eight men who described themselves as clerks also contributed certificates recording credit worth £1,711, or 4.8 per cent of London’s total. Apart from these groups, there was an even larger body of 142 unspecified London creditors who used the Westminster staple’s, or the city’s registries, to record credit which resulted in certificates worth £7,876.7 out of London’s decadal total of £36,043. The fact that Londoners were now visiting provincial registries, which included for the first time Coventry and Salisbury, as well as Gloucester, Exeter, and Winchester, all of which had become centres of cloth manufactures, hints how the kingdom’s internal trade was beginning to change as exports of cloth slowly increased in number. They were stimulated by the ban on English merchants exporting wool, and by the restriction to home staples of all sales of wool intended for export. Since none of the inland or western counties had such a staple, the ban meant that their county towns ceased to be the collecting centres for wool and so the growers found it more convenient to sell theirs to local clothiers. Consequently, Nottinghamshire’s credit fell in value by 63 per cent in the 1350s, and Northamptonshire’s likewise fell by 64 per cent, even though they retained their Statute Merchant registries. Whereas twenty-one Nottingham merchants had issued certificates for credit worth £788 in the 1340s, not one did so in the 1350s, despite thirty men from elsewhere in the county joining others from Leicestershire, Lincolnshire, Derbyshire, Northamptonshire, and Bedfordshire in recording debts in the town during this decade. Similarly, whereas twenty-eight creditors from Northampton had issued certificates worth £1,230 in the 1340s, only three did so for a mere £140 in the following decade, even though men from eight

35 Sutton, The Mercery of London, Trade, Goods and People, 99; Howard L. Gray, “Production and Exportation of English Woollens in the Fourteenth Century”, The English Historical Review, 38, 153 (January 1924): 18–21.

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other counties as far distant as Berkshire and Shropshire issued certificates from Northampton’s registry for credit worth £2,404. It is unlikely that plague could have killed most of Nottingham’s and Northampton’s wool merchants, and much more likely, once the ban on English exports and the staple legislation came into force, that the two county towns ceased to serve as collecting and financing centres for wool from the midland and western counties, to the loss of their merchants. Buyers and sellers from elsewhere, though, continued to use the midland registries to record their transactions because they were on their route to the main ports and wool-staples. Thus a debtor from Hartington in the High Peak area of Derbyshire recorded in the Nottingham registry his debt of £60 to a Leicester creditor.36 Another from Derbyshire also recorded there a debt of £20 to a creditor of Bawtry in the West Riding of Yorkshire, a port on the River Idle which was valued for its connexion with the Trent and for its position on the road junction where Ermine Street met the Great North Road.37 Northampton’s certificates also show large sums of money recorded in transactions in the town by rural middlemen, who were now challenging the townsmen’s previous dominant share of the wool trade. A typical one recording his transaction there was the debtor from the north Buckinghamshire hamlet of Lenborough who owed £126 9s. 4d., almost certainly for wool, to the lord of neighbouring Thornton.38 It is not surprising that among the other counties which had previously recorded the largest totals of credit, the three which showed the greatest falls, of between 63 and 70 per cent, were the western ones of Gloucestershire, Herefordshire, and Shropshire. All of them were leading wool-producing counties whose merchants now found themselves unable to profit from exports themselves, while they were also far from any staple which was likely to attract alien purchasers. The nearest one to them was Bristol, but few alien wool merchants visited it because it was too distant by sea from their chief market in the Low Countries. The high transport costs from the western counties to the east-coast ports had always constrained the growth of their merchant class, unless, like Shrewsbury’s in the days of Boston’s dominance, they had been able to command a particularly favourable route to a port. Without the high profits to be made from exporting wool, western merchants were at a geographical disadvantage, and they had least to gain from sales to aliens in the staples. This is particularly clear in the case of Gloucester’s merchants, who issued no certificates at all once the alien monopoly of wool exports was announced until just after it was withdrawn in September 1357. As they were responsible for 60 per cent of their county’s total credit in the certificates of the decade, their exclusion from wool sales for export must have had a significant impact on the local wool trade and could explain much of the fall in the county’s credit. The ban on their wool exports was, though, a further incentive to supply wool to Bristol’s

36 C. 241/131/93. 37 C. 241/145/7. 38 C. 241/139/3.

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expanding cloth industry in return for wine. In 1354 two Gloucester merchants owed £300 to a Bristol merchant for wine which they had bought on credit, and for wool, which, no doubt, they should have delivered as part of the same transaction.39 Dyers also became more prominent in Gloucester’s certificates as the county’s own cloth industry developed. One owed £26 to a burgess of Southampton, and another £14 to a London merchant, presumably in both cases for imported dyes.40 Dyers were also actively trading in Tewkesbury and Cirencester.41 Only in 1359, though, do the certificates indicate that the county’s merchants had resumed substantial investment in long-distance trading links with London. A Gloucester merchant then recorded credit of £140 to William Eustace, a merchant of Wheatley, a village a few miles beyond Oxford, on the direct road to London.42 Eustace was already trading with prominent London merchants, and was almost certainly supplying them with wool from the western counties.43 Herefordshire’s credit followed a similar pattern in this decade, but became even less mercantile in character, and more restricted geographically. The county town was responsible for only 40 per cent, compared with Gloucester’s 60 per cent, of the credit in the decade’s certificates. It is also noticeable that after 1351 the city’s previous commercial links with places beyond the county’s borders all but disappeared. Whereas in 1350 its merchants had given credit to a London vintner and a London pepperer, and a Herefordshire man had also owed money to the rector of a church near Shrewsbury, there are several subsequent years when there is no evidence that such long-distance links continued until the end of the decade.44 In 1358 a Herefordshire chaplain entered into a credit transaction for £100 with another chaplain in London, but only in 1359 is there any record of the county’s transactions with Gloucestershire or Wiltshire.45 Moreover, after 1352 there are no certificates recording any Herefordshire transactions with Bristol men until 1369.46 The city’s more limited trade, and, possibly, the effects of the plague, meant that only one merchant, Thomas Don, dominated Hereford’s transactions with credit totalling £303.5, out of the city’s total of £466. Shropshire Shrewsbury, likewise, issued no certificates of credit or debt to Bristol men between 1346–69, and those that it did issue plunged in value in 1353–5 when the alien monopoly of wool exports first took effect. As might be expected, its

39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46

C. 241/166/41. C. 241/139/76; 140/42. C. 241/136/53, 57. C. 241/139/144. C. 241/139/140,144; 141/121; 150/2. C. 241/131/235. C. 241/138/105. C. 241/128/45; 129/208; 140/11; 144/72.

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burgesses were particularly affected by this ban, so that after 1352 only fourteen of them appear as creditors in the certificates, only one of whom recorded credit over £20. The county’s credit had fallen more severely than that of its neighbours in 1349. This could indicate that Shrewsbury’s population suffered particularly from the Black Death and might also explain why the town’s share of Shropshire’s credit in the certificates fell to 40 per cent in the 1350s. It is more likely, though, that the county’s wool-growers chose to circumvent Shrewsbury’s merchants in the interest of earning higher profits for themselves. Thus, the abbot and convent of Haughmond granted credit of 80 marks to the lord of Pimley and to two other Shropshire debtors.47 Sir John Payn, a knight of Gobowen in the north-west of the county granted credit of 100 marks to a Leicestershire man in a transaction recorded in the Northampton registry.48 Two brothers, William and John de Pontesbury of Wem, recorded credit of £100 to two London drapers at the Westminster staple in 1357, presumably for wool they had brought there to sell directly to exporters.49 Only one Shrewsbury merchant, Robert de Thornes, gave credit of comparable size, £60, to a Staffordshire knight, presumably for his wool, but he did so in London.50 These new links circumventing Shrewsbury’s merchants meant that when the alien monopoly of wool exports ended, the county’s wool-growers had more confidence in their ability to branch out on their own, and to obtain higher rewards for their own enterprise than those they had been accustomed to receive under the near-monopoly previously exercised by Shrewsbury’s merchants. Bristol It can scarcely be a co-incidence that Bristol’s cloth exports expanded rapidly, and almost entirely through denizen enterprise, from 448 in 1350–1 to 1,265 in 1353–4, after the ban on English wool exports came into force and encouraged wool-producers to widen their domestic market. They then increased even faster to 3,476 in 1359–60.51 Nonetheless, Bristol itself did not escape the regional pattern of falling credit for most of the decade. Although it had quintupled in 1351 after the re-coinage, this was because of a single transaction in which a local vintner gave credit of £500 to a female Gloucestershire merchant for wine.52 It then diminished in 1353, and fell to nothing in 1354, as the renewed French war threatened trade with Gascony. A substantial recovery only began in 1358–9 after the Anglo-French truce, and preliminary peace of 1358. In these years twentyeight Bristol men, in place of the fifty-four in Bristol’s certificates of the 1340s,

47 48 49 50 51 52

C. 241/39/158. C. 241/133/92. C. 241/136/21. C. 241/138/85. Carus-Wilson and Coleman, England’s Exports, 75–7. C. 241/165/76.

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recorded credit in the certificates worth £2,222, This total was 63 per cent less than that recorded in the 1340s, and less than 5 per cent of London’s contemporary figure. However, it is most unlikely that the fall was caused by the alien monopoly in wool exports since Bristol’s share was only modest in the 1340s and was even more so in 1350–52 when cloth exports were expanding. It is more likely that the fall of Bristol’s credit in the certificates to 37 per cent of its value in the 1340s was reflecting its own reduced supply of wine, which was exacerbated by the renewal of the French war. No alien ship unloaded wine in Bristol in 1348–9, and only three English ones did. Although imports were quickly restored, alien importers landed an annual average of only 102.4 tons of wine in Bristol in 1350–9, in contrast with their average of 168.3 tons in the 1340s.53 It is also noticeable that the area to which Bristol men extended credit in the 1350s shrank to eight counties from fourteen in the 1340s, as there are no transactions recorded in the decade with some counties in which its merchants had previously been active. These included Warwickshire, Leicestershire, and Shropshire. Instead, the large sums suggest that Bristol’s merchants were buying up wool from the surrounding counties for the use of the area’s growing cloth manufactures.54 Leading cloth merchants, such as Edmund Blanket, Thomas Babcary, Walter Frampton, and John Besille, were giving credit of up to £120, probably for bulk purchases of locally-produced cloth. Although there are six certificates in this decade for sums under £5 owed to Bristol creditors, three of them for no more than twelve shillings each, it is unlikely that these represent small sums advanced to individual weavers or dyers, in view of the increasingly capitalistic organisation of the industry. As the financing of the cloth industry involved a series of separate, relatively small payments to different craftsmen, including carders, spinners, weavers, fullers, and dyers, its processes did not demand advances of the scale required to buy quantities of wool, and for that reason, the certificates do not trace the expansion of the local cloth industry as well as they reflect purchases and sales of wool. Yorkshire Yorkshire’s inclusion in the list of counties which suffered major falls in credit (in its case of 69 per cent to a total of £6,782) is more surprising in view of the choice of York for a wool staple, and the important part that many of its merchants had so recently played in the wool syndicates. Plague, though, undoubtedly thinned the ranks of York’s merchants and made many more hesitate to grant extensive credit. Their total in the certificates plunged in 1350–1 to less than half their previous value and only seventeen appear as creditors in the years 1349–51. By contrast, credit in the county at large had recovered by 1352. As the mint’s output of gold

53 Margery James (ed. Elspeth Veale), Studies in the Medieval Wine Trade (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), Appendices 14–15, 103–5. 54 C. 241/151/76; 166/41.

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and silver coin increased, so by 1354 the certificates show the city’s share of credit rose to 89 per cent. Hull’s wool exports also grew substantially in the years of the alien monopoly, as, too, did the sums of credit which William de la Pole recorded in certificates issued from Hull’s registry, despite his trial and imprisonment by the king in 1353–4. Pole’s total credit of £1,150 in the certificates of this decade was far higher than any other Yorkshire contribution and raises suspicions that it involved exports made in collusion with aliens.55 The banning of English wool exports meant, though, that more scrupulous wool merchants in the county lost the higher profits they had formerly made from overseas trade. Before the ban was officially imposed, the York merchant John de Acomb had advanced £200 to three men of the Wolds in January 1353, and merchants of Beverley and Hull had likewise recorded individual credit transactions of £100 and £300, respectively. However, transactions of that size were few and far between while the ban was in force.56 The worst year for the county’s credit was 1356, which coincided with the lowest total for the entire kingdom, as the renewal of the French war reduced even the aliens’ wool exports and thus cut the amount of gold bullion they brought to the mint. Yorkshire’s share of credit in the certificates fell to a paltry £162.13 in 1356 before rising the following year to £449.5, when denizen exports were again authorised from 5 May 1357. Norfolk Since the years of the alien monopoly explain much of the reduced credit recorded by the leading wool-producing counties, there was a possibility that Norfolk’s more diversified economy could have escaped a similar contraction. Its distinctiveness in these years is shown by the fact that its annual totals in the certificates corresponded with the national trends only in 1354 and 1356. In the former year it rose to a peak with the increase in the mint’s output of gold and silver coin, while in the latter year it plunged on the renewal of the French war, and the fall in national wool exports which was evident also in Yarmouth’s low figures.57 Otherwise Norfolk’s credit showed a marked divergence from the national trend in 1351, 1355, and 1358–9. In 1351 it fell to its lowest point in the decade, in contrast with a general recovery elsewhere. This was most likely because of successive bad harvests in the county in 1349–51 on top of the heavy loss of labour due to the plague.58 The county’s credit also halved in 1355, in contrast with the much lesser fall in the national trend. This could be explained by Norfolk’s response to the Scottish king’s alliance with France, and the Scots’ defeat of an English

55 56 57 58

C. 241/129/102;130/192; 135/158; 136/136,147,148; 143/99. C. 241/133/65,78,162. Carus-Wilson and Coleman, England’s Exports, 48. Christopher Dyer, Standards of Living in the Later Middle Ages: Social Change in England c. 1200– 1520 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 262, Table 19.

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force at Nesbit that year, since Norfolk normally enjoyed a valuable coastal trade with the north-east and with Scotland. Again, in 1358 and 1359 Norfolk’s credit was falling in the certificates in contrast with the national figures which show a recovery. Altogether in the decade its credit almost halved, in sharp contrast with the county’s previous record of economic growth, and despite the improved supply of coin. Can this be explained by Norfolk’s abnormally high mortality from the plague in 1348–9? Evidence from the manor of Coltishall indicates that over half of the tenants had died by December 1350, and that, like the nearby manor of Martham, its population made no recovery for the rest of the century.59 Although this death rate may not have differed much from that elsewhere, its impact on Norfolk’s economy was likely to have been more devastating because the county’s agriculture had developed in such a way as to provide employment and food for its dense population of small-holders who had been forced by growing numbers to live on ever smaller parcels of land and to cultivate them by intensive methods reliant on abundant cheap labour. The county’s prosperity also depended on women and children engaging in a variety of by-employments, including worsted and clothmaking.60 When that density of population was reduced, and could not be easily replaced, the county’s whole economy had to adjust to lower productivity and reduced trade, which meant that less money circulated within it. These changes are visible in the reduction of Norfolk’s credit in the 1350s to £6,678, compared with £12,440 in the 1340s. The number of villages which produced creditors illustrates the downward trend which had begun even before the plague when they fell from 146 in the 1330s to 96 in the 1340s, and then to 65 villages in the 1350s. Similarly, those recorded with debtors fell from 226 in the 1340s to 109 in the 1350s. These figures reflect an economy in which enterprise, as represented by the debtors, and investment, represented by the creditors, had shrunk by 45 per cent and 33 per cent, respectively, in one decade. Whereas Norwich, too, had seen its creditors in the certificates fall from 149 in the 1330s to 89 in the 1340s, they plunged in the 1350s to 34, even though the city still accounted for 30.4 per cent of the county’s credit, and Norwich’s total of £2,028 still dwarfed Yarmouth’s of £207. The effect of the alien monopoly of wool exports was also visible in Lynn’s reduced certificates of credit in the 1350s, whose value amounted to only £132. Nonetheless, despite their shrunken numbers, wool merchants continued to be the most prominent mercantile creditors in Norwich. Roger Hardgrey’s certificates amounted to £422 in this decade, which was less than half their total in the previous decade, and John Jocelyn’s to £216.66, but only four other Norwich

59 Bruce M.S. Campbell, “Population Pressure, Inheritance and the Land Market in a Fourteenth-Century Peasant Community”, in Richard M. Smith (ed.), Land, Kinship and Life-Cycle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 53, 98–9. 60 Ibid., 89–92.

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merchants, Bartholomew del Appleyard, John de Barford, John de Wells, and Simon de Blickling, recorded credit totalling over £100. The continuing importance of Norfolk’s wool trade explains why the hundred of North Greenhoe, on the county’s north coast, with the port of Wells at its centre, was the leading hundred outside Norwich for creditors. It contained Egmere, the home of the wooltrading clerk John Leech, until he secured preferment by 1357 to the rectory of Great Massingham in Freebridge hundred.61 His long experience of investment in the wool trade ensured that he recorded the highest individual total of Norfolk’s credit, amounting to £790.65, in the certificates of this decade. Freebridge was the hundred which produced most wool, and it recorded the second highest total for debts in the certificates, mostly on account of advance payments to the suppliers. South Erpingham, the centre of the worsted industry, remained the leading hundred for debtors, but its prosperity was threatened in this decade by the decline in worsted exports. In 1355–6 exports of worsteds fell suddenly from 21 per cent to only 7 per cent of cloth exports, and sank even further to 2 per cent in 1357–8.62 This fall co-incided with increased cloth exports from Yarmouth and could be explained by local merchants switching their investment from worsteds into more profitable exports of woollen cloth, and then back to wool when the alien monopoly ended. Most of the trade was conducted by Norfolk men either through London or Yarmouth. London mercers were the most eager customers and were prepared to pay Norfolk suppliers in advance for purchases. Nine London mercers and two pepperers in this decade issued certificates for advances of £1,094 to Norfolk men, mostly in transactions registered in London.63 Some of these advances, like that of John Malwain for £480, were large, but despite this, the eleven certificates which record London credit of £1,094 to Norfolk men in the 1350s indicates that their transactions had fallen from twice that value in the 1330s, and by 40 per cent since the 1340s as exports of worsted fell.64 Although the alien wool monopoly reduced the role of Norwich’s and Lynn’s merchants as creditors in the 1350s, as in most other counties, it promoted that of the land-owners and wool-growers. The Black Death did nothing to weaken the cohesion of Norfolk’s rural society as landowners, together with many Norfolk clergy, made advance payments to peasants for their wool, and no doubt also arranged for its collection before sending it to alien exporters in Yarmouth or London. Knights from thirteen villages were among the creditors who issued certificates for £1,184. Fourteen parsons, mainly from the eastern hundreds, issued others for £453.5, although none of them approached the value of John Leech’s total of £790.6. Various clerks and chaplains contributed another £125.75, while

61 C. 241/136/44. 62 Carus-Wilson and Coleman, England’s Exports, Appendix V. 63 C. 241/131/106; 133/12,18,101;134/23,111; 135/48; 139/23; 141/172; 153/160; C. 131/182/28; Sutton, Mercery of London, 146–8. 64 On the controversy about Norfolk’s production of worsteds from the 1350s see Sutton, Mercery of London, 148, n. 103.

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Bishop William Bateman issued twelve certificates in pursuit of unpaid loans totalling £400. To these sums should be added £116 advanced by the convents of Shouldham and Dereham, and by the Prior of Binham. Altogether this clerical credit amounted to £1,813.6, not much less than that of Norwich’s creditors in the 1350s, indicating that despite the halving of Norfolk’s credit in the certificates of the 1350s there was no real change in the distribution of wealth, and that such as did occur had as much to do with the government’s policies towards the wool trade as they were due directly to the Black Death. Devon and Cornwall Similarly, the mixed economies and occupational diversity of Devon and Cornwall, and their more dispersed pattern of settlement, meant that they did not suffer from abandoned holdings and deserted villages after the Black Death to the extent that the more densely populated, open-field villages of the midlands did.65 They were also not dependent on wool exports for the circulation of coin and promotion of credit, and so should not have been affected by the aliens’ monopoly in the 1350s. Despite these advantages, and the fact that for the first time Exeter exported up to 348 sacks of wool between 1353 and 1359, and in the same period increased its exports of cloth from 626 to 1,487, the decade still saw Cornwall’s certificates of credit fall in value by 64.4 per cent and Devon’s by 56 per cent.66 Can these figures be explained by the scale of plague mortality that the south-west suffered from? Although it certainly did not escape a high death-rate, the Duchy of Cornwall’s vacant tenancies were filled remarkably quickly due, no doubt, to the previous growth of the population creating a body of landless labourers who could take over vacant holdings. By contrast, the output of tin fell by up to 60 per cent below that of the previous decade.67 However, it is unlikely that this was caused solely by the plague, as almost certainly many miners were only too willing to give up their arduous and dangerous work in favour of taking up newly vacant holdings of land, with the consequence that the output of tin did not return to its former level for another forty years.68 Mining had stimulated the economies of Devon and Cornwall not just by increasing the wealth of those who owned and invested in the mines, but also by enriching the local middlemen who gave credit to the tinners and sold what they produced to external merchants. Tinners also rented plots of land on which they grew their food, thereby increasing the demand for land in the county and the level of rents. At the height of tin production, it has been calculated that more than

65 Fox, “Devon and Cornwall”, 722–42; Kowaleski, Local Markets and Regional Trade in Medieval Exeter, 38–40. 66 Carus-Wilson and Coleman, England’s Exports, 47–8, 75–7. 67 John Hatcher, Rural Economy and Society in the Duchy of Cornwall, 1300–1500 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 120–1. 68 Ibid., 30, 120, 143.

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one person in ten of the adult population of Cornwall may have been engaged in the industry, which brought wealth into both counties.69 This meant that a severe reduction of the labour force, and a collapse in the output of tin, was going to affect the economy of these counties as a whole. It is therefore not surprising that the pattern of credit in the certificates issued by Devon and Cornwall in the 1340s does not conform to the national one but showed closer links with each other’s. This was obvious in the 1350s, when their credit in the certificates plunged simultaneously from a total of £345 for Devon and £324 for Cornwall in 1354, to £48.5 and £56.5 respectively in 1355, only to rise again in 1358 to £522 for Devon and to £500 for Cornwall in 1359. Falling demand for Exeter’s cloth exports in 1354 could have influenced this pattern, but if so, the cause probably lay in London, as the capital’s merchants were deprived of their accustomed profits from wool exports by the alien monopoly, and so had less money to invest in cloth from the south-west.70 Similarly, Londoners’ credit to Cornwall in 1350–58 only produced certificates worth under £35, and their credit to Devon produced certificates worth only £105.33, until in 1356 a London pewterer recorded credit of £53.33 to an Exeter merchant and his London partner for what must have been tin.71 However, when the English regained the right to export wool in 1357, their renewed profits from the trade expanded their credit generally the following year. The mercer Thomas de Brandon then advanced £200 in the Westminster staple to a Cornishman, while a London pepperer, John de Gonwardby, similarly advanced £60 to a Devon man in 1358, probably for dyes and alum, and a London roper £200 to a man from the neighbourhood of Axminster. These contracts may have contributed to the remarkable rise in denizen exports of cloth from Exeter in 1359–60.72 Despite being appointed as a staple town, Exeter did not suffer a reduction in its credit in the 1350s which was at all comparable to that of the county towns which were centres of the wool trade. Its certificates indicate a fall of only 12 per cent in their value to £413.66, although the number of its mercantile creditors fell from twelve to five, probably because of the plague. One of the most conspicuous losses was Robert de Bridport who had been responsible for half of Exeter’s credit in the certificates of the 1340s. The city was most likely appointed as a staple to restore some prosperity to its residents after the inroads made into their number by the plague, because it had previously played little part in the wool export trade. Alien merchants also found it unsuitable as a commercial centre and exported wool from there in only two years of their monopoly. Their contribution then amounted to little more than 1 per cent of national wool exports in either year. Hence, they made little difference to the pattern of Exeter’s credit, which accounted for about 14 per cent of the county’s total.

69 70 71 72

Kowaleski, Local Markets and Regional Trade, 17–18; Hatcher, Rural Economy and Society, 32. Carus-Wilson and Coleman, England’s Exports, 76. C. 241/135/88. C. 131/11/26; 185/16; C. 241/149/144; Carus-Wilson and Coleman, England’s Exports, 77.

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A far more hopeful indication of growth lay in the figures for Exeter’s cloth exports which rose from 55 in 1350–1 to 1,487 in 1359–60.73 The county’s other towns recorded even fewer creditors than Exeter in the certificates. The stannary town of Chagford had two, as had Tiverton and Dartmouth, while Dawlish had one, and they recorded together credit worth £152.66. Ten clerical creditors, who did not include any from Exeter, recorded another £216.33 of credit, but by far the dominant creditors in the certificates were the landowners, seven of whom were knights, and one the son of a knight, while another seven held landed fees. They contributed certificates for credit amounting to £1053.5 and help to explain why Devon still recorded nineteen villages as the homes of creditors, even though this was little more than half the number in the 1340s. Thus, the pattern of credit and debt which emerges from the certificates in the 1350s, although superficially indicating a possible fall of one-third in the postplague population, can be seen in several cases to have other likely explanations. Although high mortality from plague obviously did contribute to many deaths among merchants, and explains some of the fall in credit, the alien monopoly of wool exports which the government imposed from 1353 to 1362 and the creation of home Staples, where all wool for export had to be sold, also played a significant part through their distorting impact on the market. This, and the renewal of the French war in 1359–60, worked against the interests of the urban merchants who had been the principal wool exporters, while the restrictions imposed on their wool exports also encouraged more English merchants to invest in the manufacture of worsteds, and increasingly in broadcloths for export. This movement was instrumental in expanding the trade of Bristol and Exeter, and in initiating the re-direction of investment and enterprise towards the western counties at the expense of the east and north. York was an exception in that although its recorded credit fell after the plague by 69 per cent, by 1352 its level of credit had recovered as its cloth industry expanded. Norfolk, by contrast, saw its credit halved as high mortality reduced the density of the workforce which its agriculture had needed. This caused the number of villages which recorded creditors in the certificates to sink from 226 in the 1340s to 109 in the 1350s and left the export trade in wool to fall under the control of the landowners, including knights and country clergy, who supplied alien merchants with their wool on credit in the new home Staples.

73 Carus-Wilson and Coleman, England’s Exports, 75–7.

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11 A CRISIS OF CREDIT IN THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY, OR OF HISTORICAL INTERPRETATION?

Introduction In his Howard Linecar Lecture for 2009, published in the British Numismatic Journal, and in his recent book, Money in the Medieval English Economy: 973–1489, Professor J.L. Bolton has raised questions about the money supply of fifteenth-century England which have led him to dispute that the century experienced either a shortage of money or a crisis of credit. He believes that although lack of silver coin might have caused temporary difficulties, English society found its way round the problem by creating viable forms of ‘paper money’, and consequently it ‘was not in the main a society held back by an inadequate money supply’.1 This is a surprising conclusion considering that even at its highest in the early fourteenth century, the medieval English currency was scarcely adequate for the size of the economy, while in the course of the next century, it plunged critically. At its nadir in the 1440s, the mint’s combined output of gold and silver coin was only about 5 per cent of that struck in the 1420s, and according to Martin Allen’s estimates, the silver coin, which was the currency in everyday use, fell from c. 56 pence per head in 1351, to c. 13 pence in 1422, and by 1470 had risen only to c. 33.6 pence.2 If the money supply was adequate for the needs of the economy, one has to ask why the government should pass twenty-seven measures between 1390 and 1465 to conserve and increase the supply of bullion, and why falling prices,

Acknowledgements. I am grateful to the Leverhulme Trustees and to the Economic and Social Research Council (Award No. 000271010) for financing my calendaring of the Statute Merchant and Staple certificates and the Extents on Debt in the National Archives. 1 Jim Bolton, “Was There a ‘Crisis of Credit’ in Fifteenth-Century England?”, British Numismatic Journal, 81 (2011): 162; Jim Bolton, Money in the Medieval English Economy, 973–1489 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012), 73–4. 2 Allen, “The Volume of the English Currency, 1158–1470”, 607. At its highest total, c. 1310, it is doubtful if the currency exceeded 100 pence a head, and much of this would not be in general circulation.

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wages, and rents were so widespread from the 1440s to the 1460s that John Hatcher has described the period as ‘the great slump’.3 Bolton allows that ‘shortages of coin due to bullion famines should be factored into any models of the fifteenth-century economy, to a much greater extent than they have been so far’, and he also concedes that ‘at times credit may have been squeezed by the bullion famines’.4 Nonetheless, he asserts that any crisis of credit ‘has been much exaggerated’, on the grounds, for which he claims M.M. Postan’s authority, that transferable credit instruments became a form of paper money which ‘did more than make up for shortage of coin. They also offered ways of payment without coin having to change hands’.5 I have raised two principal objections to this claim. Firstly, credit instruments were not a simple alternative to cash because even when they became legally assignable, there were hazards in giving and accepting them. Moreover, because the proportion of credit was apparently high in relation to the uncertain supply of coin, even in normal circumstances they carried a significant risk of default.6 Secondly, any circumstances which further threatened to reduce the supply of coin would increase creditors’ fears of default and would lead them to reduce their loans or credit. Therefore, rather than compensating for a lack of coin, assignable instruments, like all other forms of credit, would diminish with it. I have concluded in the light of publications by Munro, Day, and Spufford, and from extensive evidence of debt, that the decisions of creditors in medieval England were influenced by their perception of the amount of silver coin in circulation.7 This was because, as silver was the coin in everyday use, its circulation

3 John Munro, “Bullionism and the Bill of Exchange in England, 1272–1663: A Study in Monetary Management and Popular Prejudice”, in The Dawn of Modern Banking (New Haven and London, 1979), reprinted in John Munro, Bullion Flows and Monetary Policies in England and the Low Countries, 1350–1500 (Aldershot: Variorum Collected Studies series, 1992), 192–208, & Appendices B, C & D; John Hatcher, “The Great Slump of the Mid-Fifteenth Century”, in Richard Britnell and John Hatcher (eds.), Progress and Problems in Medieval England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 237–72. 4 Bolton, “Was There a ‘Crisis of Credit’ in Fifteenth-Century England?”, 151–2. 5 Ibid., 157, 162. 6 Pamela Nightingale, “Monetary Contraction and Mercantile Credit in Later Medieval England”, Econ. Hist. Rev., 2nd ser., 43 (1990), repr. in Pamela Nightingale, “Money and Credit in the Economy of Late Medieval England”, in Diana Wood (ed.), Medieval Money Matters (Oxford: Oxbow, 2004), 64–6. Although Bolton claims (“Was There a ‘Crisis of Credit’”, 156) that in 1995 I made ‘an important admission . . . that the assignable bond could at least mitigate the shortage of credit caused by lack of coin’, I was referring to what was needed, and I went on to say that what was in fact available was ‘a poor substitute for specie’: Nightingale, A Medieval Mercantile Community, 476. 7 Munro, Wool, Cloth, and Gold, 93–126; Day, The Medieval Market Economy, 16–18, 43–4, 141– 61; Spufford, Money and Its Use in Medieval Europe, 339–62; Nightingale, “England and the European Depression of the Mid-Fifteenth Century”, 640–7 & 2004; John Munro, “The Monetary Origins of the Price Revolution, 1470–1540”, in Dennis Flynn, Arturo Giráldez, and Richard van Glahn (eds.), Global Connections and Monetary History, 1470–1800 (Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 2003), 216–17.

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determined liquidity in the economy, and it therefore both influenced the giving of credit and its ease of repayment.

Private financial instruments as a supplement to the money supply? Postan’s work, in fact, makes the first challenge to Bolton’s views, because his articles on credit do not claim what Bolton says they do. In his ‘Private financial instruments in medieval England’, published in 1930, Postan surveyed the credit instruments in use in the fifteenth century. The obligation, or formal bond, had by then largely taken the place of the notched tally as the most commonly used instrument of credit, and there were other bonds in use which fell into the category of informal promissory notes.8 From the thirteenth century Italians had also used bills of exchange to transfer funds between their branches in different countries, and as English merchants won the greater share of their country’s wool exports in the second half of the fourteenth century, they, too, used them to transmit the proceeds of their sales from Europe.9 The Calais staple also issued transferable debentures in the fifteenth century.10 There is evidence, as Postan showed, that creditors in fifteenth-century London were assigning these instruments to third parties in order to settle other, unrelated debts.11 Although the common law courts did not recognize the legality of assignment, mercantile law did, and as both the Staple courts in large towns, and the London Mayor’s court, used mercantile law, assignments gained in Postan’s view sufficient legal recognition in the fifteenth century to make them ‘legally secure’, despite the ‘formalities and limitations which must have impeded the free circulation of the instruments’.12 Numerous cases of debts in Chancery show these impediments were very real and included appeals made by debtors against assignments. It was also common for creditors to ask the debtor to give formal consent to a transfer.13 In addition, the assignee could demand, and obtain, guarantees about repayment from the assignor himself, ‘in case’ said one assignee, revealingly, ‘any of the debtors refused to acknowledge that they were debtors, or that they owed the sums claimed, or in case any of the debts were found not to be true’.14 These limitations, though, did not necessarily apply to the informal promissory notes, or bills obligatory, which were devised solely for mercantile

8 9 10 11 12 13 14

Postan, Essays on Medieval Agriculture and General Problems of the Medieval Economy, 29–40. Ibid., 54–7. Ibid., 50. Ibid., 41. Ibid., 42, 49. Ibid., 44–6. Arthur H. Thomas (ed.), Calendar of Plea and Memoranda Rolls Preserved among the Archives of the Corporation of the City of London at the Guildhall, 1413–37 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1943), 166; Nightingale, A Medieval Mercantile Community, 476.

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convenience, and thus were extra-legal instruments. These normally changed hands without any of the formalities which applied to bonds, and so there was no legal impediment to their assignment.15 Postan commented on them, ‘A financial instrument which could pass hands so many times, and apparently without any formalities or additional documents, almost deserves the name of “currency”’.16 This sentence has apparently suggested to Bolton that Postan believed these bills did indeed acquire such a status.17 However, Postan rejected this notion on the grounds that although assignments were not subject to legal restrictions, their negotiability, like that of all other credit instruments, was ‘determined by the commercial and financial circumstances of each particular case’ and was ‘very largely a matter between the assignor and the assignee’.18 Their circulation depended on whether the ‘drawer were generally known as a trustworthy and reliable debtor likely to honour his obligations.’19 These practical restrictions meant that transferable bills and bonds were, in his view, ‘far removed from the modern view of negotiable instruments’, that the bond ‘never was a negotiable paper’, while the bill of exchange, although freely transferable, ‘did not become fully negotiable till late in the modern era.’20 Postan concluded that all these limitations in the fifteenth century ‘made the emergence of fully negotiable paper impossible’.21 This means that none of the financial instruments available in the late middle ages can be compared with the modern negotiable bill which is backed by governments or by accepting firms of huge capital and international repute, which effectively act as guarantor for the debtor. The only possible exception was the debenture of the Calais staple, because it was secured by the wool customs which the staplers themselves collected. However, its circulation was limited by the fact that it was only legal tender for payments to the staple.22 This means that the use of unsecured bonds and bills was not at all comparable with that of contemporary gold and silver English coins of fixed weight and fineness. While Bolton glosses over this distinction, and stresses the primary importance of legal protection for assignability, Postan put most emphasis on confidence in the debtor’s ability to repay what he owed.23 Bolton cannot, therefore, claim Postan’s authority for his own assertion that ‘viable forms of paper money’ were more than making up for a shortage of coin.24

15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23

Postan, Essays on Medieval Agriculture, 49. Ibid. Bolton, “Was There a ‘Crisis of Credit’ in Fifteenth-Century England?”, 157, 162. Postan, Essays on Medieval Agriculture, 49. Ibid., 51. Ibid., 42, 49, 62. Ibid., 42. Ibid., 50–1. Bolton, “Was There a ‘Crisis of Credit’ in Fifteenth-Century England?”, 156; Bolton, Money in the Medieval English Economy, 973–1489, 73–4; Postan, Essays on Medieval Agriculture, 42–54. 24 Bolton, “Was There a ‘Crisis of Credit’ in Fifteenth-Century England?”, 157, 162.

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In fact there is no means of knowing how extensive the market for bills was in fifteenth-century England. Critics of Bolton’s views do not deny that bills were assignable, but, like Postan, they cannot accept that they were fully negotiable. At best, therefore, they could contribute to velocity, but not to the money supply itself, because, as merely personal credit, they carried no guarantee of repayment.25 Moreover, the evidence indicates they were used chiefly in overseas trade to transfer funds, and they did not circulate outside London.26 The early fifteenthcentury cases about assignment of debt which are recorded in London’s Plea and Memoranda Rolls invariably involved Italian merchants.27 The debentures of the Calais staple were also popular with exporting merchants because they assisted the transfer of funds from the sales of wool exporters in Calais to the importers who needed to pay for their purchases of linen in the Low Countries.28 Similarly, the London clients who feature in the Borromei’s ledgers were almost all engaged in trade which required them to transfer funds to and from the wool and cloth markets of the Low Countries. Bolton, though, found no evidence in the ledgers that their bills of exchange were transferred within England, and he acknowledges that assignment features little in the numerous cases involving bonds heard in the Court of Common Pleas.29 There is also no evidence that Londoners used credit instruments to make payments to provincial customers.30 Although exporting merchants like the Celys, and the factors of the Medici’s London branch, normally used bills of exchange in their overseas business, they always bought their wool in England with coin.31 The amount and quality of wool they could buy in local markets depended on the size of the down payment in coin they could offer the growers, who then awaited subsequent instalments of cash. The Medici paid £215 in coin, half the total price, as the down payment for one purchase of Cotswold wool in 1473.32 Coin therefore continued to be vital for merchants’ transactions, even for modest provincial wool-dealers like John Heritage.33 Payments by bank transfers were confined to account-holders in London’s four or five Italian banks. Even in financially

25 Munro, “Bullionism and the Bill of Exchange in England, 1272–1663”, 214–15. 26 Postan, Essays on Medieval Agriculture, 58–64; Bolton, “Was There a ‘Crisis of Credit’ in Fifteenth-Century England?”, 157–8. 27 Thomas, Calendar of Plea and Memoranda Rolls, 236–7, 244, 250, 260, 261. 28 Postan, Essays on Medieval Agriculture, 50. 29 Bolton, “Was There a ‘Crisis of Credit’ in Fifteenth-Century England?”, 158–9. The only exception was three bills sent by its Southampton agents to London: Bolton, “London Merchants”, 65; Bolton 2012, 300, note 67. 30 Peter Spufford, “The Social Economy of the Medieval Village in the Early Fourteenth Century”, EcHR, 61 (2008): 42–3. 31 George Holmes, “Lorenzo de’ Medici’s London branch”, in Richard Britnell and John Hatcher (eds.), Progress and Problems in Medieval England: Essays in Honour of Edward Miller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 279–80. 32 Ibid., 280. 33 Dyer, A Country Merchant, 1495–1520, 93–7, 106, 157.

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sophisticated Venice little more than 10 per cent of the adult male population c. 1500 had current bank accounts, and in Spufford’s view international trade still relied predominantly on merchants transporting bags of coin.34 Edward I prohibited bills of exchange in 1283 on the grounds that they were depriving the mints of bullion, and for the same reason, from the late fourteenth century English mercantile opinion, which supported its government’s insistence on sound money, became progressively more hostile towards alien merchants using bills in England.35 In 1376 a committee of mint officials, which included prominent merchants, recommended that no payments for merchandise should be allowed outside Flanders by letters or bills of exchange.36 Parliamentary opposition to them sharpened as the supply of bullion diminished in the fifteenth century, and it forced the Staplers in 1429 to demand payment in bullion for at least part of the wool they sold in Calais, while restrictions were imposed generally on credit given to aliens in England.37 The same year the influential London Grocers’ Company protested against Italians’ assigning grocers’ bills, on the grounds that they thereby incurred ‘great shame and slander’.38 The grocers’ objection, presumably, was that assignment suggested their credit was unreliable, thus injuring their financial reputation and that of their livery company. In 1436 the polemical Libelle of Englyshe Polycye attacked bills of exchange as the means by which Italians profited at the expense of both the English money supply and the English producers of the goods they bought.39 There was more than xenophobia behind these repeated attacks on bills of exchange. Supplies of bullion in England and Europe diminished, particularly c. 1395–1415 and again c. 1440–60, at a faster rate than the decline in the demand for money or the fall of the English population. In 1445 a petition to parliament complained about the shortage of coin for domestic trade.40 The crucial question is whether in these circumstances medieval people accepted bills and bonds as a substitute for coin when they were, in fact, only unsecured instruments of credit which

34 Day, The Medieval Market Economy, 142; Peter Spufford, Handbook of Medieval Exchange. Royal Historical Society Guides and Handbooks, No. 13 (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 1986), xxx. 32–3, 41–7. 35 Munro, “Bullionism and the Bill of Exchange in England, 1272–1663”, 198–9, 213–14. 36 Ibid., 201–3. 37 Wendy Childs, “‘To Oure Losse and Hindraunce’: English Credit to Alien Merchants in the MidFifteenth Century”, in Jennifer I. Kermode (ed.), Enterprise and Individuals in Fifteenth-Century England (Stroud: Sutton, 1991), 70. 38 Kingdon, Facsimile of First Volume of Ms. Archives of the Worshipful Company of Grocers of the City of London AD 1345–1463, II, 191; Thomas, Calendar of Plea and Memoranda Rolls, 236. 39 Warner, The Libelle of Englyshe Polycye, lines 396–455. 40 Day, The Medieval Market Economy, 58–60; Nightingale, A Medieval Mercantile Community, 258; Nightingale, “England and the European Depression”, 637, 639–40; Nightingale, “Gold, Credit and Mortality”, 12–13; Bolton, “Was There a ‘Crisis of Credit’ in fifteenth-century England?”, 150; Allen, “The Proportions of the Denominations in English Mint Outputs, 1351–1485”, 192–4; 2012, 178–9.

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bore the risk that the debtor might abscond, as a prominent Spanish merchant did in 1458, leaving huge debts behind him in London.41 Even bills of exchange were exposed to the danger that Italian banks would have inadequate funds to honour them, as had happened in the fourteenth century.42 That danger intensified in the fifteenth century, as the supply of bullion fell, mints closed throughout Europe, and numerous European private banks collapsed, including some in Venice.43 Furthermore, growing political instability in fifteenth-century England can only have increased creditors’ nervousness about accepting paper promises of future payment.44 Bills of exchange were particularly affected by any warfare that disrupted the export and import trades, such as the war with the Duke of Burgundy and the trade embargo he imposed in 1435–39. The renewal of England’s war with France, in 1449, and subsequent conflicts with the Hansards, took a similar toll on trade and mercantile confidence. Political conflicts at home also raised fears of lawlessness and questioned the ability of governments to enforce debts. From the 1440s the weak and incompetent government of Henry VI permitted increased corruption and faction which contributed to Cade’s rebellion in 1450 and anti-alien riots in London. Continued misrule ended in civil war and Henry’s deposition in 1461. Similarly, other crises, like the famine of 1438–39, or epidemics, which threatened the survival of debtors and creditors alike, also reduced confidence that debts would be repaid.

Gilbert Maghfeld and a decline in the availability of credit I have illustrated what effect both shortages of coin and political instability had in undermining the confidence that was essential to credit by analysing the accounts of Gilbert Maghfeld, which cover the years 1390–95. Maghfeld exported and imported various goods and distributed them to the provinces. He also had an extensive retail trade in the City, which explains why much of the credit he gave was informal and often included relatively small sums.45 Occasionally he accepted pledges of silver as security for credit, but he also used the normal range of credit instruments available at the time, including five recognisances of debt which he registered in the Westminster staple. His book records only one example of the assignment of debt, and that was more in the nature of a repayment, when Maghfeld accepted in June 1393 a tally from two skinners in part payment of their debt to him of £100.46

41 Bolton, Money in the Medieval English Economy, 973–1489, 214; Childs, “To Oure Losse and Hindraunce”, 73–4. 42 Nightingale, “Alien Finance and the Development of the English Economy, 1285–1311”, 491–2. 43 Spufford, “The Social Economy of the Medieval Village in the Early Fourteenth Century”, 37–9. 44 Nightingale, “England and the European Depression of the Mid-Fifteenth Century”, 633–4. 45 Nightingale, “Money and Credit in the Economy of Late Medieval England”, 60. 46 TNA: PRO, E 101/509/19, f. 39v.

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So extensive was the use of credit in trade that most merchants bequeathed at their deaths a large number of unpaid debts due to them which they classified as ‘desperate’, indicating they had little hope of recovering them. Whereas some might be content to let the debts continue unpaid for some time, this could only be true if they had adequate amounts of capital and had either some hope of repayment or, more likely, realised that they had nothing to gain from proceeding against the debtor.47 The great majority of merchants held only modest amounts of cash, which were often insufficient to cover their own debts to others, and so they had to rely on a steady flow of repayments in coin from their retail trade to give the new credit that customers needed. Even in prosperous times their survival in business was usually a difficult balancing act.48 The mint’s falling output of silver coin, combined with political events which interfered with London’s wool exports, and Richard II’s huge financial levies on the City’s merchants, reduced the ability of Maghfeld’s customers to repay the credit he had advanced them. Despite the various ways open to him for recording and for enforcing debts, he responded by reducing the credit he gave over five years by 97 per cent, and in 1394 he more or less abandoned trade. Even in normal trading conditions his accounts show that his retail trade in the city had a 12 per cent risk of default, whereas the credit he registered under Statute Staple, which usually involved much higher sums, had a 20 per cent risk of default.49 When he abandoned trade he chose to employ his remaining capital in large loans to prominent people, both because of the good security they offered, and the high interest rates they could pay. Since it is unlikely that Maghfeld was alone in pursuing this policy, the effect of lending to a few people of high worth, instead of to a large number of London and provincial merchants, depressed commercial activity.50 As London was the centre of the kingdom’s trade and credit, the result was a spreading commercial recession throughout England, which affected output and employment in the cloth industry, caused prices and wages to fall, made rents harder to collect, and depressed the land market, leading to the first of the fifteenth-century depressions.51 That effect is visible in the Statute Merchant and staple certificates for the whole kingdom. They fell from 147, worth £8,218, for debts recorded in 1391, to 83, worth £4,690, for debts recorded in 1395. Five prominent exporters in the London Grocers Company became bankrupt in 1397, the year that Maghfeld died, when he, too, was facing bankruptcy.52 The next decade witnessed an even greater decline in the certificates of debt.53

47 48 49 50 51 52 53

Bolton, “Was There a ‘Crisis of Credit’ in Fifteenth-Century England?”, 153, 160. Childs, “To Oure Losse and Hindraunce”, 69; Postan, Essays on Medieval Agriculture, 21–3. Nightingale, “Money and Credit in the Economy of Late Medieval England”, 63–4. Ibid., 56–68. Ibid., 67–8; Day, “The Great Bullion Famine of the Fifteenth Century”, 1–54. Nightingale, A Medieval Mercantile Community, 341–2; Nightingale, 2004, 68. Nightingale, “Gold, Credit and Mortality”, 12–13, 14, fig. 2.

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Statute Staple and Merchant certificates as evidence of the availability of credit The debate about the relationship of credit to the money supply can only be determined by evidence, and Bolton admits that his argument about paper money is speculative and the evidence for it ‘both sparse and obscure’.54 My conclusions, by contrast, are drawn from an analysis of 36,595 debts recorded on the Statute Staple and Merchant certificates in the National Archives.55 It is this evidence which Bolton now claims is ‘not as solid as it might seem’.56 However, his judgment is based on major errors of fact, derived chiefly from Postan’s minimal investigation of this source, and from his unsubstantiated speculations about it. Bolton confidently repeats these speculative views uncritically, without apparently studying the evidence itself. The certificates were created by a system established in 1283 by Edward I’s statute of Acton Burnell, which was amended by the Statute of Merchants of 1285. These statutes established registries in London and other leading towns to record recognizances of debt which had the legal advantage of giving the creditor an automatic judgment against his defaulting debtor. Although Acton Burnell stated that the parties should be merchants, in practice the certificates show that anyone could use the system apart from in the years 1311 – c. 1330, following the Ordainers’ decree that only merchants could do so. The Statute Staple legislation of 1353 created new registries, but, contrary to what Bolton states, it did not extend the registration of debts ‘beyond London to the courts at Newcastle upon Tyne, York, Lincoln, Norwich, Westminster, Canterbury, Chichester, Winchester, Exeter and Bristol’, for the reason that there had been Statute Merchant registries in almost all these towns for many years, and these continued to exist alongside the new Staple registries.57 The major exception was Westminster, which, for political reasons, was given a Staple court and registry instead of London, although the city continued to have its own Statute Merchant registry. Together the two systems produced certificates of debt from every part of the kingdom over the entire period 1284–1529. The local registries originally recorded the debts on rolls. When the debtors defaulted, the registries sent certificates recording their details to Chancery to initiate enforcement. Whereas few of the original local rolls survive, the certificates remained in Chancery’s keeping. The clerks filed them in bundles according to the date when they received them, but as this could be many months, and not infrequently, years, after the date when the debt was due for repayment, the economic

54 Bolton, Money in the Medieval English Economy, 74. 55 TNA: PRO, Classes C. 241, & C. 152. In addition, Class C. 131 contains 1,265 certificates relating to debts registered on the Close Rolls which have not been included in this analysis because they come from a different source, and do not reflect the same geographical pattern. 56 Bolton, “Was There a ‘Crisis of Credit’ in Fifteenth-Century England?”, 153. 57 Ibid.

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circumstances in which the debts were first registered can only be revealed by rearranging them by a computer, according to that date.58 To be certain of including all the certificates registered in any year requires the collection to be studied as a whole. Its bulk has the virtue of presenting a sample of recorded debt, selected only by the unpaid creditors, which covers all regions and almost two-and-a-half centuries. The problem for the historian has been to discover how representative the unpaid debts are of the number and value of those which were originally registered, and to deduce what factors influenced the rate of default. Alice Beardwood first carried out such an exercise in 1939 for her edition of the Coventry Statute Merchant Roll of 1392–1416. This showed that in two decades of differing economic circumstances, the percentage of Coventry debts which produced certificates of non-payment was 21.7 in the 1392–99 and 19.3 in 1400–09.59 London has most surviving original rolls, all of which record debts, popularly called ‘statutes’ registered under Statute Merchant. I have matched 2,671 debts recorded on nine London rolls between 1291 and 1315, with the certificates of non-payment, and this has revealed a consistent default rate matching that of the Coventry roll. This was despite the very different economic circumstances in which the rolls were compiled. These included years of warfare against France from 1294 to 1298, which severely disrupted the wool trade and therefore reduced the output of the mints and imposed heavy taxation on the kingdom. The figures for defaults are 19.3 per cent in 1291–92, 18.8 per cent for 1293–94, 20.1 per cent for 1295–96, and 22 per cent for 1298–99. From 1304 to 1309 the output of the mints soared, and remained good to 1315, but the default rate was unchanged at 22 per cent for 1309–10, 22.9 per cent for 1310–11, 20.8 per cent for 1315–17, and 20.3 per cent for 1315–16. Overall, the mean rate of default was 20.7 per cent, compared with a mean of 20.5 per cent for Coventry’s rolls for 1392–1409, and 20 per cent for Maghfeld’s own statutes of the 1390s.60 What may seem a surprising consistency is explicable by creditors reacting very swiftly to threatening circumstances by refusing to give credit. Contrarily, much improved prospects encouraged the expansion of credit. This supposition is borne out by the varying numbers of debts recorded on the London rolls. The two rolls dated between 1291 and 1294 record between 265 and 195 debts, whereas those for the difficult years,

58 The date of registration appears on all certificates from 1330, except for those issued by Lostwithiel. Before then they have to be analysed by the date of repayment which was usually within six months of registration. 59 Alice Beardwood (ed.), The Statute Merchant Roll of Coventry, 1392–1416: XVII (Warwickshire: Dugdale Society, 1939), 939; Nightingale, “Monetary Contraction and Mercantile Credit in Later Medieval England”, 566, Table 2. 60 Nightingale, “Gold, Credit and Mortality”, 2, note 11. The City’s first recognisance roll, which was compiled under the Acton Burnell legislation, produced fewer certificates of default because mayors could sell the debtor’s goods and property in his absence, whereas under Statute Merchant, if the debtor was not present, the mayor had to send a certificate to Chancery. Few debtors chose to await imprisonment.

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1295–96 and 1298–99, show a reduction to 137 and 166 debts, respectively. Those for 1295–96 are worth less than half of those on the earlier rolls. After the restoration of peace, and the huge increase in the output of the mints, the numbers of recorded debts expanded spectacularly in 1309–10 to 845.61 This is evidence which most economic historians would take seriously, but Bolton dismisses it with the sentence ‘What proportion of debts registered they (the certificates) represent simply cannot be known, whatever statistical methods are applied to the evidence’.62 Similarly, he maintains that since the ‘totality of the credit market can never be satisfactorily measured’, any conclusions drawn from the Statute Merchant certificates ‘may be misleading’.63 These strictures, of course, apply to most statistics that medieval historians have to use, and to none more so than to his own claims about negotiable bonds, since he cites no sample of them to prove his assertion that their increased use more than compensated for falling supplies of coin. They also apply to the sample of sixty-seven English merchants’ accounts he has selected from the Borromei’s London register for 1436–39 to show ‘reality’ in the ‘actual workings of the credit and exchange markets’ compared with the ‘secondary evidence’ of the certificates.64

Credit or penal bonds? Several other scholars have used the Statute Merchant and Staple certificates, but all have done so selectively to study particular towns, or for limited periods, and these limitations have given rise to divergent views on their suitability as a sample of late medieval credit. So forbidding has been the task of analysing the certificates as a whole, that no one has questioned Postan’s views or the very limited evidence on which he based them. He investigated only some of the surviving rolls of London’s Statute Merchant registry, and although he recognized that non-merchants used them, he concluded that the first three (1285–93) show over three-quarters of the entries recording debts between merchants.65 He based this claim on the fact that the sums involved were relatively small and not in round figures. However, McNall’s investigation of those enrolled between 1291 and 1307 led him to conclude that the great majority show non-mercantile creditors. This supports my own assessment that only about 28 per cent of them were mercantile in that period.66

61 62 63 64

Corporation of London Record Office: London Recognisance Rolls, I–IX. Bolton, “Was There a ‘Crisis of Credit’ in Fifteenth-Century England?”, 153. Ibid., 162. Jim Bolton, “London Merchants and the Borromei Bank in the 1430s: The Role of Local Credit Networks”, in Hannes Kleineke (ed.), Parliament, Personalities and Power: Papers Presented to Linda S. Clark (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2011), 54–6, 58. 65 Postan, Essays on Medieval Agriculture, 38. 66 McNall, “The Business of Statutory Debt Registries”, 76. His assessment that only c. 20 per cent were mercantile should most likely be increased to a figure nearer the average of 28 per cent,

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Postan, though, used his criterion of odd sums for mercantile credit to claim that their greater presence in the early rolls, in contrast with the larger, rounded, sums of the later ones, shows that the latter ceased to record mercantile credit. In fact, the relatively few odd sums in the early rolls mostly arise from the common use of the mark, worth 13s. 4d., and its fractions. Although it is likely that many sums were rounded up to include interest, and despite larger mercantile debts becoming more common as English trade expanded in the fourteenth century, Postan decided, without any supporting evidence, that round sums in Statute Merchant and staple records most likely referred to penal bonds. The latter were penalties for default which could be used to enforce transactions and were often twice the value of any debt involved.67 There are a few certificates in most decades which do appear to represent penal bonds, but these were predominantly issued by Statute Merchant registries. This was because lawyers who used penal bonds to enforce family settlements or land transfers could not record them in the later Statute Staple registries, since they used the law merchant and had no competence in pleas of land.68 However, from their creation in 1353, Staples attracted mercantile business away from Statute Merchant registries because they offered merchants a cheaper and more effective system of registering and enforcing debts.69 In 1370 Staple registries were issuing 40 per cent of the certificates, but by the 1390s their proportion had risen to more than 70 per cent. This tendency for a distinction to arise between the types of debt recorded by the Statute Merchant and the Staple registries became most obvious in London where merchants increasingly resorted to the Staple at Westminster to register their trading credit, while continuing to record other kinds of monetary transactions on the city’s Statute Merchant rolls. Postan only considered the latter and ignored the certificates of debt produced by the Westminster staple.70 If merchants had no nearby staple then they would register both mercantile credit and settlements involving penal bonds on the same Statute Merchant roll. Alice Beardwood noted the penal bonds on the Coventry Statute Merchant roll, but contrary to what Bolton claims, she did not say that only fifteen of the 288 Coventry recognisances actually involved debt. She merely observed that only fifteen recognisances record odd sums, and then referred to Postan’s views that round numbers suggested the debts were not commercial.71 However, she then went on to say that

67 68 69 70 71

because he was unable to search for relevant certificates beyond the Chancery bundle for 1307. Many more relating to the debts recorded on the London recognisance rolls in his period were sent to Chancery in the reign of Edward II, and the last of them in 1397. Postan, Essays on Medieval Agriculture, 38–9. Edwin Rich, The Staple Court Books of Bristol (Bristol: Bristol Record Society, 1934): 36–7. Nightingale, A Medieval Mercantile Community, 565. No original roll of staple debts has survived. Beardwood, The Statute Merchant Roll of Coventry, 1392–1416, xx–xxi; Bolton, “Was There a ‘Crisis of Credit’ in Fifteenth-Century England?”, 153; Bolton, Money in the Medieval English Economy, 973–1489, 278.

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she had found only three out of eighteen Coventry cases on the plea rolls at the end of the fourteenth century which were definitely penal bonds. Moreover, she noted that many of the other debtors and creditors named on the rolls belonged to the trades and crafts of the city, and that they reveal business connexions with twenty-two counties.72 By contrast, Bolton states unequivocally that ‘by the late fourteenth century the Statute Staple recognisance had become the preserve of non-merchants who used them to register loans and penal bonds rather than straightforward commercial debts’.73 Although the most cursory examination of the certificates disproves this rash claim, he maintains that ‘doubts continue about the use of these certificates of debt as a measure of the amount of commercial credit’, and he refers to the work of other scholars to prove his case. He cites Maryanne Kowaleski’s analysis of the Exeter certificates for the ten years 1377–87. She thought they confirmed Postan’s views about their diminishing commercial character because she identified only 32.3 per cent of the creditors in those years as merchants.74 However, my analysis of the 207 Statute Merchant certificates recorded for Exeter creditors between 1300 and 1309 indicates that only 28.5 per cent of them then had mercantile interests, which suggests that in the intervening period there was an actual increase in the mercantile use of the statutory bonds in keeping with the growth of the city’s commercial class. Bolton’s unwarrantable assumption that most debts where the creditors cannot be proved to be merchants must be long-term loans or penal bonds seems to be the foundation of his claim that my figures, which show credit falling steeply in the fifteenth-century recessions, are ‘surely uncertain evidence on which to build a model linking the availability of credit to changes in the money supply’.75 In fact there are very few certificates which reveal the characteristics of penal bonds. Normally these appear in pairs bearing identical information, apart from recording two different debts, the higher one of which was the penalty which was invoked if the lower sum was not repaid.76 There are, though, in most decades, some individual certificates for round sums of 1,000 marks, or, more commonly, £1,000, which are outside the normal range of debts, and because it is possible that these were penal bonds I have excluded them from my totals. These types of certificate, though, never amount to more than 3.2 per cent of the total for any decade and average only 1.25 per cent of the total overall. Those for £1,000 or more amount

72 Beardwood, The Statute Merchant Roll of Coventry, 1392–1416, xx–xxiii, xxv–vi. 73 Bolton, “Was There a ‘Crisis of Credit’ in Fifteenth-Century England?”, 153; Bolton, “London Merchants”, 54–5. 74 Kowaleski, Local Markets and Regional Trade in Medieval Exeter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 213. The difficulty in distinguishing mercantile creditors is illustrated by the fact that some Devon knightly families like that of Guy Brian, had wide-ranging mercantile interests. See Nightingale, “Knights and Merchants”, 52–5, 57–8. 75 Bolton, Money in the Medieval English Economy, 278. 76 One example is TNA: PRO, C. 241/206/49 & 50.

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to only 0.82 per cent of the total. This is hardly surprising because the purpose of penal bonds was to deter defaults, and since debtors knew the penalties were enforced, they would do everything possible to avoid paying them. Bolton also confuses the two quite separate issues of penal bonds and noncommercial loans.77 Whereas penal bonds were used as deterrents against default for any kind of debt, it is certainly not true that certificates recording transactions between apparently non-mercantile parties usually record penal bonds or noncommercial loans. In fact, many creditors who describe themselves in certificates as clergy, knights, or gentry can be observed in others actively trading in wool, lead, or tin.78 More importantly, distinguishing between mercantile credit and loans given for other purposes is irrelevant to the question of what circumstances encouraged or discouraged the lending of money in general. The various purposes for which money was borrowed, or credit extended, do not alter the fact that whether mercantile or not such transactions required one party to have money to invest, or to lend short-term, and the other party to find the cash, or goods, within a specified time to repay what he had borrowed. Both kinds of credit depended on how confident the creditor was that he would be repaid. His perception of the sluggishness, or otherwise, of the coin in circulation naturally played a significant part in his calculations. The certificates also prove the error of Postan’s claims, repeated by Bolton, that in the fifteenth century, Statute Merchant and Staple recognisances increasingly recorded long-term investments of more than a year’s duration, rather than shortterm credit.79 Sampling five years’ certificates in every decade shows that this is not true. The proportion which specified repayment in less than one year dropped only slightly from 69.2 per cent for 1284–1399 to 61 per cent for 1400–1524, and this seems to reflect, if anything, an increased difficulty in meeting short terms of repayment rather than any decisive shift to long-term investment. Throughout the period 1284–1524, a mean of 96.1 per cent of the recorded debts had a repayment term of under two years, and this did not change significantly in any decade. Moreover, it is close to the 94.5 per cent of debts registered by the London scrivener William Styfford in 1457–59, in which credit was given for up to two years.80 The Borromei bank in London gave similar terms, and credit given for one to two years is commonly recorded in the London Plea and Memoranda rolls.81

77 Bolton, “Was There a ‘Crisis of Credit’ in Fifteenth-Century England?”, 154. 78 Bolton, Money in the Medieval English Economy, 278; Nightingale, “Knights and Merchants”, passim; Nightingale, The Intervention of the Crown and the Effectiveness of the Sheriff in the Execution of Judicial Writs, c. 1355–1530, passim; Nightingale, “Gold, Credit and Mortality”, 9. 79 Postan, Essays on Medieval Agriculture, 39; Bolton, “Was There a ‘Crisis of Credit’ in FifteenthCentury England?”, 155. 80 Childs, “To Oure Losse and Hindraunce”, 90. 81 Bolton, “Was There a ‘Crisis of Credit’ in Fifteenth-Century England?”, 158; Bolton, “London Merchants and the Borromei Bank in the 1430s”, 58; Arthur H. Thomas (ed.), Calendar of Plea and Memoranda Rolls Preserved among the Archives of the Corporation of the City of London at the Guildhall, 1381–1412 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1932), passim.

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Furthermore, Postan’s and Bolton’s claims that the recognisance of debt ceased to be popular because it lost all its former advantages while it ‘retained most of its defects’ are also mistaken. The recognisance’s automatic remedy against a defaulting debtor was, Postan believed, eroded by the encroaching jurisdiction of Chancery. Far from Chancery’s interfering to restrict the execution of the certificates, the opposite happened, with a spectacular rise in their number and enforcement under Henry VII and Henry VIII.82 Bolton considers that the greatest disadvantage of recognisances was that because they were enrolled they could not be assigned.83 However, in the late 1450s numerous country wool merchants, and sixty-nine London merchants, preferred to record their credit in two scriveners’ registers in London rather than accept assignable bills, even though most of the credit they gave was for the export trade, and 84 per cent of the debtors and 30 per cent of the creditors in William Styfford’s ledger were Italians, who were accustomed to use such bills. The scriveners’ registers also show that the creditors, who were lending sums up to £800, normally demanded repayment in silver. They scarcely mention barter, and only occasionally payment by bills of exchange.84 This suggests a disinclination to accept bills, and also that the assignability of debts counted for little in England compared with merchants’ need for, and use of, payments in coin. Furthermore, by recording credit with scriveners or in Statute Staple registries, creditors gained copies of the enrolment which they could, and did, use as security for repayment of their own debts.85 The criticisms which have been levelled since the 1930s at the suitability of the certificates to serve as a sample of credit have, therefore, no foundation, and the charge that the system lost popularity, or effectiveness, is disproved by the fact that after a long decline in the fifteenth century they steadily increase in numbers from 1495 to the end of the series in 1530.86

Continuity and representativeness of the certificates The essential continuity of the certificates, and their value as evidence of credit, whether registered under Statute Merchant or Statute Staple, is visible in the social classes and geographical range of the debtors and creditors who used them, and in the modal values of their debts. The credit registered in the years 1300–49 show that knights and other gentry then accounted for 6.4 per cent of the creditors, clergy for 25 per cent, and merchants and trades with a mercantile element for

82 Nightingale, The Intervention of the Crown and the Effectiveness of the Sheriff in the Execution of Judicial Writs, c. 1355–1530, 10–11, Table I, 24–8. 83 Postan, Essays on Medieval Agriculture, 39–40; Bolton, “Was There a ‘Crisis of Credit’ in Fifteenth-Century England?”, 154–5. 84 Childs, “To Oure Losse and Hindraunce”, 83–4. 85 Thomas, “Calendar of Plea and Memoranda Rolls”, 292. 86 Nightingale, “Gold, Credit and Mortality”, 4, Figure 2; Challis (ed.), A New History of the Royal Mint, Appendix.

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28 per cent.87 These proportions did not change greatly in later periods, apart from falling numbers of clerical creditors in the fifteenth century. Between 1285 and 1309 the modal value of the certificates was under £5, but when the system was restricted to merchants, their modal value rose to between £20 to £50. It remained at that figure thereafter, in keeping with the expansion of English trade, although throughout the whole period at least a quarter of the debts were for under £20. This range is very similar to those in the two London scriveners’ books of the 1450s and in the Borromei’s accounts.88 About 73 per cent of the parties identified in the fifteenth-century certificates belonged to the social classes below the richer gentry, thus contradicting Bolton’s supposition that only wealthy creditors would ‘take the extreme step’ of enforcing debts using this system.89 In fact creditors calling themselves husbandmen did just that.90 Moreover, despite the increasing concentration of credit in London, in the certificates of 1520–29 thirty counties had creditors, and all but two had debtors. It is this strong element of continuity which makes the certificates a valuable sample for examining how monetary, political, social, and economic changes affected credit over nearly two and a half centuries. The continuity is evident as much in Statute Staple, as in Statute Merchant, certificates, and it means that there is no foundation for Bolton’s comments that because no Staple rolls have survived, conclusions drawn from the Staple certificates are uncertain.91 He has also questioned how representative they are of credit recorded elsewhere.92 Their modal value is, of course, considerably higher than those of debts recorded in manorial or local borough courts, but the main purpose in comparing them is to discover whether they reveal similar chronological trends of expansion and contraction. I have compared their trends with those of the outlawries for smaller debts listed on the Patent Rolls; with the debt-cases which came before the common law courts of King’s Bench and Common Pleas, the London Mayor’s court, and rural manorial courts; and with those debts recorded in towns like Colchester, Exeter, and Coventry. Before the certificates can be dismissed as unrepresentative, critics have to explain why all these disparate sources reveal similar trends.93 One might expect the greatest disparity to be visible in debts recorded in manorial courts because people in villages who had crops and animals to barter had far more opportunities than townsmen to substitute food, goods, and services for loans of cash. However, court rolls show that villagers had as commercial an outlook as townsmen in their dealings with each other, and peasants’ use of a range

87 88 89 90 91 92 93

Most of the others are not socially identifiable. Childs, “To Oure Losse and Hindraunce”, 82–3. Bolton, “Was There a ‘Crisis of Credit’ in Fifteenth-Century England?”, 154. TNA: PRO, C. 241/257/19; 279/32, 65; 283/65. Bolton, “Was There a ‘Crisis of Credit’ in Fifteenth-Century England?”, 154. Bolton, Money in the Medieval English Economy, 278–9. Nightingale, “England and the European Depression of the Mid-Fifteenth Century”, 640; Nightingale, “Gold, Credit and Mortality”, 9–10, 12–13, 15, 17–20.

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of markets required them to use coin and credit extensively beyond their village.94 Loans of cash were common, but were likely to bear interest, while creditors often required security for them, and were ready to foreclose on debts, forcing land sales. They also withdrew credit altogether in times of economic hardship, when they feared they would not be repaid.95 It is therefore not surprising that, when the supply of coin diminished, the average number of debt cases per court in Writtle fell steadily from 2.38 in 1400–09 to 0.55 in 1480–89, and, significantly, there was no increase in cases involving labour and services to compensate for the fall in cash loans.96 Despite Havering’s favoured access to the London market, the number of actions for debt dropped sharply there between 1405–06 and 1444–45, only to recover in the late 1460s as coin became more widely available. Rich Londoners then bought up large units of land, new immigrants came to farm it, and money-lending increased.97 Credit in Oakington, near Cambridge, remained high in the decades after the Black Death when the output of silver was high, despite the huge loss of population, but the number of its debt cases, like those in Willingham, fell in the 1390s with the declining output of silver. They plunged by 48 per cent in the first decade of the new century, and all but disappeared with the onset of the mid-century recession. Swaffham’s cases also declined, albeit in a more protracted fashion.98 This was because major changes in the money-supply did not necessarily affect the economies of every village or region identically, any more than they do today.99 Much depended on the market opportunities available to them and whether the demand for their specialized products in the home or overseas markets could provide them with coin.100

Conclusions: credit and the money supply Bolton’s argument in favour of credit’s easing the slump, rather than itself diminishing in accordance with the output of the mints, is that in the fifteenth century it ‘was not limited by contractions in the English money supply’.101 This, of course,

94 Schofield, Peasant and Community in Medieval England, 1200–1500, 146–9. 95 Ibid., 137–45, 148; Schofield, “The Social Economy of the Medieval Village in the Early Fourteenth Century”, Economic History Review, 61 (2008): 54–61. 96 Elaine Clark, “Debt Litigation in a Late Medieval Essex Village”, in James A. Raftis (ed.), Pathways to the Medieval Peasant (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1981), 251 (table 8.2), 254 (table 8.6). 97 Marjorie McIntosh, Autonomy and Community: The Royal Manor of Havering, 1200–1500 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 192–3, Table 10, 221–31. 98 Briggs, “The Availability of Credit in the English Countryside, 1400–1480”, 9, table 3. 99 Bolton, Money in the Medieval English Economy, 264, asserts quite wrongly that historians who explain the recession of the 1440s to the 1460s primarily by the bullion famine, posit that a shortage of coin affects transactions and prices ‘on a nationwide basis and not just regionally’. Cp. Nightingale, “Gold, Credit and Mortality”, 9–10, 12, 14–15, 17–18, 19–20. 100 Nightingale, “Gold, Credit and Mortality”, 17–18. 101 Bolton, “Was There a ‘Crisis of Credit’ in Fifteenth-Century England?”, 158.

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was always true, to a limited extent, of credit in England’s foreign trade, because sales of wool and cloth in Bruges and Venice were paid for in local currencies in Flanders and Italy, and Italian banking services assisted their transfer to London by bills of exchange, as well as through short-term loans given to English merchants in Europe. The Borromei’s accounts in 1437–38 show this happening, and Bolton calculates that transferring funds in this way accounts for about 40 per cent of the transactions he analysed from his sample of 64 English clients of the firm.102 However, these loans were repaid in sterling, and therefore depended ultimately on the English money supply.103 The Borromei in Bruges borrowed from Venice and Barcelona to finance the purchase of English wool and cloth for export to Italy, but this arrangement came increasingly under pressure from falling supplies of bullion.104 The silver and gold from the Balkans which supplied Venice were diminishing from the 1420s, and mints began to close throughout Europe from the 1430s.105 The Bruges branch of the Borromei was making substantial losses from 1437, partly because of the Burgundian embargo on English trade which followed intense competition between their mints for limited supplies of bullion.106 The profits of the London branch fell by a third in 1438, and both ceased trading by 1441.107 These developments mark the onset of the second great depression to assail fifteenth-century Europe, and they indicate how the trade and credit of European, as well as English merchants, was affected by falling supplies of bullion and by the political conflicts these could engender. In these circumstances it is hard to see how Italian money can have maintained the supply of England’s domestic credit in the fifteenth century. The value of the Borromei’s exports from England far exceeded the profits they made from their imports, and they contributed to the Italians’ overall adverse trade balance with England, which Bolton has analysed.108 Their increasing inability to finance their English trade is shown by the Italians’ insistence from the 1430s on ever longer terms of repayment for their purchases of wool and cloth. The Libelle of Englyshe Polycye described c. 1436–38 how Italians bought wool in England on long-term credit, profited from its sale in Venice, and then transferred the proceeds by bills to Flanders, to lend it again, in interest-bearing bills, to Englishmen to buy Flemish goods.109 Only when their English debtors repaid them in instalments of sterling could the Italians finally pay the wool-growers whom they had kept waiting

102 103 104 105 106

Bolton, “London Merchants and the Borromei Bank”, 61–6, 68. Ibid., 62–4. Ibid., 68. Spufford, Money and Its Use in Medieval Europe, 356–60. Munro, Wool, Cloth, and Gold, 68–9, 81–2, 134–5; Bolton, “Was There a ‘Crisis of Credit’ in Fifteenth-Century England?”, 246, 248. 107 Guidi F. Bruscoli and Jim Bolton, “The Borromei Bank Research Project: The Ledger of Filippo Borromei & Co. of Bruges, 1438”, 2001, online at www.queenmaryhistoricalresearch.org. 108 Bolton, Money in the Medieval English Economy, 313–14. 109 George Warner (ed.), The Libelle of Englyshe Polycye (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1926), lines 396–455.

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for their money for up to two years.110 One Londoner who sold the Borromei wool worth over £727 in 1438 was still owed over £527 in 1440.111 The practice prompted English legislation in 1437 forbidding more than six months’ credit to aliens.112 Nonetheless, the two London scriveners’ registers, and the prosecutions in the Exchequer, show that Italians were still acquiring illegal credit for up to five years on their purchases of wool, cloth, pewter, and tin in the late 1450s.113 Any bullion which Italians, or other aliens, did bring to England had, of course, to be exchanged at the London mint. This means that it was recorded in the figures of mint output, and cannot, therefore, be counted as additional to that output when assessing the relationship of credit to the money supply. The small soldini which were illicitly imported by Venetian galleys in the early fifteenth century were the only foreign coins to evade to any significant degree the ban on the circulation of foreign coin.114 These tiny coins, worth less than a halfpenny, were welcomed by English people because they met a desperate need for small change. Despite their usefulness, the government still ordered them to the mint in 1415 and put pressure on the Venetian senate to ban their export.115 Apart from these, and Burgundian silver double patards, which were accepted at the end of the century as having the same value as groats, foreign coins had little part to play in the circulation of fifteenth-century England.116 Moreover, any gold that the aliens brought to the mint would not have affected the level of credit employed in the wider domestic economy. This was because the retail trade, as Bolton acknowledges, could not function without an adequate supply of silver coin, since even the smallest gold coin was worth about three to four days’ labour of a skilled man, and so had too great a value for everyday exchanges.117 A retail trade constricted by lack of silver reduced demand in the domestic economy and stemmed the cash-flow of exporters who depended on receipts from their distributive and retail trade to help finance their overseas investments.118 The certificates illustrate the effect on credit of a money supply too heavily dominated by gold. Even though their average value is high, and the credit they represent was therefore most easily repaid in gold coin, their number fell strikingly when the amount of silver coin in circulation fell after 1400. They indicate that the credit produced by an overwhelmingly silver coinage in the 1340s was four-and-a half times greater in value than that of the predominantly gold coinage of roughly

110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118

Bolton, “London Merchants and the Borromei Bank”, 59–61. Ibid., 55–6, 58. Bolton, “Was There a ‘Crisis of Credit’ in Fifteenth-Century England?”, 150. Childs, “To Oure Losse and Hindraunce”, 68–98. Adam Daubney, “The Circulation and Prohibition of Venetian Soldini in Late Medieval England”, British Numismatic Journal, 79 (2009): 187–8, 193. Childs, “To Oure Losse and Hindraunce”, 363. Allen, Mints and Money in the Medieval Economy, 365–6. Bolton, “Was There a ‘Crisis of Credit’ in Fifteenth-Century England?”, 149–52. Nightingale, “England and the European Depression of the Mid-Fifteenth Century”, 635–6, 641–6.

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the same value in the 1410s.119 Even if one adjusts the calculations to take into account the probable loss of 50 per cent of the population in the interval, the credit represented by the certificates had fallen by two-thirds.120 Bolton bases most of his speculations about the impact of negotiable bonds on the credit market in fifteenth-century England on what Eric Kerridge wrote about trade and banking in the seventeenth century, even though he admits that much changed between the two periods in both monetary and economic terms.121 However, Barry Supple showed in 1959 in his book Commercial Crisis and Change in England, 1600–1642, how a society which commonly used negotiable credit instruments could still suffer a devastating financial crisis, leading to recession and mass unemployment in the cloth industry, when the amount of coin available for daily transactions was much reduced. Even the issuing of token coins, which was another form of credit, did nothing to alleviate the situation, because they, too, depended for their acceptance on confidence that they could be redeemed.122 In summary, Bolton’s supposition that negotiable bonds more than made up for any shortages of coin and credit in the fifteenth century is not supported by any statistics, and it fits ill with those which Hatcher assembled showing a longlasting economic slump from the 1440s. Although Bolton claims Postan’s authority for his assertion that negotiable bonds served as a form of paper money, Postan stressed that although they were legally assignable, they could not be accorded the same status as gold and silver coin because they gave no guarantee of payment. Transferable instruments of credit had long been used in overseas trade, but they had only a limited circulation in fifteenth-century London, and none in the provinces. Even leading London merchants were hostile to their use on the grounds that they deprived the mints of bullion, and they opposed their assignment because they believed it impugned their personal credit-worthiness. The scriveners’ registers and Statute Staple certificates show that many English merchants in London, like their fellows in the provinces, preferred to register debts rather than accept transferable instruments of unsecured credit, because they wanted payment in coin and were prepared to wait years for it, if necessary. Far from losing popularity for the reasons Postan and Bolton have asserted, the rising number of Statute Merchant and Staple certificates from the end of the fifteenth century shows the increased use of registered debts. Bolton’s attack on the use of the certificates as evidence of credit is based on an uncritical adoption of Postan’s views, which are contradicted by the documents themselves. Postan was mistaken in his judgments because he did not study the certificates and did not grasp the effect the Westminster Staple had on the business

119 120 121 122

Nightingale, “Gold, Credit and Mortality”, 14–15. Ibid. Bolton, “Was There a ‘Crisis of Credit’ in Fifteenth-Century England?”, 162. Brian Supple, Commercial Crisis and Change in England, 1600–1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959), 173–8.

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of London’s Statute Merchant registry. Both Postan and Bolton have unnecessarily sought to distinguish mercantile creditors from others, despite knowing that landed gentry and clergy were heavily involved in England’s wool trade and in the credit associated with it. All forms of lending, whether recorded through assignable instruments or registered credit, were equally affected by changes in the supply of silver coin because creditors would not lend if they feared they would not be repaid. Accordingly, the certificates almost certainly illustrate the trends that all forms of credit would follow. When the supply of silver coin recovered at the end of the fifteenth century, they show how credit expanded with it. It is therefore regrettable that Postan’s mistaken assumptions are still being used to discredit the evidential value of the Statute Merchant and Staple certificates. These offer a unique sample of credit transactions over nearly two and a half centuries, which, when analysed correctly, can indicate the quantitative changes in the volume of credit in relation to the money supply. They also illustrate how the uncertainties of that money-supply bred caution in the attitude of medieval Englishmen to credit. They were reluctant to accept as the equivalent of sound money the kind of innovatory, transferable instruments of credit which contributed in the hands of their descendants, to the global financial crisis that began in 2008. That crisis showed that the fundamental rules governing credit have changed little over the centuries, and that no more than bankers, can historians afford to ignore them.

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279

INDEX

Æthelred II 72 Acton Burnell 96, 121, 178, 247 aldermen 16, 22 aliens Fig 2.1, Fig. 2.2, Table 2.1, 30–51, 53, 57, 60, 102, 106, 149, 150, 153, 154, 157, 158, 170, 171, 172, 175, 180–182, 183, 185, 186, 187, 188, 190, 192, 199, 203, 220, 221, 222, 223, 225, 227, 228, 229, 230, 231, 232, 233, 234, 235, 236, 237, 238, 244, 245, 257; alien certificates 35; alien credit 36, 37, 40, 41, 42, 44, 45, 46, 47, 50, 57, 221; alien exporters 106, 170, 222, 223; alien imports 35, 43, 47, 225; alien investment 42; alien merchants 39, 40, 42, 46, 50, 53, 150, 171, 172, 175, 180–182, 186, 187, 188, 192, 203, 221, 223, 225, 237, 238, 244 Allen, D. 80 Allen, M. 80, 82, 83, 84, 197, 198, 200, 239 Anglo-Saxon Chronicle 77 aristocracy 4, 16, 181

195, 199, 204, 216, 217, 218, 219–238, 255; see also epidemics; pandemics Bolton, J.L. 69, 239, 240, 241, 242, 243, 247, 249, 250, 251, 252, 253, 254, 256, 257, 258, 259 border counties 96–100 border warfare 100–101 Brabant 3, 31, 36, 38, 45, 92, 107, 189, 215 Brand, J. 82, 87 Briggs, C. 95, 105 Britnell, R. 30, 94 Buckinghamshire 127, 184, 220, 222, 229 bullion Fig. 2.1, Fig. 2.3, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 38, 39, 44, 47, 48, 50, 51, 53, 56, 57, 62, 64, 66, 67, 68, 73, 80, 81, 82, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 91, 92, 93, 94, 96, 102, 104, 107, 109, 110, 111, 112, 145, 160, 161, 163, 170, 172, 173, 174, 175, 181, 183, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192, 193, 195, 201, 206, 207, 215, 218, 220, 222, 233, 239, 240, 244, 245, 256, 258; see also foreign bullion

bailiffs 118, 119, 124, 125, 126, 127, 132; William Topclive 126 Bartlett, N. 146, 148 Beardwood, A. 248, 250 Bedfordshire 120, 127, 228 Belgium: Antwerp 176, 189, 190, 192, 193; Bruges 45, 86, 190, 256; Flemings 31, 32, 34, 36, 45, 50, 58, 81, 85, 86, 91, 104, 161, 178, 180, 192, 193, 215, 221, 256 Berkshire 8, 43, 229 birth rate 23, 25, 27 Black Death 4, 8, 10, 12, 18, 19, 23, 29, 54, 56–62, 67, 106, 126, 148, 157, 184,

Cambridgeshire 9, 62, 207; Cambridge 204, 205, 255; Chesterton 9; Downham 10, 11, 13, 24; Ely 126; Oakington 62; Willingham 62 Carpenter, C. 117, 129 certificates Tab. 2.1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10, 12, 14, 16, 17, 18, 19, 23, 25, 28, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 46, 47, 49, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 121, 122, 124, 125, 126, 139, 140, 141, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 156,

280

INDEX

157, 159, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168, 170, 171, 174, 177, 178–179, 180, 181, 182, 183, 184, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189, 191, 193, 194, 196, 197, 198, 199, 200, 201, 202, 203, 205, 207, 208, 209, 210, 211, 212, 214, 215, 216, 219, 220, 221, 222, 223, 224, 225, 226, 227, 228, 229, 230, 231, 232, 233, 234, 235, 236, 237, 238, 246, 247, 248, 249, 251, 253–255; see also Statute Merchant certificates; Statute Staple certificates Challis, C.E. 89 Chancellor 114, 122, 131, 132, 136, 138, 139, 140, 142 Chancery 4, 33, 34, 43, 55, 114, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 126, 127, 128, 132, 133, 136, 138, 139, 140, 142, 143, 144, 151, 172, 180, 185, 196, 197, 241, 247, 253 Cheshire 15, 138, 219, 222; Chester 78–79, 222 Chrimes, S.B. 117 Cinque ports 58 Clanchy, M. 115 Clark, G. 197 clergy 3, 4, 12, 13, 16, 43, 50, 55, 58, 72, 103, 149, 150, 159, 172, 235, 238, 252, 253, 259 climate 1, 54 cloth 43, 49, 50, 58, 59, 61, 63, 64, 65, 66, 96, 97, 98, 100, 106, 108, 110, 111, 146, 147, 149, 157, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 173, 174, 175, 176, 178, 181, 187–188, 189, 190, 191, 192, 193, 194, 207, 209, 210, 213, 214, 215, 216, 218, 221, 224, 228, 230, 231, 232, 234, 235, 236, 237, 238, 243, 246, 256, 257, 258 Cnut 72 coin 3, 9, 12, 25, 32, 33, 34, 35, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 48, 50, 51, 52, 53, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67–69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 87, 88, 89, 91, 92, 94, 95, 96, 97, 99, 100, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 124, 135, 143, 149, 150, 152, 154, 155, 156, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175, 179, 181, 182, 183, 185, 186, 188–191, 192, 193, 195, 196, 197, 198, 199, 200, 201, 202, 203, 204, 205, 206, 207, 208, 209, 210, 211, 212, 213, 214,

215, 216, 217, 218, 219, 220, 221, 222, 227, 231, 232, 233, 234, 236, 239, 240, 242, 243, 244, 246, 249, 252, 253, 255, 256, 257, 258, 259; see also gold; silver Common Pleas 55, 121, 122, 124, 138, 140, 142, 198, 211, 212, 215, 243, 254 Connor, R.D. 87 Cook, B. 80, 82 corn 105, 106, 149, 223 Cornwall 10, 136, 138, 184, 203, 213, 236–238 Coss, P. 116 Cotton, R. 87–88 County Durham 11, 103; Durham 20, 21, 109, 126; Durham Abbey 126; Durham Cathedral 95 craftsmen 4, 16, 138, 140, 162, 164, 169, 201, 209, 232 credit 4, 5, 6, 25, 30, 32, 33, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52–70, 94–113, 118, 124, 125, 126, 133, 135, 139, 142, 143, 145, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 155, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178, 179, 180, 181, 182, 183, 184, 185, 186, 187, 188–191, 192, 193, 194, 195–218, 219–238, 239–259; creditors 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 22, 23, 24, 25, 27, 28, 35, 36, 37, 38, 41, 42, 47, 48, 49, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 68, 69, 70, 97, 98, 100, 101, 102, 103, 105, 107, 108, 110, 111, 121, 123, 124, 125, 133, 135, 139, 140, 142, 148, 149, 150, 152, 153, 154, 155, 156, 159, 161, 162, 163, 164, 170, 172, 177, 178, 179, 180, 181, 185, 187, 189, 191, 193, 194, 197, 198, 201, 203, 204, 206, 208, 210, 211, 213, 215, 216, 217, 221, 224, 227, 228, 229, 231, 232, 234, 235, 236, 237, 238, 240, 241, 245, 247, 248, 251, 252, 253, 254, 255, 259 Cumberland 43, 62, 94–113, 171; Cockermouth 97; Egremont 97; Kendal 97; Keswick 105; Penrith 97, 98, 105, 105, 108 Day, J. 240 death rate Table 1.1, 2, 4, 5, 7, 9, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 18, 19, 22, 27, 28, 60, 64, 157, 185, 205, 208, 234; see also mortality

281

INDEX

debt Fig. 2.2, Fig. 7.1, 3, 4, 5, 7, 11, 13, 14, 15, 18, 28, 34, 35, 36, 37, 40, 43, 52, 53, 54, 55, 61, 63, 69, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 118, 121, 122, 124, 125, 126, 127, 135, 140, 141, 143, 144, 147, 148, 150, 151, 156, 158, 160, 161, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 171, 177, 178, 179, 185, 189, 196, 197, 198, 199, 201, 202, 203, 204, 207, 208, 209, 210, 211, 212, 213, 215, 216, 224, 229, 230, 235, 238, 240, 241, 243, 245, 246, 247, 248, 249, 250, 251, 252, 253, 254, 255, 258; debtors Table 6.2, 4, 6, 12, 53, 56, 58, 59, 62, 63, 66, 68, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 135, 137, 138, 140, 141, 142, 148, 151, 154, 155, 156, 157, 159, 162, 163, 170, 178, 180, 181, 183, 189, 191, 213, 221, 229, 231, 234, 235, 241, 242, 245, 246, 247, 251, 252, 253, 254, 256 denizen Fig. 2.1, Fig. 2.2, Table 2.1, 30, 31, 32, 35, 36, 37, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 47, 48, 49, 50, 60, 65, 104, 105, 106, 148, 157, 158, 166, 167, 168, 170, 175, 180, 181, 187, 203, 209, 213, 222, 224, 228, 231, 233, 237; denizen merchants 31, 36, 41, 106, 170, 181, 203 depressions 6, 27, 28, 62, 66, 104, 125, 126, 155, 174, 191, 193, 194, 209, 246 Derbyshire 189, 228, 229 Devon 125, 130, 199, 213, 236–238; Exeter 15, 55, 84, 160, 166, 171, 185, 187, 191, 193, 199, 213, 221, 228, 236, 237, 238, 247, 251, 254 Dobson, B. 146, 175 Dolley, R.H.M. 75 Domesday Book 71, 77, 78, 89 Dorset 219, 222 Dyer C. 7, 23, 27, 217, 218 Ecclestone, M. 7, 8 Edward I 33, 35, 38, 39, 41, 44, 46, 51, 57, 85, 90, 92, 100, 101, 112, 150, 172, 178, 179, 180, 181, 182, 191, 244, 247 Edward II 56, 58, 95, 103, 152, 153, 182 Edward III 49, 114, 115, 119, 120, 128, 133, 143, 144, 146, 154, 155, 183, 185, 192, 200 Edward IV 65, 66, 67, 68, 114, 119, 120, 133, 134, 136, 137, 138, 139, 141, 143, 170, 190, 192, 214

Edward the Confessor 74, 78 epidemics 2, 3, 9, 11, 13, 14, 17, 18, 19, 22, 23, 24, 28, 61, 64, 65, 66, 103, 125, 159, 182, 201, 206, 208, 215; see also Black Death Essex 3, 140, 180, 184, 191; Colchester 13, 55, 160, 166, 173, 175, 210, 211, 254; Great Waltham 17 Europe 2, 18, 23, 29, 30, 31, 32, 34, 38, 39, 47, 48, 50, 51, 53, 58, 62, 67, 68, 72, 76, 91, 92, 93, 100, 102, 110, 112, 161, 165, 170, 173, 179, 181, 188, 190, 192, 207, 215, 218, 241, 244, 245, 256 exchange rates 34, 46, 48, 50, 86, 92, 104, 188 Exchequer 33, 38, 84, 89, 120, 138, 179, 202, 256 exports 31, 32, 33, 36, 38, 39, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 53, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 63, 64, 65, 66, 69, 96, 97, 99, 101, 102, 104, 105, 106, 107–108, 109, 110, 111, 135, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 157, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 178, 181, 182, 183, 185, 186, 187, 189, 190, 191, 192, 193, 194, 199, 200, 201, 203, 209, 213, 214, 215, 220, 221–222, 224, 225, 227, 228, 229, 230, 231, 232, 233, 234, 235, 236, 237, 238, 241, 246, 253, 256 famine 1, 6, 7, 8, 10, 11, 17, 18, 23, 28, 54, 58, 64, 103–104, 110, 152, 182, 245 financial instruments 52, 241–245 foreign bullion Fig. 2.1, 31, 35, 36, 39, 85 France 18, 32, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 44, 47, 48, 50, 56, 57, 58, 61, 67, 79, 83, 100, 101, 104, 108, 112, 131, 133, 135, 147, 150, 152, 154, 172, 179, 181, 182, 183, 186, 189, 190, 191, 192, 199, 223, 231, 233, 238, 244, 245, 247, 248; Angevin 72, 79–80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 92; Artois 92; Burgundy 135, 168, 169; Cahors 36, 42; Calais 60, 62, 63, 64, 107, 110, 135, 156, 160, 161, 164, 165, 167, 168, 169, 170, 172, 174, 175, 183, 186, 188, 189, 190, 192, 193, 207, 212, 213, 214, 215, 241, 242, 243, 244; Champagne 32, 34, 44, 46, 50, 57, 181; Gascony 35, 36, 42, 47, 149, 160, 163, 187, 190, 193, 231; Flanders 38, 39, 40, 45, 48, 53, 58, 60, 81, 92, 93, 99, 104, 108, 152, 161, 162, 173, 179, 180, 181,

282

INDEX

190, 192, 215, 246, 256; Normandy 79, 83; Paris 33, 47, 92; Philip IV 40, 44 Fryde, E.B. 155 gentry 4, 16, 42, 98, 99, 110, 111, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 133, 134, 138, 140, 143, 144, 184, 218, 252, 253, 254, 258, 258 Germany 31, 36, 38, 42, 43, 45, 47, 51, 85, 145, 179, 215; Cologne 85, 92, 93 Given-Wilson, C. 20 Gloucestershire 213, 222, 229, 230, 231; Bristol 15, 36, 126, 146, 147, 163, 168, 171, 178, 187, 191, 193, 213, 220, 221, 229, 230, 231–232, 238, 247; Gloucester 126, 183, 187, 213, 222, 228, 229, 230, 231 (Duke of Gloucester 129, 131) Goddard, R. 177, 178 gold 34, 45, 47, 48, 52, 58, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 67, 69, 88, 90, 91, 92, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 112, 155, 156, 161, 162, 165, 167, 168, 170, 174, 183, 185, 188, 190, 192, 195–218, 219, 220, 221, 227, 232, 233, 239, 242, 256, 257, 258; see also coin Goldberg, J. 22, 146 Goldsmiths’ Company 26 Gorski, R. 120 Gottfried, R. 21, 22, 23, 27, 28 Grierson, P. 74–75, 87 Grocers’ Company 26, 72–73, 244, 246 Hampshire 8, 43, 49, 128; Southampton 31, 43, 126, 178, 182, 191, 224, 230; Titchfield Abbey 24; Winchester 7, 8, 9, 11, 18, 36, 41, 43, 75, 76, 77, 179, 180, 187, 189, 221, 223, 228, 247 Harriss, G. 118 Harvey, B. 7, 8, 14 Harvey, S. 74, 77–78 Hatcher, J. 2, 7, 13, 22, 240, 258 Henry I 80, 96 Henry II 79, 80, 81, 82, 85, 89, 92, 116, 118, 137, 141, 179 Henry IV 63, 109, 130 Henry V 114, 130, 131, 135, 138, 143, 167, 213 Henry VI 67, 114, 119, 131, 132, 133, 138, 143, 245 Henry VII 65, 68, 89, 114, 117, 118, 119, 136, 137, 138, 139, 141, 142, 143, 144, 190, 215, 253 Henry VIII 65, 137, 142, 253

Herefordshire 15, 202, 229, 230; Hereford 15, 42, 182, 189, 202, 230 Hertfordshire 22; St Albans Abbey 27, 125 heriots 8, 9, 10, 11 Horrox, R. 137 Hybel, N. 18 immigration 18, 20, 23, 27, 158, 163, 185, 192, 227, 228 imports Fig. 2.1, Fig. 2.3, 31, 32, 34, 35, 36, 38, 39, 42, 43, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 63, 66, 67, 93, 96, 99, 111, 112, 145, 149, 158, 163, 171, 175, 178, 180, 182, 186, 187, 190, 192, 193, 201, 215, 221, 225, 227, 228, 230, 232, 256 influenza 15 Inquisitions Post Mortem 10, 13, 21 Italy 13, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 36, 38, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 57, 97, 99, 112, 149, 151, 165, 174, 178, 180, 181, 184, 186, 188, 191, 192, 199, 216, 221, 241, 243, 244, 245, 253, 256, 257; Florence 34, 36, 98; Italian merchants 33, 34, 36, 40, 47, 99, 181, 186, 191, 243; Riccardi of Lucca 31, 32, 33, 37, 38, 41, 42, 44, 47, 57, 98, 99; Venice 244, 245, 256 Johnson, C. 87 Kaeuper, R. 38 Kent 11, 78, 180, 184, 191, 202, 206; Battle Abbey 78; Canterbury 7, 14, 19, 21, 57, 80, 126, 181, 182, 221, 247; Canterbury Cathedral Priory 7, 26; Christchurch Canterbury 14, 20, 21; Dover 43, 77, 78, 79; St Botolph’s Fair 41; Sandwich 43, 78 Kermode, J. 145, 176, 177, 178 King’s Bench 55, 118, 120, 121, 122, 130, 136, 139, 142, 198, 203, 211, 212, 215, 254 knights 4, 16, 43, 48, 49, 98, 99, 101, 102, 106, 110, 141, 142, 156, 159, 162, 168, 199, 223, 224, 226, 231, 235, 238, 252, 253 Kowaleski, M. 251 labour 1, 9, 20, 23, 26, 27, 59, 62, 158, 168, 173, 185, 204, 205, 215, 217, 220, 234, 237, 255, 257 Lancashire 103, 108, 110, 219, 222; Preston 103, 222

283

INDEX

Lander, J.R. 115, 137 landowners 4, 34, 43, 51, 53, 54, 57, 97, 98, 102, 106, 116, 117, 118, 119, 129, 133, 138, 140, 143, 144, 156, 168, 169, 171, 172, 173, 226, 235, 238 lawyers 16, 118, 136, 139, 140, 141, 250 Leicestershire 228, 231, 232; Leicester 74, 229 Lincolnshire 11, 15, 23, 42, 43, 44, 49, 118, 120, 154, 157, 178, 180, 181, 183, 189, 206, 221, 223, 225, 226, 228; Boston 31, 36, 42, 45, 46, 97, 98, 178, 180, 225, 229; Lincoln 15, 36, 41, 42, 45, 50, 75, 126, 163, 180, 182, 225, 226, 247 living standards 2, 25, 29, 173 Lloyd, T.H. 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 48, 207 Lollards 117, 131 Lomas, R. 95 London Table 8.1, 4, 6, 10, 11, 13, 14, 15, 16, 19, 20, 21, 22, 24, 26, 27, 28, 31, 34, 35, 36, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 53, 54, 55, 57, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 72, 75, 80, 84, 96, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 104, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 114, 121, 122, 125, 126, 127, 135, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 155, 156, 157, 158, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 174, 175, 176–194, 201, 203, 207, 208, 209, 210, 212, 213, 214, 215, 216, 217, 218, 220, 221, 222, 224, 226–230, 231, 232, 235, 237, 241, 243, 244, 245, 246, 247, 248, 249, 250, 252, 253, 254, 255, 256, 257, 258, 259; Court of Orphans 19; London Husting Rolls 10, 11; London Mayor’s Court 55, 241, 254; London Plea and Memoranda rolls 55, 69, 252; London Statute Merchant rolls 54; Southwark 15, 20, 21, 75; Westminster 7, 14, 15, 19, 20, 21, 55, 61, 108, 110, 111, 121, 122, 127, 164, 166, 179, 182, 185, 188, 191, 220, 221, 224, 228, 231, 237, 245, 247, 250, 258; Westminster Abbey 7, 20, 21 Low Countries 3, 38, 39, 40, 44, 47, 65, 66, 163, 187, 213, 227, 229, 243 Lyon, S. 71, 72, 74, 75, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 84, 85, 87, 89 McFarlane, K.B. 115 McIntosh, M. 26

McNall, C. 249 McNamee, C. 95 marriage 2, 23, 25, 27, 28, 29 Mate, M. 195, 196, 216 Mayhew, N. 80, 83, 84, 89, 94, 196 merchants Fig. 1.1, Fig. 2.2, Table 2.1, Table 8.1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 9, 14, 16, 18, 23, 25, 28, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 52, 53, 55, 56, 57, 58, 60, 62, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 76, 84, 85, 86, 90, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104. 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 112, 118, 121, 135, 138, 139, 140, 141, 143, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178, 179, 180–182, 183, 184, 185, 186, 187, 189, 190, 191, 192, 193, 196, 198, 199, 200, 201, 202, 203, 205, 207, 209, 210, 211, 212, 213, 215, 216, 218, 219, 220, 221, 222, 223, 224, 225, 226, 227, 228, 229, 230, 231, 232, 233, 234, 235, 236, 237, 238, 241, 243, 244, 245, 246, 247–249, 250, 251, 253, 254, 256, 258, 259 Metcalf, D.M. 75, 76 migration 3, 173, 217 Miller, E. 146 mint 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 38, 39, 40, 41, 44, 45, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 56, 57, 58, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 73, 74, 75, 77, 79, 80, 81, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 96, 99, 104, 106, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 124, 135, 149, 152, 160, 161, 162, 164, 165, 167, 168, 170, 171, 174, 175, 179, 181, 183, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192, 193, 194, 199, 200, 201, 202, 207, 208, 209, 211, 212, 213, 214, 215, 216, 218, 220, 221, 227, 232, 233, 239, 244, 245, 246, 248, 249, 255, 256, 257, 258 Miskimin, H.A. 91 monasteries 21, 34, 41, 42, 49, 50, 100, 103, 181, 221 Morris, W.A. 120 mortality Fig. 1.1, 1–29, 54, 58, 59, 60, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 111, 125, 145, 152, 153, 157, 173, 185, 195–218, 219, 220, 222, 234, 236, 238 Munro, J. 240 Musson, A. 116, 118, 119, 125, 129, 143, 144

284

INDEX

157, 159, 160, 164, 173, 180, 185, 191, 195, 197, 198, 199, 201, 202, 203, 204, 205, 206, 207, 209, 210, 212, 216, 218, 219, 220, 226, 227, 231, 234, 237, 238, 244, 255, 258 Poston, M.M. 1, 8, 30, 54–55, 94, 195, 240, 241, 242, 243, 247, 249, 250, 251, 252, 253, 258, 259 Powell, E. 116, 130, 131 Prestwich, M. 30, 32 prices 3, 9, 10, 18, 23, 24, 26, 41, 45, 48, 53, 54, 57, 59, 94–113, 195, 196, 197, 200, 203, 206, 209, 212, 213, 214, 216, 217, 218, 220, 239, 246

National Archives 4, 54, 121, 147, 178, 247 Netherlands 155 Norfolk 49, 119, 189, 202, 233–236, 238; Breckland 24; Coltishall 24; Lynn 235; Norwich 15, 18, 27, 126, 168, 182, 187, 213, 221, 234. 235, 236, 247 Northamptonshire 228; Northampton 15, 182, 187, 228, 229, 231 North Riding 154, 156, 158, 223, 224; see also Yorkshire Northumberland 27, 94–113, 189, 191, 206, 219, 223, 228; Berwick 107–108, 223; Newcastle 34, 36, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 126, 175, 199, 203, 221, 223, 247 Nottinghamshire 49, 154, 189, 203, 228; Nottingham 15, 44, 45, 126, 203, 228, 229 Odo of Bayeux 78 Ohlin, G. 8 Oldland, J. 176, 190 Ormrod, W.M. 115, 116, 118, 119, 125, 130, 143, 144, 146, 153, 171 Oxfordshire 43, 125, 128; Bampton 125; Oxford 19, 111, 182 pandemics 2; see also Black Death; epidemics parliament 21, 61, 63, 67, 72, 108, 109, 115, 119, 129, 131, 133, 134, 144, 188, 200, 206, 209, 220, 244 peasants 18, 24, 42, 43, 49, 51, 54, 57, 61, 98, 106, 118, 124, 140, 143, 168, 171, 173, 204, 205, 209, 217, 218, 220, 235, 254 Peasants’ Revolt 61, 124, 127 Pegolotti, F.B. 72, 79, 85, 86, 90, 91 penal bonds 54, 55, 102, 110, 139, 249–253 plague 3, 6, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 19, 22, 23, 28, 54, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 68, 70, 75, 106–107, 112, 113, 157, 158, 159, 163, 173, 183, 185, 192, 194, 205, 218, 219, 224, 225, 227, 228, 229, 230, 232, 234, 236, 237, 238; see also Black Death; epidemics; pandemics population 1, 2, 6, 7, 10, 11, 12, 14, 15, 17, 18, 19, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 54, 59, 60, 61, 66, 70, 100, 106, 112, 119, 141, 145, 146, 147, 148, 149, 151,

Razi, Z. 7, 9 recession 25, 26, 27, 52, 55, 62, 69, 70, 103–104, 109, 124, 154, 173, 175, 176, 177, 178, 214, 215, 246, 251, 255, 259 Rees Jones, S. 146 rents 13, 19, 22, 95, 103, 105, 108, 109, 111, 149, 155, 158, 159, 160, 163, 167, 168, 172, 196, 217, 218, 236, 240, 246 Richard, Earl of Arundel, 116 Richard I 83 Richard II 114, 116, 129, 130, 143, 246 riots 131, 245 Robert Bruce 103 rolls: Close Rolls 44, 55, 69; Common Plea Rolls 118; Memoranda Rolls 55, 69, 84, 243; Patent Rolls 55, 212, 254 Ross, C. 135 Ruding, R. 87–88 Rutland 15, 62, 191 Scammell, J. 95 Schofield P. 2, 27, 29 Scotland 95, 97, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 150, 152, 153, 154, 162, 172, 180, 182, 223, 233, 234 sheriffs 114–144, 179, 196 Shropshire 42, 49, 189, 203, 229, 230–231, 232; Shrewsbury 15, 42, 50, 180, 189, 229, 230, 231 silver 25, 31, 32, 34, 35, 38, 39, 45, 47, 48, 49, 51, 52, 57, 58, 59, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 74, 76, 79, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 96, 99, 101, 104, 107, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 124, 135, 151, 154, 155, 156, 160, 161, 162, 165, 166, 167, 168, 170, 171, 173, 174, 175, 179, 181, 182, 183, 188,

285

INDEX

189, 190, 192, 195, 196, 198, 199, 200, 201, 202, 203, 204, 205, 206, 207, 208, 209, 210, 211, 212, 213, 214, 215, 216, 217, 218, 219, 220, 221, 233, 239, 240, 242, 245, 246, 253, 255, 256, 257, 259; Kutna Hora mines 32, 45, 48, 58, 101; see also coin Smith, R. 8 Somerset 8, 166, 184, 187, 189, 207; Wells 213, 235 Spufford, P. 32, 34, 240, 244 Stafford, P. 72 Staffordshire 189, 231 Statute Merchant certificates Fig. 2.2, Table 2.1, 17, 19, 23, 25, 34, 35, 36, 37, 40, 47, 54, 55, 57, 70, 97, 112, 122, 147, 148, 159, 171, 176, 178–179, 191, 196, 198, 200, 202, 205, 210, 211, 212, 215, 219, 224, 246, 247–249, 250, 251, 253, 254, 258, 259 Statute of Stepney of 1299 45 Statute Staple certificates 17, 19, 25, 54–55, 70, 122, 124, 127, 139, 140, 164, 171, 178–179, 196, 198, 199, 200, 205, 210, 212, 215, 246, 247–249, 253, 254, 258, 259; see also certificates sterling 33, 34, 38, 39, 40, 41, 43, 45, 47, 48, 50, 51, 58, 67, 75, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 109, 149, 162, 181, 192, 200, 202, 212, 221, 256 Suffolk 9, 13, 132, 165, 170, 174, 187, 189, 219; Bury St Edmunds 125, 127 (Abbey 125); Ipswich 27, 170; Redgrave 9; Rickinghall 9, 11; Walsham-le-Willows 13 Supple, B. 258 Surrey 184; Chertsey Abbey 24 Sussex 11, 219, 223; Chichester 187, 221, 223, 231, 247 Swanson, H. 169 tax 8, 10, 20, 30, 33, 41, 44, 50, 57, 58, 69, 72, 74, 76, 77, 78, 95, 96, 99, 100, 101, 105, 112, 124, 135, 145, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 153, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164, 166, 172, 179, 181, 197, 248 Titow J. 8, 9 troy weight 72, 73, 79, 80, 81, 82, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93 tuberculosis 21 Tuck, J.A. 95 typhus 18, 23

unemployment 20, 258 wages 3, 9, 11, 19, 23, 24, 26, 45, 53, 59, 61, 94, 106, 159, 162, 166, 168, 169, 173, 185, 196, 198, 201, 204, 206, 207, 208, 209, 213, 214, 215, 218, 220, 240, 246 Wales 126, 178; Carlisle 96, 97, 100, 101, 102, 105, 107, 108, 109, 110 (Bishop of Carlisle 107) Wars of the Roses 64 Warwickshire 232; Coventry 34, 55, 110, 126, 160, 163, 179, 183, 187, 213, 228, 248, 250, 251, 254 (Trinity Guild 110) Watts, J. 116, 118 weight standards 71–93, 110, 167, 170, 185, 188, 190, 192, 208, 214, 220 Westmorland 15, 62, 94–113, 150, 172, 222; Appleby 97, 98, 100, 101, 149, 150 West Riding 151, 154, 156, 158, 164, 166, 170, 171, 173, 174, 229; see also Yorkshire William I 74, 75, 76, 77, 78 William II (Rufus) 75, 76 William Wallace 100, 101 wills 9, 11, 15, 21, 22, 27, 170 Wiltshire 7, 11, 17, 18, 23, 108, 121, 166, 207, 213, 220, 223, 224, 230; Longbridge Deverill 17, 24; Monkton Deverill 10, 11, 18, 24; Salisbury 75, 168, 187, 213, 224, 228; Winchester 7, 8, 9, 11, 18, 36, 41, 43, 75, 76, 77, 179, 180, 187, 189, 221, 223, 228, 247 (Bishop of Winchester 7, 8, 9; St Giles’ Fair, Winchester 41, 43) wool Fig. 2.3, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 53, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 68, 69, 91, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 135, 145, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 178, 180, 181, 182, 183, 184, 185, 186, 187, 189, 190, 191, 192, 193, 199, 200, 201, 202, 203, 213, 215, 218, 220, 221–222, 223, 224, 225, 226, 227, 228, 229, 230, 231, 232, 233, 234, 235, 236, 237, 238, 241, 242, 243, 244, 246, 248, 252, 253, 256, 257, 259

286

INDEX

149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 159, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 175, 183, 203, 213, 221, 233; Leeds 153, 158; Scarborough 162; York Fig. 7.1, 5, 12, 13, 15, 22, 23, 27, 28, 36, 42, 43, 45, 50, 80, 97, 98, 101, 102, 103, 105, 107, 108, 110, 112, 126, 145–175, 180, 182, 183, 202, 212, 213, 221, 223, 232, 233, 238, 247; see also North Riding; West Riding

Worcestershire 9, 220, 222; Bishop of Worcester 7, 13, 14, 23; Halesowen 7, 9, 11, 17, 18, 23, 24; Hartlebury 14 Wrigley E. 2, 27, 29 writs Table 6.1, Table 6.2, 114–144 Yorkshire 27, 49, 98, 151, 152, 153, 154, 156, 158, 159, 160, 161, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169, 172, 173, 174, 176, 178, 182, 183, 184, 189, 191, 207, 213, 224, 229, 232–233; Beverley 3, 156, 162; Boroughbridge 97; Hull 31, 36, 42, 44, 45, 50, 97, 98, 99, 101, 112, 126,

Zupko, R.E. 87

287