Chris Briggs

Credit and Village Society in Fourteenth-Century England

Exploring the role of credit is vital to understanding any economy. In the past two decades historians of many European regions have become increasingly aware that medieval credit, far from being the preserve of merchants, bankers, or monarchs, was actually of basic importance to the ordinary villagers who made up most of the population. This is the first study devoted to credit in rural England in the middle ages. Focusing in particular on seven well-documented villages, it examines in detail some of the many thousands of village credit transactions of this period, identifies the people who performed them, and explores the social relationships brought about by involvement in credit. The evidence comes primarily from inter-peasant debt litigation recorded in the proceedings of manor courts, which were the private legal jurisdictions of landlords. A comparative study which discusses the English evidence alongside findings from other parts of medieval and early modern Europe, it argues that the prevailing view of medieval English credit as a marker of poverty and crisis is inadequate. In fact, the credit networks of the English countryside were surprisingly resilient in the face of the fourteenth-century crises associated with plague, famine, and economic depression. This volume will be essential reading for specialists on medieval Britain and will also engage a more general readership interested in conditions and structures in pre-industrial and developing societies.

Mortgages and the English Peasantry c.1250–c.1350

This chapter investigates the extent to which medieval English peasants mortgaged their land to secure credit. Its focus is on customary or villein land, whose holders owed servile obligations such as labour services in addition to cash rent. The chapter confirms the view, derived from the existing literature, that the employment of land or other real property as collateral was much less widespread in medieval English agrarian society than it was in this period in other regions of Continental Europe. Possible reasons for this contrast are explored, as well as its implications for financial development. It is concluded that the rarity of mortgages in the English customary landholding sector was the result of a combination of factors, connected with property rights and the strictness of the terms and conditions of most mortgages. Close investigation is also undertaken of circumstances in the small number of English communities where mortgaging is found to have been more common.

Introduction: Mortgages and Annuities in Historical Perspective

This Introduction outlines the key themes and concerns of Land and credit. It emphasizes the historical importance of the use of land and other real property as security for loans in the shape of mortgages and annuities. Such secured lending has often been ascribed a significant role in the development of the pre-industrial European economy, yet the exact character of that role has hitherto remained unclear, with some commentators placing an emphasis on peasant borrowing for investment while others stress peasant expropriation via mortgage foreclosure. The Introduction explores these possibilities and, drawing on the substantive chapters which follow, places particular emphasis on the part played by mortgage law and the evolution of mortgage instruments in shaping the extent to which borrowing on landed security was taken up in the European countryside in this period.