Richard Goddard

Medieval business networks: St Mary's guild and the borough court in later medieval Nottingham

Historians have suggested that medieval urban guilds played a role in political and commercial networking. Guilds’ commercial protectionism was designed to benefit their membership and close ties have been discovered between merchant guilds and urban oligarchies. This article asks if all guilds should be viewed as commercial networking hubs. It uses evidence from a later fourteenth-century membership roll of St Marys guild in Nottingham in conjunction with Nottinghams borough court rolls to analyse the commercial connections between members and non-members in that period. It concludes that the guild did not function as a networking hub.

Merchants and Trade

This study is not only concerned with the impersonal economic trends of the later Middle Ages. It also seeks to look at the personal experiences of the businesspeople who attempted to make a living in a period of commercial challenges. Inconvenient though it is for historians eager to model the vagaries of the later medieval economy, we need to always be mindful that it was the business decisions of individuals that shaped the aggregate trend lines used in this and other works. Grouping these people together as ‘merchants’, seeing them as ‘rational’ economic agents or as some breed of medieval automaton whose actions mirror those of their neighbours falls well short of reality and strips them of their own distinctive and particular motives and experiences. In this chapter some attempt will be made to put a personal face to inanimate statistics. Of those whose occupation is given in the Staple debt certificates, the largest group are merchants (37.4 per cent). The title ‘merchant’ in this case refers to traders and middlemen who dealt, generally wholesale, in a variety of merchandise. Unfortunately, fourteenth- and fifteenth-century English merchants tended not to leave detailed records of their businesses—with the notable exception of individuals like the later fourteenth-century London ironmonger Gilbert Magfeld; the later fifteenth-century wool merchants, the Cely family and the early sixteenth-century Gloucestershire wool merchant John Heritage. Historians have undertaken important prosopographical studies of individual later medieval merchants where no detailed business documentation exists. Evidence for the lives and livelihoods of these merchants has been carefully reconstructed from a wide range of documentary sources. Examples include Adam Fraunceys (or Francis) and John Pyle (both users and mayors of the Westminster Staple in the 1370s); Richard Whittington (user of the Westminster Staple between the 1381 and 1404 and, subsequently, mayor of that court); and the Tate family, who operated their family mercery business between Coventry, London and Calais in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries (users of the Westminster court between the mid-1460s and 1504). These individuals left a significant trail for historians because they were international import–export merchants of considerable note with wide-ranging business networks and contacts; they were spectacularly wealthy—Richard Whittington gave very generously to various London-based charitable works in his will; all were eminent landholders—John Pyle held manors in Northamptonshire, Middlesex and Essex and all held administrative or governmental positions—Adam Fraunceys was a crown troubleshooter sent in to deal with administrative failure and corruption and anti-government grievances, and was MP six times. All of this has, unsurprisingly, left considerable prosopographical evidence. Furthermore, all these men were Londoners or had business connections in London, which, as will be argued in Chap. 5, made them even more visible. However, the invigorating and risky trading adventures undertaken by merchants of the first rank should not side-track historians. In fact, it was the everyday, rather dull, domestic trade which captivated the attention of most of the individuals who used the Staple.

Boom and Bust: Patterns of Borrowing in Later Medieval England

The virtually complete record of the certificates of defaulting debtors sent to Chancery and the resulting extents of debt allow an unusually full assessment to be made of changes in the English economy over the 179 years in which the Statute Staple debt registration system was in use, particularly with respect to periods of economic growth and recession. This chapter assesses the patterns of certificate generation resulting from defaulted debt transactions from 14 English Staple and Merchant courts between 1353 and 1532. These Staple defaults act here as a barometer, or guide, to the volume of credit being extended within the English economy. The analysis of these patterns is predicated upon the self-evident maxim that changes in the availability of credit—of which the Staple credit was an integral part—within the economy is a viable measure of the robustness of that economy. The chapter sub-divides the period into four sections divided into (roughly) 50-year terms in order to more closely examine the processes of, and context for, shifts in the availability of credit. It then goes on to consider ways in which theoretical approaches might help to establish wider frames of reference for these chronological movements in terms of a cyclical approach to economic change and the ‘shocks’ that are often considered the mainspring for change.

The Statute Staple and Trade Finance in Later Medieval England

Credit was ubiquitous in later medieval society. All medieval trade depended upon credit—the deferred part-payment for goods sold or advances for future delivery of goods. John Gower, the late fourteenth-century poet and moralist, certainly recognises in the above quote that merchants depended upon debt and perceptively identified the fragility of a commercial system that hinged upon credit. Chaucer, in a rather more positive tone, likewise clearly identifies the inseparability of merchants, buying and selling, and credit. The use of credit to purchase goods permeated all levels of later medieval society from the greatest magnates, like the Earl of Shrewsbury—buying goods on credit from a London mercer—and the Earl of Atholl in Scotland—purchasing merchandise from the owner of a tavern in Cock Row (Cokrowe), Norwich—to peasants, such as the shepherd John Rede of Soham (Cambridgeshire), who, at his death, was still owed 31s 11d in unpaid debts—and the husbandman, John Bygge of Stortford (Hertfordshire), who had purchased £6-worth of goods on credit from a haberdasher and a fishmonger in London. Credit was a pivotal component of English domestic trade. Wool merchants like John Heritage used credit to fund the various stages of their wool businesses. Many credit agreements were informal or oral, but by the fourteenth century, high-value debts were often documented and enrolled in special debt courts known as Staple courts. In 1423, Robert Belle, a merchant of Newcastle upon Tyne, travelled nearly 500 km to London and borrowed £40—deferred payment for goods he had bought—from William Stockdale, a draper of London. The amount was to be repaid eight months later, giving Belle time to sell the goods back in Newcastle and still have time to return to London and repay the money he owed. The agreement was enrolled at the Staple court in Westminster. This work examines the role of credit and debt agreements like this one in English trade between 1353 and 1532. This was a period of transformation, not least for the English economy, associated with climatic change, high mortality, endemic warfare, economic recession and bullion famines, all of which impacted upon trade and the merchants, like those described by Gower and Chaucer, men like Belle and Stockdale, who undertook it. The principal form of evidence used is the records of the Statute Staple, a royally sanctioned debt registration system which provided for the efficient recovery defaulted debts.

The Geography of Recession: Provincial Credit in Later Medieval England

Chapter 3 argued for a reduction in Staple lending in the early to mid-fifteenth century. This chapter examines the same Staple certificate data from a regional perspective by examining the patterns of lending undertaken at provincial Staple courts in order to assess if there was a regional component to the trends of borrowing and lending in the fifteenth century. There has long been an understanding amongst historians of the British economy that regional disparities exist and often subtle variations between the economic performances of different English regions need to be factored into any analysis. This regional analytical approach is seen most often in studies of later medieval agriculture, but historians have also examined regional economic inequality through the lens of urban decline. This is undertaken here by comparing the Staple evidence with debt evidence from borough courts, where it exists, along with other commercial evidence located within English provincial towns in order to gain a coherent understanding of the use of credit in England in this period.

London: The Commercial Powerhouse

Caroline Baron’s introduction to her ‘London 1300–1540’ chapter in the Cambridge Urban History is the key to understanding changes in the availability of Staple credit in later medieval England. She describes London’s unique position in the later Middle Ages as follows: ‘By the early fourteenth century London was pre-eminent among English urban communities. Whether ranked according to wealth or according to population, its pre-eminence was undisputed. Although London was larger, more populous and wealthier than other English towns, it was distinguished from them not only by size and volume: it developed, in the period covered here, characteristics that were distinctive. London was different not only in scale, but also in kind.’ Much of the foregoing analysis has suggested that the availability of high-value credit, or trade finance, declined in some areas of England and expanded in others over the course of the fifteenth century. Furthermore, the implicit assumption is that London took over as the principal centre for obtaining trade finance in the later Middle Ages, at the expense of these provincial centres. Indeed, Kermode, in her classic work on credit in Yorkshire in the fifteenth century, identifies the increasingly aggressive expansion of London’s merchants into Yorkshire combined with the Yorkshire merchants’ increasing indebtedness to Londoners, contracting northern trade and falling rents—the traditional source of collateral for debts—and a resulting southerly drift of Yorkshire merchants who began to set up businesses in London in the quest for the financial security offered by the capital as key to understanding economic contraction in the region. In terms of competition for trade, London played a central role in the waning fortunes of many provincial towns. The encroachment by Londoners into provincial trade is seen as a factor in the decline of other centres such as Bristol and Boston. Wendy Childs similarly suggests that, even in the worst periods of recession and bullion famine in the 1450s, credit continued to be extended to aliens. However, rather than the lenders being provincial merchants extending credit from their home ports, as had been the case in the past, this alien lending was undertaken from the mid-fifteenth century predominantly by Londoners. Once again this implicitly suggests that there was increased financial security to be found in the capital. Similarly, Derek Keene has chronicled the increasing commercial reach of Londoners into the rest of England from c. 1300, particularly as lenders, in his study of debt cases in the Court of Common Pleas.