This volume contains selected essays in celebration of the scholarship of the medieval historian Professor James L. Bolton. The essays address a number of different questions in medieval economic and social history, as the volume looks at the activities of merchants, their trade, legal interactions and identities, and on the importance of money and credit in the rural and urban economies. Other essays look more widely at patterns of immigration to London, trade and royal policy, and the role that merchants played in the Hundred Years War.
The sixteen articles in this collection analyse the contribution made by overseas trade, and the wealth in coin which it created, to the development of the English economy and locate this in an European-wide setting. In time, they range from the late Anglo-Saxon period up to the advent of the Tudors. The papers include general surveys of the importance of coinage and credit in the rise and decline of a market economy, and of the way that credit functioned in a society that lacked reliable supplies of bullion and which was also subject to the scourges of warfare and devastating disease. They illustrate, too, how from the tenth century the English crown used its control and exploitation of the coinage as part of a sophisticated fiscal system which helped create the precocious power of the English state. The author further shows how the wool trade altered the geographical pattern of wealth and enriched peasants, landowners and merchants, while the competing interests involved in the trade also cause political conflicts in Parliament and in the government of London during the period when London was establishing itself as the political capital and the financial centre of the kingdom.
Newly available in paperback, this is a wonderfully readable account of the role of merchants and money in the medieval world. Professor Spufford, who has made a lifelong study of the subject, brings together a vast amount of material from archives all over the world to build up this important economic history of the origins of capitalism essential reading for the scholar, but also engaging and entertaining to the layman.
Originally published in 1985. Frederic C. Lane and Reinhold C. Mueller, in the first volume of Money and Banking in Medieval and Renaissance Venice, discuss Venice's economic achievement in terms of the complex system the city's inhabitants developed to manage moneys of account and coins. Money merchants of Venice developed a system whereby a premium attached to moneys of account acted as a stabilizing force and allowed merchants to engage in long-term trade. This system, according to the authors, helped establish Venice as a dominant city-state in international trade and exchange. This book outlines the development and success of this system through 1508. At the time it was first published, this book made a significant contribution to the history of money and economics by underscoring the large role that Venice played in the economic history of the West and the ascendance of capitalism as a structuring force of society.
The volume explores late medieval market mechanisms and associated institutional, fiscal and monetary, organizational, decision-making, legal and ethical issues, as well as selected aspects of production, consumption and market integration. The essays span a variety of local, regional, and long-distance markets and networks.
Jacques Le Goff sets out in this book to explain the role of money, or rather of the various types of money, in the economy, life and mentalities of the Middle Ages. He seeks also to explain how, in a society dominated by religion, the Church viewed money, and how it taught Christians what attitudes they should adopt towards it and towards the uses to which it could be put. He shows that, although money played an important role in the rise of towns and trade and in state formation, there was no capitalism but only a pre-capitalism in the Middle Ages, even by their end, in the absence of a truly global market. This is why economic development remained slow and limited, in spite of some remarkable success stories. It was a period in which it was as important to give money as it was to earn it. True wealth was not yet the wealth of this world, even though money played an increasingly large role in reality and in mentalities. No similar discussion of this subject, aimed at a wide readership, has previously been published. Written by one of the greatest medievalists, this book will be recognized as a standard work on the topic.
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.
The aim of this work is to attempt to verify the theoretical concepts associated with the idea of trade and merchants activities in the 10th - 12th century within the extensive body of written sources available. The main case study is trading within the range of the influence of the Ottonian Empire and Byzantium.
The Economy of Medieval Hungary is the first concise, English-language volume about the economic life of medieval Hungary. It is a product of the cooperation of specialists representing various disciplines of medieval studies, including archaeologists, archaeozoologists, specialists in medieval demography, historical hydrologists, climate and environmental historians, as well as archivists and church historians. The twenty-five chapters of the book focus on structures of medieval economy, different means and ways of human-nature interactions in production, and offer an overview of the different spheres of economic life, with a particular emphasis on taxation, income and commercial activity. Thanks to its interdisciplinary character, this volume is a basic handbook for the history of economy, production and material culture. Contributors are Krisztina Arany, László Bartosiewicz, Zoltán Batizi, Anna Zsófia Biller, Péter Csippán, László Daróczi-Szabó, Márta Daróczi-Szabó, István Draskóczy, István Feld, László Ferenczi, Erika Gál, Márton Gyöngyössy, István Kenyeres, István Kováts, András Kubinyi, Kyra Lyublyanovics, Árpád Nógrády, Éva Ágnes Nyerges, István Petrovics, Zsolt Pinke, Beatrix F. Romhányi, Katalin Szende, László Szende, Magdolna Szilágyi, Csaba Tóth, and Boglárka Weisz.
